I made $80,000 on the sale of my house, and I'm growing the money in a high-yield savings account

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• I had never used a high-yield savings account until selling my house.
• We were originally going to put the money toward a mortgage, but we decided to save it.
• The $80,000 we put in the account will be a robust emergency fund.

Financial advice seems to come in two extremes: "Keep your cash," and "It's a great time to invest." There's one safe way to make some money on your money without the risk of investing, though: putting your cash in a high-yield savings account .

I'll be the first to admit that I hadn't used a high-yield savings account until recently. I've never had enough cash sitting around that I felt it made sense to throw it in a savings account that earned interest (although really, every little bit counts!).

Saving money and selling our first home

Over the course of 2019, my husband and I started saving more aggressively. We pulled the down payment for our current home out of savings so we didn't have to wait to sell our first home. We also saved enough to have a six-month emergency fund on top of the down payment.

After our first house sold, we had every intention of using the profit to pay our current mortgage. But then COVID-19 happened, and with it came unprecedented economic insecurity.

My husband could work from home, but he works in sales, so his income was likely to dip. That's why, instead of dumping all that money into our mortgage as we originally planned, we decided to keep it in the event that we needed it to pay our bills.

Putting our money in a high-yield savings account

We decided to invest some of the money we made on the sale of our house and put the rest into our high-yield savings account to beef up our emergency fund.

So what is a high-yield savings account? They're essentially the same as a typical savings account but with a higher interest rate.

Even when rates are down, high-yield savings accounts still earn far more interest than typical bank savings accounts. It's an easy way to earn money on your money in a safe and predictable way.

Choosing our high-yield savings account

When deciding which bank to go with, I wanted to use a company we already had experience with. I have used Capital One, Citibank, and American Express for credit cards and compared these three.

At the time, Citibank offered the highest interest rate. However, that high-yield savings account had other restrictions that had me looking elsewhere.

In the end, I decided to open an American Express high-yield savings account and deposit $80,000 into it. In the first year after opening the account, I earned about $1,000 in interest. Although that doesn't seem like a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, it's still extra money we wouldn't have had before opening the account.

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This article was originally published in April 2020.