Online banking and high interest savings accounts have revolutionized the banking industry.  For years people asked themselves whether it was worth it to save money in a savings account.  With the advent of the Internet and online banking, online banks were able to create high interest savings accounts because of the low overhead that online banking allowed.

Traditional banks with physical locations are typically paying interest rates as low as 0.25%.  If you invested $1,000 at this interest rate, you would only earn $2.50 in a year.  That doesn’t even pay some of the ATM fees that banks are charging to withdrawl money.

However, we don’t have to put up with these low interest rates anymore.  As we have written here on Smart Savings 101, there are many high yield savings accounts to choose from.  We scour the Internet to bring you the latest high interest rate savings accounts that we find.  Some of these high interest savings accounts that we have written about are,

• HSBC Savings Account
• ING Savings Account
• Washington Mutual Savings Account

Smart Savings 101 has written about many of the savings accounts offered by the largest of banks.  We are making it our goal to dig deeper and find the smaller banks that might be offering the best savings rates, but not advertised much because of them not having the national reach of the larger banks like ING Direct, HSBC Direct and Washington Mutual.

Too often we only open bank accounts with the larger banks.  Why do we do this?  Well, my guess is that because they have spent millions in name recognition and we believe that they are safer to invest our money in because of their large size.  Additionally, these larger banks tend to have more branch locations and more convenient ATM machines.  I actually think that this is a fine reason to choose a larger bank.  In fact, I have my high interest rate savings in an ING account.

However, if you are looking for high interest savings accounts, there are lots of smaller banks that are fighting for your money.  They are sometimes willing to pay higher interest rates in order to get you to open a savings account with them.

However, don’t just look for the highest interest rates.  You want to find the best savings accounts.  Some factors to look at are high interest rates, great online banking options, free checking accounts, ease of access to your savings, low fees, and good customer service.

I hope that this article on high interest savings accounts motivates you to open a savings account and start saving more money today.  If you know of any good banks with high interest rate savings accounts, please tell us about them by leaving a comment.