@Anonymous wrote:@Anonymous and @Borealis I've been looking at Ally as well for a savings account that will give me a better savings rate than my regular bank: Chase. If it's not too much trouble I'd like to pick your brains a little bit
What has your experience been like with Ally, good and bad? Is it as simple as transferring money there and forgetting about it? What does the account require from you if anything to retain the APY rate? Being able to link Ally savings as an external account to my main banking account seems very easy and straightforward.
I haven't chimed in before, but I use Ally as well. The main reasons I went with them is because they have an excellent reputation for customer service, very few fees, and of course decent interest rates. All that seems well deserved. My interactions have been good, and they haven't tried to nickel and dime me. Ally has no minimum balance or other fiddling requirements, so I can just leave money in there without having to babysit it. They even reimburse out of network ATM fees (up to $10/mo).
A fourth reason that's turned out to be very useful if they have very high limits compared to most other banks -- I was regularly depositing checks that exceeded the mobile deposit limit at another bank, which became a real pain. With Ally, I think I've only exceeded their $50,000 limit once or twice. The ability to move around $150,000/day with ACH transfers is also nice, and they seem to clear fairly quickly. They did have an annoyingly low daily Zelle cap during the pandemic ($500), but that's been bumped back up to $2,000. All that makes Ally a good "hub" account for transfering money between other banks and investments.
For an emergency fund, the money market account is a good choice. It's basically a savings account, except you can write checks (which can be very useful in an emergency). Oh, and Ally doesn't charge for checks. You only get 20 per check book, but you can just request another book whenever you want.
The only negative I've come across is you can't deposit cash. Period, no work arounds.
