Thursday, May 22, 2008

Make 5% to 10% on your savings with Wachovias Way2Save


Wachovias' Way2Save savings account, seems to be the most profitable savings plan available; better than any Certificate of Deposits being offered by any Bank. Anyone interested in a savings account should definitely go for it.


Some Important Points:
1. Way2Save account offers 5% bonus at the end of the 1 year period on top of the normal variable savings rate that is offered on the savings account. The variable savings rate as of today is 5% apy. Which means, close to 10% returns on your savings.

2. Added to that, "Save Like A Champion Program" gives you 16% interest for the next 3 months for the accounts opened before May 30th 2008.

3. To open a Way2Save account (no cost), you will need to open a free Checking account (no cost) that will be linked to Way2Save and a Check Card (again, no cost)

4. How much you can deposit into Way2Save account? - You can at setup an automatic deposit of (max) 100$ each month from the linked checking account. In addition 1$ will be automatically transferred to your Way2Save account for each Check Card transaction or each electronic bill pay that you make from the linked Checking account. Assuming you will not use the Check Card and not make any electronic Bill pay, the monthly deposit adds up to only 1200$. As per Wachovias' Way2Save calculator
, the first years bonus on 1200$ is 59$. That's in addition to the variable savings interest, which per them is 32$ (to make a total of 91$). So you will be making 59$ more than you would have made on most other savings account.

If you say all this trouble of opening a new account is not worth, since you can make only 59$ more than on your currently existing savings account?. Not really ... continue reading to see why.

Making 59$ more was a good enough reason for me to immediately open a Way2Save account (specially since its a free account with no other unreasonable hidden fees and no penalty on early closure of the account). While in the process of opening an account, I thought, can't I open multiple Way2Save accounts? Yes, indeed I could. As per the Way2Save agreement
, each customer can open upto 5 Way2Save accounts.

Opening 5 Way2Save accounts, I could make 5% bonus (fixed, guaranteed) + 5% apy (variable rate, can increase or decrease) on 6000$ (1200$ * 5). The bonus alone will be close to 300$.

Now is this not a great deal?. Where can you find a Savings account (or for that matter a CD or any other guranteed safe return on investment vehicle) which will return more than 5% apy in 12 months?.

Herez more .... If you are married, you could open 5 more Way2Save accounts in your spouses name. If I could, that would be equivalent to having a deposit of 12,000$ that earns close to 10% interest (assuming 5% variable rate). Even earning 5% (fixed, guaranteed) bonus on 12,000$ is itself a terrific deal that you cannot find anywhere these days. Note that you need not have 12,000$ in hand right now to open all these multiple accounts. What you are looking at it is 100$ each month into each account for 1 or more year.

Note:
Bonus of 5% is only for the 1st year. For the 2nd and 3rd year, the bonus is 2%.

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