The new rate, which makes the account one of the top paying savings accounts will be available online or via the app from 28 April with a minimum of £25 to all First Direct 1st Account customers.
Customers can pay in up to £300 per month, a total of £3,600 a year. Those who pay in less than £300 a month can carry the annual allowance forwards.
The rate is 2.5 per cent higher than the current rate of 1 per cent.
Savers looking to benefit must open the account from 28 April onwards in order to secure the rate.
So what’s the rub with this? Is it easy access like with Chase, or does it come with penalites for withdrawals etc?
Not keen on only being able to save a maximum of £300 a month.
I could open one of these savings accounts and just do a standing order from my Chase account for 12 months, but do I want to
I don’t use my FD account for anything other than having my wages paid into it. Perhaps I should at least try and make an effort and skim them for some interest before I decide to dump them next year
Looks like a sort of regular saver account. The rub is that if you save the same amount every month, you only effectively get half the interest rate in the first year. They normally end after a year, but I’m not sure what happens here after the first year.
If you close before 12 months, you do not get the 3.50% rate, but a paltry one.
As @anon47616136 highlights, your return will NOT be 3.50% of £3,600, but roughly half of that as all funds not in the account for full twelve months.
Funded from your FD current account, not directly from Chase.
Difficult to change monthly deposits, should you wish to.
That said, I shall be opening one. £300 from Chase Savings > First Direct Current > FD RS, until my Skipton RS deposits are finished (three more), then source will change to fresh funds instead of Chase Savings.
Ends after 12 months, then a few days later, converts into instant access savings account, from where you can move your matured funds.
Ok, so this is where I need to learn some basic math because I’m genuinely a bit of a thicko
So if I saved £300 a month i.e. the full £3600 over the course of 12 months, I wouldn’t receive a full year of interest only half? 3.5 percent on £3600 is £126? but you’d only get half that? I guess there’s going to be some laughing at me, but I genuinely don’t understand, so an explanation would be great.
Sorry, posted this before I read the explanation by Breezy, so please ignore my rambling
In case anyone needs more of an explainer - you do get a full year of interest but you don’t have £3600 in the account all year - so interest is not simply £3600 x interest rate. See “How interest is calculated” at the following link.
Effectively, yes. The last £300 you out in gets 3.5%, but only for 1 month. If you average the interest over 12 months, it works out at half the headline figure.
These type of accounts are usually good value, just not as good as the headline interest rate suggests.
Basically, it’s not a con - but it sounds better than it is due to the limited pay in.
So on month one, you put in £300 and get interest on £300. Month 2 is another £300 in, so now you are getting interest on £600 plus a small amount of compound interest.
As said, you only get interest on the “full amount” for the last month, as you haven’t been able to pay it in until then.
Basically, if you have £3,600 in Chase, at 1.5%, and drip feed it into First Direct RS, at £300pm at 3.50%pa, you would make an extra £39 in interest, compared to leaving it in Chase.
I get it now and I absolutely appreciate the explanation.
My problem is, I don’t want to be drip feeding anything. I just want to shove £300 a month away for 12 months at the end of which, I want 3.5 percent interest added
I realise my want is unrealistic, but I can’t be dealing with any mucking about and I’d rather just lose any extra interest by shoving cash away in one place, i.e. my Chase account. You can’t please all of the people all of the time and you can’t account for skewed logic like mine.
But I have a considerable amount already in with Chase, far more than FD are going to allow as a maximum into their new RS account. I just can’t see the effort of earning an extra few quid if I’m honest. Shabby excuse I realise, but Chase at least allow you to shove a whole £250k into their savings account which just makes FD’s effort look dull.
Regular savers are great for boosting your average rate across modest savings. Banks like them because people tend not to withdraw funds as much as easy access, so they can juice the cash a bit more.
There’s a sweet spot where your savings are at a certain level that regular savers make sense (I mean the hassle, not the maths - they always win on pure maths). Get too high and it’s pointless effort, as the regular saving raw interest is dwarfed by your whole pot.
Yes, now I see the whole picture (the advice here has been great by the way), I can see that FD’s new RS would be pretty pointless for me personally.
It’s not like I haven’t made any money out of FD already this year. They mugged themselves off paying me £150 for me CASS’ing an account to them that I’ll only be keeping for 12 months anyway. It’s not all bad
