Thursday, May 17, 2007

Best Savings/Checking Account Combo

Maybe people may already know this, but I am a sucker for playing the rate chase game when it comes to banking. I pretty much have an open account with majority of the online banks, as long as there is no monthly fee or minimum balance requirement. The problem is that majority of the online banks offer accounts, which have ATM access, but none of the fee free ATM's are near me or these ATM's do not accept deposits. I am trying to have my main savings and checking account at one bank, rather than having to transfer funds back and forth. The problem is that with the banks that do offer a high yield savings account they do not offer a checking account or vice versa. Another issue is that many of these high yield savings accounts are in fact money market accounts or have a monthly withdrawal limit.

Overall ING Orange Checking seems to offer the best rate (4.00% - lowest of the tiered rates offered) for a checking account, nor is there a monthly fee or minimum balance requirement. Plus this ING account offers a fee free ATM card that can be used for withdrawals at one of their many ATM locations nationwide. ING is part of the Allpoint ATM network. As far a savings account rate, the rate that ING offers for savings account is only 4.50%, which is not as good as many of today's online banks that offer rates between 5.00-6.00%.

Last month I learned about about Bank of America's affinity accounts with AAA and NEA, which offer high yield money market accounts. The rates have been around 5.07% or more. These rates are reevaluated every week, thus they change a tad every so often. Since my undergrad days I have had a free checking account with Bank of America, which I mainly used to deposit checks to and then transfer the funds to my online bank account. I figured if I opened one of these affinity accounts I could keep majority of my money with one bank now. In this case though I would loose out on a high yield checking account. Now my problem is should I go with a bank that offers a money market account with a high yield, but hardly anything for checking, or do I go with ING who offers an okay savings account rate, but higher than normal checking account rate?

For now I am using ING mainly for the checking, but using Bank of America for the money market account. Let me know your thoughts.

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