By JANE J. KIM

As the financial system reels from one disaster after another, financial planners, estate planners and bank officials say they’ve been receiving calls from panicked savers concerned about the safety of their deposits.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. guarantees bank deposits up to $100,000 per person, per insured institution. But what if you have a lot more cash than that?

For years, savers have gotten around the FDIC’s $100,000 limit by spreading their cash across multiple institutions. It’s certainly safe, but it’s an onerous process. Now, growing numbers of people are turning to other means that allow them to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars safely stowed away under FDIC protection.

One product that has been attracting attention lately is an informal trust account known as a “payable on death,” or POD, account. To set up a POD account, depositors must name a beneficiary or beneficiaries who will receive money if the primary account holder dies. For each qualified beneficiary, the FDIC will boost insurance coverage by up to $100,000.

Other strategies include:

Brokered CDs. Buying multiple certificates of deposit at once through a brokerage firm provides a fast way to spread out money across different institutions, capturing the full FDIC protection.

In recent weeks, Dan Kohn of New York started using brokered CDs through Vanguard Group’s Vanguard Brokerage Services as a way to quickly spread out his money across different banks. He could probably find higher yields by searching for local deals, but brokered CDs provide a “mixture of convenience and safety,” says the 35-year-old Mr. Kohn, the chief operating officer of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes the use of the Linux computer operating system. “I don’t want to set up eight new accounts.”

CDARS. This deposit-placement service, short for Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service, disperses deposits into different individual CDs of up to $100,000 each, up to a maximum covered amount of $50 million. Customers deposit their money with a participating bank, and CDARS — which is run by the Promontory Interfinancial Network LLC in Arlington, Va. — disperses the deposit in individual CDs up to $100,000 in 2,350 member banks across the country.

Retirement accounts. Money deposited in IRAs, Roth IRAs and certain other retirement plans is insured up to $250,000.

Joint accounts. Deposit accounts owned by two or more people are insured up to $100,000 for each account holder listed.

Credit unions. Deposit insurance for credit unions works in much the same way as FDIC insurance does for banks and thrifts, except that the funds are insured by the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund.

Revocable trusts. Under this estate-planning strategy, the owner assigns beneficiaries but retains control of the assets during his lifetime. The FDIC insures the interests of each beneficiary up to $100,000 each. Some are formal trusts, which are typically set up by an estate attorney. Others, such as POD accounts, can be created when the account owners add certain terms and the names of the beneficiaries to the bank’s account records.

William Wright, a financial planner in Wichita, Kan., says he’s working with one client who has over $1 million at a local bank to move the money into other types of deposit accounts, such as trust and joint accounts, and products such as annuities.

On the basis of ease alone, POD accounts appear to be finding a larger audience lately. The FDIC doesn’t publish data on the number of these accounts, but the agency confirms it is getting more questions from consumers about how to set them up and has been seeing more of them on the books when it takes over banks after they fail. So far this year, there have been 11 bank failures, and 117 banks that were on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s “watch list” at the end of the second quarter.

Last spring, Robert Ring of Boise, Idaho, added his three children as beneficiaries to a money-market deposit account at IndyMac Bank. That meant his account, which totaled $300,000 at the time, was fully insured.

Thanks to that move, “it was a total nonevent for me” when IndyMac collapsed in July, says the 39-year-old software engineer. “I heard about the closure on a Friday afternoon, and all my money — about $150,000 at the time — was there the following Monday.” He’s also using PODs to protect money he’s parked in a savings account at Alliant Credit Union in Chicago.

For savers, PODs can be a quick way to extend their FDIC coverage without the hassle and paperwork of opening multiple accounts across several institutions. “It’s a convenience factor,” says Mr. Ring. “You can get your FDIC coverage by setting up accounts at six different banks, but that’s just a headache, come tax time, with all the extra paperwork and 1099s you have to wait for.”

POD accounts do come with certain limitations. For starters, only certain relatives count as qualified beneficiaries. Spouses, children, grandchildren, parents and siblings are OK. Nieces, nephews and grandparents aren’t. The depositor retains control of the account until his death, in which case the money is distributed to the beneficiaries.

When the POD account contradicts the depositor’s will, it can send family members to court to fight over the estate. Austin Frye, a financial planner and estate attorney in Aventura, Fla., says he’s seen cases where clients inadvertently disinherited their children in a POD account.

Mr. Frye recalls one case in which one of his clients had been added to his father’s CD to help manage the account. When the father died, the money in the CD went directly to that son — even though his will had specified that the money was to be split equally between the custodial son and another son who lived out of state.

“You could ruin your estate plan,” Mr. Frye says. “The courts are loaded with these cases.”

Geoff Sauter of Dover, Mass., says he got some conflicting advice on how to set up a POD account. Based on the advice of one representative at T. Rowe Price Group Inc., he decided to add his wife and three children to a CD to make sure his $400,000 was fully covered. A few days later, after his wife’s broker questioned that strategy, he called back the firm and spoke with a different person who told him his deposits weren’t fully covered. “So I panicked and started calling other people,” he says.

The 58-year-old engineering-firm salesman says T. Rowe Price eventually got back to him and told him that his money was, in fact, fully covered. “Apparently, there is some confusion in the industry,” he says.

“It’s unfortunate that in the course of several conversations, Mr. Sauter was given some conflicting information,” says Brian Lewbart, a spokesman for T. Rowe Price. “But in the end, we’re certainly pleased he ended up with the correct information.”

Despite the multitude of options, many savers still choose to spread their risk around by simply opening accounts at different banks. D.C. Harris, a retired accountant who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, had her money parked in a CD at Wachovia Corp. But worries about the solvency of that bank and others, such as Washington Mutual Inc., recently prompted her to put her savings in CDs at other banks, including Citigroup Inc.’s Citibank.

