Savings Account (Finally!)

I used to have a savings account back in high school and during the undergraduate years of college. However, I ran low on money and had to transfer the money in my savings account to my checking account and get rid of the savings account (otherwise, I was going to be charged for the account). Ever since then, I have not saved any money.

Why? Because I was running out of my loan money at the end of each semester and thought that I was too poor to save any money. Boy was I wrong. I realized that if I saved at least $10 every month from the time that I had gotten rid of my savings account, that I would have had $720 by now.

I want to start saving money so I can have a fund for investing and emergencies.

I kept a savings account with a bank that I regularly use, like Chase or Bank of America. The nice thing about this is that it's easy to transfer money between accounts. Also, these banks are everywhere. The downside is that the interest rate is usually very low. One thing I learned about savings accounts is that federal credit unions offer better interest rates than banks (they usually offer lower rates for loans too but I will talk about that later).

So, I simply googled "federal credit union", looked into a local federal credit union, and started my research on a savings account. I specifically compared two savings account products from a bank (Chase) and a federal credit union (Hughes) because these are the ones that I will most likely open my savings account with.

Here are the results of a few hours of research while worrying about my kinetics exam next week.

Here's what I found: 
Pros of bank savings account: 
-easy online banking,
-no ATM fees at the bank's ATM machines
-many locations
-usually lower minimum deposit
Cons of bank savings account: 
-lower interest rate (for example Chase offers 0.01%)
-service fees applied (conditions apply)

Pros of federal credit union savings account
-higher interest rate (for example a local federal credit union offers 0.2%)
-variety of savings account for different purposes
Cons of federal credit union savings account
-fewer locations
-ATM fees and fewer ATM machines
-higher minimum deposit
-membership needs to be approved and termination fee may apply

After all this and asking around, I decided to open mine at a bank. Why? There are several reasons.

I'm not good at keeping up with my money. I recently started (literally 5 days ago) working towards improving my finances. I'm working on building a habit of saving and I would need to closely monitor how I'm doing and have easy access to my account (physically and online).

My savings will not be some huge amount of money. 0.01% vs 0.2% will not make much of a difference for me at the moment. Once I have more money and experience, I'm planning to move my money. Meanwhile, I really want to get myself started with saving.

Lastly, I am not sure where I will be. Because I don't know where I will live after graduating, I would like to use a bank I can have easy access to. It is crucial for me to be able to go to a bank or federal credit union without wasting my time (I need to save my time for studying and all these extra things I'm doing).

So here I go. I will update you guys on how I have been doing with my savings in 3 months. Cheers, everyone! We can do this.

p.s. if you guys are looking into high interest rate savings accounts, I found a nice article. They do get compensated for their articles though so make sure to keep that in mind. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/best-high-yield-online-savings-accounts/