Guide to savings accounts
As sad as it is, Christmas has been and gone for another year and it’s the time of New Year’s resolutions.
Your mind is tired from the stresses of the past year and you will be no doubt looking forward to booking your much needed holiday. Or, if you don’t really like spending your hard-earned wages on a week away somewhere, you may be wishing you had a better car or a new flat-screen TV or some other new gadget. To do this, you will probably have to start saving up your spare cash, because these things are unlikely to be cheap.
At the same time, as many as 1.2 million of you smokers out there will have set yourselves the New Year’s Resolution of giving up smoking. With an average man smoking 14 cigarettes a day the total amount set to be saved is easily over £1300 a year. Why not use our Smoking Calculator to see how much you are set to save if you kick the habit.
Even if you’re a non-smoker, there’s bound to be something that you will try to give up this New Year.
Either way, wanting something expensive and giving up costly habits are two excellent reasons to start saving, especially in light of recent figures from National Savings which showed that a fifth of us still save nothing.
If you are already in the savings habit, it wouldn’t hurt to make the New Year the time that you review your options to see if you are still getting the most out of your savings account*.
In light of all of these great reasons to start saving, we thought that a guide to saving might make the process of choosing an account easier for you. After all, knowledge is power.
To get the most out of this guide, it would help if you had an idea of how much of your New Year budget you can afford to set aside to save. It would also help to bear in mind what type of saver you might be in terms of how regularly you will want to save and how often you will want to access your money.
We also recommend that you read the guide section-by-section so that you can take a step by step approach to identifying the best savings account for your individual needs. However, if there is only one section that interests you, it can be read on its own as a mini-guide.
If you are thinking ‘I really can’t afford to save’, just remember that saving something will always be better than saving nothing.
*Why not try using our 'Savings Calculator' to see if there is an account that can offer you more than your existing one.
Savings Calculator
Guide contents
- What is a savings account?
- Savings accounts and interest rates
- Tax and UK savings accounts
- Opening a savings account
- Adding money to a savings account
- Accessing money in a savings account
- Regular savings accounts
- Instant access savings accounts
- Online savers
- Individual savings accounts (ISAs)
- Helpful links for further savings information