Emergency Savings: Do you have a cash reserve?

mike311gd: PLEASE check your credit agreement to insure that you can in fact get ahead with bonus payments. many loan plans will NOT accept bonus payments as reasons to miss a payment. you will of course close your loan faster (and it is debatable as to whether in fact you should), but many creditors count a missed payment as a missed payment, no matter how far ahead you are.

on another note: may i recommend ING savings accounts? you link them to your savings account and can have regular transfers made -- even if they're just 10 bux a week.

 

What's so great about ING, maberger?

 

You're well on your way, Smash. That's the way to do it, if you can.

 

No, only counting cash with liquidity. If you were to take money out of what's left of your 401k you would incur steep penalties for early withdraw. Not worth the penalties to get the cash.

Have any of you savers transferred money specifically to a high-interest account? I think I made $0.54 in interest last year on my regular bank savings, and I'd like to do better.

 

I have no intention on missing any payments; I just typed that because I could -- and I can. It says so on the bottom of my receipt each month. Missing payments, in my mind, would be counterproductive to every forward step I've made.

 

We've got a Money Market account that's pulling in 1.50 percent interest. That's about as high as our bank offers (unless you deposit $50,000 or more) without buying CDs.

 

better rates for savings and CDs, ease of operations, no bullshit offers for credit cards and other nonsense filling my mailbox
given today's world they may give up something in CD teaser rates.

as of rite now:
savings account at 2.75 %
6 mo. CD at 3 %, 12 mo. CD at 4 %

you can find better (citibank gave me 4 % for 6 mo. CD on a teaser when INg was offering 3.85, but i was already depositing into my checking account), but for a starting saver who may need to overcome their own laziness, ING is real easy and usually the best buy.

 

That's awesome.

I had a buddy who was a janitor at one of the casinos on the strip when I was in college, he used to steal all kinds of shit from there. He always figured if the guests did it, so could he. I could never get him to listen to my reasoning behind why it wasn't a good idea.

As for the thread I have enough for 2 months rent and my car payment for two months in savings. Which comes out to roughly $1,800. Half of that is my severance package from my former newspaper, the rest in a ton of OT at my current gig.

 

We're about halfway to our six-month goal.

I'm sort-of in the sugar-mama category.

 

I have a decent cash reserve ($25,000), but I also have a car with 230,000 miles on it, a wedding in December, and about $4,000 in immigration and lawyer fees coming in the next two months.

That $25,000 cash reserve was $38,000 just 17 months ago. That's pretty sobering.

 

OK, just looking up some interest rates, ING has a savings account at 2.75% and ETrade has one at 3.30%. Nice rates, but anyone have experience with these online-only, we're-really-a-brokerage-firm banks?