Savings guides

Four guides covering the questions that come up around the calculators. Each one is short, cites its sources, and tries to say the useful thing rather than the reassuring one.

Most writing about savings accounts is produced by companies that want you to open a savings account. That is not automatically wrong, but it does explain why so much of it reads like a brochure and why the awkward parts get skipped. The variable rate, the withdrawal delay, the tax bill on interest you never withdrew.

These pages cover those parts. Where a claim rests on a number, the number is sourced to the FDIC, the IRS, the CFPB, or the Federal Reserve, and the source is linked at the bottom of the page rather than paraphrased from somewhere else. Where something is genuinely uncertain, such as which way rates move next, they say so instead of guessing.

Where the rate figures come from

Several guides refer to the gap between an ordinary savings account and a high-yield one. The low end is the FDIC national average rate for savings accounts, 0.38% as of August 17, 2026. The high end is the 3.75% to 4.20% range online banks were advertising when these pages were last checked on September 5, 2026.

We do not publish a table of named bank rates, because a rate table nobody updates is worse than no table at all. Check the bank's own page for the current number, then bring it back to the savings calculator.