[Update 7/15/20: Insight APY rate is now down to 1%.]
For some time Insight offered a 5% APY savings account on balances up to $5,000, then it was announced that these accounts would be closed on July 1st, 2018. In the end only accounts that were opened online were closed and accounts opened in person were kept open. Interestingly reader Lindsay noticed that they were offered the option to reopen a high interest savings account from a previously closed account. Another reader was able to confirm that this is possible and that the following is also true:
- If you manually requested that they fully cancel your account and a check was sent out it’s not possible to reopen the account
- New accounts opened online will offer 1% APY instead of 5% APY
New accounts opened in person will still earn 5% APY as well.
Hey guys it looks like 1% APY is correct you can check your July statements online now to confirm. Remember do not close your accounts prior to receiving the interest on October 1st or you will forfeit the interest. I’m keeping all my accounts open for the 1% which will probably be a top rate for liquid cash very soon.
My Insight savings accounts were earning 5% APY as recent as the last statement issued on 6-30-2020. Now these accounts have updated T&C attached to them. The revised T&C is dated 7-1-2020 and shows 1.00%APY.
Can someone please update what their accounts are showing as of now? To refresh everyone’s memories, T&C can be downloaded by: login to your Insight account, from “Savings” dropdown select “E-Statement”, scroll down the page all the way to the bottom, on 4th line from the bottom there should be a link titled “Savings Terms & Conditions”. Clicking on this link will download the most updated T&C.
I also show the new 1% language.
All four of my accounts say 1% APY in the terms. As you said, we’ll have to wait until we see another statement or interest payment to see if Insight actually follows through. Not many banks paying >1% right now anyway.
Thanks for DP. I would be surprised if they don’t follow through but you never know, let’s hope there is a glitch in their system which prevents the 1% APY implementation.
Yes, I see that, the link at the bottom of the statements page, “Savings Terms & Conditions”.
What’s funny is that if you hover over the link, or right-click and copy the address, it says it goes to here: https://www.insightvisa.com/content/dypgs
If you open that link when you are not logged in to Insight, it shows the old terms, 5%, dated 12/05/2019.
If you open while logged in, shows the new .0995% interest terms, dated 07/01/2020.
An amazing internet magic trick.
Samosa
So, the question remains… are we grandfathered? I don’t think so… Not looking good!
I uploaded the new terms here: https://docdro.id/U43qp6V
Thank you so much for catching and positing this! I wouldn’t have found this out for a long time otherwise.
I have an “approved” account that still has the Savings Menu item and both the “Accountholder Agreement” and the “Savings Terms & Conditions” have the 1% Term. Our other six accounts (which were not “supposed” to get the 5% – but still got it as of 07/01/20) also showed 1% in the “Accountholder Agreement”.
(Those “extra” six accounts don’t have the Savings menu again, but the transfer link still works)
We setup ACHs to withdraw $4,999 from each account today (they will complete tomorrow). We will setup other ACHs tomorrow to withdraw the few hundred dollars/account in accumulated interest.
From past experience, the maximum amount for Savings => Card Transfers is $5,000/day. I hope this is still correct as I forgot to test this before we setup the transfers (to late to change now anyway). I will transfer from Savings => Card tonight. I hope that they still allow $5,000 transfers or our seven ACHs will bounce (and we will get fees…).
Looks like Insight savings revised their T&C on 07-01-2020. New terms state APY of 1.00%.
William Charles 
Chuck 
Gadget 🕵️
Another one bites the dust.
Does this apply to existing account holders as well?
Does Insight issue a debit card with your name on it? Opened two accounts (P1&P2) in person about 6 weeks ago and received generic cards from the seller at the time of account opening. Haven’t yet received a card with account holder’s name on it.
Your new cards with your name on them should have come in the mail by now.
Thanks for your reply. I opened accounts in mid-Feb and haven’t received new cards with our names on them, but we were able to activate the attached savings accounts and are earning 5%. Are we supposed to activate cards by doing a signature/PIN purchase?
Do you mind explaining how you were able to get 5%? I went to a “partner location” and opened in person, only to receive the 1% savings. We can discuss via email if you would prefer not to publicly disclose.
I didn’t do anything special, just opened accounts in person, setup online accounts, moved money, and it is now earring 5%. Not sure why your didn’t work.
Did you open the black/grey debit card or the green mobile banking card? The green card only gets 1%. You can only get the 5% account if you open a card in person at a “partner” location after depositing $10 to the card. Online applications don’t work.
