Wednesday, December 7, 2011

SmartyPig Interest Rates Fall Again

As I have said before, you lose purchasing power if you put money into savings accounts at the current interest rates.  SmartyPig has decided to exacerbate this by cutting its interest rate to .7%.  Apparently, SmartyPig was designed to make money off the optional gift card redemptions, and the high interest rates were too tempting to savers like myself who never redeemed any of my cash for gift cards.  So now they have a new bank, and are cutting rates.

I am hoping that this is not a sign of things to come.  SmartyPig has been a consistent canary in a coal mine.  Since I complained about SmartyPig's savings accounts rates in June, Discover's rate has gone from 1.25% to 1.05% as well.

I'm contemplating putting more of my medium-term savings into divided paying stocks with low beta.  Unfortunately, so is everyone else in the entire universe, which means that my chances of principal loss are pretty good in the medium term when something else comes into fashion.

Fortunately, since the babies have drained our savings a bit, there's less short and medium term money in the Goat household for me to worry about:)  Where are you stashing your medium-term savings now?  Any good suggestions?

1 comment:

  1. I still use Discover bank... hopefully rates go up again soon, remember the days in 2006 when banks were paying 5%!

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