Combined 30k savings - advice on where to put it

[mills81]

I have 14k, we have 12k joint and DP has 7k. At the moment my personal savings are just sat in my tsb savings account doing nothing as are our joint savings and they have been for a while. DP has his personal savings in a monzo and keeps saying we should get a joint account on their for our joint savings as you get better interest but I have been meaning for a while to look and see if there is a better account I should be using, I'm really clueless about finance things like this but I'm wondering if it's silly just having it sat in our normal accounts which earns very little interest. Anyone know about this kind of thing?

You need to consider if you need access to the money quickly or can lock it away for a while. If you can leave it for a while then you can often get a better rate.

Also you may want to consider an ISA so you don't have to pay tax on any savings. You need to pay tax on any interest over £1k a year and with £30k even a rate of 4% will lead to that.

Finally think about investment, e.g. stocks and shares ISAs which can be better but more risky.

This is a good place to start looking at rates: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/

You don't need to combine your savings to get better interest you just need to open an instant access savings account paying decent interest, you should be able to get about 5%.

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You can earn £1k in interest each before paying tax on it, so keep your savings in separate accounts.

You can find easy access savings accounts (look on MSE, they keep an updated list of protected banks with the top rates (i.e your money is protected should the bank fail) .

The easy access variable accounts have the best rates atm but variable means the rates will fall if interest rates go down. Which they probably will as inflation has fallen.

So it might be better to put your money into a 1 year fixed rate account at a slightly lower rate (typically 4.6 atm) knowing it will stay at that rate for a whole year. But keep enough in easy access for a rainy day!

When I was trying to maximise my house deposit I:

• put as much as possible in my ISA account
• I also opened an instant saving account with the rest because I needed to be able to access the money when I found a property to buy.

If you won't need instant access to your money though you can get another type of saving account where you need to leave the money for a year or more.

I have put half of mine into premium bonds. You never know I might get lucky!

The best instant access ISA at the moment is the Trading 212 cash ISA. It is also flexible, so you can repay any money you withdraw. They also pay interest daily, so excellent for short term savings and tax free!

You may want to put some in a good paying % savings account and some in a stocks and shares ISA and invest in the stock market.