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DEL.ICIO.US
SMART SAVING AND SPENDING
A New Kind of Christmas Club or Clever Marketing?
Nov 12, 2008
Remember when we saved for goals instead of pulling out the plastic?
Start-up SmartyPig.com is a Christmas club for the 21st century. The free site helps you set up an online, FDIC-insured savings account at Iowa's West Bank, earmarked for a specific goal.
And here's SmartyPig's stroke of genius: You can make your account public so family and friends can chip in toward your goal.
SmartyPig recently offered a generous 3.9% annual yield on the account. And the company has partnered with more than 25 retailers, such as Amazon.com and Macy's, where you can redeem your savings for a gift card with a bonus of up to 5%.
To start an account, you must commit to a minimum goal of $250 and a $25 deposit. Your timetable must be at least three months and no longer than 50 years.
Redeem funds with a gift card or debit card, or transfer the money back to your checking account. --Louis Jones
4 Comments
we should look into this
thought this was interesting...
I like this means of "investing" in Christmas. The requirements are easily achievable for myself. And the best part of this? You can set up as many goals as you choose, giving each one a title, much like what ING does, except with a far better interest rate.
It's a keeper.
Believe it or not, SmartyPig is potentially useful for all sorts of things. I'm contemplating using it to repay debt. I've got a pretty crushing debt load for my income level thanks to a bad divorce and some stupid mistakes, and some of those items have been lingering unaddressed for years. I thought, well, since I'm ignoring them anyway until I can afford to pay them, and I could have paid them if I could have chipped away at them a little at a time, why don't I set up some SmartyPig accounts for socking away that money so I can just call them up when I have it and pay them over the phone?
If enough people learn about the program it could be a really big help for people who can't get loans for debt consolidation.