How To Earn More Money On Your Savings
As the new coronavirus, COVID-19, spread from China to the United States and dozens of other countries around the globe, threatening an economic stall-out, the U.S. Federal Reserve last week moved once again to cut interest rates. That might give the economy a bit of fuel, but it’s bad news for your money sitting in the bank.
The interest rates that banks pay on interest-bearing accounts like savings accounts rise and fall with the federal funds rate. So, after the latest Fed rate cut, the chances are good that the interest rate your bank is paying you just decreased or is about to decrease.
That doesn’t mean you have to let your money sit there and earn you next to nothing, though. Even in the midst of Fed rate cuts, you can reap a higher return if you know where to look.
Following are several ways to earn more on your savings that you may not know are out there.
One option is backed by FDIC insurance, while the others are investments and as such entail some risk.
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1. Switch to a high-yield savings account
The national average interest rate among savings accounts currently is a puny 0.09%, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC). But you could earn almost 20 times as much by ditching your low-earning savings account and opening a high-interest one instead.
The best high-yield savings accounts still pay close to 2%.
Take for example CIT Bank, an online bank that offers an annual percentage yield (APY) of up to 1.75% with its Savings Builder account. That’s one of the highest interest rates available — and it’s a 100% risk-free return because deposit accounts like CIT Bank’s Savings Builder account are FDIC-insured.
2. Invest in real estate — with as little as $500
You don’t need millions of dollars — not even thousands — to invest in real estate. Two new companies, Fundrise and Diversyfund, make it possible for you to invest in the real estate market with as little as $500.
Fundrise enables you to invest in a professionally managed, diversified portfolio of residential or commercial real estate assets. Your portfolio grows over time due to dividends, which are distributed quarterly, and the appreciation of the real estate assets. Fundrise boasts average annualized returns since 2014 ranging from 8.76% to 12.42%.
Diversyfund is also a crowdfunding platform that allows smaller investors to get in on this sector, but it operates a bit differently. Diversyfund charges no brokerage fees, while emphasizing long-term investment gains for its investors. Fundrise, which charges 1% in fees (a 0.85% annual asset management fee and a 0.15% annual investment advisory fee), allows investors to earn dividends along the way. For a comparison of the two options, check out this blog post.
Related: Here’s How to Get in On Fine Art Investing
3. Invest effortlessly
Sit back and let Acorns, a micro-investing app, help you save and invest your spare change automatically.
The app’s service called Acorns Core rounds up your credit card purchases to the nearest dollar and invests the difference automatically.
Let’s say you spend $25.45 at the supermarket. The app will round that total up to $26 and transfer the difference (55 cents) to your Acorns account. Then, Acorns will invest your 55 cents in a diversified portfolio developed with help from Nobel Prize-winning economist Harry Markowitz.
The Acorns app starts at $1 per month, but you’ll earn $5 just by signing up. There are no trade fees.
4. Earn 5% with Worthy bonds
If you’re looking for a better return than savings accounts offer, consider skipping the bank and earn 5% by investing in Worthy bonds.
Here are the basics of how it works:
Worthy invests bond proceeds in fully secured, asset-backed small-business loans. This makes the bonds less risky than traditional secured loans and other investment types, Worthy says. Worthy bonds are also registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
To learn more about Worthy, check out “Earn 50 Times More on Your Savings.”
Have you tried any of these methods for boosting your return rate on your savings, or would you try them? Share your experience or thoughts by commenting below or on our Facebook page.
Kari Huus contributed to this post.
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How To Make Money In Your Sleep
Many fledgling creators dream of waking up to viral fame and riches. Now that dream is beginning to look a lot like reality.
Hundreds of TikTok users have begun live-streaming themselves overnight, while they sleep. Brian Hector, 18, did it just last week. Thousands of people tuned in. Some even donated to him.
“I woke up the next morning and ended the live and went over to my mom and was like, ‘Mom, I literally just made money falling asleep,’” said Mr. Hector, who has more than 347,000 followers on the app.
Through TikTok’s live feature, viewers can donate digital “coins” that can be cashed out for money. On Mr. Hector’s first sleep-stream, he said, he received about $10 worth of coins — not riches, exactly, but more than he’d usually be paid to go to sleep ($0).
