[FL] Florida Community Bank $200 Checking Bonus, Direct Deposit Optional

Offer at a glance

• Maximum bonus amount: $200
• Availability: Account must be opened in branch, all branches are in Florida. You can see a listing of all the branches here.
• Direct deposit required: Optional, see below
• Additional requirements: See below
• Hard/soft pull: Soft 
• Credit card funding: Unknown
• Monthly fees: $10-$15, waive-able
• Early account termination fee: None found
• Expiration date: September 30th, 2015

The Offer

Direct link to offer

• Open any new checking account with Florida Community Bank (excluding VEP checking) and receive a sign up bonus of up to $200. Bonus is broken down as follows:
  • Receive $150: Maintain a minimum average daily balance of $2,500+ for six months OR establish direct deposit(s) totaling $750 or more monthly for the first 6 months (direct deposit must be received within 60 days of account opening)
  • Receive $50: – Enroll in Online Banking and Bill Pay and obtain and activate an FCB Debit
    Card within 30 days of account opening
• You can also receive an additional $50 for opening a credit card, we wouldn’t recommend this as there are so many other credit cards with higher cash sign up bonuses.

The Fine Print

• Available to new personal checking account customer’s only
• $150 bonus will post within 30 days of meeting requirements
• $50 bonus will post within 30 days after 6 months of meeting the requirements
• All bank account bonuses are treated as income/interest and as such you have to pay taxes on them

Avoiding Fees

To avoid the monthly fee, your best bet is to sign up for either the ECO Checking or Essential Checking account. The account you choose will depend on whether you do the direct deposit requirement (in which case ECO checking is your best bet) or $2,500 invested for six months (Essential will be your best bet).

I wasn’t able to find their schedule of fees, so I’m unsure if they charge an early account termination fee or not.

Essential Checking account $15 Monthly

Monthly fee is waived if you do either of the following:

• Maintain a $1,000 minimum avg. daily balance OR
• Are age 55 or older

ECO Checking $10 Monthly

• Sign up for Online Banking; and
• Choose to receive FREE eStatements; and
• Sign up for FREE Direct Deposit

Our Verdict

Unless it’s easy to change your employer payroll details, your best bet will be to stash $2,500 into the account for six months. This will keep the Essential checking account fee free and trigger the $150 bonus, triggering the other $50 should be easy enough.

The real question is whether this is a hard or soft pull, unfortunately I haven’t found any data points. The plus side of having to go into a branch is you should be able to ask to see if they do a hard pull or just do a ChexSystems inquiry. If it’s just a soft pull, I’d recommend people sign up for this bonus (if a branch isn’t too far away) as the requirements are relatively easy to meet.

You’ll obviously lose out on interest on the $2,500 for six months, but even at a 5% rate that is only $62.5, leaving you well over a $100 and without the need to fiddle with a rewards checking account. We’ve added this to our database of checking bonuses, we will add it to our best of local bonus list if we can confirm it’s only a soft pull.

Direct link to offer

Hat tip to Maximizing Money