I had an interesting situation today where I was actually out with another person in an effort to find a birthday gift for another. However, he had an appoint with his bank as apparently his financial planner wanted to speak with him. So, he decided to bring me along. Even before we arrived I was suggesting that they probably want to convince him to lock in some funds with the bank through investments. While I didn’t say anything in the actual meeting, I was literally there for the entire conversation.

For the most part it seemed pretty straight forward as expected. Since he has tens of thousands of dollars available the financial planner was suggesting that he lock in various funds into investments that would be tied up for like three years. These were safe and guaranteed investments. He didn’t seem too pressured at all and was level headed such as saying he wanted to make sure he always had X amount of funds free and did not want to invest in anything that has a risk of losing money. Eventually, he did agree to invest some funds into three year terms.

He ask me what I thought after and my response was that it seemed alright if you simply always want to play it safe. At the same time the banks really love it from a business point of view since it gives them more funds to say loan to others to then generate even more interest off them. His response was of course as he understands that they must be gaining something to be offering him these services. To him, if they both didn’t gain something then there was no need for the business relationship.

While that may seem like such a small detail, it’s important to think of things like a bank as a business and what they get from you as opposed to thinking they are like an overgrown piggy bank in your room that is simply keeping your money for you. Like in this case it makes you think more where instead of investing into something blindly you should think and research a bit on how much they gain from the transaction too. You never know as similar to a retail store, if there is one item that you know where the product is marked up by like 500% then most likely they are recommending it because they gain more from it as opposes to it being the best option for you.

Needing Rewards To Save As Opposed To Spending

Today I was reading about this site called Saveup.com which by the sounds of it is kind of like a rewards program where instead of being a program focused in rewarding you for purchases it tries to reward you for doing things such as saving money or paying off a debt. I don’t think I could try this to see how it is as it sounds like it is US based only, but it sure made me wonder if these types of rewards can encourage people to save if something like gaining interest at a bank isn’t a good enough motivator to put money in it.

It does seem like they are trying to make saving and managing your money more like a game. So in some ways I suppose it’s one of those if you treat something as being more fun rather than work then you are more inclined to do it. I guess for some it’s like exercising where while for many your health is a good enough motivator to do so for many they need to package it in a different way to motivate them them to do so. Interesting idea overall.

This was creative I thought. Who would have thought about a bank having sales during times like these? Just the thought of it would be weird as what would it be? A sale in exchanging foreign currency or something? For the most part it seemed to be deals such as getting bonus money for opening various banking accounts and services that was being offered by ING direct as I read it at a press release at http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ing-direct-puts-money-on-sale-134527063.html

I guess $123 isn’t too bad if you are willing to change your payroll for just one month to that bank. Creative way of marketing though I must say.

I was reading about a deal that a bank was offering where you could potentially get a free $250 for simply signing up for an account and doing some services such as a direct deposit or auto bill payment feature. I was so tempted to do this as I was thinking at worst I could just close the account once I get the credit if I didn’t like it.

I was just thinking about the hassle though of having so many bank accounts as like a credit card I find it a lot easier to minimize it and not enroll for every card out there just because you get some kind of reward.

This made me wonder in a “what took so long?” type of mentality. I was visiting a BMO branch here and noticed that they have some nifty coin counting machines now to make deposits easier. It’s almost like those home kits that you would buy where you just dump all your coins through a machine and through that it will automatically sort out the coins.

This is better as you can literally just fill up say a container with all of your spare change, dump it in the machine there and not have to worry about wrapping the coins up like you normally would. I suppose if you were ever of thinking of spending like $20 for the sole purpose of getting a coin organizer to bring to the bank that this should change your mind to save you money.