5 Hacks To Save $50k/yr (Lower Taxes, Free Travel, Waived Fees & More)
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Today, I'm going to share with you five tactics that I've used recently to save money and maximize my points. I'm going to talk about how I lowered my property tax, drastically reduced the number of miles I needed for a vacation, cut my credit card annual fees by 50% or more, how you could get a free companion pass, and I'll share my findings going deep on bank and brokerage bonuses that could net you thousands of dollars a year.

I'm Chris Hutchins. This is All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. We've got links to each section of this episode in the show notes if you want to jump ahead. So let's get into it right after this. There is no shortage of information about how bad soda can be, but I love a good sparkling beverage, which is why I'm so excited to share a new favorite of mine with you, Dram, which I have loved so much that I reached out to see if they wanted to be a sponsor, and I'm excited they're a partner today.

Dram is unlike anything you've ever had. Imagine a drink that's zero calories, zero sugar, but tastes incredible because it's packed full of ingredients made from real plants, not natural flavoring, which can sometimes mean synthetic chemical flavoring also.

They have some amazing unique flavors like cardamom black tea, which I love, not just because it tastes good, but it's also pretty good for cardiovascular health. Their citrus is crafted from orange blossoms and fresh citrus peels and tastes delicious. But my favorite is the mushroom cola. It's inspired by historic medicinal cola syrups, but it's made with adaptogenic mushrooms like chaga, lion's mane, shiitake, and cordyceps.

but you don't even taste the mushrooms. It tastes just like cola. It really is amazing. Lastly, I love that their cans are BPA-free and that their water is tested for PFAS, so it has none of those terrible forever chemicals. You've gotta give DRAM a try, and if you go to allthehacks.com slash DRAM, D-R-A-M,

You can get a bundle pack of my favorites and 20% off everything in the store. Just go to allthehacks.com slash dram, D-R-A-M, or use the code allthehacks and enjoy dram.

All right, let's talk property tax. If you're new here or missed episode 142, I covered how many states and counties actually let you appeal your home value and thus reduce your property taxes for the year. I actually learned the ins and outs of this from a guy named Colton who founded this amazing site called OwnWell. But I want to share the results of my process.

So back in November, I filed an appeal. I paid a $30 fee where I only needed to put my stated value on a form. So there was the register value that they said my home was worth and based property taxes on.

I said it was worth a number that was 23% lower than that number. Now, I'd done some work to support that value, looking at sales comps from the assessing date, which for our county was January 1st, 2023. And then I built a little spreadsheet model to adjust those prices based on the fluctuating average home price data in the zip code I'm in that I got from Zillow, which kind of means if some sale happened in October...

And then the assessor date is January 1st. I looked at how home prices changed between October and January 1st, and I adjusted them accordingly. And then also I looked at how the individual houses might have differed from mine, mostly in terms of square footage, but could be from other features.

So that's how I arrived at a number that ended up being about 23% lower than what the county valued my home at. And a few months later, once the county had entered my appeal into the system, I followed up and emailed the assessor that spreadsheet. So the first application just needed a number, but I wanted to defend that number. So I emailed the spreadsheet and said, hey, here's this information. They said, we're not going to do any of this until you have a hearing date set. So that hearing date was set for July 11th.

And sure enough, on June 27th, just a couple weeks before, I got an email that said my value was warranted and the price would be reduced. I honestly couldn't believe it. I had expected that I would need to negotiate. Maybe they would come in and say, hey, actually 10%, and I'd say 15%, but I didn't. They just took my price, which was a 23% reduction, and...

Ultimately, my property taxes, which I've already paid, will be reduced by that amount, and I believe I will get a refund check for that amount, which in the Bay Area, 23% reduction can be thousands of dollars.

Now, I had assumed incorrectly that in California, when you reduce your home's value for property tax, it would carry forward into the future based on Prop 8 that we have that property taxes don't get reassessed each year. But sadly, that's not the case. You can appeal the base value of your home, which is the price by which it adjusts with

a very low cost of living adjustment over time. But in order to do that, you need to argue that the purchase price that you paid wasn't actually a fair price at the time. So it's really hard to do that if you had a free market transaction. Maybe you could argue that your real estate agent deceived you and led you to make an unfair offer, but it's very difficult. So what I'm going to do, as long as interest rates are high, and I believe that our home could be argued to be undervalued,

is just find a few sales comps every year in our neighborhood, use the same model that I have or a new model to update that amount and file an appeal every year until the market prices of homes actually exceeds what's on the books. Eventually in California, that'll happen because the Prop 8 limitations kind of really keep your property tax not much higher than what you paid for. So in some number of years, this will stop being a thing. But until then, I'm going to file this each year.

And if you live in other states, it can be even more lucrative. So I definitely encourage homeowners to check into this. If you don't want to deal with the hassle of going through all of the state and county rules, building your own models that support evaluation, filling in the documents, check out OwnWell. They've done an amazing job of automating this entire process. Their model is that they just take 35% of what they save you. If they don't save you anything, they don't get paid.

So if you had a property tax bill that got reduced down $2,500, they would take $875 and you would get to keep the rest. Honestly, when I look at all the work I did with the models, the back and forth, the emails, the time I spent on it,

I might just use OwnWell next year to repeat this process. They did offer to give listeners a deal at allthehacks.com slash ownwell. I can't actually remember what the discount is, but it should show up when you go through the process. Another ongoing update is around award booking, and it's about this summer trip that we're taking to Europe.

