Its a pain in the bum finding a bank with a decent interest rate! I’m not going to lie, I have been searching for a new account for a while and it is not easy – the rates are not amazing, and the advertising is misleading since many of the best rates are for a limited time period only.

Note: The rates and offers are changing quickly as well, so I am going to avoid listing all of the current interest rates and deals here so that the info isn’t out of date tomorrow. Any rates I do include are for illustrative purposes only. Also, this article includes a few affiliate links to help pay the bills but doesn’t affect which banks get mentioned.

Types of accounts

First though, its worth mentioning the different types of accounts that are available. If you have already been searching you will probably know that there are several different terms:

Girokonto – checking account for daily transactions and normally with little or no interest
Tagesgeldkonto – short-term savings account with low interest and easy withdrawals
Sparkonto – longer term savings account with more restrictions on withdrawals and often required monthly deposits
Festgeldkonto – fixed-term savings account which often offers the best interest rates but you need to commit to leave the money for a fixed amount of time: 1 or 2 years for example. The longer the fixed time, the better the interest
Depotkonto – share dealing account for shares, funds and bonds. Many investment advisors will send you this direction to invest in a mixture of low and high risk funds, managed and unmanaged, with monthly deposits.

Finding the right mixture of accounts

So far, I haven’t found a single provider that offers the best of all worlds. If you find a really good reliable Giro account, they might have a good low cost or free Depot account for trading, but almost certainly there is no interest on the savings accounts. You will end up with a situation where you have

• a bank with good online services for daily use,
• a reliable savings bank for cash saving and no risk
• and then an investment/trading account either one of the above or a free/low cost provider

This is my situation with Comdirect where I have really convenient and reliable account for daily use and the use of a low cost and intuitive Depot for saving money in funds. But interest on the Tageskonto is not worth even thinking about. If you open a new account you get an attractive 3.75% at the moment, but only for 3 months, after which it drops to 0.75%.

Meanwhile, if you go for a safe option like Postbank, you can expect to always have a generally better than average.interest rate available (currently 3% for new money for 12 months or up to 2.50% for existing), but not the convenience and reliability of a modern international bank for daily use or international travel. Another reliable place to check out is OLB (Oldenburgische Landesbank) where they are known for good interest rates.

There are also a number of new online offers with high interest savings like C24 and Bunq. Both new options on the market with really good reviews. C24 is the best I have found at the moment for a long term offer of 3% on the Tagesgeld savings account and 2.5% on anything in the Giro checking account. You won’t find much better in the market at the moment.

Bunq are advertising 4.01% at the moment on a free savings account for new accounts, again, only for the first 4 months, which is as good as anything in the market. However you can open multiple accounts and save in different currencies like Pounds and Dollars, great for expats! There is a monthly charge though if you want to open a regular account and real human support is limited.

Researching the best deals

I’m not going to list all of the possibilities though. Plenty of sites do this and google is full of paid links to follow. I would recommend doing your research on two different comparison sites: Check24 and Verivox.

These two sites will firstly have up to date deals but will show different mixtures of banks so it is worth looking at both. The interest rates will often be ordered by most attractive short term deals, so it takes a bit of digging before you see the longterm rate that is actually offered once the deal is finished.

Once you have a few options, now head over Trustpilot for an independent review of their services. Some great offers from international banks can have terrible reviews in Germany due to service and support. Its really worth looking twice before you leap.

Good luck and if this article was helpful, remember you can always thank me with a coffee/beer!