Bank of America is paying 0.01% on its standard savings account.
That is not a typo, and it is not a rounding error.
It means $10,000 parked there for a full year earns you about a dollar—roughly the price of a single item off the dollar menu.
Meanwhile, the same bank will happily charge you double-digit interest if you carry a credit card balance or overdraw your checking account.
The gap between what you earn and what you pay is not an accident.
As of early 2025, the Federal Reserve's target rate sat in the 4.25% to 4.50% range, and plenty of online banks and money market funds were still paying north of 4% on savings.
On $10,000, that difference is roughly $400 a year.
On $25,000, you are looking at about $1,000 annually—real money that simply evaporates for customers who never move their cash.
Big banks know most people open a checking account in their twenties, set up direct deposit, and never revisit the savings side.
Branches, ATMs, and a familiar app create a sense of convenience that, in practice, costs you money every single month.
It is disclosed in the fine print and on the bank's website.
But it is buried under tiers, relationship perks, and promotional language designed to make the number feel less absurd than it is.
If you have to dig through three pages to find what you are actually earning, that tells you something.
Some Bank of America customers get bumped into higher tiers through its Preferred Rewards program, which requires maintaining combined balances across accounts—often $20,000 or more.
Notice the catch: you have to hand the bank a large pile of your money to earn a rate that is still usually below what a bare-bones online savings account pays with no strings attached.
Loyalty programs at big banks are frequently structured so the reward for staying is smaller than the cost of staying.
What actually works is boring and takes about twenty minutes.
Check the APY on your current savings account.
Compare it to two or three federally insured online banks or money market funds.
If the gap is meaningful, open the new account, link it, and move the money.
Keep your checking where it is if you like the branches—there is no rule that your savings has to live at the same bank.
Rates move with the Fed, so a 4.3% account today could be 3.5% next year.
Some high-yield accounts are promotional and quietly drop after a few months.
And anything promising dramatically above-market returns deserves suspicion—legitimate insured accounts do not offer 8% with no catch.
The uncomfortable truth is that the biggest banks are not competing for your savings.
They are competing for your deposits, which they can then lend out or park at the Fed.
Your apathy is worth more to them than your business.
Our take: leaving serious cash in a 0.01% account is one of the most expensive habits in American personal finance, precisely because it feels like doing nothing at all.
The banks are not being sneaky so much as counting on you not checking.
Final Thoughts
Twenty minutes of comparison shopping is a better return than almost any purchase you will make this year.