Zopa accounts

[oncemoreuntothebeachdearfriends]

Anyone with them , please ?

They're offering a Regular Savings account with a whopping 7.10% interest, but only if you have their "Biscuit" current account.

I only want this account for the RS, so don't want to go through the palaver of opening an account only to find that it's mandatory to have salary paid in, or some SOs set up.

There are some bad reviews on Trust Pilot, but about bills, loans & credit cards that I'm not interested in.

Thanks.

I have opened one I don't put anything other than what I want to in the 'biscuit' account and transfer into the high interest. I got it for that and the free foreign spending when abroad.

I'm with them, and after some bad experiences with my previous main bank, I've swapped everything over to their current account now. Have got a couple of savings accounts with good rates, and the current account also pays interest and cashback.

I've had no problems at all.

I have just an ISA with them, with a much better interest rate than my normal bank. So far, so good - certainly it seems very straightforward to operate. But no 'biscuit' I'm afraid. The terms and conditions should be pretty straightforward - mine were.

Thanks all.

I use them, very easy to use and not had any problems. I have a biscuit account but just opened it to get the savings account.

if you use my link to sign up you get £10 and so do I.

www.zopa.com/mgma?referralCode=5beca7c5623cb56ef4b3

thanks in advance!

I did the same and the biscuit account is empty, I just opened it to get the 7.10% regular saver. Had it about 2 months and so far, so good.

I notice this only works for the first 10 referrals. Can I check, have you already used them up?

No, i haven't.

Regular savings pay half interest at the end of the term

Example
10% on a regular saver, actually pays 5% at the end of the year

7% on a regular saver will pay 3.5% interest at the end of the

You would be better putting your savings into an account that pays 4% or more, easy access
Eg
Chase 4.5% easy access

I have moved from Zopa to Chase

This is only true if you leave the balance in a zero interest current account until you put it in the saver though.
If it comes out of monthly earnings (so you don’t have it yet) or you move it from another interest-paying savings account to the regular saver each month, the rate is clearly better

True, but not everybody will have a large lump sum to invest on Day 1.

the point of a regular saver is to save money that you get for the first time in an incremental stream.
If you have a lump sum to start with then you are of course correct, the total interests received on the closing balance will not equate to 7% per year. But if you have a lump sum then a regular saver can be easily beaten on an annualised return basis.
the Zopa regular saver pays £139 interest if your max out of account at £300 per month (3,600 pa obviously). That equates to an interest rate of 3.83% pa, not the 7% headline rate used to suck you in.

Best current accounts: Get up to £200 to switch, 1% cashback & more with top bank accounts

Chase pays 4.5% in saver from day 1
So every £1 is at this rate

If a person puts money into regular saver at 7%, it pays 3.5%

So the Chase is always a better rate !!!

Regular saver at 7%
Pays less interest
Put it into a calculator & you will see

No.

the regular saver pays 7% which is more than 4.5% and it pays 7% AER on every penny in the account for every day it’s in there.

if you open an account on 1 January and put £300 in immediately, then you will earn 7% on that money for the entire 12 months. You can then put in another £300 on 1 February and earn 7% AER on that money until the end of December.

7 is a higher number than 4.5, which is a good thing for earning interest as you want to maximise what you earn, which means you want to earn the highest amount possible.

There is a website called Money Saving expert which you might find useful as it explains the concept of saving in regular savers in a very simple way and it has calculators you can use to understand what you could earn. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at explaining concepts to people who aren’t able to understand them in a way that makes sense (I’d never make a teacher) but that website really is very accessible!

If you put the money in Chase at 4.5% and then use that as a feeder account to fund the 7% regular saver, you'll end up with more than 4.5% overall.

Obviously the higher the interest rate the more you will earn, BUT not necessary always the case if you make a chalk and cheese comparison between a regular saver and a lump sum account...

The key point of a regular saver is that money is being injected every month and therefore, as you say each £1 injected earns the 7% interest rate but only from the date it was injected.

It is therefore a very different proposition to having a lump sum that sits in an account for the entire 12 months.

The regular saver account is closed after 12 months, therefore, the way to think of it is you have created 12 individual pots each with £300 in them. But only the first pot gets 12 months worth of interest at 7%. The last pot (the one created in the final month) only gets 1 month of interest at 7%. The balance on the account at any point in time is effectively irrelevant as interest is earned on the pots, not the balance.

In contrast, a lump sum earning a lower rate eg; 4.5% will outperform a regular saver paying a higher rate for the simple fact more of the money has been earning interest for a longer time period

Here is an example: £3,600 as a lump sum in a savings account for 12 months from day 1 @ 4.5% will earn £25.50 MORE than £3,600 fed into a regular saver at the rate of £300 per month.
In this example, the 7% RS produces a total of £136.50 on the total £3,600 paid in over the 12 months. That equates to a real interest rate of only 3.8% and is therefore worse (by £25.50) than a 3,600 lump sum at 4.5%

if you do already have the lump sum, then you are correct that drip feeding from a savings account with a lower interest rate than the RS account will, by the end of 12 months, have earned more than leaving the lump sum intact in the lump sum account.

I commend the effort that you’ve gone to to create a spreadsheet which gives you an empirical evidence that 7% interest is more than 4.5% but you’re still arguing that it’s not.

I think I understand why you’re confused though. It looks as though you don’t understand that if you don’t put the money into the regular saver pot, it doesn’t fail to exist. So you can put all the money into the 4.5% account and drip feed it into the regular saver.

What I mean by drip feed is to pay a little bit into the other account as and when you’re able to, i.e. on the first of each month but I really would recommend looking at a website such as MSE to find someone who can explain this in terms that you’ll be comfortable with and will be able to understand. However, the fact that you’ve got a spreadsheet does show that you are at least trying to understand it so I wish you the best of luck!

Regular savings can become very addictive, so it really is worth getting your head around them and understanding how they work and why, it really will be a game changer for you.

your condescending response is noted. I can only assume you are partially sighted and failed to see I had already provided the MSE link... ?

I was trying to help, but if you’re going to be rude about it then I won’t waste my time with you any more.

But please, dont make stupid, ableist comments about partial-sightedness. it is horrid and offensive, and it casts you in a very poor light. Just because you haven’t understood something that someone has explained to you doesn’t mean that you should start making nasty comments like that without knowing who you’re talking to.

and your condescension is not rude?????
I am glad you will not be wasting your time being rude again

PS I have been using regular saver accounts for over 20 years

7% Reg saver funded by drip feeding from 4.5% lump sum reducing balance.
Effective interest rate on £3,600 rises from 4.5% to 5.8%