Update 2/5/23: Readers have clarified with Upgrade that the fee is only when pulling money from your line-of-credit to your bank account.
The Upgrade card sent out notification that starting March 23 there are introducing a 5% fee for ACH transfers:
This is to inform you that, effective on or around 03/23/2023 (the “Effective Date”), any ACH transfer to your bank account will be subject to a fee of five (5) percent of the transfer amount, subject to any limits under applicable law. We may choose to charge a lesser fee. Applicable fees will be disclosed to you at the time you request an ACH transfer. Card purchases are not impacted by this upcoming change (there are no fees for making card purchases).
Crazy fee addition here. Sounds like they’ll only charge when initiating the ACH transfer from within Upgrade to your bank; maybe you can pull funds via an external account without any fees.
Hat tip to reader Peek
Thanks for clarifying. I live in a state that does not allow us to have the LOC. I am mainly using the Debit card to pay credit cards in store as it gives me an extra 1 percent when I do this. Plus I have their savings account so I just move the money each month to savings and than transfer to checking the day I pay the bill.
Beware for those who get mail stolen. Downgrade doesn’t mask your SSN on your mailed 1099s.
I realize this is not the “right” thread but does upgrade send 1099INTs for the rewards checking bonus?
I just got it on referrals and that’s it.
The selling point of the line of credit is that you can use it at any time and draw with no fee, then you just pay interest on the funds when drawn.
Adding a massive 5% disbursal fee makes this line of credit pretty much worthless now. Why even use it?
Sorry for the confusion about this everyone. I sent this along and failed to include the email subject when I posted it: “Important information about your Upgrade Card or Upgrade OneCard account”
This makes it pretty clear that this is regarding the card/cards and not the checking account.
Tried to clarify the post now, thanks
I don’t get the outrage here. Most credit cards charge you a cash advance fee, in addition to charging interest from that date. That’s what they’re doing here. And maybe I helped them do this. I had a nice BT offer on a card, 0% 12 months, 2% fee. So I withdrew $2300 from Upgrade LoC to a checking account. Once it posted to the Upgrade LoC card I immediately posted a BT request on that card to Upgrade. They paid Upgrade 4 days later, costing less than two bucks interest to Upgrade. So looks like they’ve caught on.
Most of the outraged people here don’t even know how to properly use a LoC account, much less how to abuse it.
A lousy bank with a website that’s very difficult to understand and navigate. Take the bonus if you can get it, and run.
A “lousy” bank with a 4.17% savings account, >=1% checking account debit card, and no fees on cash advances from a LOC, all in addition to a $50 referral bonus and a $100 Swagbucks bonus.
Why run?
I love how easily incomplete information galvanizes all the outrage-prone sheep in this community, especially when aforementioned sheep were never really affected in the first place. (The same thing happened the last time a certain bank made changes to its Line of Credit products, which to this day some people still think are credit card accounts.) Great job as always chuck
I guess that they will go bankrupt soon.
If so, it’ll be after they exhaust the hundreds of millions in venture capital funding they’ve been receiving.
Probably they will start charing 5% account closing fee pretty soon.