Update 4/18/26: There is now a $50 referral bonus, don’t share your referrals in the comments below. They can be shared in this linked post.
Update 4/15/25: Rate is 7% and available to some in FL. Hat tip to reader Eric
Offer at a glance
- Interest Rate: 5% APY
- Minimum Balance: None
- Maximum Balance: $10,000
- Availability: MI only [Branch locator]
- Direct deposit required: Yes, $900+
- Additional requirements: eStatements and 25 debit card transactions
- Hard/soft pull: Hard pull, maybe soft now?
- ChexSystems: Unknown
- Credit card funding: Up to $500
- Monthly fees: None
- Insured: NCUA
The Offer
- Dort Federal Credit Union is offering 5% APY on balances up to $10,000 when you meet the following requirements:
- Receive a direct deposit of at least $900 per month
- Enroll in eStatements
- Have 25 posted debit card transactions to your account each month
Avoiding Fees
This account has no monthly fees to worry about
Our Verdict
The 7% APY rate is attractive, but that’s a lot of requirements especially when the maximum limit is only $10,000. Personally I think there are much better high yield savings accounts out there so I wouldn’t recommend this one.
I just tried to transfer some money back to fidelity and there’s a $2 fee per outbound transfer. I can’t believe that. Not even the big guys do those cheap shots. I wanted to make this my main account but wow. Will probably use first south as the main one then.
Just try it out man. The paypal trick is genius. Thank you
So you will have 30 subscriptions, right?
I can confirm that there is no longer a hard pull (just a chex inquiry) and can fund $500 with a credit card.
Automate it with $0.01 penny transactions between a personal / business paypal account, its really not bad.
The $0.01 transactions is wholly consumed in the transaction, no additional fees on top. Basically you are donating these pennies to PayPal but its insignificant. You are essentially paying $3 a year to get a 7% APY a year on 10k. There are some websites that accept donations that you can donate $0.01 to multiple times but this is manual – paypal is automated. For the $900 / mo requirement I just set up automatic push / pulls with my fidelity account.
Aren’t there transaction fees associated with it?
25 posted debit card transactions!! ewwww
cool trick
lol that’s my bad!
Yeah I unfroze all 3 I do not remember if it was transunion or experian when they did the original hard pull. The second time around they did confirm it was a soft pull. Yeah no mention of Chex and they just sent me the Docusign which I was surprised. I believe I was able to fund $500 with a card.
Auto push / pull with a different bank and automated debit transactions make it effortless. Ordinary income taxes on interest does suck though.
You must reread from the book of the dead to resurrect me…
Not a major thing, maybe what you’re missing is it can be automated. For some the one time setup is worth it for a potentially long term and mostly passive benefit. My main hiccup right now is the hard pull, but somebody recently said it’s a soft pull now? I’m interested in more data points / confirmations on that.
After they asked you to unfreeze, did you unfreeze the 3 bureaus? What happened after; they re-soft pulled credit reports?
or $365/year in pre-tax interest. I get 365 is 365, but to do monthly dd of 900 and 300 debit card transactions a year seems like a pretty big pain
isnt having to do $900 DD and 25 transactions per month all year a big PITA for an extra $225 in interest (after tax assuming 30% tax rate) compared to like Vanguard Cash Plus interest of 3.35%? Am I missing something?
His comment was 2.5 years ago.
Amazon reloads doesn’t allow 0.5 cents anymore. They stopped that a long time ago. min is $5 now.
When I applied 2 years ago they did hard pull but declined due to Chex. I applied last year with everything frozen and they didn’t hard pull (just a soft one) but they asked me to unfreeze my reports. I played dumb and didn’t unfreeze Chex and they did open the account.
Lord Imhotep 💰 🔗 Did they leave you out the new Mummy movie ?
Are they still hard pulling? That APY is tempting.
Darclay, Darry, Dert… Dort?! Oh come on… Dort?!
Looks like Dort recently rolled out a $50 referlive and is advertising it on their home page. Been earning a nice yield off these guys for >5 years, even after moving out of MI and being allowed to keep the account open. Remember, an easy way to automate these debit purchases for HISA accounts is to set up 2 paypal accounts (1 personal, 1 business). Set up a $0.01 “subscription” with the business account, and have the personal subscribe to it and have it charge your debit card. This has worked flawlessly for me.
Updated and fixed, thank you.
William Charles , This is available to some FL residents also. See my comment here for info on that: #2044198 . Also, the rate is not 5% like you have in the post. It is 7% APY.
What works for DD here, anyone?
As someone else said, the APY for the checking is now 6.5%. For the qualified posted transactions, it also includes credit card transactions. I’m not sure if there is a minimum for the transactions, as ideally, I’d like to just do Amazon reloads (posted as debit). 50 cents x 25 = $12.50 per months.
APY is now 6.5%.
Done