[For an update on Beam, see this post.]
We’ve talked about Beam before, previously when we talked about it it was either pre release or in private beta. It’s now in a public beta and offers 1.5-7% APY. The base rate is 1.5% and you can increase it to 7% APY, to get the increased rate you need to earn and redeem ‘billies’, these then raise the rate for that day. In addition you can also increase the base rate to up to 2% APY, 2.5% APY or 3% APY. In most cases the only real way to increase the base rate is by referring friends, you can also get one billie each day for logging into your account (that can be used to increase the rate for a single day). My personal opinion is that it’s not worth considering Beam, the only real way to get a rate higher than 1.5% is by inviting friends. You don’t really want to invite your friends though because 1.5% APY is not a competitive savings rate (unless they also refer their friends and so on). For the best current high yield savings accounts click here.
Maybe this post should be updated with this news.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/28/beam-promised-higher-interest-rates-now-customers-want-their-money-back.html
We posted about that separately, I’ll add the link
Be careful with Beam, shady practices.
Interest rate lowered from 1.5 to 0.20%
Couple things weirded me out in my short time with them.
I only ever had $50 in my account. When I decided to pull it out I was at $50.02. They made me leave the .02 in my account for “security reasons.” How much would they not let me withdraw if I had all my savings in there?
Recently I’ve been closing open accounts that I have around places and Beam was one of them I wanted to close. Before they’d let me close they said that they had to P2P transfer the .02 and if I wanted Venmo or PayPal? Never had a “bank” offer to Venmo me before. The PayPal payment ended up coming from a personal Yahoo account. Kind of gives me the heebee jeebies.
I tried it for a couple of weeks with a $100 deposit and then pulled the $100 back out when the app decided to keep logging me out. The app was initially clunky and then quickly became borderline unusable.
I have had Beam for over a year and finally called it quits. Each new iteration is less valuable and gets worse. 250 billies got me a rate sub 5% for only a few days because they have devalued the billies to about 0.05% on average, Not worth the extra energy and time when you can get a higher base rate without doing anything elsewhere.
Littered with bugs, constantly logged out, and literally get a max of .05% boost per Billie. Don’t waste your time.
So, this is a pyramid scheme?
the only real way to increase is to refer friends….how is this not a MLM?
MLM’s generally have a downline, where the person at higher up gets a % of those below. This is not the case with Beam.
They are basically paying you for advertising for them, which is fine by me. I already refer multiple people to different referral programs.
what the hell happened to the waitlist signup where I was guaranteed 3-5%? lol