Apple, Goldman Sachs Debut Savings Account with 4.15% Annual Yield
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The FDIC publishes some decent statistics about average yields for various deposit products.[0] As of March 2023, the national average for savings accounts was 0.37%. The largest banks (Wells, BoA, Chase, Citi) offer 0.01% interest. That's 1 penny for every $100 you loan them.
That low rate made sense when the federal funds rate was low as an incentive for banks to borrow from consumers rather than the government. But now the rate is almost 20x more than it was a year ago, so there's a larger incentive for banks to borrow from consumers.[1] This should drive more competitive rates offered for consumer deposits.
If you're earning less than 1% APY on your checking and savings account and have $1000 in it, spend an hour researching an alternative. Going from 0.01% to 1% alone would earn you $10 more per year on that amount. If you have $10k, that's an extra $100 for maybe an hour of your time.
[0] https://www.fdic.gov/resources/bankers/national-rates
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds
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On a related note, I'm part of a team working on a service to monitor all the deposit rates across all financial institutions in the US in real time. If you're interested in learning more or signing up for the alpha launch (targeting Summer 2023), shoot us an email at bankrank.alpha@gmail.com
There's a direct correlation between advertising spend and interest yields on deposit accounts, which is somewhat interesting. It seems like the optimal business model is to focus more on customer acquisition than customer retention, because these products are very sticky. Churn rate for deposit accounts is like 8%, which is crazy given the rate variance.
+ Excellent wire and ACH support
+ Ability to invest in money market, treasury, or bonds directly from the account. And able to get someone on the phone to schedule recurring actions (e.g. ladders)
+ Decent "checking"-like features (ATM cash withdrawal with fee reimbursement, autopay, check deposit)
Essentially the only things it can't do are (1) Zelle & (2) deposit cash.
If those aren't needs you have, don't think there's a better solution with less effort.
Thanks Apple for making tax time just a bit more painful...
Message support. They’ll send a bulk-download link.
There are plenty of reasons one might want a csv, though.
Doing taxes right now and I spent about 10 minutes manually exporting+emailing OFX/QFX files to myself for Quicken. Kind of a pain. Every other card I have supports automatic data pulling.
Probably will move my main card to something that has automatic integration.
WTF is going on?
https://www.marcus.com/us/en/savings/no-penalty-cds
Best no penalty cd I've found is 4.80 @ CIT bank, which is funny enough...ex SVB.
Why is the Apple rate higher than the Marcus rate? It could be a higher intro rate, but there's no indication that that's the case. My guess is that they can afford to give an extra 0.25% because they don't need to spend any money on customer acquisition/marketing costs.
Marcus and Betterment often go back and forth on who provides the higher rate. Right now Betterment is 4.2%, so the rate that Apple/GS is providing isn't outrageously high, it's potentially a real rate that can be sustained. It's only outrageously high compared to the 0.01% that many big banks offer.
https://phatwalletforums.com/topic/109/best-nationally-avail...
Also if you're unbanked, a savings account isn't going to be your first step. It will be a checking account with an ATM/debit card.
It gives people who are poorly banked an option to save in a higher yield account than what they may have with a big bank. One of the things that Apple Card does better than others is show that information about how much you're spending. With the savings account, showing that you are saving money can be useful in knowing that you've got it and its change over time (compared to logging into a bank that you otherwise rarely interact with).
I've had an Apple card for awhile and have found myself using it more and more just because it's convenient. Not having to enter CC details into every app and instead just double clicking the side button to pay for something is incredibly convenient.
Personally I have way more confidence in Apple's ability to manage a pool of depositor funds than I do for pretty much any bank.
*plus there's other banks offering comparative rates
Apple’s iPhone Passcode Problem: Thieve’s Can Ruin Your Entire Digital Life In Minutes | WSJ
You buy a bond paying 3%, bond yields go up to 4% and you want to sell your bond, it will be less than the face value you bought it for. This isn't an issue if you want to keep it to maturity. But that's what SVB (and others) did and that creates its own problems.
If you're buying bonds, you're either parking money for a long time or you're betting on interest rates going down.
