The Sun's Financial Diary

I have added a few more banks to the interest rates table the other day when I updated the list. There are three of them that I think worth mentioning because they all offer very attractive rates: 3.50% APY or more with very low minimum deposit requirement. None of them is big, well-known name. I [...]

Just received a note from WTDirect regarding their rate change. The bank has lowered its WTDirect Savings Account rate to 3.06% APY from the previous rate of 3.31%. Actually, I though 3.31% APY was a pretty decent rate, with the only drawback that it requires $10,000 minimum deposit which is pretty high (FYI, Capital One [...]

I thought I closed my Virtual Bank account more than a year ago (that is, I can no longer log in). But apparently my account seems to be still alive, except that there’s no money in it. Anyway, I successfully logged into my account at Virtual Bank tonight and saw their Refer a Friend program [...]

Dutch financial service giant ING, which operates ING Direct in the U.S., posted its first ever quarterly loss since the establishment of the company 17 years ago. In the third quarter, ING said it lost 478 million euros or $602 million, after the company took 1.5 billion euros in pretax write-downs on equities and debt [...]

Dollar Savings Direct is a division of Emigrant Bank, which also owns Emigrant Direct. The account currently has a 3.05% yield with a $1,000 minimum deposit requirement. I have been mulling the idea of getting another savings account with a better return for several months because I am not very happy with the rates from [...]

Banks want your money and in order to get your money, they will pay you! E-Loan just launched its own version of high-yield online savings account call E-Loan Savings Plus . To promote the new product, E-Loan is offering a $25 bonus for a new account from now till December 18th. The Savings Plus has [...]

If you have most of your savings in the stock markets, you won’t be happy with what’s going on now on the Wall Street. Nobody will. Somehow, I become numb to the daily closing numbers because what happened today isn’t much different from yesterday, last week, or even a month ago, and try not to [...]

Update: Check out the Dollar Savings Direct review post for more detailed discussion on DollarSavingsDirect bank and my account opening experience. And latest rates can be found on the Online Savings Account Interest Rate History page. When ING Direct lowered its rate to 2.75% APY last week after the latest 0.50% rate cut by the [...]