Don’t you love how they still claim to have America’s Highest Rate*? My Online Bank Comparison Chart would disagree. Of course, the fine print says “*Highest Nationally Advertised Annual Percentage Yield for unrestricted day of deposit to day of withdrawal savings accounts.” What the #$*% does that even mean?

New accounts can get a $10-$20 Emigrant Direct referral bonus, and my Rate-Chaser Calculator may be useful as well.

Washington Mutual Bank has a new and improved WaMu Free Checking Account, and it looks pretty good. Features include:

» No minimum balance or direct deposit requirement
» Free checks for life
» Free outgoing wires (great for funding brokerage accounts fast)
» Free ID Theft Recovery Service
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Everyone who sent me their Form #2 in January as part of my Emigrant Direct Bonus should have gotten paid last week. If not, please e-mail me. Thanks to all who participated, I paid out over $100 this month.

It looks like the $50 bonus offer for opening HSBC’s Smart Package checking is now extended to March 15th, 2006. There is also a $10 bonus for opening the HSBC Free Checking account. Go to this page and enter the promotional code ‘check‘ in the box on the bottom right.

Click here for a comparison and why both of these go great with the HSBC Direct 4.80% OnlineSavings account.

VirtualBank recently released that their eMoney Market Account is now paying 4.60% APY. New accounts can get a $20 bonus. My Rate-Chaser Calculator may also come in handy.

I recently opened an HSBC Checking Account to get the $50 bonus, but also to work with my existing HSBC Direct/OnlineSavings account paying 4.80% APY. Now that I have both, I would definitely recommend it! With my SmartPackage Interest Checking account, there is no monthly fee with either direct deposit or $3,000 in combined balances in ‘qualifying accounts’. The big question was whether the OnlineSavings account is such an account. To have written confirmation, I sent an online secure message on HSBC’s site. The response:

Your Online Savings account balance will be included for the combined balance requirement of your checking account.

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A great thing about online savings accounts with no minimum balances is that theoretically you can just move all your money to the one currently paying the highest interest! (If it’s worth it.) But, from e-mails I have gotten and other reports on the web, you might want to leave some more spare change in those accounts. Specifically, Capital One 360 and Emigrant Direct have closed people’s accounts without warning for having balances of less than $1. On top of that, Emigrant doesn’t pay interest if your account is closed before the end of the month!

But they have no minimum balance you say. Yes, but in their fine prints they can also close your accounts at any time, for any reason. So I’d advise keeping $5+ in your accounts to avoid account closure and lost interest. This way, if the rate leaders change, your options stay open.

Perhaps inspired by Greenspan’s parting rate hike, the rate on the Presidential Internet Checking Plus (review) account has been raised to 4.25% APY and their Presidential Premier Savings (review) account is now at 4.37% APY. I consider my Prez account as my main checking due to their good rate (for a checking account) and flexibility, but their savings account has a $5,000 minimum. I was hoping they’d raise rates higher, especially on the savings end, but this is about what I expected.

HSBC Direct is now paying 4.80% APY on their OnlineSavings accounts. It’s not updated on their front page, but it is shown on their Rates page. For those with accounts, check out my Rate Chaser Calculator if you are at a lower rate right now and are thinking of transferring money. Use the HSBC transfer schedule for reference. For those without, don’t miss the $25 HSBC Direct bonus.

Update: It’s only until 4/30.

The rate wars continue! EmigrantDirect announced today that they raised their interest rates to 4.25% APY, matching HSBC Direct. For those with accounts, check out my Rate Chaser Calculator if you are at a lower rate right now and are thinking of transferring money. For those without, check out my $10-$20 EmigrantDirect Signup Bonus.

With the proliferation of new high-yield savings accounts and them leapfrogging each other’s rates, we come to the all-important question – Should I move my money to the higher rate? Well, with the data from my transfer-time experiment, I can better gauge the answer.

First, let’s find the formula for figuring out how long you must keep the money at the new higher rate account to counteract any interest lost during the transfer. I’m not the inventor of this simple formula, I just derived it right now with good ole’ pencil and paper.
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Here are the results of my bank transfer timing experiment to help estimate the lost interest when transfering money from one online bank to another. I scheduled transfers very late on Monday (~9pm Pacific) to and from various online banks and recorded when the money was taken out of the originating bank, and when the money was noted as deposited in the destination bank.

I would have posted the data earlier, but I’ve been trying to pore through all the fine print to figure out exactly when the banks stop and start paying interest during withdrawals and deposits. I’m still fuzzy on several things, but I just made some assumptions and ran with them for now. Here are the (I think reasonable) assumptions I made:
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