I mentioned in episode 175 how we managed to find five seats one way to Paris in business class this summer for 45,000 Air France points, plus about $300 in taxes per person. But we didn't actually have a return. And so I just set up some alerts with Award Tool and Seats.Aero. And sure enough, we got an alert a couple of weeks ago that five seats popped up

on United direct from Amsterdam to San Francisco just 12 days after we arrived in Paris, which was perfect timing for us.

But it introduced an interesting decision that I thought sharing with you would be really valuable because where you book the flight has such a big impact on how much it costs. So despite that this was a United flight, I could have booked it through most other Star Alliance carriers. So I narrowed it down to a few options. First was just book it on United for 80,000 points plus $93 in taxes per person, free cancellation, which was an awesome benefit.

and you can get United points transferring from Chase or Bill one-to-one. So I almost just did that, not remembering about all of these other options, and then it dawned on me to go check. And sure enough, there were some really compelling ones. So first off, I could have just booked it on Air Canada, same flight as United, but only 70,000 points and $144 in taxes per person. Now,

Because of a 20% transfer bonus, it would only end up costing 58,333 chase points. Sometimes you have to round up to make sure you transfer an even number. And that number would have gone even lower if I had a chase aeroplane card because they were offering a 30% transfer bonus.

The issue here was that it came with a cancellation fee. So that cancellation fee is $150 Canadian dollars or $110 US dollars. However, one of the great features of Aeroplan is that when you're booking a flight, you kind of get two choices. You can pay more points and get a flexible free cancellation ticket. So for 85,000 points, you got free cancellation and I wouldn't risk having to pay anything if we needed to change or cancel in the future.

Now, with that transfer bonus of 20%, it would have only been 71,833 points plus the $144 in taxes to book a refundable flight on Air Canada that roughly matched what was happening on United because United has free cancellation.

So that means that I'm paying about $50 more in taxes to save about 8,000 points. Already, that's comparable. However, a few people shared with me a trick that I didn't know about. And that's that when you go to change an aeroplane itinerary, you don't lose the space that you've secured if you add on another leg, but you do get to reprice things.

And so if you add on a leg that wouldn't change the overall price, so for us, maybe we add on San Francisco to LA. Well, now we get to reprice it. And at that point in time, we could choose to reprice it as the non-refundable version and get back.

get back those 15,000 points. And so that's one option we thought about was, okay, well, let's switch to Amsterdam to San Francisco and then add on a flight to LAX or some other place on the West Coast. And it's not really going to change the price. We would just grab our bags in SFO, not take that last leg. So that is one option. The other option would be while we still have a flexible flight,

We could change it to have an LA leg for the same 85,000 points and then change it back to have a direct flight, not include the leg and ask them if they could change it to the 70,000 point version and get back those 15,000 points. So,

Haven't played with that trick, would encourage people to try, search around online, and that would be a great option. And actually another benefit of this option for us was that back when Bilt had a 100% transfer bonus to Aeroplan, I transferred a bunch of Bilt points over. So I had almost all the points I needed. And if you look at 100% transfer bonus and being able to get this flight for 70,000 points, then that was effectively a cost of

35,000 points, at least built points for this flight. So that was an amazing deal. So it seemed like the obvious choice, but there is a third option worth considering. And that was with Avianca LifeMiles.

Now, through Life Miles, the starting price was only 63,000 points plus $115 in taxes. And there was a 15% transfer bonus from Amex, which would have brought the total to just shy of 55,000 points, which is better than Aeroplan, better than United.

Similar to Aeroplan, though, there is a hefty cancellation fee, so $200 per person, which given the uncertainty we had on this trip, we weren't really willing to risk having to cancel five tickets and paying $1,000. However, Avianca has the LifeMiles Plus subscription, which can come in handy in these situations.

So for $30 a month, you subscribe to LifeMiles Plus Basic, and that gets you free cancellation. It also gets you 2,000 miles per month deposited into your account, and you get a 10% rebate on award flights. The only catch is you need to subscribe for six months at a minimum.

So that means for us, $30 a month, six months, $180. And if you kind of split it out over the five tickets we were booking, it's $36 extra per person. But you would get back a total of 31,500 miles because you're getting that 10% rebate. And you would earn 2,000 points per month for the next six months, which is another 12,000 points.

Yes, I would need to transfer the whole total of about 55,000 points per person over to book the flights, but I would end up with 43,500 life miles left over.

So you could argue that the total cost was only 232,000 points, which is only 46,000 points per person. So here I was starting at United at 80,000 points, reducing that cost all the way down to potentially 46,000 points for the exact same flight, which is amazing.

So the LifeMiles deal is a great example of how much better a deal you can get if you dig a little bit further. And like I said earlier, I almost just booked the United flight without thinking, so I'm glad I didn't. The final comparison, United at 80,000 points plus $93, Aeroplan at 58,000 or 72,000 points, at least ultimate rewards points, depending on whether I wanted to be able to cancel it, and then LifeMiles at 55,000

or $46,000 depending on whether I wanted to pay the extra $36 per person to get LifeMiles Plus on top of the $115 taxes per person.

So from my standpoint, the LifeMiles deal was absolutely the best. And it's what I would have done because how often do you get to book five international business class flights between the West Coast and Europe for less than 250,000 total points under $150 a person in taxes and fees, including that LifeMiles Plus subscription?

