Hc000 said:One full dollar moved from our checking to saving ?

OR

One full dollar MATCHED by the bank to our saving?

One full dollar moved from our checking to saving AND 5% of total balance matched by bank (at anniversary) ATOP 5% interest rate on acct.

thanks for posting, this seems very hot...can the $100 transfer happen with each purchase/transaction?

from how i read the above, you can basically get 10% on $6000. Make 60 transactions, $6000 goes into the savings account (assuming its setup to transfer $100 each time), earning $300 "base interest" at 5% and $300 bonus from the additional 5% at the end of the year. If you can have 5 of these accounts, youll need to make 300 transactions but will earn 10% on $30,000. Not bad.

I'm on Wachovia's website right now and see no mention of this. Where can we find out more about this?

Each trans only moves $1.

Each month, you can move (through their auto xfer process) $100.

Thus, if you do bill pays, auto debits, or check card purchases, the max you can move in a year is $1200. Other deposits to the account are not allowed.

With the number of bill pays I do, I will likely max out the $1200 auto xfer and then put about $30-$40 per month in the account. Thank you BT arbitage. For me, that means at the end of the year I will have contributed the following:

$1200 auto-xfer
$360 - $480 bill pay $1 xfer
$78 - $84 interest
$81.90 - $88.20 bonus

The more bill pays, the more it contributes. Plus there is a bonus in the 2nd and 3rd anniversary, but that is only 2%.

The rep in South Florida told me that this is only advertised in branches at this time. Within the next week or two should be a national roll out (and on the website).

CycloneFW said:
The rep in South Florida told me that this is only advertised in branches at this time. Within the next week or two should be a national roll out (and on the website).

So, currently, in branch only? or in selected areas?

update: 9:50am ET: I called my branch, no rep, so they transfered me to the calling center...asked the lady and the lady needed to transfer me.

The official roll out date for thie account (including links on website) is 1/15/08 However, I was able to open the account over the phone...

Jokingly, keep 6k in the account for the $300 bonus? (I'm not a math major...but if the max bonus $300, then just make sure there's 6k in the account by the end of the year...)

Can a person ACH the 6k into the account and just let it sit? I know a person can't goto the branch to make deposits for this account, but ACH push might work?

SUCKISSTAPLES said:So then it seems the "practical/easy max" to this deal, if you dont want to do transactions or billpays , will make about 10% on $6000, earning $600 (assuming you have 5 accounts, each set to do the $100 autotransfer each month). No billpay and transactions needed. At the end of the day youll earn about $300 more than a normal 5% account.

You wouldn't quite make 10% on the $6000, would you?

Since the balance builds from $0 at a rate of $100/month (or $500/month with 5 accounts), then the average balance for the whole year would be $3000 across all the accounts. So you'd get 5% of that ($150) from interest throughout the year (roughly, I'm ignoring compounding to keep it simple), and 5% ($300) of the year-end total ($6000) from the bonus.

So $450 total, or $150 more than you'd get with a normal 5% account (into which you could have deposited the full $6000 on the first day of the year)

Or do both

SUCKISSTAPLES said:This is worse than BofA since you could do 1.01 transactions and make 99 cents.

I am confused on this part. In Keep the Change, doesn't that $0.99 come from your own checking acct? If that is the case, then BoA's would be worse as the maximum you could xfer would be $0.99. Wachovia's would always be $1.

Now, if you meant something about the bank contributing, please elaborate (or point me to the right thread).

I realize that this may not make me rich, but it is something I can easily contribute and does not require any additional work on my part (bill pays and auto-debits, I rarely use my debit card).

blkonblk said:SUCKISSTAPLES said:So then it seems the "practical/easy max" to this deal, if you dont want to do transactions or billpays , will make about 10% on $6000, earning $600 (assuming you have 5 accounts, each set to do the $100 autotransfer each month). No billpay and transactions needed. At the end of the day youll earn about $300 more than a normal 5% account.

You wouldn't quite make 10% on the $6000, would you?

Since the balance builds from $0 at a rate of $100/month (or $500/month with 5 accounts), then the average balance for the whole year would be $3000 across all the accounts. So you'd get 5% of that ($150) from interest throughout the year (roughly, I'm ignoring compounding to keep it simple), and 5% ($300) of the year-end total ($6000) from the bonus.

So $450 total, or $150 more than you'd get with a normal 5% account (into which you could have deposited the full $6000 on the first day of the year)

It's true that you can't drop the full amount in from day 1, but I think we can assume that you'll be holding it in your normal 5% interest account until you can auto-xfer it in. So really, the bonus here is being able to get the 5% bonus on some of your money at the end of the year. You'll earn the 5% interest on the money whether you have it in Wachovia or somewhere else.

I will probably go ahead and set this up for myself. I already opened a Wachovia checking account for the sign-up bonus last fall, so I'd just need to add the savings. I can get an extra $60 if I put in $100/month, and the only cost is the time to set up the account, and the loss of liquidity of the $1200 until the end of the year.

The debit card doesn't seem as good of a deal, since you basically are making 5 cents per transaction (5% bonus at end--w/o this account, you could have the money sitting elsewhere at 5%, so that part is a wash). As for using the checking account for billpay to get 5 cents per transaction, I think I'll keep using an interest bearing checking account to pay my bills.