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I love how all these companies offering high-interest accounts basically use two tricks in their playbook. First, they use the old "16x as much interest" which is technically true, but really 16x a number that is basically zero, sounds much better than it is.

Second, they offer these rates for a little bit then when people have switched over and would be too lazy to switch back, they drop the yield again.



The second point is not my experience with two institutions (a credit union, and Robinhood). In both cases they consistently tracked the federal funds rate, raising and lowering my account interest as market conditions changed. There has been no rug pull. For several years.


E*Trade did this quite a few years back - 10 or 15, IIRC. They used to offer a "max-rate checking" account that did a quite good job of coming close to matching the top rates you could shop around for. And then they decided they wanted out of the banking business, as far as I could tell, and dropped their rates to something like 0.01%. They've now outsourced it to morgan stanley's private banking and it still gets 0.05% (about 1/12 of what you can easily get at other banks).


My experience over many years is that about a half of the accounts that I've opened at high rates have continued to track prevailing rates, and the other half went down to essentially zero (e.g., 0.05%) and stayed there.




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