The Sun's Financial Diary

I know one will not make a trend, but how about two? Early this month, Capital One surprised me with an announcement of rate hike of its InterestPlus savings account. The increase is not significant, only going from 1.25% to 1.30% APY, it’s the move itself that’s maybe more meaningful because most banks are pretty [...]

I opened a 9-month No Penalty CD account with Ally Bank last July. Though I could withdraw after only 6 days without having to pay any penalty, I kept the money in the account because Ally Bank has been slowly, but steadily, cutting rates since then and the rate I got back then was pretty good. [...]

Ally Bank now has a new CD product, the second new product in as many month. The CD product, called 2 Year Raise Your Rate CD, isn’t entirely because it replaces the current 2-year high-yield CD which has a yield of 2.04% APY as of March 9th. What’s new in this product is the promise [...]

A few years ago, I wrote a post about who offers the best deal in both the checking and savings accounts. Back then, 5+% yield on savings accounts and 3+% on interest checking accounts were very common. Now, we know things are totally different. With the Fed fund rates being held at close to zero [...]

When I talked about Ally Bank Interest Checking Account in January when the product was introduced, I mentioned that I may get one for myself. What I like about the new checking account isn’t that it bears interest. With 0.50% APY for balance under $15K, there isn’t much I can earn. Rather, what attracts me [...]

A high interest rate savings account is an essential part of our financial system. With a large amount of money that is currently held in bank accounts, I’d love to get as much return as possible while making sure that the money will be there when we need it in the next few months. Unfortunately, [...]

This time last year, I created a list to track failed banks in 2009. On January 23, 2009 when I wrote the post, there was a total of 3 bank failures. At that time, I also compared 2009 with 2008, the first full year of this recession when 25 banks were shut down. I was [...]

When we moved from New Jersey to Virginia last September, we had to make a lot of changes after settling down in the new place. Among the first things I did was updating our new address with banks, credit card issuers, and mutual fund companies. This didn’t take too much time because all can be [...]