Y'all know I love a high yield savings account. I love investing as well, but when you're working towards building an emergency fund, or any funds you'll need in the next 1-5 years, it is recommended to keep those funds out of the stock market due to volatility and less time to recoup any losses.
For many years I looked for a place to put my savings fund. I knew my regular bank savings account of .01% was NOT going to work and wasn't doing much of anything for me.
That's when I came across Ally. And when I say came across, I mean months and years of googling, researching and asking other what they were using.
People had many suggestions but her's what I wanted:
High yield savings account
Savings buckets
No fees
That's it. I didn't realize how tall of an order that was going to be.
I finally found Ally right before the pandemic started, so while the savings rate started well over 1%, it came down little by little to around .50% and it's been there for around 2 years. However, as we see interest rates starting to climb to borrow money (think interest rates for houses), it's also starting to climb to save money. Over the past few months, they have raised my interest rate 3 times and at the time of this post, it's now at .90%. I don't have to do anything. They just raise my interest rate and the money I'm making on my saved money increases.
There are many ways to save, and people have different ways of looking at your money. For me, I like to have exact money amounts of specific interests. Some of my savings buckets include:
Emergency savings
Car fund
Sinking fund for house bills
Vacation fund
Fence fund
Paint my house fund
This way I know exactly how much I have saved towards each goal. In fact, you can put a goal amount and a goal date on each bucket so you can see your percentage and a visual reminder of when you want to complete your goal and how close you are to completing your goal.
If I don't have buckets, it's easy for me to see one lump sum in savings and think, yeah I'll take that awesome vacation I've been wanting. And completely forgetting that the money I'm going to be using for the amazing, one in a lifetime vacation, is actually a large amount of living expenses that I've saved. Seeing it split out is what works best for me.
If you're starting out and you're looking for a place for your first $1,000 in emergency savings or you're crushing your emergency savings and looking for a place for your 6-12 months of living expenses, I love Ally.
Do yourself a favor and check them out. They also offer investing services and loans. They've been great to me for a few years now and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
What are some of your other favorite high yield savings accounts?
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