I opened a green one in person, the check cashing place told me they didn’t carry the black card. I opened the green with hopes of having it product changed to black. Do I still have a chance?
I have never heard of anyone doing a product change on these. Couldn’t hurt to call and ask though. You have to get the black/grey debit card and put $10 on it to activate the savings account. No saving account if you apply online or by phone only if you open through a “partner” location. If you get them to do a product change tell them you opened your first card in person and you want the 5% savings account on your new card.
Years ago when I opened my Insight cards in-store, they were just marked something like “valued cardholder”. They did not send me new cards until the expiration date, which did have my name.
Did you get Black/Grey cards or Green
Samosa?
5% APY is still alive on mine… hoping to hear your DP.
The crap would really have to hit the fan before I would ever use my card, and 95% of the time the cashier would never look at it anyway. Near expiration, you get a card with your name in the mail. I’d keep your $10 and keep on moving. The account is in your name… you can screenshot the cardmember info and hang onto that. The backing bank also mails you a 1099 in Feb that will have the savings account number and your name/address. Plus, the debit card number doesn’t show your savings account number, and obviously where you keep your cash anyway.
I keep putting off stopping by my local checking cashing place, First Virginia, to see which one they have nowadays. COVID-19 hasn’t helped either. But I thought the black was extinct based on other DP’s. Interesting. I am riding this 5% as long as possible… esp. now that interest rates have been reduced to nearly nothing. There is talk of possibly going to negative interest soon… where you have to pay banks to hold your cash. That would be “interest”ing.
Deleted
Opening in person no longer gives the 5% savings account. Now it is also 1%
https://www.insightvisa.com/savings/transfer
I found the link of the transfer page from my browser history. I have tested that the transfer page is still functioning.
Edit:
Rundell found it already.
Thank you all for this info. I don’t use the card much, but noticed last night that the transfer option was gone. I’ll try typing in the URL today and hopefully that will work for me. I’ll report back no if it doesn’t for some reason.
Why in the world did you guys call them and draw attention to a clear loophole?
This is 100% why the interest rate got adjusted, jeez. Never call support. Ever.
Edit: Nevermind…. Just downloaded the accountholder agreement and the interest rate there is still in print as 5%. I’m going to keep an eye on that and check again next month.
I am more concerned that they could decide to close the “unallowed” accounts just before 3/31/20 and not pay interest.
Per one of their terms (insrb-terms-v1a.pdf):
“Effect of Closing Your Savings Account: If you or we close your Savings Account before interest is credited, you will NOT receive the accrued interest, and any accrued interest that has not been credited will be forfeited.”
YIKES! If that would ever happen, I would expect a lot of complaints to CFPB…
They may also change the interest rate at any time (but this would also apply to the old accounts that were allowed to keep the Savings):
“The APY and interest rate on your account may change. We may change the APY and interest rate on your account at any time in our sole discretion”
p.s. I hope that you noticed that they put back the Savings link?
I just checked and the transfer links were still there for all of my accounts. It might be wise to hold off on contacting customer service particularly for the accounts that were reopened. We don’t want to draw and attention to ourselves. This could just be some computer glitch from a update to their system or something. Remember how we didn’t have access to savings statements for a while? It also looks like the cardholder agreement has been updated and reworded but the terms look basically the same.
Has anyone else seen the ability to transfer between savings and card disappear recently?
@Katie,
You are right! When did you check last and before this?
The Savings drop-down menu is gone. That is were we could make transfers between the card & Savings account.
I also have an another account that was opened by phone a long time ago. The Savings account was still active after the general Savings shutdown July 1st, 2018. This account still has the Savings drop-down menu.
I sent them a message.
p.s. The home page shows that the Savings account is still there and interest was posted for last quarter 2019.
Please delete my comment above. I couldn’t edit it.
Here is a revised version:
@Katie,
You are right! When did you check last and before this?
The Savings drop-down menu is gone. That is were we could make transfers between the card & Savings account.
I also have an another account that was opened by phone a long time ago. The Savings account was still active after the general Savings shutdown July 1st, 2018. This account still has the Savings drop-down menu.
I sent them a message.
p.s. The home page shows that the Savings account is still there and interest was posted for last quarter 2019.
