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OCBC 360 account - When you should forgo the save bonus to maximize interest?

360 Calculator generated by Grok

I was lurking around some telegram channels, particularly Beansprout, to learn about how people navigate and maximize the returns from their savings account.

Not a commonly asked question but I've seen it a few times so far. When should you forgo the save bonus for OCBC 360 account?

One of the bonus that OCBC 360 account award is the "Save" bonus where you increase your average daily balance by at least $500 monthly and you will receive 1.2% for the first $75,000 and 2.4% on the next $25,000. However, anything above $100,000 earns a pathetic 0.05% that is better off placing that excess sum with other banks.

So I decided to find out building a tool and also have fun with cursor.

Cursor

Cursor is a code editor that looks exactly like VS Code but with LLM built in. If you are into writing code and haven't use it, please give it a shot. It blows my mind the first time I use it and never look back since.

I started by getting some screenshots from OCBC official website. Paste them into excalidraw and form some starting point for the UI.

Next, I take the screenshot and paste it into the "Chat" COMMAND + L, and start prompting what I need. From there, I just keep iterating by describing what I want.

How to use the tool

The calculator has some defaults.

  1. Starting balance are set at $100,000
  2. Bonus Conditions such as Salary, Save, Spend are checked by default. These are some assumptions I made given that I use the account as well. I assume most people can meet these 3 bonus conditions and not the other 3 such as Insure, Invest, Maintain $200,000 (bad choice if you are doing that unless you have way too much money).
  3. The alternative bank I used to calculate opportunity cost is Maribank as I find it the simplest among all without any hoops.
  4. I set the Maribank rate at 2.5% (although it's 2.7% at point of writing as of 17 Dec 2024) because it's scheduled to drop to 2.5% starting Jan 2025. The tool allow you to set your own interest rate for comparison as well.
  5. The number of days are alternate between 30 and 31 days although I understand February typically only has 28 days but you can change accordingly cause I imagine you might want to use this in March or so on.
  6. Any balance changes you made, the following months are automatically incremented by 500. Again, I'm assuming we are maximizing the interest here.

Tips

Deposit Notification

You can set notifications for OCBC for incoming funds to better manage maintaining exactly $500 or slightly above $500.

  1. Login to your OCBC App
  2. Bottom right corner, click on "More"
  3. Scroll down and find "Profile & app settings"
  4. Find "Manage notifications"
  5. Manage deposit e-alternates

You can select accordingly on the amount and method. For me I just set $100, push & email.

Cut Off Timing

Do note that OCBC has a cut off timing around 9.45pm. Meaning to say, any incoming funds at 10.30pm, are reflected in your account, but doesn't take into the calculation of the interest. This will affect the average daily balance in your account.

February Reset

February is a good month to do a "reset" because it's a shorter month, which means you lose out lesser by a few bucks. If you start with 102,000, the interest generated for the next 12 months with Maribank on the excess would be $118.57 which is slightly higher than the "Save" bonus in the month of February.

Conclusion

Hope you find the calculator tool useful. Note that the logic of calculating the interest for respective bonuses are correct as of time of writing (17 Dec 2024).