I just found out a $50 bonus to PerkStreet Financial™ offers a brand new online checking account designed to reward those who spend responsibly.
Each PerkStreet online checking account comes with a PerkStreet Financial Visa® Debit Card that offers 1% cash back, free music or coffee and you get a $50 bonus for opening an account.
Hate doing direct deposit to get a bonus? Then check out PerkStreet Financial $50 bonus for opening a checking account with a $25 minimum deposit. You must keep it open for 3 months but there is no direct deposit requirement. There is a $4.50 fee if there is no activity. Make sure to keep the account active once a month by depositing or withdrawing a small amount.
From the website:
* PerkStreet FinancialSM Visa® Debit Card gives you 1% cash back, free music or coffee
* Super fast live phone service, 24/7
* Free checks
* $25 deposit to open
* No minimum balance requirement
* No monthly fees when you use your account
* Nation’s largest surcharge-free ATM network
* Free online banking and bill pay
Also, they allow you to fund up to $500 with a credit card and it counts as a purchase. Good idea to use your Schwab CC to get $10 cash back. For those who want to stick with a debit card for all their purchases, they give 1% cash back for using PerkStreet debit card.
There are several problems with this bank, so I would warn potential customers to be aware of the fine print. Although PerkStreet’s website has the appearance of being clear about their policies, I found that not to be the case. These “fine print” policies seem designed to (1) make it difficult to move money out of the account, and (2) to limit the cashback that you can earn. Below are examples.
(1) They have a limit of $1500 on incoming online transfers in an entire *month*! They don’t tell you about this anywhere except when you actually try to move money into your account. When I called them about it, they said that they have this restriction for new customers and I was still in my first month. After a couple more calls, I realized that they will increase this limit to $2500 after six months.
Stated reason: Security.
Suspected motive: To limit the amount of money you can spend to get cashback.
(2) They have a limit of $500 on outgoing online transfers. So, say you move $5000 into your account to get 2% cashback. You are stuck with that money with them for the rest of the month (unless you adopt a slower paper check route).
(3) They have a limit of $1500 on daily expenses and explicitly say on their website that it can be waived simply by making a phone call. I had to book two one-way international flight tickets that cost a total of over $1500. I booked these and called them to waive the limit. They refused to do so because I was still in my first month. There is no notice about waivers not being allowed in the first month anywhere. As a result, I have to now spend much more money re-booking that ticket just because PerkStreet does not allow me to spend my own money.
Stated reason: Security for new customers. They claim that all banks have spending limits on debit cards. Really? Bank of America did not.
Suspected motive: Limiting spending => limiting cashback.
(4) When I tried to circumvent the limitation in (1) above to move more money into my account using FedEx, there was another surprise! The first FedEx check takes not 1 day as stated, but about 9 days for some reason. Again, some vague security reason that is incomprehensible to rational beings is given as an explanation.
Bottomline: It is not easy to get much cashback because of their restrictive policies on what you can do with your money. And they make it harder to move money out of the account while not giving any interest on it. As for the 5% cashback, they are on such specific and tiny items that I have never been able to get 5% cashback so far.
Initial funding is free. After that is 2.5% fee.
%2.5 fee to fund w/a credit card.