So I absolutely would have done that, except that I had already transferred points to AeroPlan back when Built had that 100% bonus, and I had no current plan for them. So I decided to go with the AeroPlan route, and I booked it at the changeable, cancelable 85,000 point level, and I will get back to you in the future if we end up trying to switch it to get to the 70,000 point level and save those points.

Now, the irony of all of this is that I actually forgot to turn off all the alerts after I booked this flight. And then three days later, Air France popped up on the exact same day for Paris to San Francisco flights for only 50,000 Air France miles.

Now, the taxes and fees were about $275, so greater than all the other options. But for a simple choice, not even requiring a transfer bonus, which oftentimes there are to Air France, was another great option.

So I didn't change that because I'd already booked it in Aeroplan and it was pretty close, but I had three big takeaways for you. One, deals pop up all the time, even for prime time travel. I was looking for flights to Europe for five people direct in business class in the summer, which is a very hard time to find awards. I got multiple options in the 45 to 75, 80,000 point range over

over the course of a couple weeks on short notice, but not one week before short notice, like a month, two months before. It did take a little bit of flexibility around dates. We were flexible over the course of about a month when we would leave and depart, and a little bit on where we went. We were just looking at alerts for direct flights to and from San Francisco, figuring we could easily buy a ticket from Paris or France.

or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or Zurich to somewhere else in Europe at a really low cost and end up with only one layover and have no problem doing that leg in a cheap flight. If you haven't already checked out the other two episodes we did on award booking tools, for flights, it was episode 166 and hotels 167. Definitely check those out.

Takeaway number two, don't forget that because you find a flight on one airline, like United in my case, it absolutely does not mean you need to book it through United's award program. And in many cases, it's going to be a much worse deal. Takeaway number three, there is so much value in having transferable points, especially across multiple programs.

In my example, if I didn't have Chase points, then I wouldn't have gotten the 20% Aeroplan transfer bonus or have even been able to transfer to United if that was the best option. If I didn't have Amex points, I couldn't have gotten the 15% bonus to LifeMiles. So definitely keep that in mind. If you're looking to boost your points balance, we have links to the top credit cards and bonuses at allthehacks.com slash cards. Using those links really does help support the show. So I appreciate everyone who does use them.

There are so many amazing apps for productivity, but the downside is that it can be stressful to have your work scattered across so many tools. Fortunately, I've been able to consolidate a ton of those tools into one space to manage all my life and work, Notion. It's a product I've loved for years, and I'm excited they're also a sponsor today. Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play for getting inspired or being creative. It's a place where you can find the joy of play for getting inspired or being creative.

It's where I centralize everything from show notes to project plans and even my brainstorming sessions. The seamless integration of Notion AI makes it even more powerful, automating tasks and making me more productive.

Best of all, Notion is for everyone, whether you're a Fortune 500, a freelancer, or neither, and you just want a single place to organize your notes, docs, projects, and more. So try Notion for free when you go to notion.com slash allthehacks. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash allthehacks, and start turning ideas into action. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show, notion.com slash allthehacks.

When it comes to managing my money, there is one app I check almost every day and it's Copilot, our sponsor today. It's one of my all-time favorite apps. It's on my home screen and it makes it so seamless and easy to track your spending and manage your entire financial picture. And just this week, they launched an importer for all your old Mint data, which is amazing because I just imported 9,917 transactions dating back to 2012, which is

which means I now have over a decade of all of my financial data in one place. Now, I've tried so many apps for tracking spending. Last year, I evaluated over a dozen of them, but Copilot is the only one I've kept using. You can link your accounts at over 10,000 institutions, and their expense categorization is the best I've used with custom Amazon and Venmo integrations that make it even better.

You can completely design your spending categories and subcategories and easily set up rules to assign transactions to them automatically.

Thanks to Copilot, I've never had a better grasp on our spending and cash flow, which I'm pretty sure has resulted in thousands of dollars of savings every year. So for the best app to track your spending, subscriptions, and investments, go to allthehacks.com slash copilot on an iPhone or Mac to download Copilot and enter code HACKS2 during onboarding for a two-month free trial. Again, that's

allthehacks.com slash copilot and the code HACKS2 for a free two-month trial of my favorite personal finance app.

Speaking of free travel, let's talk about the Southwest Companion Pass. Now I've talked before about how great Companion Pass is because for the year you earn it and the entire next year, you get to select one person and they fly free with you only paying taxes and fees, which can be as low as $5.60 per flight. And you can change your companion up to three times a year.

Now, normally it takes 135,000 Southwest points to earn Companion Pass. However, unlike many other programs, the points you earn through the Southwest credit card do count. And just having the Southwest credit card reduces what you need to 125,000. So often the strategy is to open up a personal and a business card and get the welcome bonus on both. And that'll get you to your 125,000 points.

Now, the timing of this is really important because if you're going to get it the year you earn the bonus and the entire next year, you'd much rather earn it in January or February than December. And so I always advocate people try to earn those two bonuses or all the points you can as early in the year as possible. And it's based on when the statement closes on the statement that you hit the spend to get the bonus. So you want to be really careful here because most

One time about six, seven years ago, I mistakenly spent too much on a card and I hit one of the bonuses in December and the next bonus in January. So I was kind of out of luck.

