After continued analysis of the economy and central banks’ decisions, our investment team believes that interest rates likely won’t go back up for the foreseeable future, meaning the underlying funds will be earning less. Given the lower interest rates around the world, the projected rate that we expect StashAway Simple™ to deliver is 1.4% p.a., and that rate will be effective starting September 2020.
You may have noticed that the 1.9% p.a. wasn’t being earned by the funds alone recently. So, instead of lowering the rate a few months ago when the funds weren’t performing as well, we added a rebate to bridge the difference between the projected rate and the actual rate. This is part of our promise of complete transparency to you: We haven’t, and we won’t, communicate a projected rate that we don’t expect to deliver. We also don’t offer a range that you might expect, because we simply aim to give you what we tell you.
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Every week, our investment team reviews the projected rate from our fund managers. In the case that Simple’s projected rate changes, we’ll either inform you ahead of time of a change in projected rate, or, instead of delivering a lower rate to you than the currently communicated one, we may decide to rebate you an amount in order to deliver the projected rate (in 3 decimals).
StashAway Simple™ will keep returning 1.9% p.a. until 31 August. So, this means, for example, that money in StashAway Simple from 1 July to 31 August would still earn 1.9% annualised returns. That 1.9% p.a. includes the rebates we calculate daily, and distribute quarterly. We’ll distribute the next round of rebates at the end of October.
Keep in mind that we won’t always give rebates, but it’s our commitment to deliver the Simple rate we advertise.