oik
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Post by oik on Oct 31, 2015 19:15:49 GMT
Lloyds best rate is what, 4% for £5K max with a monthly fee of £5 with two direct debits ...
.... and there are other perks which I ddn't actually want, but had to choose one, so I get "free" Gourmet Society membership, and I have only used it once; my banana supplier refused a discount.
Shame. If you could fit in the seats you could choose 6 free Vue cinema seats instead.
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 31, 2015 19:07:08 GMT
I rapidly closed a regular savings account with Nationwide, paying 5% on an accumulated £22K, when I discovered that if I dared to withdraw a pound instead of shuffling in the required 1K in a month I would be docked a month's interest on the entire balance of the account. Losing the interest on that which one withdraws is common enough, but losing the interest on the remaining full balance is beyond the pale. And IIRC, closure needs to be carefully timed too to minimise the effect of the interest rate dropping to the minimum during the month of closure. This savings and investments lark has become awful complicated On which point, we have 7 direct debits in total, so have 3 that we could migrate to other current accounts - I don't want to open any more Santander accounts (ie a joint and two singles), as we would then be over the £75K protected total (including some cash ISAs). Though how big a risk is there of Santander failing completely (and thus potentially losing maybe £20K of unprotected cash) against other, riskier, options? So, any suggestions for further current current account homes for a bit of cash? Lloyds best rate is what, 4% for £5K max with a monthly fee of £5 with two direct debits - anything around with a higher limit? Paragon Bank savings rates aren't too bad, for general retail banking... but not close to P2P or high paying current accounts. Dermot Not both higher rates limits and higher limits that I can think of. There's 5.0% on both TSB and Nationwide currents but lower limits. (There's also a £125 sweetener for switching until Monday at TSB and £100 through a referral deal at Nationwide - with no time limit. Cashback on contactless debit card payments at TSB.) At BOS you can/could have 3 accounts holding up to £5k each, so £15k, at 3.0%. You could also add a Halifax which operates from the same BOS login for an extra fiver a month even with a zero balance and also pays a sweetener for switching - as do several other providers at the moment. Tesco pays 3% limited to £3k a month per account - is/was a 2 account limit. You can set up as many DDs as you need with a Tesco savings account. I know many would say differently, but I personally don't worry too much at having a few pounds over the FSCS limit, especially in an instant access internet account. I give more weight to only banking where I won't need to rely on any bailout. (I kept well away from the Icelandic banks backed by a country with a population the size of Croydon.) If the loss of that amount would financially cripple you then the position would be different.
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 31, 2015 16:45:17 GMT
Fear not. Has now soared to 1.3%.
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 31, 2015 11:09:44 GMT
I don't object at all to how others 'play the markets', after all I'm not obliged to invest and certainly not to match their lending offers. As you say, it's their money. I am interested though in who the platform might be used by, and how and why, as that might inform my view of whether I should consider it of use to me beyond the short term.
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 30, 2015 20:35:22 GMT
I noticed a few hours ago that the lowest lending offers for monthly money were at 3.6% and then just from 3 lenders offering a total of £4.3k. The highest borrower offers are at 3.4%.
Now I see the lowest lending rates on offer have crashed to 2.7% and 2.6% offered to borrow. At 2.8% there's just a single lender offering £43k and another offering £43.9k at 2.9%. (Could they be the same individual?) Makes those lenders who transferred money in earlier hoping for around the rates on offer then look a bit lonely.
I wondered if anyone had a view on the likely profile of the big lender? Doesn't look like the action of a typical retail investor so who/what are the those retail lenders competing against?
