It should be noted that Captial One offers a DirectBanking Money Market Savings with a solid rate as well. It is one of the few that makes it easy to add (link) more than one account to it. Also, be wary of offers such as Citi’s new online savings which require you to have another or other account(s) with them to utilize the account or realize the highest interest offered.

I just stumbled on your series today, and it’s fantastic that you’re doing this. I might even have to send my readers over here. ((wink!)) I’m very into trying to dig out of the hole my husband tends to unintentionally deepen. It’s one of my New Years goals, and this is going to be a good tool to catch what I might’ve missed.

((I’m a little behind, so here’s to hoping you cover IRAs/CDs and best investment ideas. I’m a stay-home mom with a 401K rolled into mutuals that just aren’t a comfortable fit, but I have no idea what else to do with that very piddly amount.))

Thanks.

As is true in all my challenges, you need to do what is best for you. I have provided three because each of them offers a bonus for signing up and every little bit counts for those currently in debt. These three also tend to switch among who is the interest leader (except for ING recently) so it sometimes makes sense to switch your funds between them to get the best interest rate.

Not nearly enough to make it worth the time and effort under normal circumstances!

Please do your own research…these are the online banks paying the most without a huge deposit required – except for ING, but as I explained they are by the most user friendly of the online banks and there is a $25 bonus. Would I recommend these banks if I didn’t receive anything? Absolutely. There are a lot more that I could recommend and earn more money but they don’t provide a bonus to the person signing up – and that is the key here – free money.

So, onto your question of what I’m getting out of this.

ING pays $10 per referral from a friend. Both Nate and I long ago used up our referrals and had stopped, but new members can’t get the $25 unless they have the referral. If you go straight to the ING site you get nothing when you sign up so I would not recommend ING unless you can get a referral. Now we split the $10 fee with those that want to get rid of their referrals in our 100 post club. For the time it takes me to go through the referrals, place them up, coordinate everything, get payment form the members, etc I would say it is worth the time, but not by a whole lot. The main benefit is we can reward the members that have help build our main site with a little bit of extra money with little effort on their part (the main reason) and it drives traffic to the site. We will likely stop offering the bonus links once all the 100 post members have had thier used – while I get a lot of offers from other people wanting to split the fee, I don’t think it will be worth the time or effort at that point. Even when we stop however, I will still recommend signing up for ING to get the $25 bonus – it’s an instant 10% return and just makes sense for how easy it is.

Emigrant doesn’t offer a bonus at all for people signing up. There are several people offering to split the affiliate fee which is $20 with people that sign up through them. We are the only site that I know of that is offering $20 (through conversions of ING invites). This is most definitely NOT worth the time and effort just for the money (sign up for their affiliate program and see what an absolute mess it is). So why do we do it? Promotion for our main site. We actually view the Emigrant program as cheap advertising to introduce our website to new people. Offering $20 when nobody else does has brought a lot of new people to the site to see what we offer at no cost.

HSBS has a $25 bonus program that uses different codes from time to time like the current “start” code. We do not receive anything from them – we recommended them because at the time I wrote this they offered a bonus and were paying the highest interest rate (Emigrant is now also paying 4.25%).

So is there some promotion in there. Yes, but only because it benefits the person signing up. There is no promotion there that gives us more than what the person signing up receives.

You will need to hook them up with an existing checking account. This allows you to transfer money back and forth between the two since these banks are online.

I’ve decided that it just isn’t worth it for $25.