Short term high interest savings for £260000

laudami

Please can someone help us?. From the sale of our home we will have gained approx £260,000 which we want to put into a high interest account or accounts. First advice we need is we couldnt possibly open 7 different accounts to cover us for any potential failure what do you suggest?
We are also emmigrating soon and will leave this money in a UK account/s until the ozzy dollar is favourable to exchange who knows when this will be? So we intend to live in oz off the interest until we can exchange and will then exchange into an oz high interest over there eventually
We have seen ICICI & First save are these the better deals??
Notice from this forum that sometimes the building societies offer really good one off deals-does this happen a lot?
Thankyou

Steve_xx

If you put the whole of the 260k in one account then you are taking some risk, ie if the bank you decide on goes to the wall you would only be protected for the first 35k for a sole account or 70k in a joint account. Therefore, you should divide it up and deposit it with separate organisations. The divided portions should be for amounts of less than 35k or 70k so as to allow for the addition of interest which will push the total deposited upto the maximum level of compensation.

If you deposit it into online type accounts then you will be able to access those accounts online no matter where you are in the world. You might consider opening several online accounts with different banks and that will make it easier to open new accounts with those particular banks should they bring out any new products.

However, having said all of that I know that when opening some, if not all bank accounts, the banks ask if you are a UK resident. At the time of opening any account you probably still will be, but if you go overseas with the intention of living there then things are different. There's a taxation issue to start with. You could declare that you are a non UK resident for tax purposes and have your interest paid gross. But if you declared this then you may become liable for tax on your interest from Oz.