The Old Regular Savers Discussion Thread 28/12/24-29/1/26

surreysaver

Pompeydave1967 said:

Opened a zopa last month and got the 4.75% a/c and thought I’d grab the RS @ 7.1%. I’m usually a longer fixer with my money 1 , 2 , 5 year but wanted to grab the RS at that rate. Looking on a calculator tonight I think I’ll get £141 interest after 12 months whereas if I had fixed £3600 over 1 year even at 4% I’d get £144 or more if compound a/c .What’s peoples views on these RS’s ? I see many have 20,30,40+ a/c’s and must take a huge amount of time to monitor them - wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? 

The £3,600 isn't in the account for a year. You get 7.1% on the money in the account. On average, over the course of the year, you have about half of £3,600 in the account. The other half will be somewhere else earning interest.
If you can be bothered with a little faff, you will earn a lot more money than just leaving it in an account paying ~4%

Bridlington1

soulsaver said:

Just watch out for Chorley BS maturity process on their RSs.

Goes to an EA maturity account. Tried to withdraw all the funds in there Friday.

Their system tells you that the w/d request has been submitted and they'll be in touch.

Took them until Monday morning to tell they've rejected the transaction as it would take the balance below the min of £25. I should use the 'close account' option to w/d all the balance.

So miffed, I do. "..the w/d request has been submitted and they'll be in touch." Again.

Still no sign of the money - only 4 days later......

Yes I know there's a w.e... it's in the terms (probably)... Great customer experience? 

For balance I recently closed my Chorley BS RS early (on Thursday last week) using the close account option, a few hours later they said they'd processed it and the funds would be in my nominated account the next working day. Funds arrived in my nominated account on the Friday.

For now I've retained a notice account with £1 to keep their online portal alive in case it comes in handy in the future.

Ch1ll1Phlakes

Pompeydave1967 said:

Opened a zopa last month and got the 4.75% a/c and thought I’d grab the RS @ 7.1%. I’m usually a longer fixer with my money 1 , 2 , 5 year but wanted to grab the RS at that rate. Looking on a calculator tonight I think I’ll get £141 interest after 12 months whereas if I had fixed £3600 over 1 year even at 4% I’d get £144 or more if compound a/c .What’s peoples views on these RS’s ? I see many have 20,30,40+ a/c’s and must take a huge amount of time to monitor them - wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? 

Have a read through the prior comments. Very simply the money being fed into the Regular Saver, should be sitting in an easy access account before being transferred to the higher rate. Using your example above with a 4% EA and 7.1% RS at £300pm (the calculator treats interest and fixed so an EA and fix at 4% are equivalent), we get the following results from the MSE calculator as noted by @Bridlington1


On it's own, yes, the regular saver would be out performed by a 4% fixed/EA account over one year (i.e £137<£142) but the funds can be held in an EA account until they are needed by the Regular Saver. Opening the RS along side an EA at 4% would give £61 more than the EA alone.

Pompeydave1967

Bigwheels1111 said:

Pompeydave1967 said:

Opened a zopa last month and got the 4.75% a/c and thought I’d grab the RS @ 7.1%. I’m usually a longer fixer with my money 1 , 2 , 5 year but wanted to grab the RS at that rate. Looking on a calculator tonight I think I’ll get £141 interest after 12 months whereas if I had fixed £3600 over 1 year even at 4% I’d get £144 or more if compound a/c .What’s peoples views on these RS’s ? I see many have 20,30,40+ a/c’s and must take a huge amount of time to monitor them - wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? 

You are not understanding how Reg savers work.
I leave the funds for my 22 regular savers in an easy access isa at 3.85% tax free.
Then on the 31st, or just after 00.01am I move the 5k I need to fund them into my bank.
So I get 3.85% and 5.5% to 7.5% on the reg savers.
So much more than 4.75%.
I need 60k this year to fund them all.
I don’t have that much but some mature every month, they get reinvested and so on.
The reg savers are on Standing Orders.
Each one takes around 5 or 10 mins to open, fund and set up SO.
Thats it for a year.

Thanks bigwheels for the explanation , I was just going on figures from a maturing fix that goes into an ea then gets fixed for another year immediately. As always I appreciate your reply as I know you have fixes as well (mentioned on the fixed thread) .You seem to have this off to a tee bigwheels , I’ll look into a bit more , cheers 

Pompeydave1967

Bridlington1 said:

Pompeydave1967 said:

Opened a zopa last month and got the 4.75% a/c and thought I’d grab the RS @ 7.1%. I’m usually a longer fixer with my money 1 , 2 , 5 year but wanted to grab the RS at that rate. Looking on a calculator tonight I think I’ll get £141 interest after 12 months whereas if I had fixed £3600 over 1 year even at 4% I’d get £144 or more if compound a/c .What’s peoples views on these RS’s ? I see many have 20,30,40+ a/c’s and must take a huge amount of time to monitor them - wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? 

