It’s been an emotional week.
On Thursday afternoon I opened up news.com.au and saw my noggin smiling back at me.
The headline read:
“‘Disappointing’: ING scraps wildly popular Savings Maximiser high interest savings account.”
Brutal.
You’d think they would have picked up the phone and called me.
I mean, they have my number.
Not. Even. A. Text.
Not that I’m bitter. After all, this relationship was one-sided from the very start. I never received so much as a sausage roll from ING for the millions of customers I sent their way.
Truth is, I wrote The Barefoot Investor imagining I was sitting at the pub with my best mate, telling him exactly how Liz and I managed our money.
The backbone of the plan was the buckets. They put an end to dumping everything in the one account and doing the shuffle. We set up the Savings Maximiser accounts. Nicknamed them. Made the automatic transfers. Even sharpied “SPLURGE” on the second card.
Fun fact: The Barefoot Investor was published almost 10 years ago, and it’s still in the top ten non fiction best sellers. The success of the book meant most banks ripped off the ‘buckets’ idea (just as I ripped it off from my grandmother and her envelope system).
Today there’s UBank, Macquarie, AMP, Up. (The big banks are pretty crap; their profits still come from billions of dollars sitting in zero-interest bank accounts.) You can use your mortgage offset. Heck, one bloke in Coober Pedy told me he stuffs his money into rusty buckets (not advised).
The brand of bucket doesn’t matter, so long as you’re getting a decent return on your savings (in an account covered by the government’s bank deposit scheme). The buckets are a financial filing system, not a way to get rich. In other words, I wouldn’t bother changing your set-up for an extra half a percent. Your time and energy are better spent making more money.
So what should you do now that ING is consciously uncoupling from us?
If you’re an existing ING customer you don’t have to do anything. The changes from 1 December only apply to new savers. You can keep your Maximiser and keep earning the rate, as long as you still hit their (annoying, self-serving) conditions.
If you’re setting up your buckets today, you have so many more options. They’re all going to honeymoon you, and then start layering the conditions for the bonus rate. That’s life. Just understand that banking is a lot like dating in your 40s. It’s treacherous. Every new bank will have some baggage, they all have a hidden agenda, and they’ll dump you at a moment’s notice.
Tread Your Own Path!