A savings account is a bank account designed for saving money and earning interest. Unlike a checking account, which allows you to write checks and make purchases with a debit card, a savings account typically only permits ATM withdrawals and doesn’t support check writing. Additionally, there may be limits on the number of withdrawals or transfers you can make each month before incurring fees. Despite these restrictions, savings accounts are a secure way to grow your money over time.
A high-yield savings account is a special type of savings account that offers a higher interest rate than a regular savings account. These accounts are usually offered by online banks and credit unions, which can give you better rates because they have lower overhead costs than traditional banks.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reports that the average interest rate for savings deposit accounts is 0.45%. While anything above this rate is considered decent, the top high-yield savings accounts can offer returns of 3% or more.
Many FDIC-insured savings accounts offer a 5% APY, including Forbright Bank, BrioDirect and Varo Bank.
Currently, no savings accounts offer a 7% APY. However, OnPath Federal Credit Union provides a high-yield checking account with a 7% interest rate on balances up to $10,000. Additionally, Landmark Credit Union offers a Premium Checking account that pays 7.5% interest on balances up to $500.
Policy Details
LA Times Compare is committed to helping you compare products and services in a safe and helpful manner. It’s our goal to help you make sound financial decisions and choose financial products with confidence. Although we don’t feature all of the products and services available on the market, we are confident in our ability to sound advice and guidance. We work to ensure that the information and advice we offer on our website is objective, unbiased, verifiable, easy to understand for all audiences, and free of charge to our users. We are able to offer this and our services thanks to partners that compensate us. This may affect which products we write about as well as where and how product offers appear on our website – such as the order in which they appear. This does not affect our ability to offer unbiased reviews and information about these products and all partner offers are clearly marked. Given our collaboration with top providers, it’s important to note that our partners are not involved in deciding the order in which brands and products appear. We leave this to our editorial team who reviews and rates each product independently.
At the LA Times Compare our mission is to help our readers reach their financial goals by making smarter choices. As such we follow stringent editorial guidelines to ensure we offer accurate, fact-checked and unbiased information to all readers. Learn how we are compensated by our partners.