What you're missing is that in your calculations you're assuming that if the money isn't in regular savers it's earning no interest. In practice many will stick their money in an EA account and then drip-feed the funds into regular savers.

In the case of Zopa's 7.1% RS, if you had £3.6k in an EA account at, say, 4.5% and you drip-fed the funds into Zopa at 7.1% at a rate of £300/mth you'd earn roughly £138.45 on the regular saver, but you'd also earn roughly £74.25 on the money whilst it's in the EA account, leaving you with roughly £212.70 overall.

When you've enough regular savers you can easily end up in a position where the money that's being paid into regular savers is coming exclusively from other regular savers, making these figures rise further.

There's also MSE's regular savers calculator if you want to have a play around with some figures:

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/regular-savings-calculator/

Thanks Bridlington1 as always a very professional and informative reply. Yes based it on figures from a maturing fix that goes into a non interest earning ea then gets fixed up again. As said to bigwheels I’ll look into this a lot further .Would be interesting to hear your interest figures  earnt from RS’s compared to a standard fix over a year . Thanks again for explanation. 

Pompeydave1967

surreysaver said:

Pompeydave1967 said:

Opened a zopa last month and got the 4.75% a/c and thought I’d grab the RS @ 7.1%. I’m usually a longer fixer with my money 1 , 2 , 5 year but wanted to grab the RS at that rate. Looking on a calculator tonight I think I’ll get £141 interest after 12 months whereas if I had fixed £3600 over 1 year even at 4% I’d get £144 or more if compound a/c .What’s peoples views on these RS’s ? I see many have 20,30,40+ a/c’s and must take a huge amount of time to monitor them - wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? 

The £3,600 isn't in the account for a year. You get 7.1% on the money in the account. On average, over the course of the year, you have about half of £3,600 in the account. The other half will be somewhere else earning interest.
If you can be bothered with a little faff, you will earn a lot more money than just leaving it in an account paying ~4%

Thanks surreysaver all making a lot more sense now. As above I was basing it on a maturing fix getting reinvested for a year rather than into a ea then drip feeding into RS. Lots to look into but I guess a bit of fun too.

Pompeydave1967

Ch1ll1Phlakes said:

Pompeydave1967 said:

Opened a zopa last month and got the 4.75% a/c and thought I’d grab the RS @ 7.1%. I’m usually a longer fixer with my money 1 , 2 , 5 year but wanted to grab the RS at that rate. Looking on a calculator tonight I think I’ll get £141 interest after 12 months whereas if I had fixed £3600 over 1 year even at 4% I’d get £144 or more if compound a/c .What’s peoples views on these RS’s ? I see many have 20,30,40+ a/c’s and must take a huge amount of time to monitor them - wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? 

Have a read through the prior comments. Very simply the money being fed into the Regular Saver, should be sitting in an easy access account before being transferred to the higher rate. Using your example above with a 4% EA and 7.1% RS at £300pm (the calculator treats interest and fixed so an EA and fix at 4% are equivalent), we get the following results from the MSE calculator as noted by @Bridlington1


On it's own, yes, the regular saver would be out performed by a 4% fixed/EA account over one year (i.e £137<£142) but the funds can be held in an EA account until they are needed by the Regular Saver. Opening the RS along side an EA at 4% would give £61 more than the EA alone.

Thanks very much for replying , all makes a lot more sense now. I guess the more RS’s open the more juggling around with ££ .All sounds interesting. 

Bridlington1

Pompeydave1967 said:

Bridlington1 said:

Pompeydave1967 said:

Opened a zopa last month and got the 4.75% a/c and thought I’d grab the RS @ 7.1%. I’m usually a longer fixer with my money 1 , 2 , 5 year but wanted to grab the RS at that rate. Looking on a calculator tonight I think I’ll get £141 interest after 12 months whereas if I had fixed £3600 over 1 year even at 4% I’d get £144 or more if compound a/c .What’s peoples views on these RS’s ? I see many have 20,30,40+ a/c’s and must take a huge amount of time to monitor them - wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? 

What you're missing is that in your calculations you're assuming that if the money isn't in regular savers it's earning no interest. In practice many will stick their money in an EA account and then drip-feed the funds into regular savers.

