Starting to Save for the BIG DAY!

HappyBone

Can anyone recommend a financial institution (a bank) with a high interest rate and little to no fees for a savings account? My FI and I are starting our wedding fund and I want to make sure our money is invested wisely. Any help with this would be great, its kind of an overwhelming task. So many banks, so little time.

RailWayWife

I would start off with the bank you deal with now. See what rates they offer then call around to other banks in your city and see how they compare. I think rates are different everywhere you go so checking local rates is important.

Kelli7025

Based of of what my FI and I are doing, I would recommend looking at credit unions in your area. Huntington is our regular bank, but all our wedding money is in a savings acct at a credit union associated with our church.

We did this because we have a checking and savings acct with Huntington, and we tried keeping money for bills and miscellaneous in checking, and wedding in savings. The problem with that is Huntington allows you transfer money from one acct to the other online, and it takes about 2 clicks to be done instantly.

We had a hard time not touching the money in savings, so we went with a seperate acct at a place on the other side of town. Its only a savings acct so we do not have a debit card for it, and we only take money out for deposits and other things for the wedding. It has essentially made the wedding money "untouchable" which has worked great for us !

Good luck !

dancinkristy

Sallie Mae has a high yield savings account online. There are no fees or minimums involved. You can link it with a Upromises account which rewards you with a cash back type system  from purchases at certain retailers/restaurants/etc.

alanie1

Smarty pig yields high interest.

beautifulvice

We've been using ING Direct (www.ingdirect.com). You can make as many saving accounts as you want for no fee (which is great, because I just split out different costs for the wedding and funneled money into those -- you're also able to label them so it's easier to see exactly how much money you have for what). 

It's pretty much all online banking, though.  They have just institued a program where you can deposit checks by taking a picture with your phone (also great because, before this, you had to mail your checks in) but we love it.

bjhubble

My Fiance and I have been using INGdirect too.  I have it linked right into my checking account.  The only problems we've seen so far are that recently his auto-deposits (we have it set up so that the account automatically pulls a little over $100 each into the wedding fund every week) have been bouncing back for no reason so they're not actually being deposited.  The other issue is it takes up to 5 days for the money to transfer from the ING account to my checking account so we can't just pull the money out immediately when we need it.  We already have a good chuck of money in there so we'll stick with it, but I won't lie, it's not my favorite.