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Bankwest 8% savings account (highest by 1.4%)

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Bankwest only just released a new savings plan which is quite a bargain. In their move to undercut the big banks and in line with their expansion to the east coast, they're offering 8%PA on a Regular Saver account. Considering that average returns on sharemarket in the long term is about 10% and there's a chance that shares drop, I think this is a pretty good savings account but here are the conditions (in English):

  1. No initial deposit
  2. Must be regular deposit of a fixed amount (eg $50 per month every month from your linked account)
  3. Can't be over $500/month contributed
  4. At the end of one full year, all the money and earned interest gets sweeped into your linked account and you start saving all over again.
  5. Interest calculated daily and paid monthly
  6. Money is accessible anytime but any month where you withdraw, you don't get interest for that month

By far the best % return on your dollar but limited in how much you can earn in this account.

(none of this is financial advice, just mere opinion)

To put a dollar figure on this, if you had $3000 after six months of regularly saving up, that month you will recieve $20.If you want to see an article on this account, click here.

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  • Nice. Although it is a bit too complicated and too restrictive. It also somehow forces you to have a Bank West transaction account as well…

    Also with $500 max a month, that means $6,000 a year max saved + interest. Not that much, but I guess you would be looking at a completely different financial product if you are saving over $6k a year.

  • All the work for less than 10 dollar extra on a year, with lots of restrictions… Think the RaboPlus offer is still better.

    Robcur

  • I don't like these misleading advertisements, it says 8% but when you read the fineprint, it is only 8% for a limited amount and for a limited time. Same with Citibanks 7%, you need to have $5000 in a non-savings account. You almost have to be an accountant to work out how much money you minimally need to deposit to get to e.g. 6.6% which is the current rate with RaboPlus, with none of these conditions as far as I'm aware (only 1$ deposit).

  • I read through one of their savings product's fine print before. Interest was calculated a little differently to other products I had encountered. Something about, you don't get interest on up to 4 days, to do with whether the month finishes on a Saturday, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, and whether there is a public holiday around then.

    So be sure to read the fine print with BankWest, including how they calculate interest.

    Also from what Scotty said …

    You have to factor in the costs and charges of all your accounts, in both situations, when comparing.

    Say you have an account with "SomeBankOrOther", and you will still have that account, even if you go with BankWest, then you need to factor in changes to charges from "SomeBankOrOther".

    If you no longer maintain a required minimum balance at "SomeBankOrOther", you may have extra fees to pay.

    Moving funds back and forth between "SomeBankOrOther" and BankWest may increase transaction charges.

    If BankWest is not paying you interest for every day of the month, you should factor that in too.

  • When you consider that you can only invest 500$ per month, if you actually have $6000 to invest you are much better putting it in a different account.

    $500 per month at 8% APR gives you a total of $6,225 at the end of the year. That's the equivalent of just 3.74% return on your $6000.

    You can do much better overall by going to a financial advisor and investing in a managed investment. Last time I looked, there are large funds doing quite nicely on an average 20% a year return over 5 years.

    • Saving account is obviously for those with conservative risk profile. We all know that most diversified portfolio will yield much better result over a long period of time (5+ years) but then you still somehow need an on-call account.

      So if I have $6,000 I probably won't put that into BankWest. If I have $60,000 to invest and if I have a medium/high risk profile, then I might set aside $6,000 in an on-call cash account earning just interest.

      Well, I am not a financial advisor so I shall stop here :) Personally I find the RaboBank deal anyway.

  • Did you see that RaboPlus raised the on-call interest to 6.7%, and there is no limits or strange conditions with that.

  • how bout bankwest telenet saver? they have 7% intro rate savings for the first year? http://www.abetterdeal.com.au/

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