“I’m more scared than I’ve been in my life about our economy and our banks,” says the 65-year-old. “I’m thinking about moving my money to United Bank of the Mattress.”

Write to Jane J. Kim at jane.kim@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D1

By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

This week will bring the long-awaited opening up of a new realm of Web addresses in which just about any word—such as dot-furniture or dot-arcticvacations—can serve as a domain name. And to some, that spells opportunity.

Beginning Thursday, the organization that oversees the Internet will start accepting applications to manage new top-level domains—the names that appear at the end of website addresses, like dot-com and dot-net.

It will be the first time in more than a decade that anyone can apply for the rights to control a slice of the broader Web marketplace, as opposed to just domains for specific types of Internet users. Only a few options, such as dot-jobs for sites catering to job seekers, have been available more recently.

Allowing a wider variety of domains to exist will create more choice on the Internet and potentially spur innovation, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, the nonprofit that regulates the world’s Internet domain names.

Jeffrey Smith, an entrepreneur in Louisville, Ky., sees gold in the opportunity. He and domain-name speculators like him have been building entire businesses around ideas for new right-of-the-dot names, and in many cases they have lined up backers to help them cover application and other costs.

Just applying to be the overseer of a new top-level domain—and become what’s known as a “registry holder”—involves an application fee of $185,000, more than double the cost Icann charged in 2000, when it last accepted applications for top-level domains of just about any kind.

The goal of the overseers is to sell their names to registrars like GoDaddy.com LLC. The registrars specialize in reselling so-called secondary names—the words to the left of the dot—to entities known as registrants that want to own Web addresses. But before an overseer can sell its name to a registrar, it has to determine who will be eligible to use the name and provide the technology that will enable the domain to function.

Mr. Smith and his eight partners started their business in 2000 for the sole purpose of having it become a dot-shop registry holder that could sell dot-shop Web addresses, such as jeans.shop and coats.shop. “I’ve dedicated the last 10 years to this,” says the 46-year-old Mr. Smith.

The way he sees it, dot-shop at some future point could catch on among retailers and others involved in Web sales—and one day may even rival dot-com, the dominant domain operated by Internet-services giant Verisign Inc.

Mr. Smith says he has already put more than $2 million of his own money into his speculative dot-shop registry business. He and his partners have also lined up four angel investors to raise capital.

Their business, called Commercial Connect LLC, initially applied for the rights to dot-shop in 2000. But Mr. Smith says that application was denied for reasons he’s not clear on. A failure to nab it in the coming application season would be crushing, he acknowledges.

Jacob Malthouse is also developing a domain-registry start-up. He and two business partners say they plan to apply for dot-eco, a domain they hope will be attractive to companies and nonprofits with eco-friendly products or missions. “We get emails almost every day from people wanting to buy” a dot-eco domain name, says Mr. Malthouse. He and his partners began building the Vancouver, angel-backed start-up in 2007.

Mary Iqbal of Fitchburg, Wis., has a start-up dedicated to dot-bank and dot-secure. She thinks the domains will be attractive to financial institutions and large and midsize businesses seeking greater security on the Web, a service she says her domains would provide. “I’m obsessed with this opportunity,” she says, adding that several thousand potential buyers have expressed interest in her addresses.

Getting the rights to be a domain registry doesn’t guarantee success. A small number of these new dot-anything names may catch on, but it could take years. Many dot-something businesses will likely go bust.

Even if they succeed in their quest to become registry holders, these entrepreneurs will likely need to spend hundreds of thousand of dollars annually on technical support and promotional efforts to generate revenue consistently.

“You’re going to have to have a widespread marketing campaign to build up consumer recognition,” says Christopher Glancy, an intellectual-property attorney in New York.

“It requires care and feeding,” adds Jothan Frakes, a domain-name consultant in Seattle.

Tom Embrescia, the owner of the Cleveland business that oversees dot-jobs, a domain that Icann approved in late 2005 only for websites listing job openings, says he spends more than $1.5 million annually on marketing. It took about three years for his venture, Employ Media LLC, to become profitable, he adds.

But for the current crop of people hoping to become dot-anything entrepreneurs, there’s an immediate concern. If more than one equally qualified applicant seeks the same domain name, an auction would likely ensue. And that could drive up the costs of getting started.

“It’s possible to have no competitors, but we could have five,” says Jean Guillon of Paris, who along with several partners is seeking the rights to dot-wine, a registry aimed at wine bloggers, retailers and others.

Enrico Schaefer, a Traverse City, Mich., attorney specializing in Internet law, is excited about his right-of-the-dot idea. But he’s so worried about the possibility of a bidding war that, in an interview, he refused to divulge the name that he and his business partner intend to seek.

Mr. Schaefer thinks his undisclosed dot-something could become a leading rival to the ubiquitous dot-com registry. “Dot-com is not immune to real competition,” he says. “This will be the very first opportunity for competition to come to dot-com in a real, meaningful way.”

Large companies are likely to make up the bulk of applicants. But most of the big firms will probably go after brand names for which they already own trademarks and hold onto any registries they acquire.

Compared with the last broad, dot-anything application period in 2000, the application itself is now several hundred pages long and far more complex, according to Icann spokesman Andrew Robertson. It requires numerous additional details about applicants’ finances and technical capability, as well as their plans to use the domains they’re seeking the rights to, he says.

“You can’t have a fly-by-night organization run out of a kitchen,” says Kevin Wilson, who served as Icann’s chief financial officer from 2007 to 2011 and is now co-founder of a South Pasadena, Calif., consulting practice.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com