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What’s Ahead:
Finding the best CD rates for your savings goal
Most of the time, CD rates are significantly higher than regular savings account rates. The trade-off is you need to keep your money in the account for the specified term in order to earn the best CD rates.
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of investing in CDs versus savings accounts.
What is a certificate of deposit?
CDs are like savings accounts. They are federally insured, meaning they can’t lose value, so they are a totally safe place to put cash.
Unlike savings accounts and money markets, however, when you “buy” a CD, you can’t access that money anytime you want. If you withdraw money from a CD before the end of the term, you will pay a penalty equal to some or all of the interest the account has earned.
When not to use CDs
Because you face a penalty if you access your money before the end of the CD term, CDs don’t work for emergency savings or other money that you might need on short notice. (If your car breaks down, you want to tap your savings now, not in three months when your CD matures.)
When to save with CDs
A CD make an attractive option for short-term savings goals. CDs can be a smart way to save for a major purchase like a new car, vacation, wedding or the down payment on a home. When saving for a short-term goal, you may be able to earn a better return on your money in stocks or bonds, but investing involves risk; with a CD, you know you’re principal will be there for you at the end of the term.
If, for example, you have been saving for home and know you will not be buying for another year, throw your savings into a 1-year CD to get a better rate than you could in an online savings account.
Finally, if you are an aggressive saver and have at least two months of emergency cash and are working on building more, you can do what is called CD bracketing or CD ladders.
Say you are putting $400 a month into emergency savings. Once you have, say, three months living expenses saved, you can begin to buy CDs with different maturity dates. The goal is to think about what would happen if you needed your emergency savings in the future, and to have different CDs mature each month after your initial cash reserves has run out.
The higher CD rates get, the more CD ladders make sense; it all depends on how much extra juggling you want to do to earn a few extra points in interest.
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Source: moneyunder30.com