UOB One: The One To Rule Them All

I have never been a fan of hacks.

Whether it’s saying some Chinese phrases at Haidilao to get free plush toys or drinks, knowing which are the best seats to book on an airplane, or figuring out how to save money at Disneyland, I’m just not someone who is inclined to search and to optimise the hacks even if it helps me save a few dollars.

There are good reasons for this. You see, hacks often require us to go out of our way to do things we don’t normally do. To get what we want, we may also need to plan in advance to execute these hacks.

In Singapore, one of the easiest ways to earn extra money is to simply use a high-interest savings account. A high-interest savings account gives us bonus interest on the savings we hold in the account, as long as we fulfil the required criteria.

Fulfilling these criteria is not always so easy. For a start, they sometimes don’t even make financial sense. For example, in my view, purchasing an insurance or investment product that you don’t even need (or want) so that you can earn bonus interest for one year isn’t sensible.

At other times, fulfilling these criteria could be cumbersome. These may include having to increase your savings balance each month to qualify for bonus interest. While I have a rough idea of how much I have in a particular savings account, I don’t try to calculate the exact balance I had last month, and whether I have more this month.

This is why when my colleague Angela wrote in a recent article about why she chose to switch to the UOB One Account, I could immediately identify with those reasons.

UOB One Account Offers Both Simplicity & High Interest

We all want high interest. At the same time, we want this to be earned in a simple way.

With the UOB One Account, we don’t have to make trade-offs between simplicity and high-interest rates. It only takes two simple steps – credit card spending and salary credit/ GIRO transactions – to earn up to 7.8% p.a. interest.

Credit card spending is straightforward. Charge a minimum of $500 on an eligible UOB credit/debit Card. The good news here is that UOB allows us to choose from a range of credit cards to accumulate the spending though my personal preference would be the UOB One Credit Card.

On its own, the UOB One Credit Card is already a great card to be using, even if you don’t have the UOB One Account. It offers up to 15% cashback on daily spending. We can earn bonus cashback on things that we likely already would be paying for on our daily or monthly spending, including SimplyGo for daily public transport commute or Grab if we are taking a private-hire ride. We can also use it to pay for our groceries at Giant and Cold Storage, as well as our SP utility bills.

In other words, hitting the minimum spend of $500 should be easy as we can simply charge the usual spending we are already making to the UOB One Credit Card and earn the additional rebate.

The salary crediting is a non-issue. As long as your take-home salary is $1,600 or more, it’s just a one-time effort to inform your HR to change the bank account details for salary crediting each month. That’s all.

With the current interest rates for the UOB One Account, these two simple steps can earn us an interest of about $1,155 (about $96/month) if we have $30,000 in savings. If we have $100,000 in savings, we can earn an annual interest of $5,203, or about $433 a month.

I’m not sure about you, but this is a simple hack I think I can easily follow.

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