Today, Market Watch reported that ING Direct‘s earnings were down 25.00%:

LONDON (MarketWatch) — Dutch insurance and banking firm ING Group on Wednesday reported a 25% drop in second-quarter net profit as the downturn in markets weighed on its investment returns, though write-downs on risky debt remained low. The group reported a net profit of 1.92 billion euros ($2.86 billion), down from 2.56 billion euros a year earlier but still ahead of market expectations.

ING attributed a good part of the loss due to write-downs of sub-prime mortgages they had offered to customers which had gone into default:

ING said the bottom-line impact of write-downs in subprime and other risky assets was just 44 million euros in the quarter. It also wrote-down around 260 million euros through shareholders’ equity, which doesn’t affect profit.

Online savings accounts are a great product as long as you stick with a high-quality bank. You can often get better interest rates, lower fees, and better bonuses than what you would find at a traditional bank. Not all online savings banks are the same, some of them are much better than others. You’ll have to do some comparison shopping and find the best bank to place your money at.

Here are some things to consider when choosing an online savings account:

Interest Rate – This is one of the most important things to factor in, it’s how much money you’re going to make. Right now, online savings account are offering anywhere from 2.75% to 3.75% APY. You’ll want to find a good one that’s toward the higher end of that spectrum. Of course the going rates will change over time, but you’ll want to find an online savings account that has had a history of very competitive interest rates.

Amount Limitations – Some online savings banks have limitations as to how much money you need to open an account. Some also have a minimum amount of money you can have in your account and a maximum amount of money in your account. Make sure that the amount of money you’ll be putting into your online savings account won’t hit any of these amount boundaries.

Customer Service – There are a few online savings accounts which have horrendous customer service, and a few that offer very good customer service. After selecting an online savings bank, search for reviews by people who already have that online savings account and make sure that others have had positive customer service experiences.

Fees – Some of the less competitive online savings banks are offering accounts that had a set of fees for certain types of transfers, going under a certain minimum balance, and other actions. In most cases, it’s not worth considering an online savings bank that has a bunch of fees, because most of the very competitive online savings banks offer great interest rates with no fees to speak of.

Transfer Limitations – A few online savings banks are very restrictive about how much money you can put in and take out of the account each month. Be sure to look at the bank’s transfer limitations to make sure that you hit the boundaries that the bank has. Quite often you’ll have to dig deep inside of the service agreement to find this information.

ATM Card – In most cases you probably won’t need an ATM card, but there are a few instances that you’ll want one. If the money in your online savings account needs to be accessed quickly, say for an emergency fund, you’ll want to get an ATM card.

New Account Bonuses – This shouldn’t be your primary consideration, but if two online savings accounts appear to be equal and if one offers a new account bonus and the other
one does not, you had just as well take the free money if they’re offering it!
This might seem like a bit of work, but it’s definitely worth your while. After doing a bit of research, you’ll find the perfect online savings bank for you.

You might also be interested in reading our reviews of online savings accounts.

Emigrant Savings Bank (Emigrant Direct) has been around since 1850 and was founded by a group of Irish emigrants. The bank is located in New York City and is the largest privately owned bank in the country. Currently it has 36 branches and assets of nearly $12.5 billion dollars. Emigrant’s mortgage subsidiary offers loans in 20 different states and has provided over 4000 home loans in the year 2005 alone. This is certainly not your fly-by-night bank that could be gone at any moment.

When compared to other online savings banks, Emigrant Direct has historically had very competitive rates. A lot of banks start out with high rates and then drop them after they get a bunch of new customers, but Emigrant has stayed near the top when it comes to the interest rate. As of August of 2008, the interest rate that Emigrant offered was 3.00%. At that time, online savings banks ranged from 2.75% to 3.75%. It’s certainly not the highest and is on par with ING DIrect. Their American Dream Savings account has no fees or service charges to speak of. In addition there is no minimum balance to open the account. The money in your Emigrant Direct American Dream Savings Account is FDIC insured, so you know that your money is safe. Bankrate gives Emigrant Direct 4 out of 5 stars, meaning that their bank is financially stable.

The signup process is fairly straight forward compared to other online savings accounts. You can apply online through their website. They’ll ask for some personal information and perform a soft credit inquiry, meaning that your credit score will not be affected. Emigrant Direct will then put two small deposits into your checking account, and then you will need to verify that information so that they know you own the checking account. After you verify your checking account, they will mail you a letter with your account number. This can take upwards of a week if you live a distance from New York. You can use your account number to login, and then they will ask you for the answers for the five secret questions you entered when you signed up. Write them down, because they are very hard to remember! You will then be able to login to your new Emigrant Direct American Dream Savings Account.