What most users hope to gain from these sleep-streams are followers. “Overnight my video blew up, and I got over 6,000 new followers,” said Oscar Reyes, 18. “After I stopped the stream I lost followers, so I don’t know if people were just following for the stream, but I grew substantially. I went from 12,000 to 18,600 followers.”
Jasmine Stephens, 16, said that for days, her “for you” feed on TikTok has been full of videos promoting sleep live-streams. “I scrolled and scrolled and saw more and more,” Ms. Stephens said. “I was like, OK this is a thing now. I saw videos with over one million likes.”
On Feb. 9, 18.5 million viewers tuned in to watch one man sleep on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese counterpart.
Before they go live, TikTok sleep-streamers usually create a promotional video that they post to their feeds, advertising the sleep-stream happening that night. When bedtime approaches, they prop up their phones on their night stands, crawl under the covers and hit the live button.
“I’ve seen so many people start doing it,” Mr. Hector said. “The first time I saw it I thought it was honestly the weirdest thing but also the coolest thing.”
For users who watch sleep-streams, the appeal isn’t necessarily the person streaming but the pop-up community that forms in the stream’s chat section. Live-streams on TikTok aren’t archived, so sleep-streams, many of which are simply a dark blank screen, provide a time and place for users to meet.
“I think it’s about trying to find online friends,” Ms. Stephens said.
Todd Neer, 32, has watched a handful of sleep-streams and even done one himself.
“It creates a chance for a live online chat that’s not really available anywhere else in TikTok,” he said. “The sessions aren’t saved, so you just chat with whoever is there. It’s just an opportunity to have a more real-time dialogue than the comments section on someone’s post. It’s a hub for people to have conversations.”
Brian Mandler, a founder of the Network Effect, a digital agency focused on TikTok, said that the streams also provide a level of authenticity that so many users on the platform currently crave. “Audiences really like the behind the scenes of someone’s life,” he said. “They want authentic, engaging content. Watching someone sleeping, while it’s unique and somewhat strange, as you start to understand what really works on social media, it makes sense.”
Between the performance anxiety and all that blue light, not everyone can sleep through a live-stream. Mr. Reyes said he woke up several times during his own; at one point, he saw about 600 people were tuned in and chatting. “When I woke up they’d be like, ‘OMG he’s awake!’” he said.
Because the sleep-streams are in real time and unedited — versus other TikToks — there are also safety concerns. Rylee Breann, 21, was deliberate about what her viewers would be able to see. “I didn’t show much of my room because I have a lot of pictures,” she said. “I didn’t want to show anything that showed where I lived. You could just see my head and my bed.”
Dale Adams, 21, said that he turned his phone over after a couple hours to shut the stream down. “It was kind of nerve racking,” he said, “Like, what if someone could hack into my phone and figure out where I am?”
Some users have found other ways to idly host live-streams.
“People have gone live saying, ‘Oh, my parents don’t want me filming myself sleeping, so I’ll stream this other picture in another room overnight,’” Ms. Breann said.
“I’ve seen people live-stream their rooftop overnight with 10,000 people watching, or people stream a glass of milk while they’re gone at work,” Mr. Reyes said. “All these people come into the live just to chat and make group chats.”
Rather than streaming his sleep, Joe Fay, 24, decided to live-stream his white Tesla “sleeping” in the driveway overnight. He taped his phone to the window and hooked it up to a charger; by the morning he had accrued $50 worth of digital coins. “It’s a pretty easy thing to do,” he said, adding that he plans to continue streaming until the trend dies out.
The streams can have a pleasant, sedative effect. Some sleep-streamers play soft music, or perform a soothing bedtime routine for their viewers. The experience can be relaxing for the host too.
“When I did it, I felt like people were watching over me so nothing could happen to me,” Mr. Reyes said. “I slept like a baby.”
How To Make Money On Twitch, TikTok Sponsorship Rates, And Olivia Jade's Return To Influencer Marketing
Welcome to this week's Influencer Dashboard newsletter!
This is Amanda Perelli, and I'll be briefing you on what's new in the business of influencers and creators.
