Pragmatic Finance

Over the last year or so there has been several promos with Citibank to earn money for opening up an EZ checking account. Also, if you link your account up at the thank you network you earn points each month if you have 3 or more “products.” If you have an account open you might want to consider this strategy to increase the amount of thank you points you earn each month. If not its probably best to wait until they have another promo for new customers and get $100 to $200 for that.

Before I get started note that it seems as though Citibank likes to make hard inquiries for every new product or account, so be aware of that if you want to open up new ones.

The amount of points you earn each month is based on the type of checking account you have and how many “products” you have. Midway down the page here is a listing of what qualifies as a product and how many points each account gets. In addition to what you’d expect for savings, checking, cds, etc you will notice that direct deposit, bill pay, and having a debit card count as products. So if you have a debit card, pay bills, and have direct deposit that is already worth the equivalent of 75 cents each month for an EZ account, which is what I have been earning until recently. Add in their new esavings account and its $1.50 per month. If you wanted to do more you could add a cd and checking plus(overdraft protection for $5 fee per year). Only caveat is the credit hits.

However, if you switch to The Citibank Account, your points more than double. The main requirement here is that you keep a balance of $6000 in your linked accounts. While the esavings is at 4.5% apy which isn’t the leader, it is still pretty decent. Up until now your probably thinking its not worth the hassel but the interesting thing is that the balances on certain linked credit cards from citi can count towards the total. So if you have large sums of 0% Balance Transfer money out you can link the accounts and not have to deposit the 6k to avoid service fees.

So with the checking, esavings, and doing bill pay and direct deposit you can net $48 dollars per year or if you wanted to add a cd (500 minimum) right now at 4.7% apy and checking plus you would net $96 $91 after the fee. You should have a debit card from when you opened the checking account and you can set up regular deposits from ing and regular bill pays to satisfy the other requirements. Paypal also counts toward the dd requirement. If you dont mind the hassel to set it up and the credit hits you can net some nice change.

Haven’t seen this deal mentioned much so I’ll go ahead and post it. Offer expires 4/30/06. Open an account at HTH Worldwide Bank and enter code 25FREEHTH in the referral box on your application. You need to open it up with a $50 deposit and you should receive your bonus in 6 weeks. There is a $30 fee for closing within 90 days but there is no minimum deposit so you can take your money out asap. You get a debit card, bill pay, and a first set of checks free if you wanted to use it but with 0.39 to 1.22% APY you probably won’t.

I opened mine about a month ago. As soon as I get to my bonus I will probably use bill pay or write a check to get all but one dollar out and close it after 90 days. Note that there is an ACH out fee and also a dormat account fee if you have no activity for 24 months.

It did take a few weeks to get things sent out to me but not as long as HSBC and there was no hard credit inquiry so no problems.

I guess this is where I give my introduction while playing some cleverly crafted theme music as I make my grand entrance. Well, you will just have to imagine the latter part.

I have been wanting to make this blog for a long time now but never got around to it. The creation of mblogs was a perfect excuse..err I mean opportunity to finally start it. I am a 24 year old college student with about a year left to graduate. I am not majoring in finance but it has really become my hobby over the last year. I absolutely love micromanaging my finances and signing up for promotions, even when the time cost doesn’t make it worth it. It all started about a year ago when I had gotten to the point where I had to take out a cash advance to pay my bills. So I, unknowingly at the time, decided to overcompensate. Yadda yadda yadda here I am. Hopefully this blog will talk about personal finance, money, investing, the economy, and anything else that I can find a way to remotely connect to those subjects.