I’ve always believed that it is important to have money easily accessible for a rainy day, great investment opportunity, or some other need. However, savings accounts, which have an average interest rate of about .5% – 1% APY, makes it hard to want to save money. When one factors in that inflation is about 2% a year, at the end of the year, you have less buying power than you did at the begining of the year. As a result, I have never been very good at putting money in a savings account, even though I believe that it is important.
My beautiful sweetheart, on the other hand, is really good at trying to keep money in our savings account, of which I am very grateful. A few months ago, we found that Citibank offers a 4.75% APY savings account if you open online. We then found that Washington Mutual offers a 5% APY savings account if you open it and a “WaMu Free Checking” account online. Earlier this month, we opened them up at WaMu. Since our business checking accounts are with Washington Mutual and with such a great savings account rate, it made it easy to want to use them. And also, since I own a few dollars of stock in them, hopefully they can loan out this money and make a lot of money (but not from me) and then I can get a nice dividend.
