Saving money these days can be a challenge, especially with interest rates at their lowest. Though spending your hard-earned cash on things you actually want sound much better than leaving it in a cold dingy bank, it’s important to save little and often so you’re prepared for those unexpected expenses. Fortunately, we’ve found some alternative savings accounts to help build an emergency fund. If however, you don’t have enough saved away when disaster strikes, My Financial Broker can connect you to a short term loan lender.

Moneybox

Moneybox is a simple and easy investment app. It works by rounding up your everyday purchases such as your morning coffee to last night’s Uber to the nearest pound and investing the spare change. They also offer cash saving products and long term investment products that can be set up from your mobile phone in minutes.

When setting up the app, you choose from three different investment options – cautious, balanced and adventurous. These options are made up of different allocations of a range of tracker funds. Cautious is fairly low-risk investments such as cash funds and government and corporate bonds. Whilst adventurous is high-risk with a majority of your money being invested in global shares.

It’s important to remember that there is a risk in investing as you not receiving a fixed rate interest, but over the long-term stocks have delivered better returns as they pay higher interest so there is also a risk with not investing. Though it’s true that keeping your money in a standard saving account gives you more certainty about the interest rates, it’s very unlikely the interest you’d earn will match inflation – meaning the purchasing power of your money declines every year. With Moneybox (as well as most banks and building societies), your investments are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme up to £85,000.

Monzo

Monzo is a smarter online bank account that helps you to manage your money. It allows you to set monthly spending budgets for things like groceries and household bills and notifies you if you ever go over your budget. You can also use your card abroad for free! But how does a current account help you to save?

As you can see an easy summary of your account at any time using their handy app, you can identify where you’re spending unnecessarily, cut back and put that money into one of their saving pots. Monzo has partnered with a variety of providers who offer competitive saving rate (all over 1%). You can also add customer images to your saving pots to stay visualise what your saving for (whether that be a house, car or holiday) and stay motivated. Similarly to Moneybox, Monzo will also round up transactions to add spare change to saving pots automatically and schedule monthly saving to deposit to keep you on track.

Squirrel

Squirrel operates a little differently than other alternative saving account but it still makes saving for your goals easy and helps you create your own personalised budget.

This is an online savings account and operates as a middle man. Rather than having your salary paid into your current account, the money will be transferred to your squirrel account where it will be held safely until your bills are due to come out. Squirrel will automatically transfer money to your current account the day before your bills are due so there’s no need to ever have to worry about accidentally spending bill money. You can also transfer some additional spending money to your debit cards, and leave the remaining safe in your squirrel account.

Squirrel’s different from a regular saving account as it makes it easy to save and importantly help to keep you motivated to not to withdraw your saving early unlike a normal account. Similarly to Monzo, you can create personalised saving pots for all things you might want to save for and add your names and pictures to saving and set goals and track progress.

The most important thing about saving is not necessarily how much you save but making a habit of it, so we hope these alternative savings account has inspired you to save up for a rainy day. Though there are other methods of cover rainy day costs such as credit cards and overdraft, they can have high-interest rates, and wouldn’t you rather earn interest that has to pay interest.

Plum

If you don’t know how much you can afford to put away each month, Plum is the app for you. Plum aims to make it saving easier so you can spend money on the things you want, rather than the things you need. It’s smart algorithm analyses your spending, and every few days transfers the perfect amount into your Plum savings account automatically

Plum works as an AI chatbot service, built into your Facebook messenger. You can adjust how much Plum saves for you whenever you like by messaging Plum via Facebook. When you’ve reached your saving goal, or need some extra cash, you can request to withdraw at any time. Having Plum built into Facebook messenger as opposed to its own app makes it easier for those who struggle to save. As it blends into your everyday life, you can rest assured that your money is safe and savings are building up little by little rather than downloading and checking a separate app.

Plum savings don’t pay interest, but you can invest part of the saving earn with a single command. Your saving will be invested at RateSetter – one of the biggest peer-to-peer (P2P) lenders in the UK. P2P lending is a rapidly growing, FCA regulated form of investing in which people with money who are looking to achieve an interest return are able to lend collectively to credit-checked individuals and business who are looking to borrow.

Chip 

Similar to Plum, Chip is an AI-powered money app that calculates what you can afford to save, and securely saves for you automatically. The app analysed more the 160 million transactions to save you money without it affecting your day-to-day spending. It’s different from Plum as you receive a high-interest rate by recommending a friend.

You start with a base interest of 1%, but every time you refer a friend, you’ll get a 1% boost for the year, up to 5%. You need to ensure your friend signs up with your specific code and connects their bank account. After a year, you can again refer another 5 friends. The interest is calculated on a weekly basis but is paid quarterly so you may potentially lose money if you withdraw the saving early.

Unlike Plum, Chip is a separate app but still features the simple chatting service so it’s perfect for those who want to keep their social account and bank account separate. At the moment, Chip connects to with traditional high street banks and building societies.