Back then, you could actually transfer Marriott points to Southwest and they would count towards Companion Pass. I don't think they do anymore. And so in January, even though I had these two bonuses, I had to transfer points over again to hit the bonus, which was a huge bummer. However, right now, the two Southwest business cards each have welcome bonuses that can earn you 120,000 points, which is the best offer I have ever seen. It means that

that after you spend the $15,000 you need to get that welcome bonus, which you will also earn points for, you will be over the limit for Companion Pass, and you can get it this year and next year with just one card.

Plus, you can use all the points you've gotten to book your flights and still use a companion. So those 135,000 points you'd earn from the welcome bonus and the spend to get it would be worth about $1,755 of travel. So one signup bonus for one Southwest business card gets you Companion Pass,

and $1,755 of travel. So when you factor in that your companion is getting the same travel as you, that could be worth over $3,500, which is a huge signup bonus and much bigger than almost any other signup bonus I've seen out there that only takes $15,000 of spend. Now, if you don't think you have a business, keep in mind that you might be surprised if

Even things like blogs, newsletters, being an Etsy seller, an Uber driver, a freelance consultant, all those things can count and they can be so early in the life cycle of your business that they might not be even making money yet. You can also apply as a sole proprietor under your own social security number instead of needing a business with a tax ID. So I just think that there are a lot of people that might be more eligible for business cards than they think.

Now we have links to both of those offers at allthehacks.com slash cards. Just note that the way they're written all over, you don't actually see the 120,000 point bonus anywhere because how it really works is for the premier business, you earn 60,000 points after you spend $3,000 in three months and another 60,000 points when you get to $15,000 spent in nine months.

On the performance business, it's pretty similar, $80,000 after spending $5,000 in three months, and then the additional $40,000 when you get to $15,000 to spend in nine months. As for which card, the performance business card does have an annual fee that's $100 more, but it does come with 3,000 Southwest points a year, which is worth about $40. You get four A1 through 15 boarding passes.

And you get $365 $8 in-flight Wi-Fi credits per year, which covers an all-day pass for Southwest Wi-Fi. I really hope you're not traveling enough to use 365 credits, but it is there. So I think if you travel enough that the companion pass is going to be worth it, then those extras are probably worth it. But if you don't, the Premier card will save you $100 on the annual fee. And it does come with two early bird check-ins.

So Southwest Companion Pass, amazing opportunity. Normally I might consider waiting until January or February to try to get this, but this is a rare opportunity to get it with one card. So if you had a lot of travel coming up in the rest of the year, this could be really, really awesome.

Speaking of credit cards and annual fees, there's another thing that happened recently and I get lots of listener questions about it. And that is how to avoid annual fees. So I've talked in the past about if you have a card and you don't want to keep paying the annual fee, one option is to downgrade the card to another card in the family. But my favorite option happened this year when I got my $695 Amex Platinum annual fee. Now,

Now, I think that's a pretty high fee, but I think I also probably get enough value to justify keeping it, getting 5x points on airfare, getting Uber credits throughout the year, airline credits throughout the year, which are actually really easy to cash out towards United and Southwest. I get Saks credit, though I definitely don't value it at the full amount because I am certainly not normally buying $30 underwear or whatever I get from Saks that's overpriced.

And I do go to the Centurion Lounge a couple times a year. However, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to try to ask for a deal. So...

I pop open the live chat on the Amex site. I said, hey, I noticed my annual fee has just posted and it just feels high relative to all the benefits, which is true. $695 is a really big annual fee. I asked if there were any way to get it reduced at all. Took a little bit of back and forth. The agent is always saying, hey, let me tell you about this. Have you heard about this benefit? Have you heard about this benefit? And you can know, yes, I'm not able to use the Equinox benefit because I don't go to Equinox, stuff like that. And ultimately you get an offer.

Now, in the past, I've gotten some amazing offers. One year, they offered to just waive the annual fee entirely, no requirements. This year, my offer was 25,000 points if I can put $3,000 on the card in the next three months.

Now that's over nine points per dollar. So that's worth at least $400 to me. And so I said, yes, I moved on and I'm going to cut my annual fee down by more than 50%. It took less than five minutes and I was able to do it on live chat. So I was also able to get some work done at the same time. Highly recommend anyone with a high annual fee on a card you'd like to keep just going and asking.

You can search Flyer Talk or Reddit on retention offers, which is what these are often called, and get lots of data points of what other people are seeing to try to ballpark whether what you're being offered seems reasonable. Amex seems to always say this is the only offer we have today, but we might have something different tomorrow, so you're welcome to try back. This offer seemed fair for what I thought other people were getting, and so I just went for it.

Okay, since recording, a few other welcome bonuses have come out that I really wanted to share, two of which are best ever offers. First, the Chase Inc. Business Preferred is now offering 120,000 Chase Points after spending 8,000 in three months.

120,000 Chase Points is worth at least $1,500 through the Chase Travel Portal, if not more by transferring to different airlines. And this card only has an annual fee of $95. So this might be one of the best ROIs for transferable points and is definitely a best ever offer for this card. And as I said earlier, you might be a lot more eligible for a business card than you actually think.

Next is the Chase IHG Premier card, which has a best ever five free night offer after spending $4,000 in three months. This is a consumer card and only has a $99 annual fee, so five free nights is an awesome benefit. The nights are capped at 60,000 points per night, but in the past, they've let you use IHG points to top off those free nights with additional points if you want to stay at a more expensive property.

And finally, I think I've mentioned this before, but the Hilton and Hilton Surpass Amex cards both come with a free night offer and 70,000 and 130,000 points respectively if you apply by the end of July and spend $2,000 or $3,000 in the first six months.

