Lesson 3: Waiving Fees With Automated Transfers

Lesson 3: Waiving Fees With Automated Transfers

The Netspend cards DO have fees. An inactivity fee of $4.95 applies if you don’t use the card at least once, or make an ACH deposit to the card every 90 days. If you followed step 1. Your Discover Savings Account allows up to six free automated transfers per month. All you have to do is link your Discover Account to your Netspend accounts and set up an automated transfer of $25 to each Netspend card every month. Then transfer a $75 back to the Discover account every 3 months. (Deposits don’t count towards the 6 transaction limit) Every time you see that you get your $75 back into your discover account you know interest has posted on each of your Netspend cards.

To get the money OFF your Netspend cards you have to log on to each card, move the interest from the savings account to the checking account (the card) THEN you can ACH transfer it to your Discover account. For this reason I tend to leave it alone and transfer it maybe once per year. After all, any balance over $1000 still earns 0.5% interest. That’s 50 times better than Bankofanotherfeeforya. But if you are trying to squeeze every red cent out of your interest, transfer the excess to the Discover account the day that it posts and you will make an extra $0.25 per card per year in interest.

You COULD only make 1 transfer every 90 days, but since computers usually mess up at some point in their lives I figured I would safeguard against a transfer not going through and them slapping me with fees. (Over 10% of Netspend’s income is from fees like these!) This way two out of three transfers could fail and I would still be fee free.

Now that you have the Netspend suite set up and your savings is making you money. Now it’s time to look at ways to maximize the value of all the money you SPEND.

ON TO LESSON 4>>