I recently decided to open an account with Bank of America again. This time I took advantage of a $100 bank opening bonus and enrolled my new checking and savings accounts in the “Keep the Change” program. For those of you that don’t know KTC is a program where all purchases made on your check card are rounded up to the nearest dollar. The difference between your actual purchase amount and the next dollar is transferred from your checking to savings account. It’s a poor excuse for replacing actual savings but it’s the promotional match offer that is attractive.
For the first 3 months Bank will match 100% of your Keep the Change transfers dollar for dollar up to $250. Also to get the most match you want your transactions to be rounded up as most as possible therefore transactions ending in low amounts are ideal such as x.01, x.06, etc. Here are a couple of strategies to get the most match possible:
- Tip amount. If you have a transaction where a tip amount can be entered, enter enough tip so it ends in .01. For example if you get take-out and the total comes out to $3.65, put $0.36 in the tip field to make the transaction $4.01, getting you the maximum $0.99 cent match.
- Gas up in $.01 increments. Get $5.01 or gas and whatnot. I don’t do this because in NJ it is illegal to pump your own gas and I don’t want to hassle the attendant. I also get 5% cashback on gas purchases already. Avoid doing this too many times in a short span of time as it’ll trigger a fraud alert and you’ll have to call BoA to get your card unfrozen. Generally criminals will do small transactions on stolen credit cards to test if they work hence the possible fraud alert.
- Value card. At my school you can load money into your student ID which allows you to purchase almost anything around campus. The minimum amount to load is $2 so I generally load $2.01 everyday.
- eBay seller fees. You can make one time payments towards your eBay seller fee balance even if you don’t have one. I do sell on eBay from time to time and I recently incurred $4.50 in seller fees. For the past 3 days I made payments in amounts of $0.30 to $0.50. However today I get an error message saying I’ve reached the payment limit. After researching it turns out eBay limits the weekly amount of payments you can do.
Note that I’ve heard about accounts being suspended after people doing tons of $0.01 transactions which can be easily done by sending a penny to your friend with paypal or so.
Anyone have any other strategies?
So is this done by leaving your PayPal account balance as $0 and then getting “instant transfers” from your bank account? Or would you have to switch the payment option to the card?
Janet, I’m assuming you’re referring to the eBay seller fees.
Yes, you would need to have a PayPal balance of $0 and then switch the payment option to your card.
See this is the type of stuff that kills good stuff for all of us. Ppl should just pretend like this program doesnt exist or just at least keep it to a minimum. I can see B of A ending this program cuz of ppl trying to “take advatage of something good”.
@ Roley33
The Keep the Change program has been around for years. Customers trying to maximize the $250 bonus is something Bank of America is well aware of and makes total sense for you as a customer.