You may be familiar with E*Trade as one of the first online stock brokers. What you may not know is that E*Trade is also a great place to bank. They even do home loans and credit cards.
E*Trade Max Rate Checking
E*Trade’s Max Rate checking account provides the usual checking perks:
- Free bill pay
- Free debit card
- Online access, etc.
Where it gets good is that E*Trade Max Rate Checking also gives you free unlimited ATM fee refunds and pays interest on balances over $5,000. As of May 22, 2012, that rate was 0.15% APY. Not much, but it is a checking account.
E*Trade Complete Savings Account
To round out their brokerage and banking options, E*Trade also offers an online savings account with no minimum balance requirement and just a $1.00 require opening deposit. As of this update (5/22/12) the APY is a paltry 0.05%, but if you want a savings account under the same roof as your brokerage services, it’ll do. Otherwise, find another online savings account here.
Learn more about E*Trade or open an account here.
NOTE: E*Trade is an affiliate advertiser on this Website.
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About David E. Weliver
If you were to keep a balance of over $5000 grand, is there any benefit of having the savings over the max-rate checking? I have both but I’m trying to figure out why I don’t just close out my savings and dump it all in the 3.25% checking account. Assuming I plan on always having at least $5000 in it, does that make sense? Thoughts?
Yeah, Terrence, you raise a good point. I didn’t think of it before writing this, probably because I’ve never seen a bank offer a better rate on checking than savings.
In this case, if you keep more than $5k in checking at all times, it would make sense to dump the savings account.
It looks like the Max-Rate Checking APY has now dropped to 3.01%. The Complete Savings rate of 3.30% APY is definitely better now.
They probably did that to encourage people to have both the max rate checking and the complete savings….I just signed up for it…looks like a very interesting package!
I’ll keep most of my cash in the Savings account, and i am going to set up DD to the checking to avoid the fee, since i won’t be keeping the $5,000 in the checking…..