I noticed at the start of the year that ING Direct was offering a 3% 90-day GIC for RRSP accounts (no transfers required) and also 3% for a TFSA account, but with the rate subject to change at any time.
Anybody with an RRSP in ING Direct would do well to lock in the 90-day rate as soon as they can; even though they stated they will offer it until March 1st, they could revoke it. The difference between a 3% rate and a 1.25% rate (which is more representative of the current market rate for a 1-year GIC) is $43.15 on a $10,000 investment. It is not huge money, but it is more money nonetheless.
The 3% TFSA offer is quite a lure, but it is designed to trap as much money before they reset the rate back to a lower rate. The trick with the TFSA is that once customers have deposited their money into the TFSA, it is a lot of unnecessary paperwork to get their money out of the TFSA account once the rate resets to something lower. If customers decide to withdrawal the TFSA once the rate goes lower, then they lose the contribution room into their TFSA until January 1, 2011.
For those people that want to keep their money in a risk-free instrument (e.g. a GIC), use the ING Direct TFSA at your own peril. As a matter of financial planning, the TFSA should not be used as a risk-free account anyhow, but some people will want to use it to park idle cash.
ING Direct used to be the undisupted best place to save money, but over the past few years they have become just “normal”. They are still excellent with respect to having a no-fee operation and this works to their benefit – if money is easy to get out of them, then I feel much safer keeping money with them. For matters such as RRSP and TFSA transfers, however, there is a real bureaucratic cost associated with these and it is not worth it to capture an extra 0.5% elsewhere for the dollar amounts in question that people typically deal with.
If ING Direct wanted to raise a lot of longer duration capital, they’d do fairly well if they offered a 5% 5-year GIC.
What unnecessary paperwork are you talking about, with regard to having money in an ING TFSA savings account? If it’s anything like PC Financial, wouldn’t it just be a matter of initiating a transfer out using the online interface?
You would have to fill in paperwork at the receiving institution, and ING Direct would have to process the transfer manually. I have found financial institutions are notoriously unreliable whenever manual processing is involved.