Drip feeding into multiple regular savers, why not?

Bazzalona13295

Bigwheels1111 said:

I have 9 regular savers now, I plan to open mor as some mature, Ive run out of spare cash.

I use my emergency funds with some as work a bit like easy access.

Roll on May when 2 cash out and I hope I can take them out again and another one or two.

Yeah I've hit a quite solid if not yet brick wall.
FD expires in a month - final payment is 2mrw as it happens - and when I get that cash it'll pay for anothrr couple of months RS.

Bridlington1

subjecttocontract said:

I don't understand how manual payments into regular savers can be more efficient than standing orders. I pay all mine by standing order and wouldn't dream of doing it manually.

Whilst I can see why some prefer SOs, personally I find SOs to be a bit of a pain to be honest and I pay into most of my regular savers manually for a few reasons:

1. Flexibility- If I decide not to pay into a regular saver one particular month or do not have enough available funds to fund it fully, be it due to a cash-flow issue, the interest rate decreasing or whatever I can simply choose not to make a deposit that month, delay the deposit or reduce the deposit without having to faff about with changing SOs, which can become difficult at short notice.
2. Interest maximisation- I do not want to leave money in a current account earning little/no interest overnight before the SO goes out and I do not have anywhere near enough in OD facilities to cover all of my regular saver deposits so unless I chose to risk going into unarranged ODs and/or SOs bouncing I'd be losing out on a little bit of interest if I did everything by SO. Also most SOs do not to go out on non-working days with the banks/building societies I use so if 1st of the month falls on a non-working day, my deposits can still be made on 1st using manual FPs.
3. I usually meet the minimum pay ins for the reward accounts on 1st of the month so have money bouncing through Natwest/RBS manually on 1st anyway, so it usually makes sense to do a manual transfer into these regular savers whilst I'm at it.

subjecttocontract

Perhaps we are each dealing with the task of paying a regular contribution from completely different starting positions. I open a regular saver, pay in the first payment, set up a standing order with the bank and forget about it. All I need to do is ensure there are sufficient funds in the account to cover the payments.......just as I would for any other regular monthly payment. I don't even need to remember or record when it ends cos they write or email well in advance. This way I can find time to get on with the other important aspects of my finances such as eg. chasing up repeated delays with my ISA transfers. 😁😁

allegro120

Bridlington1 said:

subjecttocontract said:

I don't understand how manual payments into regular savers can be more efficient than standing orders. I pay all mine by standing order and wouldn't dream of doing it manually.

Whilst I can see why some prefer SOs, personally I find SOs to be a bit of a pain to be honest and I pay into most of my regular savers manually for a few reasons:

1. Flexibility- If I decide not to pay into a regular saver one particular month or do not have enough available funds to fund it fully, be it due to a cash-flow issue, the interest rate decreasing or whatever I can simply choose not to make a deposit that month, delay the deposit or reduce the deposit without having to faff about with changing SOs, which can become difficult at short notice.
2. Interest maximisation- I do not want to leave money in a current account earning little/no interest overnight before the SO goes out and I do not have anywhere near enough in OD facilities to cover all of my regular saver deposits so unless I chose to risk going into unarranged ODs and/or SOs bouncing I'd be losing out on a little bit of interest if I did everything by SO. Also most SOs do not to go out on non-working days with the banks/building societies I use so if 1st of the month falls on a non-working day, my deposits can still be made on 1st using manual FPs.
3. I usually meet the minimum pay ins for the reward accounts on 1st of the month so have money bouncing through Natwest/RBS manually on 1st anyway, so it usually makes sense to do a manual transfer into these regular savers whilst I'm at it.

For me it is mainly about flexibility (as you described).  I also tend to do shortcuts (e.g. instead of always using one feeder account I use a variety depending on current circumstances).  For example, at the moment it makes sense to make most deposits directly from Santander iss3, but when the term is over this account will be empty and I will use some other account.  Sometimes it can be beneficial to do it by credit card...  I tend to do my distributions slightly differently each month, so in my situation constantly changing SOs would be very inconvenient.

And the maximisation of interest is also important, because that's the whole point of using regular savers.

I do understand why people prefer SOs. Some years ago when I was in full time employment (i.e. very little time and energy for dealing with savings) and had only about 5-10 RSs, I used SOs for feeding them.  Also the world of savings wasn't as eventful as in the past couple of years.

allegro120

surreysaver said:

allegro120 said:

boingy said:

yourlocalcheesemonger said:

Thanks for the replies and the welcomes. Some of you have a lot of accounts to keep on top of!

I suppose that's the downside really, 

That's exactly the downside - the admin. Each account can have a few quirks. First Direct can only be funded by standing order from an FD current account. Natwest needs at least £1 of the amount to come out of a current account. Some don't allow withdrawals (although you can close the account outright). Some are fixed term so you can't close or withdraw but you can stop adding money to it etc.

So you end up collecting a bunch of current accounts that you didn't need just so you can access the regular savers and you end up with a bunch of standing orders to shuffle the money around once per month. I have a calendar reminder on the 5th of each month that says "Check all the accounts" so I can make sure it has all happened as expected. If you can cope with a bit of extra admin then go for it! I use KMyMoney to track all my accounts (my spreadsheet started to get a bit messy!)

Apart from FD and Coventry which don't allow to choose your own date, I do all feeding on the 1st of each month.  I combine this with feeding current accounts that require monthly payments, so I do a lot of my transactions in one go.  Takes about 15-20 minutes and then I don't need to think about it for the rest of the month. I only use SO when it is necessary (FD), otherwise I found manual feeding more efficient method than SO.

You can choose your date with Coventry. Its just the first day of the month isn't the first day of the month; its the monthliversary of the account 

Thanks for correcting me. Yes, of course you are "allowed". I've used the wrong word, but hope those who are into  maximising their interest understood what I meant.

elkiedee

Before I had children I built up savings, mostly in two ISAs, and then I had no money to add to savings for many years. I certainly don't have enough to open huge numbers of Regular Savers, particularly as many of them need other accounts with the bank or building society to access. I have opened a Nationwide Regular Saver with an initial maximum payment of £200, but I looked at the terms and conditions etc, and I understand that I don't need to put the same amount in every month if I don't have it. I think I don't actually have to put money in every month. I will still get 8% or whatever variable annual rates are payable through the year on that initial £200, and won't get any less for the £200 if I only add £10 a month. I realise the rate's quite likely to drop a bit but if it does, this will affect the others as well. I could lock up some, not all of my savings for one year with a fix, but as my oldest is now in his first year of A levels and thinking about higher education, I want to keep things fairly flexible and accessible

If I did have a lot more money available and got carried away with multiple regular saver accounts, and realised I didn't really have the money to fund them all, I'd think of choosing just a few to put max payments in and just putting in enough to keep the others ticking over. 

where_are_we

I fund a large sum on the 1st of the month to my RS`s by SO`s from Santander lite 123. For interest maximisation, after what exact time should I do an internal transfer from Santander Easy access Issue3 @5.2% to my 123 lite? Is it midnight?