The interface on the website is not particularly complex, but it is functional much in the same way that ING direct is. It is also much better than the banks which make use of the Cashedge transaction system which are horrendous to use. When all is said and done, Emigrant Direct’s American Dream Savings account is a reasonably attractive option for your savings account, but they’re no longer as competitive in the interest rate world as they used to be. If you’re looking for customer service, ING Direct is probably the way to go, if you’re looking for the absolute highest interest rate, there are definitely better options.

ING Direct was one of the first high-yield savings accounts which was founded in 1997. Unlike most banks, they do not have any branches which allows them to offer much better interest rates than traditional banks. They have since branched out and offered investment products and mortgages through their sister companies. Many other companies have also followed the model that ING Direct created. Some believe that other companies’ slightly higher interest rate have overshadowed ING and left it in the dust, while others maintain that ING’s superior customer service and website are more valuable than a small increase an interest. We recently reviewed ING Direct and believe it still has quite a bit to offer.

The signup process is very straight forward. You will need to visit the ING Direct Website, and fill out a simple form. They will request some personal information as all banks do. ING Direct will deposit 2 small deposits into your checking account, and you will have to enter that information on their website. This way they can verify that the checking account you entered is yours. When I registered, they had some problems verifying my identify, but I called their customer service number, and they asked me a few basic questions about my credit report and I was set to go.

ING Direct currently offers a 3.0% APY. This is a bit lower than most online banks which offer about a 3.5% APY rate. ING Direct does offer a $25 bonus which makes it very desirable to just try the account. You just need to get a referral from an existing ING Direct customer. In addition, ING offers an automatic savings plan feature which makes it very easy to save. You can also create ‘sub-accounts’ with ING Direct to earmark your savings account for various purposes. This is excellent way to tell your money where it is going.

The company has a number of security features to keep your money protected. They have an account number and a pin number you use to login. Instead of typing in the numbers, you use an image map so that your pin number cannot be logged. They will also display a specific image called a site id image, which will always show up when you try to login. Thus if the image is not there, you are not on their site. They also make use of advanced SSL technology to encrypt the data being transferred between you and ING Direct. In addition, if you are not on your home computer, they will ask you three security questions to make sure that it is you trying to sign into your account.

ING Direct can’t be beat when it comes to offering a quality and secure online banking experience. They might not have the highest interest rate, but the new account bonus is nice, and their customer service can’t be topped.

It’s college football and personal finace over at NoDebtPlan.com, the host of this week’s personal finance carnival.  Here are some of my favorites from the week:

• InsureBlog tells us about the downfall of social security disability payments. Scary indeed!
• Happiness is Better says to leave your bank and take your bill pay with you.
• Green Panda Tree is trying to minimize her use of student loans by looking at work study and grants.
• One Million and Beyond has found success by budgeting on a weekly basis
• Uncommon Cents looks into using Wal-Mart’s generic drug plan to save money even though he has good prescription benefits from work

Also be sure to checkout this week’s Money Hacks Carnival at the Personal Financier.

Recently there have been a number of different bank failures which have left people with large amounts of money deposited in savings high and dry when the dust settled. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) will insure up to $100,000 for any consumer at an individual bank and up to $250,000 for a retirement account. To most of us, we won’t have to worry about exceeding these limits for many years to come, but for others, saving money above the FDIC insurance limit is a major problem. Fortunately, there are options for individuals who would like to keep their money safe well above the $100,000 limit.

NetBank is the quintessential example of why wealthy individuals should take very specific actions to keep their savings FDIC insured. Many consumers though the bank was doing just fine and had a lot of money saved there. It was FDIC insured and people never even considered that their money might not be safe. NetBank hit some hard times and went out of business and a whopping $109 million of their deposits were not FDIC insured and the people who held those deposits were simply out of luck.

In order to keep your initial deposit and the interest you earn FDIC insured, you should never deposit more than $90,000 in any one bank. If you deposited the full $100,000 into a bank and it went out of business, any interest that you earned would be lost. By only depositing $90,000, you are giving yourself some room to earn interest that is still FDIC insured.

