T-Bills Pay 1.59% With No Conditions. Your Bank's "4.10%" Has Five 🦖
T-Bills Pay 1.59% With No Conditions. Your Bank's "4.10%" Has Five 🦖
🔍 The Angle
The cleanest rate in this whole comparison is also the smallest headline, 1.59% on a 6‑month T‑bill, yet it is the only number that pays you without conditions. UOB One, OCBC 360 and DBS Multiplier all flash bigger percentages, but once you strip out card spend, salary gymnastics and product cross‑sell, the realistic interest drops sharply. The tension I wanted to surface is simple, the honest rate on your CPF or cash might be much closer to the T‑bill than the number your bank prints in bold.
💰 What It Means For You
If you are parking S$50,000 or S$100,000 while you decide what to do next, a 1.59% T‑bill is now a clean benchmark, cash in, rate out, no behaviour hoops. UOB One’s 1.9% on S$150,000 only shows up if you hit S$500 spend and salary or GIRO every month, miss those and your effective rate can look embarrassingly close to the base 0.05%. OCBC 360’s “up to 4.70%” needs insurance and investment purchases on top of salary, save and spend, so the honest comparison for idle cash is nearer 1.95% without buying anything extra. When you see “up to” on a savings ad, treat it like a REIT’s best‑case yield, informative about the ceiling, not a promise of your actual payout.
📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/BQ4z6emlaqo
📩 Substack: https://investingiguana.com/p/t-bills-pay-159-with-no-conditions
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