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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

I use Robinhood's banking feature for this (I don't use them as a brokerage, though). It lets me do direct deposit and automatic withrdrawals from a single account, while earning savings account interest. The interest isn't significant at the moment, but it was nice for a few months, before COVID. I use Mint and Personal Capital for monitoring my budget, rather than earmarking funds.

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I do this. I've moved everything from my bank into RH because its far easier to play around with money to both deposit and withdraw. I'm seeing similar trends among my college friends.

I'm also going to do everything through my brokerage from now on. I realized I didn't use any of the budgeting or goal features anyways.

I was using the goals in the beginning, but the rates just kept going down.

You're getting 0.3% APY, which is pretty useless. I would instead try some of the banks that promise you higher APY rn. There are some offering 2-3%

Who's offering 2-3%?

IIRC, Yotta Savings (https://www.withyotta.com/) is in this range. HN did the math on Yotta a few months back:

- founder's comments (claims ~3%): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23786893

- the math (~3.4%): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781247

Note that it's likely to go down to get in line with other HYSAs over time (and it's fairly easy for them to change the winning probabilities to hit any interest rate). Currently they're just burning VC cash to get users...

Prizepool (https://getprizepool.com/) is another player in this space, unsure where they're at though (I know we could do the math, I just haven't).

The APY on Yotta has already decreased, it's currently around 1.6%.

I don't know of anyone offering 2% right now, but for historic purposes here is an article about some great rates above 2% over a year ago: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/11/savings-accounts-besides-all...

Well, since the stock market only goes up [0], just put all your money in TSLA and you'll do better than 2% </s>

[0]: https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/12685424540867502...

TSLA goes up and down a lot... scalping trades on that has been very profitable this year.

No one is offerring 2%-3% when the fed rate is at zero. You're about a year behind relity.

https://www.hmbradley.com/ currently does, with the caveat that you have to save at least 20% of your direct deposits.

Wait what's the catch? It's insured and still able to give so much interest? Even CDs don't give anywhere close

People who make enough money to save 20% of their deposits probably aren’t going to bother with some convoluted system to earn a maximum of $3000 interest annually. You could make more with AMEX points.

You make amex points if you spend money. I barely spend anything I make (and whatever I spend mostly can't be on cards) so for people like me this will be ideal. Given the pandemic and wfh boom I doubt I'm alone. I'm also extremely averse to every speculative investment bin right now, so if someone guarantees coverage for 3% inflation I'll happily give them my money.

Here's a big one:

> We do not pay interest on account balances above $100,000

https://www.hmbradley.com/apys

That just means people with six figure savings won't use the service, it's still not clear how that helps them achieve profitability with such high interest rates

Interesting. Seems like you could work around the caveat by splitting your paycheck's direct deposit allocation between your checking account bank and HM Bradley, so that from their perspective you're saving 100% of your direct deposit.

Exactly what I’m doing! Uh... I hope they don’t catch on.

Can already do this with normal bank account churning and make way more than 3%

That's pretty cool, although I generally just want enough in my account to cover my monthly expenses, plus buffer. I want the excess going into investments. I don't want my balance growing from quarter to quarter. It looks like you get 0% if you keep a stable balance.

“Only” covers first 100k, has a bunch of other rules that make it impracticable

TMobile's bank is offering 4% on the first $3000 and 1% on anything after that and they treat it like a checking account with their own debit card.

It was going to be a total no brainer to move nearly all banking to them until I realized they block all automated financial tracking software. No budgeting with YNAB makes it a non starter for a checking account, but luckily YNAB can note transfers in automatically by looking at other accounts. When treated strictly as a basic savings its fine if my total cash on hand is missing the occasional interest payment.

> How APY works and what it means for you: As a T-Mobile MONEY customer you earn 4.00% annual percentage yield (APY) on balances up to and including $3,000 in your Checking Account per month when: 1) you are enrolled in a qualifying T-Mobile postpaid wireless plan; 2) you have registered for perks with your T-Mobile ID; and 3) at least $200 in qualifying deposits have posted to your Checking Account before the last business day of the month.

So it's a neat little discount on your T-Mobile bill.

That’s a bank account bonus not a real interest rate. I made 20% APR in 90 days for churning a PNC account by that logic, does that mean I can in turn make 20% on arbitrary deposits on a regular basis?

Sure there are, you just have to meet some requirements like direct deposit and minimum number of debit transactions.

Really dissapointed in HN nowadays. Downvoted to hell and people telling me im wrong without doing any of their own research.

Maybe you could edit your comment now that multiple other commenters have shown that you're wrong? There are multiple companies offering 2-3% rn.

Varo Bank offers 2.8% on up to $10k in your savings account if you get direct deposit and use your card 5x/mo. Not the rich features of Simple, YNAB, or even Virtual Wallet...but when they earn next to nothing for interest, that's how those features get paid for (they need your cheap deposits).

https://www.varomoney.com/savings-account/

I basically use it as an interest checking account for the purpose of paying monthly expenses. It's a very simple system that requires zero babysitting and produces better yield than a real checking account.

I could chase higher yield with my emergency fund than where I currently keep it, at Alliant Credit Union (0.55% APY), but it's not worth the effort. No one does significant better without also having gimmicks.

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