JP Morgan Chase Bank is offering a $100 bonus for new customers who sign up for the Chase Checking account. If you are not a current customer of Chase, you can qualify for this $100 bonus with an initial deposit of $100 and by initiating a direct deposit or five purchases using your new debit card within 60 days. You will receive your $100 bonus 10 days after your direct deposit or fifth debit card purchase.
Like most account opening bonuses, the $100 is considered interest, so it will be reported to the IRS as interest income. You might owe taxes on the bonus as you would owe taxes on other interest earned in bank accounts.
Keep in mind that in order for this account to remain free, you have to abide by Chase Bank’s rules. Keep your direct deposit or make five debit card purchases each month to avoid a $6 monthly fee.
Also, if you close your account within six months, Chase will take the bonus back.
You can either apply for the account online or at a branch. To generate and retrieve your coupon, click here. This coupon expires December 31, 2009, but if there are more coupons after that point I will post them here.
I do very little stock trading. In fact, the only individual stocks I hold are Microsoft (MSFT) and Akamai (AKAM), both of which I purchased with free money for opening a brokerage account. Naturally, I think free cash is a perfect candidate for experimentation with the stock market and I most likely would not have made these purchases without this particular incentive.
Zecco Trading is offering a different incentive for those who have funds for trading stocks but would like to avoid pesky transaction fees that eat into your returns. For a very limited time, Zecco is offering 20 free traders. This discount brokerage normally offers 20 free trades each month for customers who maintain a $25,000 bonus in their account or execute 25 trades each month. Otherwise, each trade costs $4.50, still one of the lowest transaction fees available.
Here is how to receive 20 free trades without meeting the minimum balance or minimum trade volume. First, be a new customer. Only new Zecco customers are eligible. Apply for your Zecco account here, and use the code bonus1 when signing up for your account. Your application must be complete and approved by September 13, 2009.
As long as you meet the above criteria, you will see 20 free trades available in your account by September 16, 2009.
For more options, see this summary of five true discount brokerages.
Update: The waiting list is currently full. Keep reading Consumerism Commentary (or subscribe) to be notified when the waiting list is open again.
ING Direct is one of my favorite banks due to their savings account. While ING Direct’s Online Savings Account does not offer the highest interest rate, they are consistently towards the top offering much more to savers than a typical brick and mortar savings bank, have a fantastic website, and offer a smooth experience when dealing with customer service.
While I have started exploring other high-yield savings accounts like FNBO Direct (review), Ally Bank (review), and EverBank (review) I still use ING Direct for the bulk of my cash management.
Here are some of the ways I currently use ING Direct:
- Every two weeks, my pay check is automatically deposited in my ING Direct checking account (known to the locals as “Electric Orange”).
- Each month, several services deposit money directly into a couple savings accounts at ING Direct.
- My money at ING Direct is split into twelve sub-accounts, ten personal and two business, with names like “Orange Vacation Fund” and “Orange Emergency Fund.”
- I have two PayPal accounts, and one sub-account at ING Direct corresponds to each. This way I can maintain very small balances in the linked accounts to prevent problems with PayPal. When I withdraw money from PayPal into ING Direct, I can move the money to a different sub-account immediately.
- ING Direct works with Quicken’s Direct Connect feature, which means I can download my bank transactions from the software and reconcile the account automatically.
- My credit cards are configured to automatically deduct the full amount of my bill from my ING Direct checking account on the date the payments are due.
Although ING Direct’s interest is not competitive with the newest online banks, you can match or exceed the income generated by this savings account by using the bank’s referral feature. For each friend you introduce to the bank, ING Direct will thank you with $10 for you and $25 for your friend in the form of an interest bonus. You have 50 opportunities to earn the $10 bonus for a total of $500.
Unless you’re extremely well-connected, it is unlikely you have 50 friends who are interested in opening an account in ING Direct (though they should be). So for the last year or so I’ve been helping Consumerism Commentary readers by connecting them with potential new ING Direct customers. Through this announcement last year, I’ve already helped over 300 readers earn some extra money towards their $500 limit.
I am running out of names of readers waiting for their turn to earn a bonus so I am re-opening the waiting list. If you are interested in earning bonus interest from ING Direct, comment here (comments on this post are now open) or on any earlier article about ING Direct and mention you’d like to be added to the waiting list. I will cut off the waiting list at about 100.
