Best High Yield Savings Accounts

February 5, 2010 by Silicon Valley Blogger

Not all high interest savings accounts or money market accounts are alike. If you look at it from the standpoint of savers who decide to open such accounts, you’ll find that we’re all prompted to select savings accounts according to various reasons and criteria.

Based on where we are in our lives, we tend to choose accounts according to specific requirements. Younger people in their 20’s may be particularly interested in what kind of returns to expect from their savings, and whether an account has an associated debit card or ATM bank card. Older people with some money tucked away will be more interested in the ability to easily move their money around and between accounts — perhaps from cash accounts to investment accounts and vice versa. In this case, they’d be more interested in online bank account features such as ACH, wiring and account linking.

Given these concerns, I thought it would be good to present this comparison table that shows how various high yield savings accounts rank and score on a variety of characteristics and features. I sourced this data from a couple of reports (from WTDirect and EverBank, in particular).

Best High Yield Savings Accounts

Bank Features
 EverBank
 Ally Bank
 FNBO Direct
 ING Direct
 WTDirect
Top Savings Account EverBank Ally Bank FNBO Direct ING Direct WTDirect
Rates / Balances          
APY (as of 02/09/10) 2.51% 1.44% 1.40% 1.20% 1.41%
Maximum Balance 10MM Unlimited Unlimited 1MM Unlimited
Minimum Balance $1,500 $0 $0 $1 $0
Service          
Live Person Answering Phone Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Mobile Banking Availability Yes No No Yes Yes
Account Types / Transfers          
Totten Trust Accounts Offered Yes Yes Yes No Yes
# of External Bank Links Unlimited Unlimited 3 3 Unlimited
ATM Card Yes No Yes No No
Next Day ACH Transfer   No No No Yes
Can Initiate Transfers From Another Bank Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Personal Savings Rates: Some Observations

These days, many of us question the interest rates that are earned in these popular savings accounts — could you even consider these to be “high yield” returns? I’ve often mentioned that the term “high yield” is used relatively, because you’ll find most rates at banks and financial institutions to be set at even lower levels, resulting in an average APY of 1.001% for money market and savings accounts.

Granted, our current interest rate climate is not the most exciting at this time, but the expectation here is that our savings account rates won’t be staying down for too long.

Also, the good news is that these low returns have not fazed us, as a nation. The U.S. personal saving rate (or how much money we sock away each year) has doubled over the past few years compared to how it used to be. Here’s a chart that shows this information.

U.S. personal savings rate
Image from the Bureau of Economic Analysis

Clearly, the state of the economy and the credit industry has had quite an impact on how we save as a nation. Question is, will this positive savings trend continue once our economy fully recovers or will we return to our spending ways as soon as we see an upswing?

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