business people playing tug of war for money Source: AdobeStock

Along with the usual holiday festivities, in my household December is a month for financial move-making. The tradition entails things like cashing out savings bonds that have been sitting in a safe deposit box since the ’80s, depositing all or a portion of the annually permitted $6,000 into a Roth IRA, and a lot of procrastinating and second-guessing around these things, because thinking about money can be scary, stressful and exhausting.

For my December 2022 financial move, I took a significant chunk of change out of my credit union money market account that was paying me a 0.05% dividend rate and put it into a Vanguard Federal Money Market Fund with a 7-day SEC yield of 4.32% after being alerted to the opportunity by my Dad. I made the decision based on the fact that I had an existing relationship with Vanguard, could withdraw money out of the fund at any time, and would earn enough interest by the end of 2023 to cover the majority of the cost of a trip to Europe I have planned this spring. And, at the time, my credit union had no high-yield savings offers available (to be fair, the credit union is now offering a 15-month CD at 5.00% APY).

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Natasha Chilingerian

Natasha Chilingerian has worked in the credit union space for over a decade. She joined CU Times as managing editor in 2015 and was promoted to executive editor in 2019. Before that, she served as a communications specialist for Xceed Financial Credit Union (now Kinecta Federal Credit Union) in Los Angeles from 2013-2015, and as a CU Times freelancer from 2011-2013. She has been a professional writer and editor for more than 17 years, specializing in news and lifestyle journalism as well as marketing copywriting for companies in the finance and technology space.

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