The Sun's Financial Diary

Good bank deals are rare these days. You are lucky if your bank pays you 3.0% or more for your money, unless you use one of those high-yield rewards checking accounts that always have a cap on how much money you can put into the account to earn the sometime 5+% yield. And, as you [...]

I wrote quite often about banking deals here, mostly high-yield savings accounts (well there probably isn’ t any real “high-yield” account any more if you look at what savings accounts are offering now) but occasionally checking accounts, because I am always on the look out for better places to park our cash. And when I [...]

Money Aisle is an online marketplace where banks compete to each other to offer better rates for high-yield savings account or CDs. I have heard about MoneyAisle a while back, but never got a chance to check it out until recently, partly because back then I was very happy with Dollar Savings Direct’s 4.0% APY. [...]

Looking for incentives to open a bank account? Following are some bonus offers valid for this month (March 2009) only. All of them are for checking accounts though. M&T Bank is offering $100 bonus when opening a M&T Direct Checking, Classic Checking (with interest), Select Checking or Power Checking or $25 bonus for M&T Totally [...]

After being with the bank for only half a year, I think the time to move on has finally come. When Dollar Savings Direct was first launched last summer, it was touted as a high yield savings account from Emigrant Bank, which also owns Emigrant Direct. You may wonder why one bank wants to have [...]

Stocks are down (another 300-point plunge of the Dow today closing below 7,000 for the first time in 13 years) and savings account interest rates are declining too. Are you wondering where to put your money these days? Treasuries are safe, but you won’t get much from buying bonds/bills unless safety is your absolute concern. [...]

Last Friday, I received an email from Dollar Savings Direct, which currently holds most of our cash, another rate reduction notice. This time, the yield of their savings account was lowered from 3.20%, a rate that they just adopted a week ago, to 3.05%. I opened an account with DSD in November 2008 after monitoring [...]

It has been more than two weeks, but my PNC Bank Business Checking Account is finally up and running. The waiting is much longer than I expected and what happened after the account was opened was more troublesome. When I opened the account at the branch, I was told to select a PIN so I [...]