I’m mostly an autopilot kind of investor and saver.  I don’t enjoy researching investments and I only like reviewing our holdings when everything’s going in the right direction (and there hasn’t been a lot of that lately).   But a facebook page caused me to review our bank account situation lately.

A friend of a friend had a fan link to ING Direct.  I’ve been a client of ING for a few years so I looked over the page and I thought it was pretty good.  But I was surprised by a comment from a fan that the High Interest Savings rate had been recently lowered to 1.85%.   Holy cow!  That doesn’t feel very high interest to me.   So I shopped around a bit.  There’s some excellent comparison sites out there.   I always assume ING is near the top so I don’t often check them.    But according to the comparison - Canadian Tire Bank has a rate of 2.5% plus a +1% 3 month promotional bonus.

I pulled out the spreadsheet program.  Say we were talking a full CDIC-insured balance of $100K… That’s a difference of $900 in year 1!   Easy to check comments and reviews.   Looks fine.   And I didn’t find any negative service comments (I’ve had really bad service issues with another HISA bank - ICICI - so I always check).

So it took 2 minutes to signup with CT, and the account will be set up as soon as they process my cheque.   Then I’ll simply move some funds from ING, into my transactional bank account and on to CT.   (I would never link the accounts from two savings accounts - I think it’s important to keep a low-balance transaction account between them as a firewall - more about that in a future post).

The lesson for me is to occasionally comparison check HISA accounts - maybe once a quarter.  Where there’s really no switch cost and no service differentiation - then price rules.  The lesson for ING?  Well I suppose I could say that the Facebook page led to me leave them - but I actually think that Facebook is a good play for ING… they aren’t able to differentiate on price and they have a good brand that a social media campaign can leverage.