Comments on: Wachovia’s “Way2Save” and Bank of America’s “Keep the Change” Saving Programs

By: David

David — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:39:36 +0000

Johnyyyy,
Right idea, wrong program. Why go for 5% when you get ~99%. Keep the change is much easier to exploit. Just pay your online bills 1.01,1.02…one at a time online or do your selfpaying method… You need ~$83 a month over 3 months to fully exploit it for your $250…after the 1st 3 months it’s 20 times less efficient so don’t bother.
Cool thing is you are allowed to get 5 cards and do it 5 times. So that’s $1250. I’m on #4. I know somebody that is on #8 or so, so that 5 card limit might not be real.
My concern is with overdraft fees becoming less of a moneymaker KTC might go away. I’m guessing they’ll be able to sucker enough people into still paying overdraft fees that it will stay.

By: johnyyyy

johnyyyy — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:31:55 +0000

put 1,200 into the checking and set it up to automatically deposit 100 a month(1,200 a year),, i also put in another 3,800(thats all i have to work with) into the checking for a total of 5,000. i then went into bill pay and put my own name as a biller. this is the crazy part… you cant make the same monetary amount payment on the same day.. in other words you cant make 10 $1.00 payments,, but you can do like i did,, take an hour and do this. make the first payment $1.00, then next $1.01, $1.02, $1.04 etc… the point i am making is your sending money to yourself and every payment moves $1 from checking into way2save, hard part is you will receive hundreds of checks in the mail all for increment amounts starting at 1.00 then 1.01…. go to bank, cash all the checks, then deposit cash back into wachovia checking,, in my first month i moved $1,100 from checking to way2save plus the $100 automatic deposit. so far wacovia hasnt caught on.. good luck

By: Shelley

Shelley — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:27:59 +0000

I fail to see what all the complaining is about. BOA recently dropped $179 into my savings account due to my enrollment in their Keep The Change program. And you cannot deny Way 2 Save’s 5% APY plus the 5% bonus in year one…

By: Christa

Christa — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:22:34 +0000

I meant $10 a month.

By: Christa

Christa — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:21:57 +0000

If people have so little money in the account that rounding up their purchase to the nearest dollar will trigger an overdraft, then yes, don’t use Keep the Change. But if you have a cushion, I find it quite simple to use this program. All you have to do to track your own spending and stay within your budget is to round your own receipts up too. How hard is that? And checking in on your account on a daily basis online, isn’t a bad idea either. I do it just to make sure I’m not missing anything. It’s really not all that difficult and it helps me save an extra $10 a year, which is nice.

By: Syd

Syd — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:08:37 +0000

Another point is level of the limit. It would be hard to get to that much of a match. Take the Wachovia model, for example. It leads you to believe that you might get $300, but do people realize that to get that they will have to use the card 6000 times in one year ($1 * .05 * 6000 = 300)? Who can even come close to that? For Bank of America, if you assume $.50 per transaction, then for any year after the first 3 months you’ll need 10,000 checkcard transactions to hit the match (10,000 * 5% * $.50 = $250). Does ANYBODY shop like that? Is something wrong with my math?

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:40:26 +0000

@ Bobby – Your experience is exactly what I was afraid of when I wrote this article awhile back. The fact they would charge you $$$ to transfer $0.00 from one account to another in the form of an “overdraft” fee is ridiculous. Your right, nobody has the time and frankly money to mess with a program like this that can cause more harm than benefit. Again, you can’t save money you do not have and these types of programs play to this type of thinking.

Thanks for the great comment.

By: Bobby

Bobby — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:47:24 +0000

The problem with this program is bank of america doesn’t really care if you want it or not. They put it on several accounts regardless of anyone signing up for this program. Then when you have an overdraft the keep the change program takes $0.00 out of your account and then they charge you and over draft fee to move no money. Then they issue a cancel keep the change and charge you a second overdraft fee to not move the no money back to where it didn’t come from. Confused? Good because you’re not done yet.

Lets say you have overdraft protection and actually had some money in the savings. Now they’ll transfer that money into the checking account which will pay back some of or all of the money you had overdrafts on. But since you’ve got keep the change, they’ll pull some change out putting you just a few cents over and now we repeat the overdrafts on the keep the change and it’s cancellation.

Great, because within moments this undesired, nearly impossible to cancel feature will sap out hundreds of dollars from your account. This is really nice on student accounts, because between working 50 hour weeks and going to school full time and struggling to pay back student loans with my now destroyed credit wasn’t stressful enough. I really needed a bank to come steal as much money as they can get away with.

So to sum up in what is appropriate comment size, These programs cause far more trouble and expense than will ever be useful to the majority of the population.

By: Marketing Diva Deb

Marketing Diva Deb — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:01:13 +0000

Bravo! These two programs make it appear easy to save just by “purchasing” when in reality you’ll just save pennies, or maybe a few dollars a month – if that.