Save More Money for a Wedding - Using a High Interest Online Savings Account

Utilizing the computer for all of your basic banking activities is a great way to manage your accounts and becoming the norm versus balancing a checkbook by hand and visiting the bank on a regular basis to deposit checks and manage your accounts. Setting up a High Interest Savings account should be apart of anyone's regular solution for managing their money and saving a rainy day fund. However many people just occasionally deposit money into these accounts and use them to just save while their is basic techniques you can do to manage your cash better and in the long run help you save much more than even just turning on an automatic deposit into your high interest saving account.

Check out this article which covers most of the online high interest savings accounts that are available to the public.  There is a basic search function that allows you to review different types of accounts quickly.  Also included is a nice overview paragraph for each banking institution that offers this type service with the current interest rates that are available depending upon the amount of money you will have deposited in the account.

While the current interest rates being offered by most financial institutions right now is not that high and thus reduces the incentive to save lots of money in an online savings account right now, it is always good to have a chunk of cash stuck away for an emergency and a high interest savings account from one of the available providers is still a great option for that emergency.  

Online savings accounts are easy to manage and do provide a way to control your money if you use them as a place to deposit the most of your money rather than just your checking account.

One of the problems many people struggle with is ending up at the end of the month with money left over that can be deposited into a rainy day fund for use in an emergency or to make your girlfriends dream of an amazing wedding come true.

The solution is to utilize an automatic withdrawal on your primary banking account that is linked up with you high interest online savings account to make a regular timed withdrawal on a date and schedule that you deem appropriate. Some people want a weekly addition to their account or biweekly scheduled around your work checks while others may prefer a monthly money transfer into the savings account.

The problem with doing this is that throughout the month most people just let a large portion of their paychecks sit in checking accounts receiving zero interest or traditional savings accounts which have interest rates that are near zero. Unless you have a checking account as well that is providing you an interest your money is sitting doing nothing for you while you wait to pay the bills whether its a rent check,car and insurance payments, and all the other regular bills that must be paid.

Of course you do not want to tie up all of your money in a online savings account as sometimes there is a day or two or three delay in the ability to withdraw the funds into your traditional online checking account connected to your debit card. So keeping some money for quick needs is essential but if you are tracking your finances and using an online banking / transaction software like a mint.com then you know about how much you spend for different things and can easily identify the times of the month that you pay those bills.

Keep your money in the accounts that give you the most interest for the longest time possible. As you set up your online bill paying for all of your regular payments you can schedule the payments to be sent by your bank at a specific date and then coordinate with your online savings accounts to make deposits, just always give yourself a day grace period if you are paying large bills. This way you keep the most of your money in the best interest accounts possible and when you use the online savings account as your primary storage location for cash you will be surprised at how much more you are able to save each month. When you separate your cash from being easily spendable by keeping it in the savings account that has a day or two to process you will become more conscious of each expense.

This helped me go from constantly with no savings to be a net saver by trying to always end the month with more money in the savings account than I started the month. After a few months the savings amounts went up dramatically as I became less inclined to make random unneeded purchase as I was being conscious of each time I had to withdraw additional cash for things that were not essential bills.  I'm good to go for my planned March 5th wedding with my fiancée because of my commitment to saving as much as possible each month by maximizing the way the I used my high interest online savings account.