Before we get started, I want to first introduce a colleague who will be appearing more frequently in this newsletter moving forward: Kevin Webb! Kevin has been covering gaming for Business Insider and he'll be digging into the business of esports and gaming influencers.
This week, Kevin spoke to top Twitch streamers who broke down the six main ways to make money on the platform, from subscriptions to bounties, and how lucrative each is.
The top creators on Twitch earn millions each year and the platform has created an ecosystem for more than 27,000 partnered streamers to make money from their broadcasts.
Becoming an affiliate is the first step to making money on Twitch. Once you're invited to the Twitch Affiliate Program, you'll gain access to new account tools, including what you need to activate advertisements and channel subscriptions. But that's just the start. (Check out Kevin's full post here.)
Kevin also reported on 23 investors pouring millions into Overwatch esports teams. Activision Blizzard's Overwatch League is one of the most popular esports competitions in the world and the investors range from Patriots owner Robert Kraft to Chinese conglomerates. (Check out the full list here.)
You can reach Kevin at kwebb@businessinsider.Com and on Twitter @Forte2K.
You can read most of the articles here by subscribing to BI Prime. And if this is your first time reading Influencer Dashboard, subscribe to the newsletter here.
Screen shot of Josh Sadowski/YouTube
I spoke to 20-year-old TikTok comedy star Josh Sadowski who has around 4 million followers.
Sadowski told me that he divides his time between creating content for TikTok and his other popular social-media accounts, and assisting the nine other TikTok creators he manages in building their online businesses.
He broke down the main ways he earns money through TikTok, like sponsorships, music promotions, and helping his clients secure brand partnerships. He also shared how much he charges brands and how he landed deals with the likes of Chipotle and Bumble.
"A lot of people are afraid of jumping into a contract or not knowing what to say to a brand," he said. "One thing creators don't realize is that they can get a lot more money than what they are getting right now."
Read the full post on Sadowski's TikTok business, here.
Instagram user Monica Rojo has roughly 3,000 followers on the platform. She created a sponsored post for Kettle Brand chips in November 2019. Monica Rojo/Heartbeat
As social-media users look for authenticity on apps like Instagram, there's growing demand in the influencer-marketing space for creators with fewer than 5,000 followers who seem more like "real people" than career influencers with millions of followers.
These "nano influencers," who don't work full-time as creators, are much cheaper to hire, and can drive high engagement rates to their smaller audiences. Companies like Dunkin, Bose, and Kettle Foods have all tapped nano influencers to post about their brands for campaigns on Instagram in the past couple years.
My colleague Dan Whateley spoke to the CEO of influencer marketing startup, Heartbeat, which has built a marketplace to connect brands with 275,000 Instagram users that have an average of about 2,000 followers.
The company shared what brands typically look for when hiring a nano influencer, and how much a creator can earn by participating in campaigns.
Read the full post on how Instagram nano influencers make money, here.
Instagram
Dan also wrote about Olivia Jade and how she is getting back into influencer marketing on Instagram as her parents Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannull face charges in the college-admissions scandal.
Jade's parents were accused of paying $500,000 to guarantee her (and her sister's) admission to USC. They have pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against them and will likely start their trial in October.
The 20-year-old creator posted links to two Amazon pages in her Instagram Story this week using affiliate-marketing links that suggest she could earn a commission from resulting sales.
Jade also reshared a photo of herself promoting Kim Kardashian West's shapewear brand, Skims. Jade previously had deals with Sephora, TRESemmé, and Amazon, but they cut ties with her after the college-admissions scandal broke.
Read the full post on Olivia Jade's return to influencer marketing, here.
What else happened this week on BI Prime: We want to hear from you! Screen shot of Vanessa Lau/YouTube
Vanessa Lau is an online business coach with almost 200,000 subscribers on YouTube. She posts videos about social media and entrepreneurship every week.
In this video, Lau shares her tips for growing a YouTube channel in 2020. Gaining your first 1,000 subscribers is important because it will allow you to apply for YouTube's Partner Program and gain access to video monetization features.
She says to grow a YouTube channel, you need to think about your audience and the specific type of person who would be watching. She also advises creators to make searchable content by thinking about what people are actively looking for on the internet.
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