Kind of a stupid statistic, how much people have in their savings account. With interest rates so low, a savings account is basically worthless. The more interesting question is how much they have saved in total, across all accounts and investments.
That said, despite the savings-account-specific question, I suspect the statistics would look quite similar if you made the question less account-type-specific and just asked how much money people had saved away.
If you do a lot of transactions from your checking account, and only occasionally transfer from savings to checking, then the former is more likely to be compromised than the latter.
This difference increases if you use your checking account online, at via third party pin entry devices, or even at your bank's ATMs while only accessing your savings account from a teller in your bank. All of the former methods of access can be compromised and you can lose the contents of your checking account -- which would be limited if you didn't keep all of your money in your checking account.
Unlike credit cards, bank accounts aren't protected against theft or fraud, so the risk of theft is a real possibility that could cost you.
I'd definitely recommend not doing any transactions from the same account that you keep most of your money in; have a layer of insulation. Don't use a debit card or a bank-account-backed "credit" card.
Local banks and credit unions are almost always better for you and your money..
So if you deposit $299 on 1 January, and are over 18, you end up with $239 on 31 December. Yay for that -20% interest rate. So make sure you deposit that extra $1 to hit $300. But if the daily-compounded interest is rounded to the nearest $0.01, you don't even get any interest unless you have a balance of $18250.91 or greater. In order to get the minimum possible $3.65 daily-compounded interest on a balance of $300, the APY has to be at least 1.2167%.
Just be honest and say the rate is 0%, man. It's no wonder all those Wells Fargo employees had to commit fraud to open more of those accounts. PT Barnum's maxim notwithstanding, there just aren't enough suckers in the world to open a new Way2Save account of their own volition.
My spouse recently suggested that we open savings accounts for the kids, so I pointed out the abysmally low effective interest rates on accounts . We're opening investment accounts for them instead. Kids, the way to save is to dump everything in index funds and forget it's there.
And we got a new house in the end!
And if you own stocks and such, those are pretty liquid.