SURE, WE’LL KEEP IT: A lot of you have probably at least heard of Bank of America’s Keep The Change (KTC) program by now. It’s a marketing effort / savings program wherein when you make a purchase, B of A rounds up the total to the nearest dollar and transfers that difference from your checking account to your savings account. It’s a forced savings program, and based on the way people actually behave, it’s actually a pretty good one. We’re happy to level criticism at banks when deserved, but credit where credit is due: it’s a pretty well-executed program.
And then comes the marketing department to make things interesting, of course. To entice customers to sign up for this, B of A will match the first $250 you save. Here’s an example of how this works: you buy a candy bar for $1.01. B of A deducts $2.00 from your checking account–$1.01 goes to the merchant, and $0.99 goes to your savings account. And then B of A reaches down into its pockets and matches that $.99 you just saved.
You end up with $1.98 in your savings account, half of which comes from you and half of which is from B of A. Rinse and repeat up to the maximum and that’s $250 right there.
But scroll down to the bottom of the page and read the fine print:
Bank of America will only match Keep the Change transfers on up to five checking accounts per depositor (including joint depositors) or up to five checking accounts per household, whichever is less.
Only five checking accounts, eh? Fair enough. Since our readers are excellent at math, they have undoubtedly arrived at a total of $1,250 in KTC rewards already.
And finally, if you want to sweeten the deal even more, you can get an extra $100 by using code BAW100 when you open your first checking account.
To really maximize this, you’ll have to figure out some ways to do small transactions. It will take some experimenting on your part, but you can pay utility bills in small increments, pump gas, buy Amazon gift cards, make charitable donations… use your imagination. Do note that repeated transactions of the same amount are more likely to get your account flagged as a fraud risk.
And if you really want to get into more details, here’s a link to the FWF discussion thread on the topic. Happy banking!
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