As I’m sure you’re aware, interest rates are at an all-time historical low. This means the money in your savings account is just sitting there, not doing anything useful. You’re making at most 0.5% interest per year, if you’re lucky. It doesn’t have to be that way, though! I recently signed up for five unconventional savings accounts that are yielding 6x that amount. There are savings accounts that make even more than that, some above 6% even, but those have restrictions that made me decide they’re not worth it – a very low maximum balance that earns interest and/or a requirement for a minimum number of debit card transactions each month. I don’t want to work to earn my money – I already have a job. The savings accounts discussed in this post all have a large maximum balance that can earn interest (the lowest is $10,000 and highest is $100,000) and don’t require any maintenance work to maintain. There are a few tricks you can do to squeeze out slightly more benefits if you are a high earner and have very high balances, but I’ll save that unnecessary optimization for Part 2.

Disclaimer: Most of the links below are my personal referral links, so you and I will each get a small benefit if you sign up. Aside from those referral bonuses, I am not being paid by any of the companies listed to promote them. The bonus I get is no different than anyone else would get. I picked these savings accounts because I evaluated them and decided they were worth it. I was not contacted by any of the companies to promote the accounts. If you happen to have a friend or family member who already has one of these accounts, I recommend you use their referral link instead of mine.

HMBradley

This is the king of these savings accounts. If you only open one account, it should be this one. 3% interest on a balance of up to $100,000. Wow! That’s probably more money than most people need to ever set aside in a savings account. So what’s the “catch”? Well, it sounds more complicated that it really is. You need to save at least 20% of your paycheck each month in order to qualify for the 3% interest rate. Technically, you need to save 20% of the money that is going into your HMBradley account. So if your employer allows you to split your paycheck between multiple destinations, you can easily save 100% of what’s going in to this account. And it’s even possible to increase your interest rate to 3.5%, which I’ll discuss in Part 2. This is an amazing savings account that really isn’t very complicated. The most thought you’ll need to dedicate will be setting up your paycheck to deposit to two separate accounts, which is a one-time action for great benefits in exchange. All money that you transfer into the account will receive the 3% interest rate, not just your direct deposits from your paycheck.

Prize-linked Savings Accounts

What if I told you that you could earn free lottery tickets in exchange for saving money, which you should be doing anyway? Most Americans would initially scoff at the idea, but premium bonds have been issued by the UK government since 1956. Prize-linked savings accounts have started to take hold in the US after Congress passed the American Savings Promotion Act in 2014, which allowed banks to offer lotteries and sweepstakes based on the amount of money in a customer’s account. Isn’t it bad to encourage risky behavior, though? The opposite, in fact, according to behavioral economics.

50% of Americans play the lottery, spending an average of $1,000 on lottery tickets every year. And yet, over half of all Americans have less than $5,000 of savings. This is not enough to make it through an emergency if there’s an accident or an unexpected medical condition. Prize-linked savings accounts fix both those problems at once. You can scratch the itch for the lottery while being rewarded for saving money. And what’s more, both the accounts below pay more interest than the national average, even if you don’t win any prizes. Plus, they’re FDIC-insured like any checking or savings account would be, so your money is never at risk!

Your expected value with these accounts will be above 2%, but below the 3% you could get with HMBradley (unless you get lucky). However, these accounts offer something intangible: hope. We Americans buy lottery tickets not because we think it’s likely that we’ll win, but because it buys us a week of dreaming about what we’ll do if we win. With a prize-linked savings account, you don’t have to pay for that hope, and you can get it every week of the year. For this reason, I prefer Yotta over PrizePool because there’s a bigger jackpot to dream about. I know I won’t win either of them, but it’s fun to think about it! I’ll dive deeper in Part 2 into how to optimize both your expected winnings and your hopes and dreams.

Yotta

Base interest rate: 0.2%

Jackpot: $10 million every week

Other prizes: Tesla Model 3, $10k, $3k, $2.5k, $10, $7, $0.75, $0.15, $0.10

Tickets earned: 1 ticket/week/$25 balance up to $10,000 balance. 1 ticket/$150 after that.

This one is more similar to a traditional lottery. Each ticket has 7 numbers, and a number is drawn each day of the week. At the end of the week, your winnings are deposited into your account. Pretty straightforward. The big prizes are split between all the winners, while the $10 and under prizes can have an unlimited number of winners. The little prizes add up quickly with a lot of tickets. You can join a pool within the app to split the earnings with your friends (or with strangers from Reddit) without worrying that somebody will run away with the money. I don’t recommend putting more than $10,000 into this account because you get far fewer tickets for any money above that amount.

PrizePool

Base interest rate: 0.3%

Jackpot: $25,000 every month

Other prizes: $1000, $500, $100, $20, $10, $5, $2, $1, $0.20

Tickets earned: 1 ticket/day/$1 balance up to 3 million tickets

This one feels more like a raffle than a lottery. Each month has a fixed pool of $50,000 in prizes. There’s one $500 winner each week, and a $25,000 winner the 4th week. You don’t pick numbers, rather one of the tickets is randomly selected for every prize in the pool. This means your expected winnings will decrease as more people sign up. Hopefully they increase the prizes available if it gets more popular

Other 3% Accounts

These accounts aren’t as useful as HMBradley in my opinion, but they’re more than just honorable mentions. For one, you never know if HMBradley (or any bank) will suddenly change their interest rate or shut down, so it’s good to have other options in place. Additionally, since they have different sorts of restrictions than HMBradley does, diversifying across accounts gives you more flexibility in case you unexpectedly need to withdraw a large sum from HMBradley (after all, that’s the point of savings – it’s there when you need it) and don’t want to miss out on your 3% interest rate.

One Finance

I really like this one. When you direct deposit money from your paycheck, you have the option to send up to 10% of it to your “Auto-Save Pocket” which earns 3%. Once your money is in the Auto-Save Pocket, there are no restrictions. The regular “Save” pocket still earns 1%, but I don’t recommend keeping any money in it, as there are better options available. I send all my paychecks here and then figure out where I want to move them after. The 10% acts as a nice “forced savings” nudge from behavioral economics. It’s a bit of a game to try to maximize how much I can get into Auto-Save, since I can’t transfer it there directly.

Porte

This is my least favorite account on this list, but they’re still good. They offer a simple 3% interest rate on a balance of up to $15,000. The only catch is that you need to direct deposit $1,000 in a single month in order to unlock the savings account, but once you’ve done this one time, you don’t need to do it again in subsequent months. I also found that they counted a transfer from my bank account as a direct deposit, but your results may vary.

What I don’t like about this account is that they don’t offer an easy way to withdraw your money from within the app. They provide your account and routing numbers, so you can still pull from another account, but it would be more convenient to do that from Porte, so that you know what your balance is when setting up a transfer.