Earlier 4.0% £322.8k 139 £925.8k 3.9% £409.2k 96 £603.0k 3.8% £144.8k 44 £193.7k 3.7% £44.6k 18 £49.0k 3.6% £4,332.54 3 £4,332.54
Borrower Offers Rate On Offer Orders Cumulative 3.4% £7,987.41 5 £7,987.41
Now 3.2% £49.7k 2 £137.1k 3.1% £287 1 £87.4k 3.0% £100 1 £87.1k 2.9% £43.9k 1 £87.0k 2.8% £43.0k 1 £43.1k 2.7% £120.36 1 £120.36
Borrower Offers Rate On Offer Orders Cumulative 2.6% £7,924.84 16 £7,924.84 2.5% £13.8k 6 £21.7k
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 29, 2015 21:22:45 GMT
Oik, think there is a fair bit of horses for courses. If your savings are 40-60k+ (And you're mortgage low/free) then Santander makes sense. I just think it's now a horrible option for us smaller savers with the fee substantially eating into the interest. As you put for you it makes sense, for me it doesn't Would totally agree with you. With so many options out there, there should be something to suit everyone. For many people Santander 123 will only make sense after using the other 3-5% options. Could look better for someone picking up a lot of DD cashback which could give them above the nominal 3% return, especially if they had just one account. Central point is that although lots of peeps complain about poor savings rates, they're only bad if they don't look for better. Back around 2010-15 I had a 5 year fixed rate product paying 5.15%, which sounds pretty good, but for much of that time RPI was around 5%. Now up to 5% and instant access can be had with RPI at 1% and CPI at minus 0.10%. We've rarely had better. A difficulty I still have with P2P is that it's nigh impossible to assess the risks and therefore what I need as a risk-premium. I have less problem with, as Rumsfeld put it, the "known unknowns", it's those pesky "unknown unknowns" with little possibility for useful back-testing. I get the impression that a fair few are taking low P2P rates thinking that because the risks aren't known that they can't exist.
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 29, 2015 15:05:39 GMT
Santander from 1st Jan will be £60/year, so on £20k you're actually only looking at a 2.7% account. If you go under 20k, the interest becomes worse and of course there is tax on top which you pay out on the 3% but don't get back on the £60 fee. I suppose it is FSCS protected but the real rate of return on that account looks skinny going forward to me. My accounts are TSB, Nationwide, M&S Reg Saver, FD Reg Saver. That's the 5 and 6% accounts cleared, 4% may be worth it in the future but I've set an awful lot up recently ^^; ... Santander 123 simply wouldn't be even if I got 30k more in my bank tommorow. Depends how much you want in cash savings and how much hassle you'll accept. It can be a balance of return v convenience. Santander is useful to me because with 4 accounts (including Mrs oik's) I can instantly access £80k for investment opportunities. It also pays cashback on DDs, in my case amounting to £120 a year which is untaxed and will still cover the new higher fees when they come in for two accounts. To add to your list there's also BOS and Tesco which both pay the same rate as Santander but with no fees and with a lower limit - and not forgetting Halifax who'll pay £60 pa net of tax on a balance of zilch. I know a lot of people like regular saver accounts but, with a few exception, seem too much trouble to me for the small monthly sums they allow. Many only run for 12 months so the average balance is tiny. They can also drop the rate as soon as you have a decent balance as did Nationwide and Newcastle BS. May still suit some. All in all, there're a lot of options before anyone considers lending at 3.00% using P2P platforms with the attached risks. It's still bit of a mystery to me why some appear to require little or no risk premium.
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 27, 2015 10:30:34 GMT
Nope, it isn't institutional money. They typically prefer the higher rates and to be classified as "permanent capital". So that's one theory gone then. I know you can get high rates from some current accounts, but many people can't be bothered with the trouble of meeting all their T&Cs and having to change every time they take a rate away. And some of us just have a personal problem with their methods, it's a point of principle. I suspect many people over-estimate how onerous the conditions for high-interest current accounts are. It's true that the highest paying ones have lowish limits on what can be invested but Santander 123's £20k per account isn't too bad and just requires two DDs to be set up (with no requirement to be actually used but with cashback available if you do). With 4 accounts we can hold £80k at 3.00% there which provides immediate cash on hand for investment opportunities using "faster payments" and debit cards. The rates (1% on £1k, 2% on £2k, and 3% on £3k+) haven't changed since launch in 2012 and will be interesting when they want to do that: the "122.5 acccount" won't have the same ring. The only current account I'm aware of significantly changing terms and conditions was when Lloyds made the Classic Advantage account less attractive while introducing the Club Lloyds account with just one account per customer at 4.0%. For those who like it simple, Tesco's current ac pays 3.00% on £1+ and now has no fee, DD or monthly funding requirements. Most current accounts require no attention once set up and certainly not the constant monitoring that anyone using P2P platforms should be doing, let alone the time required to actually understand them and evaluate the risk. I agree that investing should be principled but I invest in many different companies and have far greater reluctance to invest in tobacco, some drugs companies, all arms manufacturers, as well as many retailers using cheap labour and dodgy sales tactics, than I do with most banks. And of course some of the most popular equity income fund portfolios are packed with such companies
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 26, 2015 11:20:09 GMT
Thanks Kevin. I see there the average for 1 month money is 3.1% but for 1 year is 3.7% - which for 1 year is probably above what I spotted over the week. So things seem to be a bit out of kilter at the moment. Would be surprised if informed retail savers were content with lending at 3.0% and below when they can get 3.00-5.00% from current accounts, so is that largely institutional money coming in? Interesting to see the extent of daily swings - some in excess of 1%.