Update: The waiting list is full again as of 11:15 PM ET on August 18, 2009, eleven and a quarter hours after this notice was posted. Thank you, everyone. I’ll post a new message in a few months when the waiting list is open again.
It has been awhile, but I now have a new set of $25 bonus referral links available for new customers of the ING Direct online savings account. ING Direct is currently, as of June 16, 2009, offering an interest rate yielding 1.5% APY on this savings account.
Here is how this works. If you open an account using one of the referral links available here and deposit at least $250, you will receive a $25 bonus, and the bonus is considered interest. Although ING Direct’s interest rate is not the highest among high-yield savings accounts, depending on how much you deposit you could earn more with this bonus and ING’s interest than you would with just interest from another bank.
The referral links posted on Consumerism Commentary have been provided solely by other readers. When you earn $25, the reader who donated the link will receive a $10 referral fee. After you sign up, you will receive your own referral links to share. Everybody wins! I have a long waiting list of readers who are waiting to have their links posted. The waiting list is closed at the moment, but when I need more links I will post an announcement and allow people with new referral links to be added to the waiting list again.
See our update with a new code.
Chase is offering a $100 bonus if you open a checking account by July 7, 2009. There is no maintenance fee with this checking account as long as you activate a direct deposit or use your debit card for purchases five times each statement period. There is no minimum balance requirement, but an initial deposit of $100 within sixty days is required to qualify for the bonus.
If you live near a Chase branch, you can take this code with you when you open your account. Otherwise, you can open your account online at Chase’s website.
The coupon codes are good for one use only, so if you want to earn this bonus you must be quick to act.
3471822349438807 (Expires July 7, 2009)
If you have received coupons on the mail which you do not intend to use, please post the codes in the comments so others can take advantage of the bonus. I’ll add any posted bonus codes to this article.
Even though ING Direct has lowered the interest rate offered on the Orange Savings Account, one of the most popular online savings accounts. The bank is still offering $25 bonuses to new customers who open this savings account or the high-yield paperless checking account with an initial deposit of $250 or more.
In addition, when you become a new customer of ING Direct, they generally provide fifty referral codes for your own use. You can share these with your friends, earning $10 for each customer you send their way. Each of your friends will earn $25 for opening an account. It’s quite the pyramid scheme, and it’s been successful for the bank so far. The good news is that the bank’s customer service is among the best, as is the bank’s website.
If you’d like to earn $25 as a new customer, use one of the new $25 bonus referral links posted here, and be sure to clear your browser’s cookies before attempting to use any of the codes.
For more banks, see the latest savings account interest rates.
Today is the deadline for American International Group (AIG) to pay $165 million in the form of bonuses to executives involved in businesses that led to collapse of the company — and the broader economy — last year. The company argues that these bonus payments were agreed to before the company required support from the government and taxpayers to stay in existence, and the government agrees. While some of the bonuses paid by AIG to its employees were reduced, these will go forward.
According to an anonymous government official quoted in the New York Times, the White House is outraged at the continuation of bonuses at taxpayer expense, yet they cannot do anything about it.
Is this too much attention on the one company? Should AIG be permitted to honor contracts drawn up under significantly different financial conditions? These bonuses supposedly help the company retain the best employees; if the employees in these divisions that led to the company’s collapse were the best employees, wouldn’t they have been able to avoid that collapse?
In March 2006, my company rewarded its employees for achieving an enterprise financial milestone by offering a company stock bonus, designed to vest on March 14, 2009. The vesting period was perhaps designed to create an incentive for employees to stay with the company. When the bonus was announced, the stock grant was worth about $2,000. At the high point last year, the value of the package approached $3,000.
If the bonus were to vest today, each employee would receive the same amount of shares, but the value would only be about $300. The value of a share of my company’s stock has declined 90% from the high. To reclaim that high, the price would need to increase by 818%. That would be 5% a year for 30 years or 3% a year for 75 years. It’s probably safe to say it will be a long time before we see last year’s prices again, if ever.
I don’t see this price changing much for the better within the next week before the grant vests. I suppose I should be happy that I still have a job, although I’m considering leaving to work for myself full-time, and I should appreciate receiving this bonus in the first place.
Management says that our company’s stock price is sympathetic to the rest of the industry and the decline is not due to internal factors.
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