BootsnAll Travel Community

Hi all!

I graduated from college about a year ago, I've saved $4,000 since, and I'm ready to make my first investment:

an HSBC six-month CD with 5.25% APY.

It's going to be $2,000.00 for now; I'm just trying out investing and leaving enough in my regular savings in case I need it. If I freak out or don't like it, I figure six months is a short enough time to deal with it.

Has anyone else done this or anything similar?

I have a CD with Citibank at 5%. I could have gotten a slightly better rate, but I mainly do it so I can get the "thank you points" that I can redeem for airline tickets for having the CD.

If you don't like having your money locked into a CD, you can put the money in an HSBC savings account, which pays 5% interest. The disadvantage over a CD with that is that your rate could go down, but with a CD it's locked in. The disadvantage is, well, your money is locked in!

Some CDs have early withdrawal options if you pay a penalty. So even if you have an emergency, you might be able to get to the money by paying a fee.

That's great Kate! I have an HSBC Direct savings account for 5.05% and it's very worthwhile because you can set up automatic transfers each week from your main account where your paycheck is deposited. Another good feature is the HSBC ATM card you get which is helpful when traveling because it is accepted all over the world.

Good luck with you travels!

I currently have 4 cd's with ING. They are all set to end a different times. I love watching my money grow that way! I also sorta feel like I'm saving and I don't want to use it now anyway so there is no need to have easy acess to it!

On CD's, they advertise them at say 5.25% apy, so does that mean you'll earn $525 on a $10,000 CD, if it's a 7 month CD, or is that only after a year (annual percentage yield = apy?)

To figure out what you earn take the number your putting in the cd and multiply it by the percent interest. Then divide that number by tweleve. Then multiply that number by the number of months long the cd is. That will tell you how much you will get.

Great, thanks for the help, it's what I thought... I ended up going with HSBC's savings account which is at 5.1% I think... there seems to be no catch to it that I can see (no annual fee, no minimum balance, etc and you get a atm card), since I dont know if I'm leaving later this year or early next, I didn't want to be locked into a CD and not have access to those funds for a few months or so, just in case.

quote:

Originally posted by mikeheenan:
Great, thanks for the help, it's what I thought... I ended up going with HSBC's savings account which is at 5.1% I think... there seems to be no catch to it that I can see (no annual fee, no minimum balance, etc and you get a atm card), since I dont know if I'm leaving later this year or early next, I didn't want to be locked into a CD and not have access to those funds for a few months or so, just in case.

There's no catch. I love HSBC and have had the accounts (check/sav.) for almost two years now.

I did run into one little problem when I was out of the country. They sent me a notice saying that I could only perform transfers from my online savings account into my free checking account 6 times per month or they'd have to change my account type.

This happened because I would go online, transfer a small amount to my checking account from my savings, and then withdraw cash from an atm. I wanted to keep as much money in my savings to earn interest. So I just kept it to under 6 transfers and put more in my checking account.