We wrote about the various versions of Serve and which option is best, see Six Different Flavor of Serve and How to Remain Fee-Free. Briefly, most of the Serve options charge either a monthly fee or a Serve loading fee. The only option left which is currently available and can be fee-free is the One VIP Serve card. The card does not have a fee to load at Walmart and the monthly fee of $1 is waivable.
How does the monthly fee get waived?
In the original post, we wrote that the fee is waived by loading $500 to the card using any load method, including credit card loads or Walmart loads; it’s not limited to direct deposit loads.
Those were the details showing at the time on the One VIP site.
This is great because most of us will be loading $1,000 per month with an Amex credit card and will be free of any monthly fees.
Shawn at FrequentMiler picked up on a subtle change in the tune of the One VIP website which seems to indicate that you now need a $500 direct deposit in order to waive the $1 monthly fee, indicating that other load methods won’t exempt the monthly fee.
Interestingly, the legal section on the Serve site still lumps One VIP together with the Old BlueServe and indicates that both have the rule of any $500 load exempting you from the monthly fee. This made me skeptical that direct deposit is really necessary to get the fee waived.
Reader Horace recently got the One VIP Serve and confirms for us that any $500 load is working to waive the monthly fee; no need for direct deposit or ACH transfer.
We don’t know how long these terms will last (probably until the contract between One VIP and Amex get renewed), but the current terms of One VIP apparently remain the same as the Old BlueServe and any VIP Serve obtained now will likely get grandfathered in under those terms even if the terms change in the future.
