Citibank Checking Account $100 Bonus Promotion

In case you are shopping for a checking account, Citibank is currently running a promotion for its checking account that comes with a promotional bonus up to $100. The promotion runs for a full year, from now to December 31, 2012. During the promotion period, if you open a Citibank checking account, you could receive up to $100 cash rewards. To qualify for the cash bonus, you will need to meet these conditions:

• Open a Citibank checking account in the Citigold or Citibank Account Package;
• Within 45 days after account opening, fund the account with at least $1,000;
• Within 45 days, complete one direct deposit AND make one electronic bill payment for two consecutive months.

The cash bonus for Citibank Account package is $50. If you choose to open a Citigold package, you can get $100 bonus instead.

Actually, the requirements for getting the bonus aren’t that high. You only need to make $1,000 deposit and do the direct deposit and online bill pay for two months and $100 is a pretty good bonus. However, as I mentioned early in the post about free checking, big banks are increasingly shifting from free checking accounts to fee based checking accounts these days after regulatory changes in the last couple of years. For those fee based checking accounts, in order to get a waiver of the monthly account fee, account holders are required to maintain a certainly level of deposit in the account and, at the same time, establish direct deposit and/or make online bill payments, just as what Citibank requires for this offer. And Citibank is no exception in this regard. For example, Citibank has increased the required minimum account balance to avoid monthly fee since December 9, 2011. The minimum account balance requirement for the Citibank Account Package to avoid monthly fee of $20 will increase from the current level of $6,000 to $15,000. For the Citigold package, the minimum combined account balance (the combined account includes all linked deposit and retirement accounts held at Citi) requirement to avoid monthly fee is $50,000, or a $30 account fee will be charged.

As you can see from above, the biggest issue here is maintaining the required balance for the account to avoid monthly fee, and the balance requirements are rather high. If you can come up with the fund ($15,000 for Citibank Account Package and $50,000 for Citigold Package), then the free money is available. The cash reward will be directly deposited into your checking account within 90 days from the end of the month in which you satisfy all requirements. If you are interested, you have plenty of time to open a Citibank checking account and get the bonus.

BTW, there’s another promotion from Citi that lets you earn nice ThankYou Points. The Citi ThankYou Preferred Card will give new cardholders 30,000 ThankYou Points as bonus after spending $2,000 in purchases within 3 months of account opening.

I have a more detailed discussion about the Citi ThankYou Preferred Card early. Basically, you get 1 ThankYou Point for every dollar spent on purchases, plus anniversary bonus every year, and the card has no annual fee. Check out the post for more info.