Krunk4Ever!

I just got this email:

The last time I wrote to you, I told you how committed we are to helping you get the most from your money and reach your savings goals faster.

Well, even as the economy continues to prove challenging and the Federal Reserve reduces rates, we have some good news to kick off your summer.

Your Online Savings Account rate has increased to 3.50% APY*, effective June 2, 2008. That’s up from 3.05% APY. And it’s 9x the national savings average.** This at a time when some other savings rates have been falling.

This great new rate will be available through August 15, 2008. After which, you’ll continue to get our great everyday rate. So the faster you deposit, the faster your money will grow.

And you can feel confident knowing that we’re part of the global HSBC Group ranked number one by Forbes magazine in their annual Global 2000 ranking issued on April 21, 2008.

Once again, I sincerely appreciate that you have chosen HSBC Direct as the place to make your money grow.

Sweet! While other banks are hovering between 2.75% and 3.15% (HSBC Direct was at 3.05% if I recall correctly) and when interest rates continue to drop, this is a sweet interest rate! Too bad it’s only going to last 2.5 months. I doubt others are going to follow suit, but who knows.

If you don’t already have an HSBC Direct account, you can get more information here: Online Savings, Online Payment and Online CD Accounts, HSBC Direct.

Not really worth opening a new account if you don’t already have one, but for those who do, it might be worth it to temporarily hold you savings in HSBC and get the extra 0.5% of interest. Best of all, it applies to your whole balance and not just new deposits like some banks (*cough* INGDirect *cough*).

There should be 2 account numbers for each checking (or savings) account. One should only allow deposits, while the other will allow both withdrawal and deposits. The reason for this is that today when you associate a checking account with another bank or another financial institution, you might not want them to have the ability to withdraw from that account, which currently I don’t see any barrier besides the fact they can only withdraw up to your balance. That’s a lot of trust to put into some financial institutions, especially when identity theft has been such a big problem.

Personally I never transfer money from my checking account to Paypal, only the other way around. However, since my checking account is linked to Paypal, they can on the whim decide that I broke some rule and withdraw money from my checking account without my consent (no, this did not happen to me, but I’ve heard it happening to others).

This also avoids mistakenly withdrawing from an account that you did not want to. I’ve personally done that multiple times. Once I switch the source/destination and had the money go in the opposite direction. Often times, due to how Paypal is structured, I would accidentally pay via my bank account instead of my credit card.

I currently solve this today by only having minimal money in accounts which I only expect deposits and not withdrawals. I have another checking account which I use to pay all my bills etc.

However, I think this can all be solved if financial institutions decide on giving you 2 account numbers, one as I stated earlier should only be deposit only. That way even if someone gets ahold of this number, they can’t do much damage.