To accomplish this task, it’s as easy as opening up several different savings accounts or certificates of deposit at multiple banks. This works fine until you hit the range of several million dollars when keeping all of your money FDIC insured would require opening dozens of different bank accounts. There’s a service which addresses this exact issue. The Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service (CDARS) will invest your money in certificates of deposit across dozens of different banks and keep the money invested for you. You’ll only have one account to deal with and earn one interest rate. With the CDARS service, you can deposit up to $50 million and still have your money FDIC insured. This is a great option for people with a large amount of money to deposit who want to maintain FDIC insurance on their money.

Never leave more than the FDIC insured limits in any one bank, no matter how financially stable it is. If you’re going to leave a substantial amount of money in savings, make sure it’s diversified across a number of different banks.

UFB Direct is one of the many competitors in the online savings account market that ING Direct pioneered in the late nineties. UFB Direct offers a high-yield money market savings account which currently earns 2.96% APY, which is certainly not the highest rate around, but it somewhat competitive. Is it where you should put your money? Let’s find out.

If you take a visit to UFB Direct’s website, you’ll notice that it wasn’t made by any all-star web designer. Fortunately for them, most of us don’t choose our bank based on how pretty their website i.! This isn’t very big of a hassle, but it makes it kind of hard to gather information about them, you have to do a bit of digging to find anything.

UFB Direct isn’t really a full-fledged bank; rather it is a front for Sky Financial Bank (skyfi.com), much in the manner that Grand Yield Direct is a front for The Apple Bank. This isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s certainly worth mentioning. Sky Financial Bank is one of the 40 largest publicly held banks in the nation. It does most of its business in the Midwest, and has been around for quite sometime. Much like every other bank, it’s an FDIC member, and offers a wider range of financial products.

Like other online banks, the UFB Direct High-Yield Money Market Savings offers no minimum deposit to open an account, and no monthly minimum balance, which is always a good thing. Currently the bank offers an interest rate of 2.92% which after interest is calculated makes for an annual percentage yield (APY) of 2.96%, which isn’t terrible given today’s markets, but with places like FNBO offering 3.50% APY, it’s hard to say yes to a lower rate.

There are some fees that UFB Direct has that many other banks do not have and they can really sting you if you don’t watch what you’re doing; read their rates page very carefully before doing any business with them. Since it’s a money market account, you’ll have check-writing privileges, however if you write more than the maximum of 3 checks per month, you’ll be charged $10 for each check after that per Federal law.

The major drawback of UFB Direct is that they don’t accept electronic fund transfers (EFT). So when you want to deposit money into the account, you’ll have to do it at one of their ATMs or a direct deposit from your paycheck This makes it very difficult to transfer money in and out of the account. With other major banks, such as ING Direct, Emigrant Direct, and the like you can make transfers online directly from their websites, which makes it so much easier.

One benefit of an account with UFB Direct is that they will give you an ATM card and refund ATM fees that other banks charge you. This means that you can take money out of any ATM or deposit money at ATM, regardless of who’s it is, and not have to pay any fees for the privilege of doing so.

In the end, I probably wouldn’t use UFB Direct as my primary savings account because it would be very difficult to send money to on a regular basis, but it would make for a very good place to put your emergency fund, because you can get to it with your debit/ATM card readily and you won’t have to deposit much into it too often.

Hunting National Bank has created an online arm they call Huntington Direct and are offering high-yield savings accounts at a semi0competitive rate of 3.00% APY. The new “Hunting Direct” brand was launched about a year and a half ago, and since then they’ve had an opportunity to grow and flourish in the online savings world.

Hunting National Bank is headquartered in Columbus, OH and has been around for over 140 years. The bank has 380 regional banks in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. They have a network of over 1000 ATMs, and have $36 billion in assets. They even have offices in Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands! This is not a small bank by any means.

Direct Huntington’s online savings account is a pretty standard product. It offers a 3.00% APY for balances from $0 to $1 million. You can link to a checking, savings, and money market accounts. The application is done online through the Cash Edge Management System, which can be quite a hassle to get everything set up, but it does the job.

The account has some very major down sides which would probably make me choose to look elsewhere. First, the account has a minimum balance of $1,000. If your account drops below that amount, you have to pay a $3.00 monthly fee. You have to pay a $1.50 fee if you use another bank’s ATM machine. If you close the account within the first 6 months, you have to pay a $20 closing fee. The account is also not available to residents of California, any non-US citizens, or anyone under the age of 21. Their terms and conditions and conditions state the interest is paid quarterly.

