UBank Term Deposit Review

The following is a guest review

After a few years of just using high-interest savings accounts for all the money I had put away that I didn’t want to have in my transaction account, the time came where I thought I’d have enough funds to invest in a term deposit. I’d been in the workforce for the best part of ten years and had enough savings to make it worthwhile – still keeping my normal savings account open too, for emergencies.

So, wanting my money to work a bit harder for me, I decided I could put $13,000 into a term deposit and be confident that I wouldn’t need to get at the cash for perhaps a year or 18 months. I started by initially looking around the major banks and saw immediately there was a huge amount of choice on the market.

I moved from UK last August, where I previously had a Citibank Term Deposit account which was okay, but after hours of research in the Australian market it soon became clear that UBank would be the best option for my needs.

Given that my primary requirement with my term deposit was to maximise returns, the rate was my highest priority. UBank simply had the highest rates going – I eventually went with the 12-month UBank term deposit with a rate of 5.06%. That was marginally better than UBank’s main competitors and a lot better than my own bank. Rates are probably UBank’s main attraction to potential term deposit investors.

And since making the decision to go with them, UBank has proven to be a good option in other ways. Chief among these must be ease of use. Having had a couple of bad experiences in this way with other banks I was keen for UBank to be efficient, and they didn’t disappoint. I found their website to be mostly very easy to negotiate, while, importantly, it is impressively smooth to actually make your deposits through either BPay or electronic transfer.

Great rates and being easy to use were the main factors with UBank, but their extras were pretty good too. By that I mean such things as loyalty bonuses and the like. In addition, there are plenty of re-investment options on maturity, while their ‘turbo deposits’ are also a great option for many people.

You also must remember that despite perhaps not being the biggest name in the term deposit market, UBank do have the backing of NAB, allowing a crucial degree of security and peace of mind.

There are also a couple of important factors surrounding term deposits that I had no experience of with UBank. These include the penalties if you do need to access the money before the term deposit has matured. The experience I had with interest rates and overall convenience however, was more than satisfactory.

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