Last Friday I opened a bank account with an incentive of $100* to be deposited into my account with either a direct deposit set up or ten online bills paid within the first 60 days. Shane's employer doesn't direct deposit, and I don't receive a regular paycheck, but I figured it would be easy to pay ten bills online within a couple of months to "earn" that $100. I'm not closing our "old" account and while I will probably keep the new account open as my mystery shopping account, my reason for opening it was strictly to get the free money.
Today I purchased our new dishwasher on our Visa credit card. The balance is right at $600. Instead of setting up several different bills to be paid with the new account, can't I set up just the Visa card and make ten payments of $60?
Even if I don't make all of the payments to Visa, I'll have to repeat some of my payments, since we only pay six or seven different online payees each month. If I can pay a payee twice, why not ten times? As far as I know, there is no stipulation against it. Does anyone know any reason this won't work, either with VISA or the new bank account?
*For the curious, it was at Bank of the West, but as far as I know, the offer ended Friday. :( I didn't learn about it until about 5:00 Friday afternoon when a bank representative at HyVee stopped me to tell me about it. I would have shared the info earlier otherwise.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Is There Any Reason I Can't Do This?
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9 comments:
You might check with your cc company first - we have had cards before that only allowed you to make 2 payments per month. That would be the only hindrance I can think of. I'm assuming you're planning on paying this off ASAP and holding the interest costs to a minimum?
Yes, we plan to pay it off immediately. We like to pay for certain things (larger purchases, camping reservations made months in advance, etc.) with our credit card so that if there is a probem of any kind later, it will be easier to track down and resolve.
It also keeps our card account from being closed from inactivity; we had that happen with a couple of our gas cards.
We have had accounts closed because of inactivity before, too. About a year ago, we ended up with no credit card at all because one we had had forever (literally all of our married lives) closed for that reason and the one we used all the time ended funding for some odd reason. It was a business card and the bank decided to stop funding business accounts. It was frustrating, though, because those two cards were unavailable to us within a period of a couple of days and we had to scramble to transfer some auto payments to our regular bank account quickly. I always keep a cash-back credit card and use it more like a debit card, always paying it off in full each month.
I would read the fine print carefully--seems like there are lots of restrictions on good deals like that--at least there have been for us. Hope it works out for you.
Looks like this is a go. Our Visa CSR said we could make a payment daily if we like with no penalties and the new bank people say I need 10 transactions, but not necessarily 10 unique payees. The only thing I have to wait for is for the purchase on the Visa to post. As of this morning, it's still pending.
So I won't say it should work now since I see you got your answer.
I opened an account last yr. just for the free money too over at ING....same deal as you-make a specific # of transactions in a specific time frame and it worked.
And if I hear about some other bank offering the same type of deal, I'd be on it like ugly on a warthog.
I did the ING account, too, when they were running a Black Friday bonus. I love free money. :)
We recently opened a new checking account just for free money. LOL! Hubby is using it for his mystery shopping and ebay sales. But we did it just for the $100 they offered. (We already have 2 accounts that that bank.)
The bank ladies said that most people won't do it because they can't be bothered to set up their payees. Crazy people. :)
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