My 4.5% Savings Rate Lasted Five Months and One Email

Six oh five on a Tuesday morning. My phone buzzed on the nightstand with an email from Redrock Bank, where my $62,000 had lived since August, and the subject line read Central Update to Your Savings Rates, which is the phrasing banks use when a number is about to go down and they would rather you heard it from 'em first. I did not open it until the coffee was done. The coffee did not help. Every dollar of that $62,000 is spoken for. It is my emergency fund plus half of a down payment on a house we are under contract to buy in June, with $9,400 of earnest obligations already signed, and I keep it in cash for the same reason I keep a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. At 4.50% the account threw off about $232 a month. At whatev came next, it would throw off less, and the mortgage underwriter does not read marketing emails. The email linked to the rate schedule it was amending, and that PDF, on page two, held a table the signup banner had never once said out loud: 4.50% introductory for the first five statement cycles, then a variable rate, currently 3.10%, effective January 1. No action required. No action possible. The banner never said teaser.

the asterisk on the signup banner

I found Redrock on a rates aggregator in August, in a list of high-yield savings accounts topped by its 4.50% APY, which at the time beat every brick-and-mortar offer I had by more than four points and beat my Chase savings by $23 of monthly interest on its own. The asterisk next to the rate opened a modal that said introductory offer, first five statement cycles. I read those five words and assumed cycle six would still be north of four. The banner never said teaser. Assuming is what cost me $496 a year.

$62,000 and a 20-minute wire

Moving the money took twenty minutes on a Sunday in August: $38,000 wired from Chase savings, $24,000 pushed from checking, both landing the next business day. The first interest payment posted October 1 at $232.34, and I remember the number cuz it was more than my cable bill. For five months the machine did exactly what the banner promised. That was the whole contract, five months.

the rate schedule PDF, page two

The January email contained three paragraphs of boilerplate and one link. The link opened a seven-page rate schedule where page two held a two-row table: statement cycles one thru five, 4.50%; cycle six onward, 3.10%, variable, subject to change. Five cycles had elapsed on December 31. I did the arithmetic standing at the counter with coffee in my hand: 0.8 percentage points gone, on $62,000, is $41.33 a month and $496 a year, gone quietly on a Tuesday before I brushed my teeth.

SGOV was paying 4.2% the whole time

The same week, a coworker showed me something in his Fidelity account that reframed the whole complaint: SGOV, an ETF that holds Treasury bills with about three months to maturity. Its yield was 4.2% while my bank's was falling to 3.1%, because the bills inside it reprice at every auction and there is no introductory rate on a Treasury bill. I could sell any trading day, the money settles fast, and the yield was never a promotion. My bank's rate was a promotion with an end date. The Treasury bill rate is just the rate.

the ordinary income line

Interest is interest to the IRS, whatev the high-yield savings marketing says. My marginal bracket is 24%, which turns 3.10% into about 2.36% after federal tax, and Illinois wants its share of bank interest too. Treasury interest skips state tax entirely, so the ETF's edge was wider than the sticker gap suggested, maybe 1.9 points after both governments took their cut. Nobody puts the after-tax line on the homepage. The homepage is for the hefty number. My 2025 Form 1099-INT from Redrock arrived in the mail this week showing $1,047 of interest for the year, which is the document where the government sees the whole picture instead of the banner. I checked the math twice. Five months of teaser, wrapped in ordinary income tax, does not compound the way the homepage implies it does. The effective yield I actually kept landed closer to 3.2%, not the headline 4.5%. The number on the tax form is the only one that ever mattered.

moving $40,000 on a Thursday

On January 15 I moved $40,000 into SGOV through Fidelity, kept $22,000 at the bank as the true emergency float, and the whole operation cost one lunch break. The order filled at 2:04 p.m. at $83.12 a share, commission zero. First full month at the new mix should net about $140 combined, versus $107 at the bank's new rate. Thirty-three dollars a month is not a fortune. It is a $396 a year habit of not reading page two.

the banner is still up

Redrock's homepage still says 4.50% in the biggest font on the site, asterisk and all, and it said that on January 21 while paying 3.10%. The January statement shows my blended interest at $148 and the new rate in a footnote. I still get their emails at six oh five some mornings. I read the number before I read the subject line now. That is the whole trick. The real rate is on page two, and almost nobody turns to page two.