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Newsletter 2020 V3 Article: Financial Wellness

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Financial Wellness:

A New Take on Savings to Help You Achieve Your Goals

One of the changes coming along with our system upgrade is some new names and features for our standard savings accounts. These changes are centered on clarifying the role that each of our savings accounts play for our members. Whether you’re building an emergency fund, saving up for a specific goal, or trying to make your money work harder for you, we have a savings account to meet your needs!

College Fund Savings

At UMassFive, it has always been our goal to help our members achieve and maintain financial security through the products that we offer, and we’ve spent a lot of time encouraging proactive saving habits through our workshops and communications. The fact remains however, that for many households, creating a safety net is easier said than done—and as an institution with a moral responsibility to assist our membership, only talking about saving doesn’t feel like enough. This year has presented us all with previously unforeseen challenges, highlighting the importance of saving and planning ahead for the unknown. Though the economic impact of COVID-19 was still a distant, unfathomable series of events when we began discussing refreshing our savings accounts, the need was already clearly present for a tool that our members could use in building critical funds for emergencies.

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According to a 2019 Bankrate.com survey, nearly three in ten (28 percent) of U.S. adults have no emergency savings.

The changes to our Savings Accounts begins with our solution to this need. First, our Primary Savings Account will transition to being called our Base Savings Account. This is the account that holds your $5 membership share of the Credit Union, therefore every membership with UMassFive will automatically benefit from an enhanced interest rate to help build a base for achieving personal financial goals.

How Base Savings Works: Our Base Savings Account will earn an enhanced interest rate of 0.25% on up to the first $500 in the account, encouraging faster growth of your savings to better cover emergency situations. Any amounts over $500 in the account will earn our regular savings rate (currently at 0.03% at the time of publishing).

The second adjustment will be to our optional secondary Savings Accounts, which will be getting a long-awaited formal name: our Goal Savings Accounts. (We previously only called them additional savings accounts!) We understand that sometimes saving up for a big investment can feel more exciting and achievable when you can create a whole separate account—and watch your progress independently of the rest of your finances.

Whatever you’re looking forward to, these accounts are intended to give you a clearer picture of the finish line. Not only will you be able to rename your Goal Savings Account in Online Banking to reflect your unique aspirations, but we are also removing the minimum balance fee from this account to make sure that wherever you are on your savings journey, it’s moving forward.

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Additionally, our Money Market, and Money Market Plus accounts—savings options structured to help you continue to grow larger balances—will see the word “Market” replaced with “Manager” to clear up any confusion that these accounts are tied to the market.

Finally, our Term Share Certificate Accounts will be renamed as “Term Deposit Accounts” to better clarify their purpose: setting aside money to grow for a defined term, or period of time.

We hope these refreshed names and enhancements can help each and every one of our members achieve their own individual goals for financial health, and we look forward to rolling them out in November when our system upgrade goes live.

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