West Boston Savings Bank has created an online division called EBSB Direct.  The online savings account is ideal for individuals who have a large amount of money to save, as the interest rates are best for balances over $50,000.  For balances over $50,000, EBSB Direct is offering a 2.81% APY through September 30, 2009.

For balances between $5,000 and $50,000 during the same time period, the rate is 2.00% APY and the minimum balance to open the account is $5,000.  If you don’t have a lot of money to deposit, you  will probably be better off checking around for banks that don’t have such a high minimum balance requirement.  With EBSB Direct, when your balance falls below $5,000, you pay a monthly fee of $15 and will not earn interest on your savings. You can save up to $1 million maximum in an EBSB Direct savings account.

The bank offers unlimited external account linking, which means you can connect your EBSB Direct savings account with as many other accounts as you like to transfer money via the ACH bank-to-bank transfer service.   To verify external banks, EBSB Direct will make small deposits to the external bank that you can confirm in order to verify the account you are linking is your own.  They have a maximum transfer limit of $150,000 per transfer, which makes it easy to transfer money between your accounts whenever you need to.

EBSB Direct is available nationwide, and can be opened online. You can make your initial deposit and subsequent deposits with ACH transfers from other bank accounts.  The account you use to initially fund an EBSB Direct savings account does not need to go through any further verification process in order to perform additional bank-to-bank transfers in the future.

According to the bank’s published FAQ’s, there is no credit report accessed when you open an account.  You are limited to a total of 6 withdrawals per month from your account as is true with many pure savings accounts, and there is no check writing feature. If you meet the minimum balance requirement to earn the interest on your savings, interest is compounded and credited monthly.

Tags: ebsb direct, high balance savings, online savings accounts

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 9:44 am and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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