How Much Money Did the Soriano household Make from Bank Account Bonuses & Interest in 2020?
Our Founder and CEO, Jorge, and his wife Hilary are avid side income hustlers. The Soriano household truly loves a great deal and this blog post is worth sharing to hopefully motivate you to consider making a little extra money from the lucrative bank bonus offers. In this post, we will go over the individual bank account bonuses with helpful information regarding the bonus details, how to avoid monthly fees, when to close the account, how often you can open a new account, and much more.
For the last 7 years, we have been opening new checking and saving accounts for the introductory bonuses. Going forward, we will make it a tradition that at the end of each year, the Soriano household will share the results on the blog. After researching our last decade worth of tax returns for this post, we realized we have made $22,259 in bank account bonuses and interest on our checking and savings accounts. This is incredible due to the fact that anyone with a direct deposit can take advantage of these deals. With that said, here are the results from the past 8 years:
2013 = $350
2014 = $515
2015 = $600
2016 = $850
2017 = $3,956
2018 = $4,012
2019 = $6,196
What about 2020?
Drum roll, please
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Last year, we were able to open 4 new checking accounts (2 separate HSBC accounts, Chase, and First Home Bank) and we were able to make over $2,000 by simply reading the terms and conditions and making sure we followed each requirement. Some of these requirements can be difficult to meet, such as (Account holder must receive a monthly direct deposit of $5,000), but some requirements are easy for most consumers to meet, such as (Account holder must receive a monthly direct deposit of $2,500 over a 3 month period). Once you understand the rules of the game, you can easily add a few hundred dollars to your pocket every year.
So there you have it, a total of $5,780 of interest reported for the year 2020. We were able to earn almost half of that with bank intro bonuses and the rest by making sure we were optimizing our savings rate with the best paying bank accounts. The best part? This doesn’t even include what we earned in miles, points, or cash back with our credit cards. Those credit card bonuses were not reported on any 1099-INT tax forms, so they were completely tax-free! In 2021, our goal is to get closer to $7,500 total...especially now that our founder is a business owner -- we got to save money, that’s what we practice and preach here folks!
We don’t mind jumping through hoops to open new checking/savings accounts. That might not sound fun to you, but we enjoy the process. Especially, when our return on time invested is over $283.20 / hour. Yep, you guessed it, we calculated the time it took to open, move money, change direct deposits, keep track of bonuses, close accounts. Repeat. Even factored in the time it takes us to update this blog every year ;)
If you do plan on adding bank account bonuses to your side hustle, let us know. We will inform our clients of new bank bonus alerts so they are able to fatten their wallets.
