Thursday, September 06, 2007

HSBC New Account

Okay I gave in and decided to open a new online savings account. I chose HSBC because they have this online bill-pay which can be linked to the savings account. The savings account pays 5%, which is fine.

The bonus I think is they have this online bill-pay which would be great because I hate transferring money between online and my Bank of American Checking Account. I find it takes 2-3 days to transfer the money then I have to mail my payment off asap all the time, so the amount of time my money is lost in cyberspace has not been worth the effort of the interest. I know others may find it worth it, but we do pay a lot monthly to our mortgage and to DH's tuition.

So we need ready cash during the year. I also don't like scrambling looking for money in 5 different places. Though HSBC doesn't have seperate accounts like ING, it does have a lot of ATMs worldwide. So we travel we'll be able to access our cash internationally without fees. Something I thought about doing before we travelled last time, but we were lazy and didn't set it up in time.

We'll see how it goes. Minimally we have to leave it open for 6 months. Then we can close it.

3 comments:

ChiefFamilyOfficer said...

May I suggest you set up ETFs (electronic transfer funds) for your mortgage at the very least? Our mortgage payment is deducted automatically from our savings account each month, which means I don't have to worry about it one bit. If you had it deducted from your online savings account, you'd lose no interest at all.

Janet said...

i've had a hard time setting up the bill pay with HSBC after opening the checking account and linking it with the 5% savings account.

have you setup the savings to checking system? how was your experience?

Living Almost Large said...

About to. I don't care for automatic withdrawals because I worry I'll overdraft or something.