Values: It pays 6%, but allows access to up to 25% of the balance without notice or penalty at any time.

WHEN a product called Sleep Easy Saver hits the market, fear must be stalking the best-buy tables. Unlike Aberdeen's infamous unit trust that promised to let you sleep at night, which went bust and had to repay investors £40m, the Nottingham's is an account that promises to have you safely tucked up in a building society.

It offers a headline rate of 6.5%, which falls to 5.5% if you make more than six withdrawals in a year. However, the rate is only guaranteed to be 0.5% above base rate for two years - which in theory could mean it falling like a stone.

Accounts with catches are the norm. Another society, the Coventry, has relaunched its postal account for the over-60s paying 6.15%, which turns out to be 5.3% plus a one-year bonus.

The Newcastle, meanwhile, has devised a complex inflation protector account, which in typical financial industry style is being launched just as inflation is forecast to crash.

It promises to pay the retail price index change plus 2.25% - in one year's time.

In what the Newcastle calls "a great added feature", savers are guaranteed a rate of 2.25% if inflation falls to zero.

The top-paying fixed rate bonds, which have attracted so many savers into potentially toxic accounts in recent times, are likely to stay as exotic as ever as interest rates fall and the credit freeze thaws.

According to comparison site moneysupermarket.com this week, "the decline in the number of non-UK banks in a table which was once full of the likes of Kaupthing and FirstSave demonstrates that the days when foreign banks continually trumped UK providers with headline grabbing rates could be numbered".

However, its own table shows foreign banks from India, Ireland and Holland still offering eight of the nine 7%-plus rates, with ironically Halifax the only UK interloper.

Five 7%-plus products available only three months ago from UK providers have disappeared.

The Nottingham Building Society is keen to remind us that it is a "secure institution", with no exposure to sub-prime mortgages and no investments in Icelandic banks, adding: "We have never bought a mortgage book."

It notes that its arrears levels are less than a quarter of the industry average, and it draws 75% of funding from deposits, above the 70% sector average. Such reassuring data is new to press releases - and is yet to appear in best-buy tables.

Over the past year as much as £46bn has been withdrawn from savings accounts that penalise you if you make a withdrawal, according to research this week by Sainsbury's Bank, plugging its plain vanilla account paying 5% on £1.

Around a quarter of the top-50 supposedly instant access accounts restrict withdrawals and 8% apply a penalty, in some cases paying no interest in any month of a withdrawal. A headline rate of 6.5% would fall to 4.33% on four monthly withdrawals, Sainsbury's points out.

For some reason, savers in Wales and south-west England have been strangely susceptible to this pitfall, withdrawing £14bn from accounts with penalties over the last year, 10 times the amount in canny Scotland.

So the bond launched this week by another building society, the Leeds, is worth looking at. It pays 6%, but allows access to up to 25% of the balance without notice or penalty at any time.

In another innovation that will appeal to many, the Coventry has come up with the Poppy Bond, available from today, offering a fixed 6.25% until the end of 2009, but also the first product of its kind to deliver what it calls "a significant charitable donation".

The Coventry will make a donation to the Poppy Appeal equal to 0.25% of the total funds invested in the Poppy Bond.