(Not speaking for Michael, our current Treasurer, but having preceded him in that role, here are some thoughts.)
Hi Barak, On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:21:40PM +0100, Barak A. Pearlmutter wrote: > > which is an annual interest rate of roughly > > 100 * 12 * 13.45 / 243911.50 > => > 0.066 % > > Rounding up, zero point zero seven percent. > That is, a little bit more than one twentieth of one percent. Given how low interest rates are in the US currently, lots of accounts do have such bad rates. It's surprisingly typical, and these things are hard to compare quickly across countries (your country of Ireland has a very different situation right now on this point). You're right that for our amount of money, some better rates are likely available, but within the FDIC-insured world in the current US interest rate climate, we won't get dramatically more. This is especially true if we continue our current practice of splitting the money between more than one bank, both for significant convenience reasons and to stay below government insurance limits. In other words, $250k is not the relevant tier from any single bank's perspective. There are other investments that aren't government insured which can be prudently considered, but before taking any such risk we should have more man-hours available for such things than (primarily) a single busy spare-time volunteer Treasurer. If you want to identify specific banks and account products we should consider for better interest rates, do let us know. Some relatively obvious preferences are that it should be a US bank (including US subsidiaries of foreign banks) or credit union offering a US-located deposit account (with or without checkwriting privileges) denominated in US dollars, insured by the FDIC in the case of a bank or the NCUA in the case of a credit union; and that we want room to grow in all of our accounts before we reach $250k held with any one institution, which is the current government insurance limit. The account of course needs to be available to nonprofits, not solely individuals. Finally, be cautious about suggesting online-only accounts; those often are only accessible via several-day delayed transfer to a linked account of the same owner, and are very lacking in customer support, which is how they can offer such good rates. Similarly, even standard savings accounts have other transaction frequency restrictions. All of these may (or may not) affect their suitability for us. Probably the best place to direct specific thoughts is [email protected] since this is primarily his responsibility, but it's reasonable to CC whichever of the board, spi-private, or spi-general you think is the most appropriate. I'm definitely not trying to create more work for one very overworked Mr. Schultheiss. :-) - Jimmy Kaplowitz [email protected] P.S. - Thank you for crunching the numbers. It's been a while since anyone had, though I remember doing it at some point in the past and having a similar reaction to yours. _______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general
