Recently, Lloyds TSB in the UK having been showing adverts for a new saving method they have. Basically, everytime you pay for something on your Lloyds TSB debit card, they round that amount to the nearest pound, and pay the difference into a Lloyds TSB savings account.
So, for example, if I spent £13.47, they would pay 53p into a savings account, and deduct £14 from my current account.
Although I’m not a Lloyds TSB customer, I realised that doing that for any account wouldn’t be too difficult. So I’ve taken my bank statements for 2007, looked at all the payments out that had a “pence” amount. I took the each pence amount away from 100, and totalled all the results.
It’s taken me about an hour to produce a spreadsheet and do this for almost 3 months worth of statements (next time, it won’t take me so long as I’ve already created the spreadsheet).
My savings account is now an impressive £11 better off – and that’s not including the values for March (which I’ll add in at the start of April). I’ve got a feeling I might manage to save a fair amount of money this way.
The other thing that I was planning, and haven’t done yet, is to look at the closing balance each month and round that down to the nearest pound (or even £5, or £10), and pay that into the savings account as well.
Could work quite well, as long as I remember to do it each month!
Keep The Change
Bank of America has been doing that for 18 months or so. It’s called "Keep the Change", and it’s made me a tidy sum.
For the first 3 months they *match* your transfers. After that, they match a few percent. This means that you should tip to .01, costing Bank of America 99¢ in matching. Haha!