The Sun's Financial Diary

According to September issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine, Flagstar Bank, is currently offering a promotion rate of $5.30% APY for their Express Money Market account. The account has a minimum of $1 to open and no limit to earn interest. It also offers check writing ability for up to three checks per statement cycle. [...]

Last weekend I emailed Emigrant Direct to close my account. While there isn’t really additional issue that prevents me from shutting down the account immediately, I did get a notice from Emigrant Direct early this week, warning me that if I close the account right now, the interests earned so far this month will be [...]

Update: Emigrant Bank, the owner of Emigrant Direct, has launched a new high-yield savings account, Dollar Savings Direct (my review), which offers 4.00% 1.50%APY. Check out my other discussions on Dollar Savings Direct here and here. Now it’s really the time to say “Goodbye” Emigrant Direct was good, for some time. I have been using [...]

In the July issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, there’s an ING Direct’s account application form with a reference code which promises a $25 sign up bonus if it’s used to open an account before September 30, 2007. ING Direct is a leading online bank which offers high-yield savings account (4.50% APY) and interest bearing checking [...]

Well, not exactly a virtual bank, but Virtual Bank, the bank that I used for about a year. As part of the plan to simplify our finance, I called Virtual Bank yesterday to close my account (they are quite nice to call me back to confirm with me after I sent the request via bank [...]

I have noticed recently two “direct” online banks that offer competitive rates. Though both of them have decent introductory rates, the high minimum balance required to get rates make them less appealing if you have a small deposit. One is WT Direct, a division of Wilmington Trust. For balance of $10,000 or more, the bank [...]

Somehow I have the feeling that ING Direct has lost its luster as the leader of online banking, the position that it held for several years before everybody in the banking industry started to offer “direct” banking with similar products. My reason is the rates of their Orange Savings Account have consistently fallen behind its [...]

I have been using internet banks for more than eight years. The first internet bank that I remember I used was NetBank in 1999. At that time, there aren’t many banks that offered savings accounts with decent rates. My local bank, Summit Bank (then Fleet Bank, now Bank of America), had a rate that was [...]