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 24, 2015 19:37:46 GMT
Thanks for that. So the "small fee" might be anything but small. P2P would only ever be a very small proportion of my investments and I'll always have others where I could raise any cash I wanted. I tend to keep a lot, too much, in cash anyway. So the only circumstances I can envisage when I might want an exit would be if I sensed serious problems for the platform or industry. 3 to 5 years is a long time in a very young industry so would take a seriously tempting offer for me to commit to that sort of term without being able to reasonably accurately cost what the exit price would be. At the moment, I see a real 3.5% upwards as fine for 1 month money - a small premium over the 3.0% I get in our 4 Santander accounts which are the lowest paying of the current accounts we have. At the moment I can put money into RS when I see decent rates on offer: the interesting bit will be when I see whether decent rates are consistently available for for reinvestment. Would you mind saying what you feel a reasonable expection of overall return for 1 month RS money over a longer period would be? Seeing offers to lend at 2.9% today makes me wonder if my 3.9% average so far might not be so easy to maintain.
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 24, 2015 12:01:44 GMT
OK being disillusioned with the misery rates available as a saver i have taken a learning approach by depositing 2 x 500 deposits with RS on the monthly market. One at 3.3 (which was the MR at the time) and the other at 3.5. As you speak of "the misery rates available as a saver" but have invested £1k in Ratesetter at 3.4%, can we clarify if you've already taken full advantage of all the current accounts paying decent interest? Some of them pay way more than 3.4%, albeit for fairly small sums, all are fully covered by the FSCS and give instant access. By using several you should be able to stash away around £60k or more at between 3.00-5.00% and double that between you and your partner. (A bit less than was possible now that some banks have reduced the number of new accounts they allow per customer.) While the arithmetic of pursuing an extra 0.1% or two, as set out be markr, is clear enough, I wouldn't be prepared to take on the additional risks of P2P without getting a decent margin over what I can get in a rock-solid current account. At the moment my target for 1 month money is 4.00% and I'm not sure I'll be too interested at much less than that - other than on a very short-term basis. My first £1k put in at MR got just 2.9% which wasn't too promising. After finding that little link to set my own rate I've now managed to get the overall average up to 3.9% with the help of a couple of loans at above 4%. What does surprise me is that there's currently a queue of people to offer a 1yr fix at just 3.3% and still no takers. There's obviously a lot I need to learn because, for private investors, that doesn't make much sense to me. I just don't understand the strategy. Warning: like you, I'm a complete newbie at this of just a week and still testing the waters so my views might make no sense either. The trickiest part for me is to actually assess the level of risk because I'm still not clear on exactly what happens in various circumstances. For example the exact level of "the small fee" Ratesetter refer to in my welcome email if I want to bail out of a contract. It read "Don't worry, with our Sell Out feature you can access your money at any point for a small fee. Find out more." The 'Find out more' link didn't work. The trick seems to be to push up your rate to an acceptable level without having too much dead money lolling around. After less than a week my learning of how that's done is still a work in progress.
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oik
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Post by oik on Oct 24, 2015 11:40:43 GMT
To get the referral bonus can the wife sign up for an account? I did that without any problem. The terms just say "The Referred Investor should be someone with whom you have an existing relationship, such as a friend or family member."
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