The following is a paid review. See the notes at the bottom for more information.
Looking for a place to store your hard earned (or not so hard earned) money? Savings-Accounts.com is site that shows the interest rates available at the most popular US banks.
According to the list, HSBC is the best bet with a 6% rate on “new money”. But hurry, you only have until April 30th to get the “promotional rate”. Bank of America and E*Trade are also decent with 5.1% and 5.05% repspectively. Your corner banks like Wachovia and Wells Fargo are offering just 0.25% and 0.50% respectively. The worst offer on the list is Key Bank, with a pitiful 0.15%.
The table at Savings-Accounts.com also has a notes column, which relays any minimal balance requirements extra fees or (as in HSBC’s case) if the rate is promotional or the standard rate.
Other than that, the site doesn’t offer any more. If the data stays up-to-date, it will still be useful to people who want to compare all those numbers in the same place. And if Savings-Accounts.com’s SEO strategy pays off, they might get enough search engine traffic to make a few bucks on the Google ads they show. (They didn’t seem to have affiliate links for the bank links though, which could be a better source of income.)
I’d like to be able to sort the list by any of the columns (primarily the rate column), and an RSS feed or email update feature would be nice. Also user-submitted comments and reviews would help round out the info in their notes column (which looks like it was just copied from a website) and possibly out any “hidden fees” or issues with the banks. The site is in “alpha” though, so features like this and more than I can’t even imagine could be in the works.
I think a site that with this information that is uncluttered and easy to use would be great. I did a quick search for similar sites and coulnd’t find anything else in this space I really liked. There is a savings account search application at BankRate.com that seems to have much more data. However, the site is a bit cluttered.
Note: A couple months ago, I signed up as a blogger at “pay-per-post” site ReviewMe.com. The post above is my first paid posting through this service. I plan on writing an article soon about my experience using ReviewMe. Stay tuned.