The bank has some pretty strange and annoying withdraw and deposit limits. You cannot withdraw more than $2,000 a day or $10,000 a month according to their FAQ. There’s also a maximum of $25,000 for an initial deposit.

The interest rate is pretty reasonable, but that’s really about the only good side of the account. With this account there are a lot of fees that you have to pay that you wouldn’t have to pay at other places. When you add this to the limiting withdrawal and deposit limits, as well as their strange account restrictions, it’s just not worth checking out.

There are a lot of banks that are less restrictive and offer better savings rates than Huntington Direct. Instead checkout HSBC Direct, ING Direct, or another more established online savings bank with lower fees.

There’s a percentage of the population which is a group of people that are just absolutely nerds about numbers. They count where every single penny goes, and sometimes even keep track of fractions of pennies. They know where every dollar they spend goes, and can probably rattle off their debt to income ratio off the top of their head. If you’re someone like this, a company called Yodlee has created a free service that might be of interest to you.

Yodlee’s service is called “Yodlee MoneyCenter.” You can do so many different things with it to track your money, it’s amazing. Unlike other budgeting and money management software on the internet, Yodlee will make use of your online banking information and format it in ways that statistics oriented people would love. Many people wonder how safe it is to give your online banking information to this company, but it’s actually very reputable, many different major American banks make use of its technology for their own online banking systems.

When you log into Yodlee, you will first see a listing of all your accounts and their balances. You can login to each of the sites by a simple click of the button. Essentially it’s a portal for all of your online banking. After a bit of further examination, you’ll notice a “Net Worth Summary” link, which is also very interesting to look at. Basically, it will add up all of your assets and subtract them from your liabilities giving you your net worth, of course this does not include your non-liquid assets such as vehicles, but that’s okay. You can also view a detailed net worth button. It will show you a graph of how your net worth has changed over time. This is a great way to see if you are headed in a positive direction financially!

Another interesting function of Yodlee’s MoneyCenter is its expense analysis chart. It shows where all of your money is going each month! You can view information for the last month, 3 months or 6 months. It will list all of your spending by categories and create a pie graph for you to see. You can also create a budget for each category and Yodlee will tell you how you are doing on each category that you specify an amount to spend on!

There are a number of other great features, such as a function which makes sure you make the most of your credit card rewards, as well a fancy graph of your income versus your expenses. A bit more savvy users can create their own custom reports as well!

Many banks are looking for ways to set themselves apart from the pack by offering better interest rates and additional account features that others can’t match. In its first two years of operation, Flagstar has done their best to accomplish that. At a time when ING Direct was offering a 4.50% APY, Flagstar threw their hat into a ring offering 5.30% APY on savings. Interest rates have since gone down, but Flagstar is still near or at the top with an interest rate of 3.65% APY.

Flagstar is a fairly established bank, so you know that they’re going to be around for a while. They’re headquartered in Troy, Michigan and have over $15 billion in assets. They also have banks in Indiana and Georgia. The company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is said to be the largest publicly held savings bank in the Midwest.

Flagstar’s Express Money Market Account offers an extremely competitive 3.65% APY no any money in the account. This is about as good as you’re going to find in money market accounts right now, with one or two exceptions. In addition to offering a very competitive rate, the account requires no minimum balance to open or maintain the account. In addition, there are no fees to speak of to hold an account.

You can transfer money in and out of the account in a few different ways. You can use the standard ACH electronic transfer service, but they do have some relatively low maximum deposits. You can only deposit a maximum of $5,000 per month and $2,000 per day into the account through Flagstar’s ACH transfer service, so if you have a lot of cash you want to put into savings, you should probably keep looking. If you initiate the ACH transfer from your home bank account, you can deposit as much as you’d like. You can also deposit money through wire transfers (which is free), and through direct deposit if you’d like.

A very good feature of the Flagstar account is that they offer a Visa Debit Card which can be used without charge on the Allpoint network (they have ATM’s just about everywhere). In addition they offer you free personal checks to make use of, but unfortunately because of federal law, you’re limited to writing 3 checks a month and a maximum of 6 non-ATM withdrawals per month.

The application process is relatively straight forward. It’s a lot easier than some banks, but you do have to mail in a signature card. The bank contacts Transunion to check your credit score, but they merely perform a soft credit pull so that your credit score will not be negatively effected.

Overall Flagstar offers a very competitive savings account that’s definitely worth considering if you’re planning on opening a savings account anytime soon. The only real drawback is the limitation in ACH transfers which can be overcome if you make the request from your bank. It’s definitely a winner.