While these are only one free night, they can be used at pretty much any Hilton, Waldorf, Conrad, SLH property worldwide with standard availability, which means you could be saving over $1,000 a night. Links to all those card bonuses are at allthehacks.com slash cards, and it really means the world to me when you guys use them. Thank you so much for supporting me.

Okay, back to the original recording. Now for the main event today, I want to talk about bank and brokerage bonuses. So after recording my episode with Kai on finding profitable deals a few weeks ago, I started really digging into a lot of the deals we talked about. And I started with bank and brokerage bonuses, and I wanted to share everything I learned.

So first let's talk bank bonuses. High level, I decided to break all the bank bonuses up into three different categories. The first category is kind of the big spender one. If you can deposit over $100,000, you can actually get a bonus of over $1,000.

Now, we'll get to brokerage bonuses later and if you have that much money why they might be a better option, but that was category one. Category two is for depositing anywhere from about $10,000 to $50,000, getting a bonus of anywhere from $100,000 to $900,000. Last is the same bonus, $100,000 to $900,000 bonuses, but only needing to deposit as little as $1,000, but in this category you also need to do a direct deposit.

So one category, you deposit more money. Next one, less money, but you have to move your direct deposit over. Now, Doctor of Credit has a great page that I'll link to in the show notes with all the bank bonuses here. There are also some at allthehacks.com/bankbonus. So you can check out both those links if you wanna go find bank bonuses. Most of the bonuses require you keep money at the institution for about 90 days.

Some of them have lifetime language, but some of them you can actually repeat every one to two years. I'd recommend looking at the comments on Doctor of Credit posts because you can go in and see what people have had experience with, and sometimes they can be repeatable.

Also note that bank bonuses are taxable. And so yes, you might make an $800 bonus, but you are very likely going to get a 1099 and you absolutely need to report that to the IRS if you want to abide by the law. So you will not get the full amount tax-free. Finally, before I kind of break down the analysis, I'll talk about how available these are. At that $100,000 plus level where you're getting a $1,000 bonus or more, there aren't that many options, maybe a dozen, half a dozen, somewhere in that range.

But on the other bonuses where you're depositing much less, there are so many. At just national banks, maybe it's a dozen or two dozen. But if you start including local credit unions, which the Doctor of Credit page has, there are so many bonuses that you could probably do this 20 times a year if you wanted to.

Most of them range in the 100 to 200, 500 range, some as high as 750. And as I mentioned earlier, there's at least a couple that are pushing close to a thousand, but don't require a six figure deposit. So when I went through this analysis of trying to just break down what these bonuses look like, not only did I look at everything out there today, but I also went to archive.org and I looked at a lot of the old bonuses over the past few years to try to give you a sense of what you can expect.

And I was looking at the bonus relative to the balance you need. I was looking at the number of days you need to have the bonus there. And I was looking at what interest rate you'd actually earn on the cash. So if you have to put a bunch of money in an account that earns 0%, it's not really that exciting of a bonus unless it's really, really big relative to a bonus that's similar, but will also pay you 4% or 5%. So in that first bucket of $1,000 plus bonuses for a $100,000 plus deposit,

I looked at nine different offers from banks like Capital One, Citi, Chase, Wells, HSBC. The bonus basically ranged from $1,000 to $3,000 for depositing $100,000 to $500,000. And for almost all of them, you needed to hold the funds there for 90 days. And so if you look at all of them,

and you take the bonus and divide it by the deposit, just looking at the ROI on the bonus, but not looking at it over the year, but actually annualizing it because you only need those funds there for 90 days. What I found was that the ROI was somewhere between two and a half to 6% as an annualized yield.

So the best one out there was HSBC and Capital One, where you could deposit $100,000 for 90 days and you'd get $1,500. So that's about a 6.08% return. And then the worst ROI was Chase Private Client giving you $3,000 for depositing $500,000 for 90 days, which is about a 2.4% return. Now that's just the annualized benefit of the bonus. There's also the benefit you get from earning interest on the cash you deposit.

And in this tranche of bonuses above $100,000 deposits, every single one of the institutions I looked at either paid a high yield amount of money at least for the 90 days you deposited the money or let you put the balance that you need into a linked brokerage account where you can earn yield on money market funds

at the 5% or greater level. And so your total APY for those 90 days annualized is anywhere from 8 to 11%, which is pretty good and is much better than the 5% you might get putting it in a high yield savings account. Now it is only for 90 days, but it's not that difficult to move money around. These don't require you changing your direct deposit either.

The latest report from the FTC showed that in 2023, $10 billion was lost to consumer fraud and $2.7 billion of that was lost to imposter scams, which had over 850,000 reports last year.

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Moving on to the second group, I looked at seven different offers from banks like Capital One, Citi, Wells Fargo, Discover, Citizens, and the bonuses ranged from $150 to $750 for depositing somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000.

Now, if you want to look at the annualized benefit, the deposit requirements were anywhere from about a month and a half to five months. And so the annualized yield was about 6% to 12% on these bonuses. So what you'll see is that the lower dollar amounts you deposit, the higher kind of annualized yield you get. And so the outlier there was citizens, which would give you $500 for depositing $10,000 for five months.

And so if you annualize that, that's a 12% return, but it's only on $10,000. So if you have $10,000 and that's it, this is great. If you have $100,000, you'd need to find 10 offers like this, and that would probably be exhausting.