In the case of Zopa's 7.1% RS, if you had £3.6k in an EA account at, say, 4.5% and you drip-fed the funds into Zopa at 7.1% at a rate of £300/mth you'd earn roughly £138.45 on the regular saver, but you'd also earn roughly £74.25 on the money whilst it's in the EA account, leaving you with roughly £212.70 overall.

When you've enough regular savers you can easily end up in a position where the money that's being paid into regular savers is coming exclusively from other regular savers, making these figures rise further.

There's also MSE's regular savers calculator if you want to have a play around with some figures:

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/regular-savings-calculator/

Thanks Bridlington1 as always a very professional and informative reply. Yes based it on figures from a maturing fix that goes into a non interest earning ea then gets fixed up again. As said to bigwheels I’ll look into this a lot further .Would be interesting to hear your interest figures  earnt from RS’s compared to a standard fix over a year . Thanks again for explanation. 

I typically don't bother to calculate how much I earn in regular savers versus a standard fix but I've just done a quick calculation using the sumproduct formula in excel and last month I earnt just over 50% more interest from my regular savers for October 2025 than I would've done from a standard 4% fix you use in your example given that my regular savers are mostly self-contained so seldom need to keep non-ISA savings outside of regular savers..

As ever the actual rate of return would vary given that many of my regular savers pay a variable rate of interest and the balances in each change month on month. I would expect November's average to be slightly higher given that I was short of cash for November's regular savers so I've had to empty a few of my lower rate regular savers to feed higher ones.

Born2Save_3

Pompeydave1967 said:

Opened a zopa last month and got the 4.75% a/c and thought I’d grab the RS @ 7.1%. I’m usually a longer fixer with my money 1 , 2 , 5 year but wanted to grab the RS at that rate. Looking on a calculator tonight I think I’ll get £141 interest after 12 months whereas if I had fixed £3600 over 1 year even at 4% I’d get £144 or more if compound a/c .What’s peoples views on these RS’s ? I see many have 20,30,40+ a/c’s and must take a huge amount of time to monitor them - wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? 

"What’s peoples views on these RS’s ?" - asking on this thread you're going to get a very pro RS opinion !

"wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? " - yes, potentially a lot easier; but you don't make as much.

My view on RS ethos is putting your money where ever it can gain the best rate, no matter how small an amount and profit, at the expense of your effort and time.  If you can make ~£100 profit an hour consistently and regularly doing something else, then you're probably better off putting your money in a fix and do what makes you that good profit.  I don't really put a price on my time, but I can make money from RS and the risk to capital is extremely low. A positive aspect of RSing is that your money is spread over many organisations and it is highly unlikely you would have more than £85K in most RS organisations, unless you had other accounts with them.

Some people like doing RSing maybe doing admin, spreadsheets, keeping abreast of new developments, the community here, learning about banking, maybe other things too.  I find some aspects enjoyable, others a PITA.  But it's something I can do and make better money from it than in a fix or notice or defined access and without the risks of investment or gambling or crypto or whatever.

There's different ways of doing RS, some easier and less effort ie using Standing Orders or more involved doing manual payments.  Each has pros and cons.  The beauty is you work out what's best for you, you will make some mistakes, each RS organisation has it's own peculiarities, but this is a great community and the best source of RS information and help that exists, well as far as I've found anyway.

HTH

clairec666

Pompeydave1967 said:

Opened a zopa last month and got the 4.75% a/c and thought I’d grab the RS @ 7.1%. I’m usually a longer fixer with my money 1 , 2 , 5 year but wanted to grab the RS at that rate. Looking on a calculator tonight I think I’ll get £141 interest after 12 months whereas if I had fixed £3600 over 1 year even at 4% I’d get £144 or more if compound a/c .What’s peoples views on these RS’s ? I see many have 20,30,40+ a/c’s and must take a huge amount of time to monitor them - wouldn't it be easier to just put larger amounts in a 1 year fix ? 

Others have explained it well already, but I'll add my bit.
With interest rates as they currently are, you're not gaining a lot in a fixed rate account compared to easy access anyway, so a combination of easy access drip-feeding to a regular saver will come out on top.
If there were some enticing fixed rates out there, it might be a bit different. I would predict that that regular savers would still come out on top though.

If you prefer to keep your finances as simple as possible, a fixed rate account might appeal. You'd get less interest overall, but could just dump your money there and forget about it for a year. As you say, running multiple RSs takes time and effort. The effort is worth it in my opinion, but admittedly a family member has expressed concern that if anything happened to me and they needed access to my money, it would be, in their words, "a right nightmare to sort out".