DOC Compass — Offers, decoded

Maximum Bonus: $50 + $50 donation to Kids’ Food Basket
Interest Rate: 5.00% APY
Minimum Balance: none ($100 initial deposit)
Maximum Balance: up to $5,000 (beyond that the rate is .10% APY)
Availability: Nationwide
Direct deposit required: No
Additional requirements: Yes, see below
Hard/soft pull: Soft
Credit card funding: None
Monthly fees: None
Insured: FDIC
Valid until: July 31st, 2016

The Offer

Open the UltimateAccount checking account at Northpointe Bank with the promotional code DOC and receive the following:
- Receive a sign up bonus of $50 if the initial deposit is $100 or more, Northpointe will also donate another $50 to Kids’ Food Basket
- Receive an APY of 5% on balances of up to $5,000 and ATM refunds (up to $10 per month) when you complete the following requirements each statement cycle:
  - Be enrolled in eStatements
  - Use your debit card to make 15 or more purchases per month in the amount of $500 or more
  - $100 or more in direct deposits or automatic withdrawals per month

Any portion of the balance which is above $5,000 will earn an interest rate of .10%. (The first $5,000 will still earn the full 5% interest.)

doc exclusive 50

The Fine Print

Valid until July 31st, 2016
$100 minimum deposit must be received within 30 days of account opening
Bonus will be paid out within 30 days of initial funding
Accounts must be kept open for at least 120 days or there is an early withdrawal penalty (forfeiture of bonus)
This offer is limited to one per household (tracked by address)
Customers that have been paid an Ultimate Account bonus within the past 365 days are not eligible.
All bank account bonuses are treated as income/interest and as such you have to pay taxes on them

Funding the Account

The bank requires an initial funding of at least $100. The funding can only be done via ACH transfer from your existing checking or savings account, so be sure to have the routing/account numbers handy at the time of application. They do not allow funding with a credit or debit card.

Avoiding Fees

This checking account does not come with any monthly fees or any fees at all. There is a dormant monthly fee of $5 if the account has no activity for twelve months or more.

ATM Fee Waiver

Not only is the account fee-free, they’ll actually reimburse you for up to $10 in ATM fees charged by the ATM owner. (Northpointe themselves will never charge you any ATM fees from their end.)

This is a really nice benefit of having this account as you can always fall back on it to withdraw money at any ATM nationwide (or even internationally, perhaps) and get the fees reimbursed. Since you’ll already have $5000 in the account, you won’t have to worry about making sure the account has funds which you can withdraw.

Meeting The Debit Card Requirement

This is probably the most difficult part of getting the 5% rate, as you need to make 15 or more purchases that total $500 per month. If you put that on a credit card earning 2% cash back, you’d earn $10 per month (you’d be earning ~$20 per month from the interest, but there are other high interest accounts out there).

Meeting the Deposit/Withdrawal Requirement

The direct deposit requirement is pretty typical, but here they gave us more leeway and allowed an automatic withdrawal as well. The main goal here, apparently, is that you should actually use the account and not just park $5000 in it, so they’re okay as long as they see some regular account activity such as a direct deposit or automatic withdrawal of $100.

Based on my correspondence with the bank:

The $100 withdrawal requirement can be fulfilled, for example, by making a $100 credit card payment, initiated by the credit card.
Making ACH transfers from another bank account may work in many cases to fulfill the requirement of a direct deposit, but it can vary by the bank as to whether it gets coded as a direct deposit.

Making an ACH withdrawal should probably work in any case since that doesn’t require a special ‘direct deposit’ coding to qualify. Thus, it should work for you to just have an automatic transfer of $100 from your regular checking account to your Northpointe account and another transfer back. Even if the transfer to the Northpointe account would not come up as a ‘direct deposit’, the subsequent withdrawal should presumably be considered an automatic withdrawal and suffice to make you eligible for the 5% interest rate.

Our Verdict

Thanks to Northpointe for agreeing to do this bonus, normally they give a $50 sign up bonus and $50 to the blog owners but we agreed to give our $50 to the Kids’ Food Basket charity, who help make sure kids are well nourished. Northpointe did offer a $100 sign up bonus in the past and it’s possible that’ll come back, but it depends on how active those customers that signed up are and if it makes sense from Northpointes perspective – I wouldn’t expect it to come back in the short term.

This is a pretty good bonus as there are no requirements and you also get a 5% account, there are other 5% accounts out there that are easier to get the 5% rate on so you might want to investigate those first. There are also other bank accounts with a higher sign up bonus.

I’d recommend this account for people that want/need another 5% account and also want a small sign up bonus. Thanks again to Bill Clancy and his team for putting this together.

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