$100 Fidelity Bonus for New Customers - Need $10,000
Got $10,000 in cash? (Perhaps via 0% balance transfers?) Don’t have a Fidelity account yet? Want $100 in about 2 weeks? Fidelity is offering a $100 bonus for new households who open an eligible (non-retirement) account with $10,000+. Per the fine print, you get the $100 within 7 days after your funds hit the account. I did a very similar $100 bonus deal exactly a year ago (whoa… deja vu), and got my money in and out in a week with zero hassle and no extra fees. Here’s a play-by-play:
1) Open a brokerage account, and fund with $10,000.
2) Sign up for online e-statements. With e-statements, there are no account maintenance fees!
3) Keep it in cash or another money market fund option that has the best return for your tax situation. I just used the default FCASH option.
4) Wait the 7 days (was only 2 for me) for your $100.
5) Withdraw your $10,095. I left $5 in there, I don’t know why. When I talked to the guy he said you could leave $0 in there, but I was paranoid.
6) Keep the account open for six months, as the fine print says “Accounts must be maintained for a minimum of six months.”
This is precisely what I did a year ago. $100 in two weeks with $10,000 is a 24% annualized return, neglecting whatever the money market pays. And I have been charged no fees since! In fact, I still have my account open there with $5.08 or something. Should take that out and buy some hot apple cider in this weather =)
Of course, you could also keep your account open too. They have some competitive money market fund choices, but I just zipped my money in and out, so I didn’t care. Fidelity has actually been a very good company to deal with in my experience. They also have some very low-priced index funds, albeit with high minimum investment requirements.
Offer link via this Fatwallet thread.
Find more in Deals & Offers | 12/9/05, 11:32pm | Trackback
December 10th, 2005 at 5:20 am
Hi Jon, you may have covered this in a previous post but which brokerage firm do you use?
December 10th, 2005 at 9:21 am
Taxable Brokerage - Ameritrade I-Zone ($5 trades)
Retirement - Vanguard (low-cost index funds)
If you search in the box on the right you can find more posts where I talk about them.
December 10th, 2005 at 9:48 am
I’ve been really happy with them for my retirement funds (Roth and Rollover both there) and their customer service is phenom. They do have a higher barrier to entry (financially) than some of the other discount brokerage’s but they’re better if you auto-invest in funds, and if you can merge multiple accounts into a “household relationship” to qualify for lower commissions.
This might be the deal for me…I’m looking to open a taxable account, and I was leaning toward fidelity anyway. thanks for the tip!
December 10th, 2005 at 10:03 am
doh. now i see it’s for “new households” only (i hate when i read too fast to glean the finer points of a deal at first. sigh)
December 10th, 2005 at 10:42 am
Caitlin - I would still try it - People with 401ks there have reported getting the $100.
December 10th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
I am going to give this a shot. I have a ROTH IRA account with them.
December 10th, 2005 at 3:17 pm
Just curious Jonathan, how long did it take you to set up the money link and get money into the account?
December 10th, 2005 at 7:01 pm
Looks good .. know if they do any credit stuff? Soft, hard or none?
December 11th, 2005 at 12:33 am
I can’t recall exactly, I’m pretty sure I did it all online with their Moneyline service. It didn’t take longer than a week for sure, I want to say 3 days?
Credit check was soft or none for me, it didn’t show up on my credit report as a hard. But again, this was a year ago.
January 2nd, 2006 at 1:47 pm
I received the $100 as soon as the money hit the account, so it’s a valid deal if you just have an IRA with them and no brokerage account.
It took about a week or so for the moneyline to be set up. I’m not sure why they needed to set it up seperately for the brokeage seeing as how they already had my information for my IRA.
March 30th, 2006 at 1:24 am
Did they charge you fee to withdraw the $10000 back. I saw a fee schedule of $15 for “out” wire from the Fidelity acct. How did you withdraw ?
February 2nd, 2008 at 6:29 pm
This actually works fine for existing Fidelity brokerage accounts too. The headline text at the top says “new households only”, but if you read the fine print, it has provisions for “existing Fidelity Brokerage customers” also. Just register, transfer $10k in new money to your existing account, and a $100 deposit will show up within a few days. Worked fine for me, and my account’s been open for years.