Picking savings accounts

On the seriously boring front, my wife and I set out to pick some new savings accounts after our previous bank really let us down. After some very in-depth research, we found that Washington Mutual, or WaMu, had the right range of savings accounts for our needs.

The options that WaMu gave us was a selection among these types of accounts:

• Online Savings
• Statement Savings
• Traditional CD
• Online CD
• Liquid CD

Essentially, what we needed was a few accounts to handle our everyday, short term, savings for stuff like vacations, white goods, well, you name it. Money we'd need within the year. And then there are the longer term accounts.

We required at least two of these, one which was to hold a few months' worth of salary in case something radical happened and we'd need to live off our savings. This needed to be a high interest CD that didn't penalize too heavily if the money needed to be withdrawn. And then there's the savings fund for a future house purchase and maybe our (hypothetical...) child's college fund. This is a very long range savings option, with the latter being far in advance of 10 years. We also know there would be no need to touch this money until the CD matured, so we where free to pick the highest paying options.

Where we ended up was with a mix of the Online Savings account, an Online CD, and some long term high interest Traditional CDs for 5 and 10 years. That should pretty much sort our savings for 'a rainy day' and let us get on with the business of playing the stock market better!

Fool.com has plenty of information for saving money well.