@Katie,
I sent them a message asking about how to transfer now and the missing menu. Here is their response:
“Thank you for contacting us! This request must be made through our Customer Service Department for the security of your account. Please give us a call at 1.888.572.8472 between the hours of 7am – 9pm (CST). We look forward to assisting you. Thank you for choosing Insight Cards. Have a great day. ”
Sigh…, I guess that they really want to charge the account $1.00 for calling them.
Well that’s BS… I won’t pay it. I’m going to ask them to waive the fee since their website isn’t working or has been altered from the terms I signed up under.
Try 888-796-1516 or 855-355-8117. This is posted in older blog entries.
I called the new number, but thanks for that info Storm. It took a while to get an actual rep (by reporting a card lost). Then the agent had no idea why i couldn’t transfer online and insisted the website was working. After some back and forth, I got her to transfer my funds to savings. She did not mention any fee for this, so I assume it will be free (but will check). The irony of this is that spending half an hour on the phone with a live rep is surely going to cost them more money even if they do charge a fee!
I suggest that we all send them messages about this technical(?) issue of the missing Savings drop-down menu.
(I just sent them another message asking about the status of a fix for the missing drop-down menu)
I hope that they didn’t disable it on purpose….
I’m afraid it might be disabled on purpose. If you manually type in URLs that are related to the savings – /savings or savings/enroll you get the message: Savings option has not been configured for this product
HOWEVER, if you use savings/transfer it will go to the transfer page. As a test, I successfully transferred $0.01 from savings to the card.
Not sure if we should REALLY report the drop down missing…
Thanks. That is good information to know. I wonder only the recently re-opened accounts were disabled. The accounts that I opened in person and kept open still show this option available.
@Rundell,
Great Find about the URL!
Note that /savings-transactions also works.
They must have known that the Savings account was there if they purposely removed the Savings menu only for accounts that “were not supposed to be allowed to reopen their Savings account”…
In doing so they tried to prevent more “unallowed” Savings accounts to be reopened.
I wonder if they will do anything about the current “unallowed” Savings accounts…?
Most likely they will :-(. I wonder when the menu disappeared. Anybody know? Date range?
p.s. I got a response message that they are reviewing the issue about the missing menu..
One more thing:
If anyone has less than $5K in their Savings it would be **very helpful** to know if they can transfer money from Card to Savings using the savings/transfer link that you found.
(I need to transfer out $4,900 and 2 weeks later transfer most of it back to Savings)
Thanks, Erik and Rundell. Never thought to try URLs. If it helps to know, I do now have my transfer back to savings showing in my account without any fee assessed after talking to that rep by phone (who had no clue what was going on).
If you have less than $5K in the Savings, could you please try to transfer in any amount using the URL?
Erik
Erik I do now have the full 5k back in savings again, but I’ll try transferring $1 with the URL.
Thanks,
Gadget 🕵️. Mine was an online account… the only one of 4 my husband and I opened that had the link to reopen savings. Since this was clearly unintended, I’m guessing Insight is now cleaning up their own sloppiness.
Ahhh, that would make sense. I had called and completely close my online opened Insight accounts when the savings accounts went away, so reopening them was not an option.
The issue of the missing menu was only for accounts which had the Savings reopened recently.
Are you aware that we earn interest on the total amount in the account, even if it is above $5K (after accumulating interest)? No need to remove the quarterly interest.
I am definitely getting 5% on the total balance (which is above $5K)
I use this this simple formula to confirm:
Q4-Balance*92(days)*0.0488895(interest rate)/365(days).
The interest I received was a few pennies more than calculated. Probably because of rounding of the interest rate.
Ooh… I did not know this. Thanks for the tip!
Same here Erik and I have posted on this several times. They are definitely paying 5% on the total amount. I have almost $6,000 in my oldest account and I made nearly $75 last quarter. Between all my accounts(8) the additional interest accumulated is around $5,000. This is like having another account opened. The only problem is if I take it out I can’t put it back in! lol I look at it like a long term 5% CD.
I see that the Savings Menu is back now (01/03/20 at 1:20 PM PST)!
This is the worst place DO NOT do business with them I was with them for 6 months they take your money for any reason u go to the gas station they with took $20 I’ve have several reasons why should not join this place it is a scam out your money this place is bad they don’t care about the customers they are bad business DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH INSIGHT don’t do it I’m saving you !!!!
1. Gas stations charge a deposit to debit cards to make sure they are valid before turning on the pump. This charge should reverse in a few days.
2. This community is not interested in using the debit card. We are only using it for the interest on savings.
3. Have you ever heard of punctuation?