This Apple savings account will likely go down over time. Any time new branded savings accounts are marketed they always put super high returns to foster deposits and then they slowly trickle them down to a mean value that sits somewhere between 50~100 bps from what you get from a money market play.
As of 4/13 30-day SEC yield on ICSH is: 4.92%
As of 4/17, Marcus HYS is: 3.90%
[0] - https://www.ishares.com/us/products/258806/ishares-liquidity...
ICSH is an ultra-short bond fund with average duration of 0.42 years. So very little duration risk.
That said for the GP it’s only slightly more work to buy actual treasury bonds. Hold them to maturity and there’s no risk of losing money from interest rates going up. You know exactly what you’re getting and when. And if interest rates drop suddenly you can decide if you want to sell the bond and take a gain.
But are bonds liquid? Part of the appeal of a savings account is that it's still cash you can spend immediately by check/debit/cash with no need to sell/transfer to an account.
I agree that a 4% savings account is not a good way to invest money - but that's why I don't think they're comparable to bonds.
I guess to answer your question of why not get bonds - they just aren't comparable. One's effectively an investment that requires multiple steps to be used to purchase that expensive computer monitor on amazon, and the other you just select your payment to be a debit card and click purchase.
T-Bills sound relatively liquid, but a savings account still beats it at the cost of 1% interest (assuming 5% for the bonds).
If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and need to move money around to make small purchases, then it’s not for you, yeah. Money market funds are for savings, not money that will be imminently spent. But then so are savings accounts at banks (vs Checking accounts)
Yeah this is the part that I'm confused about because I think that savings accounts are federally restricted to 6 withdrawls a month? I could be completely wrong on that.
But yeah the target audience for this IMO - people who have maybe a few thousand saved up that they keep for emergency funds or semi-hot money for larger purchases. which matches the target iphone audience I think pretty well.
I bet they restricted accounts to less then 250k because they don't want to bother splitting it across banks when the target audience would be expected to only have several thousand.
The fund will lag Fed hikes by a few months, but otherwise will yield the same as buying T-Bills directly.
Using trailing distribution data to compute yields will not work for a T-Bill fund in the middle of a Fed hiking cycle.
The yield to maturity should be the earning you get if you hold the fund until maturity and interest rates stay as they are today. It's possible Ishares is not reporting this number accurately.
There are different ways of measuring a fund’s yield, but at the end of the day this is mechanically how this fund works.
As with anything, approach it rationally. Is there a home you want to buy, and can you put 20% down today, and can you afford the monthly payments + property taxes + insurance + random repairs that you'll have to make? If so, it's not a bad investment; after all, you have to live somewhere. As with any investment, there is some risk. Your neighborhood could become bad. The entire house could be supported only by dead termites. But most of the time, the horror scenarios you read about don't happen; you enjoy living there, and sell it some years down the road for well more than you paid into the loan. It's worth considering over pure investment vehicles; you can't live in an ETF, and there are no tax breaks.
With mortgages at over 6% and personal loans at 8-9% (according to my local credit union) I'm not sure if it's that much better and if deductions would offset high interest rates, but it's definitely a nice kickback.
Be careful investing on things/markets you don't fully understand.
Are the fees, minimums, limits and rate structures similar? If so, then the inflation thing is irrelevant. They either beat it or don't, but at the end of the day, you're still comparing who has the better APY and what not regardless of that differential on inflation.
If HYSA's (which this is, by reasonable metrics and their own definition) beating Inflation is important to you, that's a separate discussion to be had first before shopping specific offerings, as that's a discussion of a systemic problem and if HYSA's are relevant to you at all in the first place. Hot tip, in high inflationary markets like today, HYSA's don't beat inflation.
I have no financial interests in them, but I'm a happy customer. I like using it to make float on cash in between tax payments and other obligations.
This year's inflation might be below 4.15% (not sure what the projections are)
Now you don't need an iPhone to use and pay on an apple card[1], but currently I don't see any way of accessing the savings account on the card website. Not that you would want to use an Apple Card without an iPhone anyway because using the card gives you less money back. (1% vs 2% or 3%)