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  Dear
Dr. Don,
How do my wife and I structure accounts at one bank to keep more
than $100,000 insured?
-- Scott Saver
 Dear
Scott,
You can each have $100,000 insured as a depositor with a single
FDIC-insured financial institution. The accounts can be held individually
as single accounts or jointly. Here are some excerpts from the FDIC
guide, Insuring
Your Deposits, about structuring your accounts to maximize the
insurance coverage:
The FDIC insures deposit accounts such as checking,
NOW and savings accounts, money market deposit accounts, and certificates
of deposit (CDs). The basic insurance limit is $100,000 per depositor
per insured bank.
If you or your family has deposits at one insured
bank totaling more than $100,000, you should know that different
ownership categories of accounts are separately insured up to
$100,000. You may qualify for more than $100,000 in coverage at
one insured bank if you own deposit accounts in different ownership
categories.
The most common ownership categories are:
- Single accounts
- Self-directed retirement accounts
- Joint accounts
- Revocable trust accounts
The FDIC Web site also has EDIE,
the Electronic Deposit Insurance Estimator, that will allow you
to input the particulars concerning your deposits and estimate your
insurance coverage.
A new approach to arranging insured deposits with
one bank is CDARs,
which is the acronym for Certificates of Deposit Account Registry
Service. You can deal with just one bank, but have your money fully
FDIC insured up to $10 million. A Bankrate feature
has more information about this approach to insured deposits.
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