If Your Bank is Cutting Rates and Benefits, It Is Time to Find Another Bank

Banks have always used the end of the year as a time to cut rates on savings accounts or allow promotional rates to expire, and/or to reduce benefits. For the last eight years, rates have been falling and the lack of competition has offered depositors little recourse but to accept these changes.

Things have finally changed. Rates are already beginning to increase.

Several banks have also recently reduced their rates from competitive rates to ones that aren’t. Even if your bank has given you some sort of great first year interest rate (Salem Five) or great 3 month rate (EverBank), you should not sit by and let them quietly reduce your rate to one that isn’t competitive.

And, if you are a business customer at a bank like Chase which is using the turnover from 2016 to 2017 as an opportunity to strip benefits that they have always offered you, it is also not OK.

Pure and simple, there is competition for your money. Not only is the rate environment increasing, but Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin figures to change the landscape in 2017 to make banking as a whole much more competitive. You no longer need to start the New Year sitting idly by and letting it happen.

See the best savings rates here.

Ari Socolow
Ari Socolow: Ari Socolow is the Chief Economist and Editor-in-Chief at BestCashCow. He is particularly interested in issues relating to bank transparency and the climate crisis. Since co-founding BestCashCow in 2005, Ari has been frequently cited in the media as an expert on local and national savings accounts, CD products, mortgage and loan products and credit card rewards products.


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