Tesco Savings 3%

We have a joint account with them and OH has one in his name.  You're right about the DDs, between the 2 a/cs we get less than the monthly fee in cashback for those, but added to the interest on the money in there, it still means well over £40 a month after the fees have been paid.

And yes, cashback on some DDs will go up as our council tax will go up a fair bit too; every cloud and all that

If you have all the 3% accounts already, other than Tesco, the next beat is Club Lloyds which is now 2% on £5k, a couple could have 3 accounts.  So that would beat Santander.

We are also doing the HSBC and FD monthly savers which for us are 6%, but have now dropped to 4 or 5%.

Good post but I have to ask FD?

Bakers,  you are not alone, I had to ask the wife!  

First Direct 

completely forgotten I'd ever heard of them 

I tried them last year took them 2 months to set up the account, in the end I told them what they could do with it.  

Yesterday it took about 5-10 mins to set up the Tesco one, same when I did the TSB one.  OH now opened one, then we will do a joint one, that way we will get the full £12,000 at 3% rather than .75% in my Loyalty one.

TG, you need to open 2 Tesco ones each to get the full £12k at 3%.

Sometimes a second one can be tricky, OH had to phone for the second one, the problem seems widespread, but they are very helpful via phone.

OH had a small problem with FD as we had an account with them about 20 years back and they dredged it up and were looking for original passwords etc, but it was all sorted within a week.

You can avoid the minimum pay in by also opening a savings account and depositing £1.  Check for switching bonus too.

I opened HSBC, they can be quite fussy on income level apparently, you need at least the Advance account for best rate on the  monthly saver.  It did take me a few weeks to get it sorted, but I also got a switching bonus as I used an old account to switch in.  Worth looking into that.  Check out the requirements on pay in too.

OH just saw on MSE that applications for this Tesco account have been suspended temporarily as they have been overwhelmed by the number  of applications.

On the Tesco website it said that a joint account could have £3k in for each member giving the full £6k, that plus the 2 single accounts should give us the full £12k but will check it out before proceeding. 

OH saw that Tesco had suspended their application just now, ours went through yesterday so hope those 2 are at least ok.

Ah, right, thanks, that is interesting.

We had not looked at joint accounts, MSE seems to only mention 2  sole accounts per person.