Suggestions for where to put $150k cash?
 

I am selling my house so if all goes well I will have around $150k in cash. Any tips for what to do with this money to maximize earning points? I have already done the Ameritrade and Fidelity offers though...

You could open a BankDirect checking account which earns AA miles. $150,000 would earn 15,000 miles per month, and because it is a checking account you can withdraw as required.

http://bankdirect.com/products/checkingmileage.aspx

Wirelessly posted (palm: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 8.12; MSIEMobile 6.0) Sprint Treo850e)

do people realize that this bankdirect promo is not that amazing after all.because your interest will be close to nothing.and if you value your aa miles at .015/mile it comes out to about 1.7 percent because its
1200 per 1k for a year but i guess to each his own

I currently value AA miles at $0.021 each, which raises my return to 2.5%, and the money is completely liquid. Interest is taxable, miles are not.

Mind sharing how you arrived at 2.1 cpm as your personal valuation?

I think it depends on one's ability to redeem for reward tickets.

In my case, I redeem 110,000 AA miles for SEA-SFO-HKG on CX in J. Price of ticket is always above $4,000. So in my case, each mile is worth $0.036. Of course, one can argue they will never pay $4,000+ for a J ticket, so YMMV.

You would be lucky to get 1.7% interest per year at a liquid checking account.

Some may find close to that in a Credit Union Money Market Account which limit 6 withdrawals a month, of which only 3 of them can be a check.

Besides, interest is subj to tax, miles are not, as pointed out by mia.

It also depends on how you redeem your AA miles. We only use miles for international longhaul J, which even at the "cheaper" valuation of OW award, often comes to 0.04 to 0.06 cpm for our travel pattern, which tends to have many stopovers on a single itinerary, and involves 4 or more airlines.

The more important concern actually is the soundness of Bankdirect. Eventhough the current FDIC amount is 250K, you may encounter some temporary inconvenience should Bankdirect go under.

Take a look at all of the offers on the Finance page of my website below. Also, Ameritrade will often give you more miles if you offer to deposit more money in your current account. Just ask nicely via their secure mail link.

Alliant Credit Union offers high-yield checking at 1.75% with no limits on withdrawals (it's a real, full-featured checking account). They also offer a high-yield savings at 2.0%, with the usual 6-withdrawal limit. All available online, including check deposit.

Perhaps not what the OP is looking for, but I wanted to counter the quoted assertion.

Indeed! Alliant has high-yields on their accounts. I wonder where you can check their safety ratings? It seems the CU signed up w/ many employers/organizations to broaden its membership and even just by living in greater Chicago area would quality. Amazing.

Colonial Bank had branches in our area and they took out Ads a couple months ago touted their high yields. Colonial Bank was taken over by FDIC and subsquently bought by BB&T on Aug 14. The parent company has filed bankruptcy last week.

In the game of rate-chasing, despite the 250K FDIC insurance, it might be better to go with "proven" names than an unknown entity. CapitalOne has 1.29% rate on MM, so is 0.5% lower than Alliant CU, but CapitalOne has survived the financial crisis and actually has CC default rate LOWER than that of BofA.

One place would be bankrate.com:

Financial Statement
Rating Memo

They give Alliant 3 stars overall, which is "neutral." Most banks receive that rating, including Capital One Bank.

The returns don't look so great, but at least it will get me 180,000 miles closer to AA Gold/Platinum . you have a good point that the miles are not taxable like interest. But at the same time I do not need that much liquid cash, so it may not be a good fit for me.

Unless the higher limit has been extended and I missed it, you will only get FDIC insurance for $100,000 after the end of the year, so if you are actually going to leave money in these accounts for a while, split it between two accounts so you will be fully covered.

How long have you been sleeping? FDIC coverage is now $250,000 and even higher much higher in most cases. The FED did this to stop the public from panic because things are reallly much worse than most people imagine. Just make sure you have an FDIC account.

I will go to great lengths to earn miles/points, but with that amount of money interest rate is going to trump anything else.

Personally, if I had that amount of cash sitting around and I could bear a small amount of downside risk I'd be putting $100k of it in a muni CEF (http://www.dividenddetective.com/closed_end_funds.htm) that was trading at a discount to NAV. You should be able to find a yield of 6+% federal and state tax free in most states. Just to emphasize again munis are not without risk, but unless you are going to need the money in a hurry or you absolutely can't risk losing a dime of it then IMO munis are offering a great risk/reward compromise.