GoBank $10 Bonus and Updates

The Offer

Direct Link

• Buy a GoBank starter kit (costs $2.95) and register it. Add $500 within 45 days of registration. Receive a bonus of $10 in your GoBank account.

The Fine Print

• Fine print sounds like it’s only available for those who open the account via a starter kit. Not for the free online registration option.
• Account must be successfully registered by 4/30/15.
• $10 credit will be applied to account within 10 business days.

Our Verdict

It’s a little interesting rebranding that GoBank is calling themselves, “GoBank checking account”.

We’ve written about GoBank before. See GoBank Reappears? At that time, the starter kits were just starting to show up in some Walmart stores. Now they’ve been rolled out and I’ve seen them at my local Walmart. It seem as if it’s still not available everywhere.

Another interesting thing is that at that time it wasn’t possible to open an account online. The system only gave the option of using a starter kit to register for an account online. Now they’ve enabled online account registration without a starter kit. That being the case, the $10 bonus is really just a $7 bonus, since you’d be spending an extra $3 to buy the kit which you wouldn’t have had to do if you just opened an account online.

It’s also important to note that GoBank started charging an $8.95 monthly fee, and they now limit you to just $3,000 on “cash” loads at Walmart per month. (See Are GoBanks’s New Limits For Real?). Because of that, GoBank is of much more limited use versus Bluebird/Serve. Old accounts are grandfathered in without the monthly fee.

There is an option of getting a $500 Direct Deposit to waive the monthly fee, and there’s one unconfirmed report of a Paypal transfer working as a Direct Deposit to get the fee waived. Most likely ACH transfers would work as well, but we don’t have any reports on that yet.

If you need a supplement to your Bluebird/Serve, it could be an option, especially if you could work out the Direct Deposit to get the monthly fee waived. With this offer, you’d get another $10/$7 as well.

HT: Maximizing Money