I had an idea, but wasn’t quite sure it would work. With all these banks giving away money for just opening an account, it was sure worth a try…
First step, is to do a web search on bank promotions, and my goal here was to find two banks with the most promo payouts. My contenders were Santander and Wells Fargo.
Santander at the time had a $300 promo (It’s $225 at the time of this writing), if you open an account and get at least $1000 of direct deposits into the account within 90 days. You also have to keep that account open in that time frame:
https://www.santanderbank.com/us/pages/personal/checking-accounts-acq
Wells Fargo’s promotion was $400, but this one required direct deposits which total $4000, within those 90 days, and unfortunately now the Wells Fargo promo isn’t available.
It doesn’t hurt to google it every now and then to see if it comes back! These promos usually fluctuate in and out of existence, so keep an eye out, and don’t forget to just google bank promos, as you may find other banks offering similar promotions.
Just searching that phrase I came up with a PNC promo for $200:
https://www.pnc.com/en/personal-banking/banking/checking/campaigns/checking-vw-tiered-offer.html?
By far the easiest account to maintain is the Santander Simply Right Checking. To avoid the monthly maintenance fee for this account, you need to make one transaction a month, or have $500 in direct deposits a month. The one transaction a month, is something as using your debit card once each month, easy peasy.
Wells Fargo Every Day Checking was a little more difficult to avoid those monthly fees. Unless you have a monthly direct deposit of at least $500, you’ll need to do a little more work using your debit card, as they call for 10 transactions a month. Still not the end of the world, but I’m not one to use my debit card, and prefer using cash back credit cards.
What I did about the direct deposit situation for meeting the Wells Fargo account terms, in order to avoid future fees, was told my work to split my payroll into two bank accounts, they gave me a form and it let me choose the amount to go into one bank account, which I set to $500 and then the remainder of my pay went into my original account.
When you do your taxes online, at the end they give you the option to split up your refund into different bank accounts. This was the part I wasn’t sure about. If these direct deposits from a tax refund would be considered as a direct deposit in the banks eyes. From what I’ve experienced they are, which is great!
After the 90 days exactly, both banks produced my promo credits in my account. I made $700 for just following through! If this helped you or you have any questions please post below!