Second best was Wells Fargo at $525 if you deposit $25,000. Just some more examples. Citi was offering $500 for $30,000. Both of those were over 90 days. The worst was Capital One offering $300 for $20,000. And I say the worst of

of the about seven best offers I found, there are plenty of banks out there that will give you $0 or give you $50. And so these were kind of the worst of the best and they ranged from about six to 12% annualized return on the bonus. However, on these banks, when you start to look at the APY you earn on the cash, there was a wild varying difference.

Wells Fargo, 0.01%. Citizens, 0.07%. Capital One, 4.25%. And Citi, 4.75%. So here's where it matters not just what the bonus return is, but also what the underlying APY return. So because Citizens was giving such a good bonus relative to the balance, they still had a net APY when you stack the bonus with the underlying earnings to 12%.

But Citi, when you stack the 6.8% bonus plus the 4.75% APY, it was an effective 11.5% bonus also. So while those looked very, very different ahead of time, when you actually realized that Citi was giving you high yield on the cash and paying you a bonus, it was almost comparable to Citi's.

And then Wells Fargo, while it was kind of middle of the pack when it got started, the fact that they paid 0% interest on anything made it the worst bonus of all. And so that effective total APY bonus of all of these accounts ranged from 8.5% to a little shy of 12.5%, which again, compared to 5% if you're just in a high-yield savings account, is more than double at the high end.

Now, the percentage returns get really crazy when you're willing to move your direct deposit. So I looked at what I thought was kind of the eight best offers, similar institutions, but also included SoFi, Chase, PNC, Bank of America. And the bonuses were similar, $200 to $900, but you only needed to deposit $1,000 to $15,000. And so if you look, most of the time the range was 90 to 120 days.

The actual bonus APY, meaning what is the bonus divided by the balance you need and then annualize it, was crazy. It was from 24 to 200%. And so the top bonus was Axos Bank 5%.

$500 for depositing $3,000 for just 30 days. So that's how you get to 200% return because you get $500 on $3,000, which is about 16% return in just 30 days. So if you annualize that and multiply it by 12, it's just wild and way more APY than you'll get anywhere else.

it did require that you have at least $1,500 of direct deposit. And so the way a lot of these situations work is if your employer makes it really easy to log into their portal, you can go in and say, oh, I'm gonna split my paycheck this month. And then you can turn it off down the road if you want.

There are a number of reports in the comments on Doctor of Credit about what classifies as a direct deposit. There are some types of transfers that you can make between accounts doing ACH pushes and stuff that will show up and count as electronic transfers, but you'd have to go in on a per institution basis. The tried and true is to just switch your direct deposit.

If you have enough income that splitting off part of your direct deposit will let you maintain your cashflow needs in your primary account, but then also meet the minimums on these bonuses, that's great. If not, you might have to move things around a little bit for a few months if you want to try to go for them. Second best bonus was Wells Fargo. You get $325 if you have a balance of $1,000 for 90 days and you need $1,000 direct deposit.

So earning 325 on 1000 over 90 days is an annualized APY of 129%. The worst of all of these still better than all the previous ones is 99%.

Chase offering $900 if you deposit $15,000 for 90 days, which ends up being an annualized 24%. You do need a direct deposit, but I believe the minimum is $1. And so that is a pretty decent direct deposit requirement. Probably easy to split your paycheck there if your payroll company that your employer uses allows that. So unfortunately in this category, the range of APY you're gonna get on your underlying cash, meaning the interest you earn on the balances is pretty low.

Unfortunately, in this group of bonuses, how much interest you'll actually earn on your deposits varies widely. PNC, SoFi, and Axos were all paying over 3%. The rest were pretty much 0%, maybe 0.01%. However, this is way less relevant because the bonuses were so high and the balances were so low. If you look at that Wells Fargo example, yes, you don't earn any interest, but

but you only have to deposit $1,000. So how much interest would you be foregoing over something like the Wealthfront account? 90 days, $1,000 is only gonna earn $12.32, especially after taxes. Is that even a barrier in this circumstance? Probably not. So the total APY here is not really as big of a factor as is the amount of the bonus and kind of that effective APY annualized for how often you have to do it.

So I knew I threw a lot of numbers out there. I'm going to summarize this and I'll put some of these notes into a spreadsheet and share it with all the Hacks members. You can join if you're interested, allthehacks.com slash join. But here's my takeaway. If you had the $100,000 to move around and you could use those non-direct deposit bonuses, you could probably earn about on average $1,350 each time you did it. And then separately, if you had somewhere between, let's call it,

$1,000 to $15,000 to do the direct deposit bonuses, you could do those and earn about on average $650. So here's my hypothetical scenario. You and a player two

Every four months, so just three times a year, you do each one of those. So you earn $1,350 from the large balance bonuses. You earn $650 from the direct deposit bonuses for about $2,000. Every four months across two people, you end up getting $6,000 a person or $12,000 a year.

