MrFrugality said:Cheap:

Confusing as it is, my take on the FirstFedDirect Internet Advantage Savings Account situation is that the expansion of their services is via internet to residents OUTSIDE of California and they are assuming CA residents will simply use the B&M locations. ."

Problem is if you goto into there branches the best rates they have is 2.94% tier which requires $49999 and that is on there Client Money Market Advantage account. There normal MM account pays a only 1.5% and a min balance requirement of $5K to avoid the $15 monthly service fee. There is a branch down the street from my office. I walked in there and asked. I figured if I could walk into a local branch and get 4.03% I would prefer it over an online savings account. They told me even if you lived outside of CA and come here on vacation they cant service thoses accounts from inside the branch nor can they open a comperable account inside the branch.

So this bank sucks if you live in California. There rate of 4.03% is not the highest rate either as HSBC rate is now 4.25% and GMAC bank is 4.30% and umbrellabank.com is 4.40% so not sure why you would open an account with them now anyways. Also they cant even seem to keep there web page up and working which is not a good sign of an online only bank account.

dolmar said:

"...nor can they open a comperable account inside the branch."

Glad you posted your personal experience with First Federal Direct. So much for my clarification theoryconcerning the CA/non-CA debate.
Not surprising, however, that they wouldn't service an online account at the B&M; that isn't that unusual for the internet/B&M to be separate entities.

Yet to be cleared up is if the Internet Advantage Savings Account is or is not actually available online for CA residents.
It does actually state (as Cheap said) on the CD page "California residents excluded from this offer." but until the link returns for the Savings Account we don't really know for sure about the savings account. Does look iffy for CA people, though.

May consider nominating First Federal of California for the "Cumbersome introduction to online banking award 2005"...

Since there is no discussion thread on CountryWide bank thought I would put this here. I am thinking of opening an account with them for their MM which is now paying 4.25% for over $100k, just downloaded an application and they have a form that allows you to put on POD's and it was discussed here recently that many banks do not allow POD's anymore. So depending on the number of qualifying family members you have you could get a number of times the $100k FDIC limit

http://www.firstfeddirect.com/ is up but says:
California residents excluded from this offer.
So no savings account either. I kinda want to start a thread about this product so non-California people can know about it but I also don't want to help these people who can't keep a webpage up and exclude me from their offer.

MrFrugality said:Cheap:

Regarding the KeyDirect Premier Money Market Account, my correction was simply to show that the account does pay the 4.11% from $0 (as is stated on thier website), rather than the $25,000 + as was originally stated in the Quick Summary. Thus, the corrected figure would accurately reflect the Amount/APY they are offering.

I agree that it wouldn't necessarily be the best choice if one's balance consistently fell below the 25K level but thought that debate would be best left to another thread.


I hope that my last update of the summary is good for you. Maybe the best of both worlds...

Updated the list, made the OP into a FAQ and moved some rate thread stuff into this thread's OP.

I couldn't find a way online to open an account at First National Bank of Giddings so they are not added until there is verification that there is a way to open an account without going to a branch.

If you are including 5 with ACH, I would like to see a guarantee of at least a couple of checking accounts.

At the moment, Presidential, which is a very real, usable checking account, at 4%, is off. CNBT is the only checking account included, at 4.03%, but its obnoxious requirement of 10 debit card uses per month makes the account useless for me at least.

Cheap, I see your point. Maybe the best solution is a separate list for checking accounts; but I'm not volunteering to put in the massive effort you clearly have on the overall list.

It's just that I wonder how much value anyone is getting out of the many accounts on the list that aren't the highest interest, and don't offer any other useful feature. Keydirect is paying 4.11%, but with a $25,000 minimum, money market transaction limits and no other redeeming features I know of. Yes, that's useful for anyone who already is at the FDIC limit at, by my count, 27 banks currently paying higher rates, which is $2.7 million if you don't have any ability to use either joint or trust accounts; I would hope anyone with that much to spread around could do better, though.

If it were up to me, I'd like it to be easy to see, say, the highest account with free ACH and a minimum no higher than $2000, or the highest at a checking account with ATM rebates.

But I thank you for all the hard work you continue to put into this.

LH2004 said:It's just that I wonder how much value anyone is getting out of the many accounts on the list that aren't the highest interest, and don't offer any other useful feature. Keydirect is paying 4.11%, but with a $25,000 minimum, money market transaction limits and no other redeeming features I know of. Yes, that's useful for anyone who already is at the FDIC limit at, by my count, 27 banks currently paying higher rates, which is $2.7 million if you don't have any ability to use either joint or trust accounts; I would hope anyone with that much to spread around could do better, though.

If it were up to me, I'd like it to be easy to see, say, the highest account with free ACH and a minimum no higher than $2000, or the highest at a checking account with ATM rebates.
I find this highly subjective. $2000. ACH (in, out, both?). ATM rebates. All of these are highly subjective. That is without going into the speed of the ACH or rebating. I don't want to say that these are meaningless in anyway because they aren't. The key is that they matter to different people differently. I'm not going to say that the account in the top of the list is any better for you than the one on the bottom. In fact, they might all be lame in your shoes. The goal of the list is simply that, to have a list with the highest, risk free APYs out there that anybody can apply for (being US-centric, of course). I don't want to get into giving each account's features because they can be quibbled with, be misleading, and can change without warning (I can either copy the info on the linked page or get information offline, either of which can be out of date, it is a task just getting the rates updated). We got into this a little already, but I think the less, the better as there are still at least 2 accounts that are pending because of lack of the information that is already required.

In what I believe is the FWF spirit, the list is a starting place to do your own investigation. I don't want to guess what the best account is for everyone because I think I will be wrong most of the time.

That is why the list is fairly long; to include features that some find important. If to do that and remain fairly impartial to what goes on the list we have extra accounts, I say I can deal with the extras. But if there is a way to shorten the list impartially do that without killing off accounts that others feel are desirable, I am all ears.

Someone on another forum had asked about historical rate trends, so I put together some graphs I thought people might find interesting. I got a lot of the data by reading through old pages of the Best Current APRs thread, its predecessor, and a bunch of the linked threads, cross-referenced with some threads on other forums, and consulted archive.org and old press releases for confirmation and to get some of the pre-2004 data. I'm personally only interested in no-minimum, no-fee, ACH-having banks, so I limited myself to the six of those I know about (ING, VirtualBank, HSBC, CapitalOne, Emigrant, FirstFed). Anyway, it was kind of a pain to piece all that information together, so hopefully someone other than me is enough of a data geek to find it interesting.

http://www.pfstuff.com/savings/index.html#historical