Anyone know of a free savings bank account?

[hstraf]

Hello,

In the US and Canada, there are places like "ING Direct" where you can open a free interest-bearing savings account.

Does such a thing exist in France? I haven't been able to find anything and my current bank wants to charge me for their savings account.

I have about 20k Euro that I would like to deposit into an "emergency fund" savings account.. but I'm too cheap to pay a monthly fee if there is something that is free out there.

Thanks!

[suein56]

This is quite good, but beware outside the current offer the interest rate at the moment is only 1.8%. It does all you ask.

Sue

[Judith]

Interesting this - as I was about to post about ING - a warning.  I have an ING savings account, but today found out that they will not accept money from foreign (ie non-French) banks, so the money which I arranged to transfer whilst I was back in the UK has been swanning around.  ING did not tell me that they did not accept from foreign accounts, nor did they manage to tell me that they had returned the money.  It took an email to enquire its whereabouts, and another phonecall to the bank in England to get it back into my account.  And two weeks interest lost and the transfer back to square one.

So the moral is, check it does do all you want before you open the account.

Since I will be needing the money in the ING account for our immnent house purchase, as well as the monies which have been swanning around I will shortly be closing the ING account.  I had thought about a cheque account with them, but no way now!.

Yes, I know I should have checked, but since my other banks have happily received foreign monies (they had all been transferred into euros through Swift payments) it is only because ING are not really a proper bank they they do not do this.

Also, unlike ING UK, it is extremely difficult to set up any virements to and from your "proper" bank account, so do be careful what you sign up for.