Tuesday, 28 July 2009

Bank CD Rates Give You Very Little Return

By Pete Veslick

Anyone who has money to invest is hurt by low interest rates. If you want to buy things on credit such as a car you might like the interest rates where they are now but people who have money sitting around are not happy. Right now the saying time is money does not really apply to bank cds and other investments where you make money by lending it to banks.

The people that are hurt by low interest rates are those people that like to invest in bank certificate of deposits (CDs) and other investment that are guaranteed by the government. Government bonds would also fall into that category. Seniors often have their money in this type of safe investment vehicle because they need to be guaranteed that they will not lose the money. In exchange for the low risk, they are willing to make less that they might be able to in the stock market. However, with rates so low right now, they are making practically nothing on their money.

The best CD interest rates might not be found at your local bank or even the bank in the city nearest you. The Internet and Internet banking have allowed people to search for the highest yields online and invest their money in places never thought of before. It used to be that you had few choices when buying bank CDs or money market accounts. You could walk in to any of the local city banks and see which ones had the best rates. That was it. Sometimes you might find a bank that was doing a promotion and giving a quarter or half point higher than all the other banks just to get the business.

By looking on the Internet you will be able to find banks that give the best rates and maybe even ones that have promotions for an extra quarter point or so. You need not worry that you might be sending your money to an institution that is in another state or even clear across the country. You will be able to electronically transfer the money to them and so it doesnt matter where the bank is physically located. However, take note that even the highest rates you will find online are still very low compared to a handful of year ago.

One thing to take note of is that if you have a maturing bank CD, you will rarely get the best rate they offer by just letting it automatically roll over. For some reason that the banks will never disclose, you have to physically go into a bank and request the best rate on an expiring CD that you want to roll over. You will probably have to close out your CD and then open a completely new one to accomplish this. This is a minor inconvenience but one that you have live with if you want to get the best CD rates.

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