And so when I looked at these individually and thought, okay, well, this one, I might earn $400. Yes, I have to pay taxes on it. How much hassle is it worth? You know, it kind of crossed my mind that is my time really worth this? I don't know. But then I thought, wow, if you could really get a system going that made this pretty straightforward and every four months you did it,

you and a P2 could get to about $12,000 a year. All of a sudden that's sounding very, very different. Spending a few hours for $500, depending on your wealth and your income may or may not be a good deal, but doing it, figuring out the system that makes it really simple and then repeating it throughout the year with your P2 to earn $12,000 a year. I don't know. It seems really interesting. I'll let you be the judge of whether it's worth your time, but I could definitely see it making sense for lots of people.

or even just waiting for the really outsized ones, right? I mentioned Citizens was a great one if you're at the level where that balance matters, but waiting for really big bonuses, just like you might wait for really big signup bonuses on a credit card is not necessarily a bad option here as well. The nice thing here though, is that unlike credit cards where you're having hard inquiries and you're dealing with

card application rules. It is much, much easier to get approved for a bank account. And they're not doing hard inquiry polls on your credit that's going to affect your interest rates in the future.

So that's bank bonuses. Let's last look at brokerage bonuses. This one's a bit more interesting to me because instead of having to move around money and make sure your cash flow needs are in order, you can actually just transfer positions that you're holding of stocks or index funds. And while they're in transit, you're not foregoing your earnings or any growth in those stocks, and you don't really need access to them on a day-to-day basis. So it's a little bit easier in my mind than a bank bonus because it's

It's kind of less invasive into your cash flow. So to evaluate these, I looked at 20 different brokerage bonuses and some of them were household names, Schwab, Citi, E-Trade. Some were fintechs like Robinhood, Webull, and Public. And some were brokerages that I wasn't really familiar with, like Tasty Trade and Trade Station. All were brokerages with SIPC protection, which...

usually protects you, I think, on $500,000 of balance. Similar, but not the same as FDIC insurance. So none of these were kind of...

non-protected brokerage firms, but some of them were ones I didn't know. What really kicked this off was that when I started doing this research, Robinhood at the time was offering a 1% bonus on all transfers. And so I really started thinking, is that something that I want to take advantage of? I had missed when they had previously offered a IRA bonus even higher, but I'll come back to that at the end.

And then I really wanted to do my diligence. I wanted to make sure I wasn't just looking at bonuses now. So I went to this thread on Bogleheads, which is kind of a index fund investing community. And I found a thread on brokerage bonuses with over 8,000 posts.

So I wanted to be able to read them, but I definitely didn't want to take the time to read 8,000 posts. And so I went to ChatGPT and I said, hey, could you help me build a tool that would crawl this website and grab all 8,000 posts and save them? And it did. And so I built a little tool that I ran that did that. And then once I had all of those posts saved, I went back to ChatGPT. I said, hey, here are 8,000 posts. They're all posts about brokerage bonuses. I'm trying to collect all the brokerage bonuses that paid out over $1,000 and

And can you build me a table of them with what all of them were? And so ChatGPT made a table and put them all together. And then I could process all of them alongside all the bonuses that are out right now. Now, the good news is that the bonuses that are out right now are pretty competitive with the best all-time offers. So there aren't that many all-time amazing offers that were missed, though, depending on how you view the

the repeatability of some of these things, you might find that some of the Robinhood offers were better, but it actually depends on how you look at them. So we'll get to that. Now, the good news is that of all of these all-time best offers, they're not that different from offers you can get today. Sure, the Robinhood offers aren't around anymore, but there are some pretty similar offers from Webull. In fact, both of those offers aren't as good as some of the other offers that I'm going to talk about, depending on what your balances are. So

So, the range of offers is also really wide. Some firms required you to deposit securities for three months, some as long as five years, but most of them are in the three to 12 month range.

And the minimum amount of securities that you needed to transfer in or deposit was as low as $50. But some of them were percentage based with no caps. Theoretically, your bonus could be five, six, even seven figures if you were transferring enough money. And the way I thought about these was a little bit of a twofold method. One, you could look at just the amount of the bonus relative to the cap.

account balance you would be transferring, but it also comes down to how much you want to repeat this each year. Unlike the bank bonuses where they're almost all 90 days, here you might get a little bit more for a bonus that's 12 months or 24 months, and that might be worth the fact that you don't have to repeat this if you don't want to.

Okay, so here's what I found. For balances under $100,000, it's very similar to bank bonuses where the amount you're going to earn ranged from about $100 to $938, and that required a three-month to 24-month holding period.

For the most part, the annualized yield, meaning if something was only three months, multiplying it by four, was anywhere from 3% to 4%. Now, when you go down to balances in the $50 to $500 range, some of the annualized APYs went wild because E-Trade is going to give you $100 for a balance of $50, which ends up being about 400% APY because you only need to have those funds there for six months. But

But once you start getting past the $5,000 mark, everything gets a little bit more easier to compare. And the takeaway for a balance is under 100,000 is that E-Trade and TD are probably the best options if you want to repeat this because they require three to six months and they're decent bonuses.

If you don't want to repeat it that frequently, Webull and TastyTrade probably had the best earnings for a longer holding period. Webull at two years, TastyTrade at one year. If you're looking at balances over $100,000, now you're starting to look at bonuses over $1,000.

And some of them scale up and up and up and up. I think the highest bonus that wasn't based as a percentage of your portfolio was as high as $10,000 with public and SoFi, but that was into balances over $5 million. So pretty high. So if you're looking to repeat this, HSBC and Wells Fargo have three month requirements with pretty high bonuses for the 100,000 plus range of accounts. Those bonuses anywhere from $1,500 to $2,500.

