The Account
Discover offers a cash back checking account, they’ll basically give you 10¢ (up to 100/$10 per month) when you do any of the following:
At the moment they are actually doubling the amount of cash back you’ll receive (20¢ per transaction up to $20 per month). If you don’t already have an account, there is also a $50 sign up bonus. Fellow blogger WallersWallet let me know about a tip on Twitter that makes this account even more valuable.
The Tip
You can have the rewards redeemed into your Discover Credit Card Cash Back Bonus Account. Basically this just means it’ll go into your unredeemed rewards on your credit card. Normally this wouldn’t be that interesting, but Discover is a bit different.
It’s actually possible to redeem this cash back for items other than cash back, for example you can purchase gift cards at a 10% discount (e.g $50 gift card will cost $45 in un redeemed cash back). You can also redeem for car rental certificates and get a massive 50% discount.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t anything groundbreaking, but when paired with the current double bonus you could get up to 40¢ per qualified transaction with Discover – which is a nice benefit for transactions you’d normally be making anyway. What are your thoughts on the Discover cash back checking account? Do you have one? Do these recent promotions make you more likely to sign up? Let us know in the comments below.
Discover Bank has been unbelievably unreliable and irresponsible since I opened my account in 01/2014. Their website has been not working properly for half a month now with no fix, not even an estimated fix time. No recent transaction is shown in the past half a month. Support confirms the known issue but is unable to help. Not to mention the endless everyday maintenance, longer than usual funds hold and transfer time, and extremely slow loading of webpage.
I highly advise against it and am shifting away from it as my primary checking. $2.5/month cashback for me is not worth the headache.
I had no issues with their website or hold/transfer time.
Discover CV Checking is garbage. They caused me an NSF on my banks end and their end during my initial deposit because they incorrectly coded the initial ACH pull to pull from my savings account when I gave them the code specifically for the checking account, there wasn’t even an option to select between checking and savings for the initial deposit on the application. This was back in January’ish.
It takes like 8 days for stuff to clear and become available. Not to mention, you can’t wire anything in unless you wire to their “banking partner” and specify your Discover CB account number in the transfer. It’s like Discover Checking isn’t actually a bank account in itself but rather like a front-end for an existing bank.
Also, try finding their Terms & Conditions online. The link was completely broken and support couldn’t even point me to it.
The only upside is they did pay out the $50 bonus in about two months. There’s absolutely no incentive to keep this account open. Just churn it.
I just signed up for the Discover checking account in order to get the $50 bonus. I may do one for the wife as well. Easy money, and I am not concerned about the pulls. Note, I have signed up for four accounts between three banks within the last 2-3 weeks and all have gone smoothly. Not to mention the multiple credit cards in the last couple months.
Anyways, this account/account bonus seems easy with regards to the low maintenance and lack of fees. Nothing needs to occur minus the small initial deposit.
Discover has some very interesting wording around using the debit card and getting cash back (the $.10 per transaction). It is worth reading, as they will have no issues about retracting transactions that appear to be “manufactured”. They are quite explicit about it, and it definitely made me think twice about how lucrative this could/would be (since I never use a debit card). Anyways, worth noting for anyone thinking they need to purchase 100 Amazon gift cards.
The problem is that this is rarely enforced by Discover, although I suspect if people start abusing it they will enforce it pretty quickly.
Even without abusing, you can get something out of it, for example, I sometime have to buy only bread of milk from Kroger and total is $2 or $3 or if you buy fast food breakfast/lunch and total is less than $5, you can use this debit card and get 10 Cents without abusing it. Also for bill payment, if you have to pay a lot credit cards, and you pay it 2 to 3 times a month you can easily rack up 25 to 30 bill pays. So its still worth doing it. I have been using same method for over a year with them without any issues. Yes if you start putting 50 $1 transactions, that’s surely an abuse and they might notice.
Funny thing is for last year, they somehow matched my total Cash back at the end of year, So instead of $44 cash back which was there in the account at the end of December, they made it $88, I have no idea why. At least in my memory, I don’t remember signing up for any of such promotion. But I didn’t “argue”..!
That’s nice they doubled it for the whole year, I wonder why.
Thanks for the mention Will!
Thanks for the tip, if you’ve got any others then please let me know.