A calendar that tells you which account to open, what a given bank will count as a "direct deposit," when the hold window closes, and when it's safe to exit. Your paycheck stays where it is at nearly every bank. Updated as offers change, sized to the cash you have idle.
Correct. You don't have to. That is the single most misunderstood fact about these bonuses.
Every offer says "direct deposit required." Most people read that and close the tab, because it sounds like a chore involving HR: log into the payroll portal, split your paycheck, remember to switch it back three months later, then repeat the whole exercise at the next bank. Nobody runs twelve of those a year. The money stays on the table.
What the banks don't advertise is that payroll rarely has to be involved. At most banks, a one-time transfer from an account you already have (a brokerage, sometimes just another bank) will register as a qualifying direct deposit, provided it's sent the way that bank's systems expect: pushed from the sending side, from an institution known to code correctly. It arrives looking like a deposit rather than a person-to-person transfer. The flagship sequence below clears a $10,000 requirement this way, with ordinary transfers between your own accounts. Where a bank is stricter, the calendar says so and gives you that bank's workaround, so you don't spend a 90-day window on a transfer that was always going to count for zero.
The catch is that every bank expects something different. A method that works at one bank fails quietly at the next, and none of this is published anywhere official. We keep a running record of which method currently works at which bank. That record is the deposit-method matrix.
Sequenced, $25,000 returns roughly 12 to 16 percent in a year, counting interest and bonuses, all of it on FDIC-insured deposits. The figure is conservative, since it charges the full balance for the full year even though deposit requirements release most of the cash mid-sequence. For scale, the S&P 500 has averaged about 10 percent over the long run, with full market risk attached. A couple runs both calendars on the same household cash and roughly doubles the take. One good sequence covers the price of the calendar.
| Where the cash sits | One year later | Principal at risk |
|---|---|---|
| $25,000 in high-yield savings, ~4% | + $1,000 | None. FDIC-insured. |
| $25,000 in the S&P 500 at its long-run average | + $2,500 | Full market risk. |
| $25,000, sequenced | + $2,900–$4,100 | None. FDIC-insured. |
| $50,000, sequenced by a couple | + $5,800–$8,200 | None. FDIC-insured. |
All rows pre-tax; bonuses are ordinary interest income, taxed the same way as the savings interest in row one. The couple row is the same per-person math run twice, since each adult qualifies for their own new-customer bonuses. The S&P figure is the long-run nominal average, and individual years vary widely in both directions. Deposit insurance is FDIC, up to $250,000 per depositor per bank; every account in the calendar is at an insured bank and far under the cap. The sequenced row counts each dollar as busy all year; in practice most of a balance is released once a bank's deposit requirement is met, and several banks pay the bonus within weeks, so the rate on the dollars actually at work runs higher than the row shows.
We are running this sequence in our own accounts right now. It appears below exactly as subscribers receive it, minus one row. Anything you want to check is linked to the bank's own page.
// Eleven more months like this one. The method row unlocks at checkout.
Between Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, BMO, Huntington, KeyBank, U.S. Bank, Capital One, and SoFi, seven or more offers like the one above are live at any given time. Finding them is easy enough. Running several at once takes care, because the deposit rules and hold windows differ at every bank, and a missed detail usually costs the whole bonus.
If you already read the churning forums every morning, you don't need this. Everything in the calendar can be assembled from public sources by anyone willing to spend a few hundred hours on it. This is for people who want the yield without the hobby.
Almost never. Banks require a deposit that codes as a direct deposit, and at most of them a one-time push from an account you already have does the job when it's sent the way that bank expects. A brokerage works at some banks; a plain bank account works at others. The occasional strict bank (Chase, currently) shows up in your calendar with its own workaround, a one-cycle paycheck split, or gets routed around entirely. Either way you know what you are facing before you open anything.
Yes. These are published promotions; banks budget bonuses as customer acquisition the same way they budget advertising. What they dislike is customers who close accounts early, which is why every sequence carries a hold rule and an exit date.
You're not misstating anything to anyone. You send an ordinary transfer between your own accounts, and the bank's systems decide whether it codes as a direct deposit. That classification is theirs to make. The realistic downside is a transfer that doesn't qualify and a bonus that doesn't post, not a penalty. Banks publish none of this, so the method claims on this page come from reported datapoints rather than promises. That is why they are worded "reported to code," and why the matrix gets re-verified weekly.
No. At any moment several banks have live offers, and your calendar routes around any bank where you're ineligible. An existing account costs you one lane. The two questions at checkout are how the calendar knows which lanes are yours.
Checkout asks two questions: the cash you can cycle, and which banks you've held checking accounts with in the last 24 months. Your calendar is assembled from those answers, so lanes you're locked out of don't appear. Within the hour you get a welcome email with your calendar, the feed link for your phone, and the first week's tasks. After that it is one short email a week plus reminders from your own calendar. If your history rules out a lane later, reply to any weekly email and the slot is re-routed.
The weekly emails and the live feed stop. Everything already delivered stays in your calendar and remains yours, and alerts on any account still inside a hold window continue until it closes. Year two is a new purchase at the then-current price. Nothing renews on its own.
Rarely. Checking and savings accounts are screened against deposit databases such as ChexSystems, a soft inquiry with no effect on your score. The rare banks that do run hard pulls for deposit accounts are flagged in your sequence and easy to route around. Credit card churning is a different sport; this isn't it.
You can. Every offer is public, and the forums document methods if you have the hours to spend. You're paying for the sequencing and the upkeep. Concretely: transfers that code on the first try, and no account closed four days inside its hold window.
You get the amendment immediately, and on the Full Sequence and Household tiers a replacement offer fills the slot. First Quarter members get the amendment and the alert. Banks change terms constantly; keeping up with them is most of the maintenance.
About 90 minutes a month once running: an account opening or two, a scheduled transfer, an exit. The calendar tells you which day; the tasks themselves are small.