In fact, the Wells Fargo $2,500 on a $250,000 balance is effectively 1% return, which you only have to keep there for three months, which is like a 4% return. Webull had a 1.25%, but you had to hold it there for two years instead of three months. And you have to decide how you feel about private company fintechs versus public company banks. Another interesting option, which I hadn't used...

but I have seen that most people don't have issues is TastyTrade. They offer $2,000 for $100,000 transfer, $3,000 for a $250,000 transfer and $4,000 for a $500,000 transfer. You have to keep the money there for 12 months, but relative to most other transfers, that was among the highest bonuses you can get. So just thinking about how this plays out, that's anywhere from 2%

to about 0.8% is kind of what Tasty Trade offers for one year. Unfortunately, at the million plus mark for anyone listening in that camp, everything starts to look pretty bad compared to what Robinhood and Webull were offering. Robinhood was offering 1%, Webull 1.25%. And no matter where you look, they pretty much all cap out at $5,000 to $10,000. But as a percent of your account, they're really maxing out at about half a percent.

So if you're looking to get much more than that without going to Webull or Robinhood, if they bring that promotion back, you're going to be looking for a while unless you get really lucky. And that is possible. And I'll mention that in a second because I got an email from a listener that got what I would say the best bonus offer that I've ever seen, especially based on all this research. Now,

Now, if I weren't thinking about earning bonuses, ideally, I would have all of my stocks at a place where it's easy to trade, where I can trust it, interface is good. And for me, that's probably something like Schwab or Fidelity.

Unfortunately, they have among the worst bonuses. Fidelity doesn't really actually have any stated bonuses. I did find an old expired bonus that ends up being depending on your balance anywhere from 0.1 to 0.5%, but they don't have it right now. However, just for fun,

I opened up a Fidelity account when I was doing all of the testing for best bank accounts. And a Fidelity rep had called me from our local branch and said, hey, I'm calling from the local branch. Noticed you opened an account. I'm here if you need anything. And so I actually called that person. They didn't answer. I left a voicemail and said, hey, I'm thinking about moving a bunch of assets over. What kind of bonus would you give me if I did it? There are a bunch of other companies offering bonuses. And they basically said somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2%.

Now, I have no idea if I got the right person. I don't know if they would be willing to be more flexible. From that Bogleheads forum, a recurring theme was a lot of the established brokerage firms, you might just have to ask for bonuses and they're not going to publish them, which comes to a point that a listener sent, which was they tried to do the Robinhood bonus. They thought,

you know what, I'm going to transfer all my assets to Robinhood. I'm going to get that 1% bonus. They had a sizable portfolio in the mid six figures and the Schwab rep they were transferring from Schwab called him and said, hey, I noticed you're trying to transfer to Robinhood. What if we just gave you a 1% bonus and you had to keep the funds here for a year? Now, Robinhood was offering 1% for two years and they didn't have to transfer anything. So they immediately took it, canceled the transfer, stayed at Schwab.

If I could find a Schwab offer to give 1% on my brokerage account, if anyone from Schwab is listening, I would more than gladly move all of my stock investing ETF, everything assets over to Schwab, call it a day and not really worry about this for a while. I don't know if that bonus is possible. I actually emailed back the listener that told me that and said, Hey,

Do you have the name of the person that called you? I'd love to speak with them because ideally from a simplicity standpoint, I do love Schwab and Fidelity's platforms, but I was actually willing to do the Robin hood one. And so funny enough, I,

The night of the transfer, I was like, you know what? I've done my research. I'm going to do this. I'm going to move all the individual stocks I own. I'm going to transfer them all to Robinhood. And I forgot or didn't realize that Robinhood doesn't support trust accounts. And so they actually wouldn't accept the transfer because my current brokerage account is titled in our revocable trust. So what they said I needed to do was transfer everything from the revocable trust into an account in my name and then transfer it to Robinhood.

But for that to happen in the next 24 hours was basically impossible. So it didn't happen. I'm not too upset about it because there are a lot of other offers that are pretty comparable. And it was kind of a last minute, all right, let's do this. But I think if Robinhood came back with that offer and I had a few days to process things, I think I might take them up on it. Or I might try to find someone at Schwab to see if I could make that the primary investing place. So...

Like I said, on the bank bonus side, I've got a spreadsheet where I broke down all of the bonuses that are out there right now on brokerage by all the different account sizes and looked at them in two ways. One amount of bonus, which is the best.

and the annualized percentage that bonus represents in terms of return. So I'll share that with all the members. If you're interested in joining, you can go to allthehacks.com slash join. Okay, another one since I recorded. Webull came out with a absolutely monster brokerage bonus that I felt like I had to share. Through July 31st, they are offering a 2% brokerage bonus on transfers up to $5 million.

That means if you move over 50 grand, they'll give you $1,000. You move over 100 grand, they'll give you 2,000. Move over a million, get 20,000. And move over $5 million, and they will give you $100,000.

They pay half the bonus after one year and the other half after two years. For large balances, this blows all the other bonuses I've talked about and actually ever seen out of the water. And they are a SIPC member, so you do have protection on up to $500,000 of securities. This is definitely one to consider if you can get comfortable with Webull.

That is all I have for today. Thank you so much for listening. The content in episodes like this comes from questions and comments and feedback from all of you. So please keep sending those in, podcast at allthehacks.com. If you're enjoying what you're listening to, please go ahead and follow, give us a thumbs up, subscribe. I'd really appreciate it. Obviously the ultimate thank you is jumping into Apple Podcasts and leaving a review and a five-star rating. That's all I've got this week. I will see you next week.