How to Open an EverBank Savings Account

I have always been on the look out for better savings accounts, which are getting harder and harder to come by these days in such a low interest rate environment.  One of those accounts that had been on my radar for a long time was EverBank High Yield Money Market Account. What makes EverBank stand out is its pledge to be in the top 5% among the nation’s banks as far as the interest rate is concerned. Currently, at 2.51% bonus rate, the Money Market account beats other savings accounts easily, though the promotional rate is good for the first three months after account opening. The current yield for the Money Market Account is 1.51%.

After long delays, I finally opened the account in July. The process is a little bit longer than other bank accounts, but not tricky. There are five steps in the opening process.

At first, you will need to select the type of account you want to open. EverBank offers a quite few banking and investing accounts for you to choose from, including Money Market account, Checking account, CD account, World Currency account and investing accounts. If the Money Market Account is what you want to have, select it from the list accounts available.

Once you selected the account, you will need to provide personal information in the next step. All the information are pretty standard, such as your name, address, email, employment, etc. However, EverBank does conduct a credit inquiry as part of the procedure to verify your identity. You will be asked to answer a few questions based on your credit history, which is retrieved from your credit report during the process.

Not every bank verifies a new customer’s identity through credit inquiry. In the case of EverBank, the credit inquiry is a hard inquiry as it will show up in your credit report, even though it will be different from those when you apply for a loan or credit card. As EverBank puts in their Q&A section:

What kind of inquiry does EverBank obtain and how will it affect my credit score?

EverBank obtains a credit inquiry for the purposes of opening an account. While such an inquiry will show on your credit report, it’s coded differently than an inquiry for a loan and would have less of an impact on your credit score.

So even though it is a hard pull, it won’t affect your credit score that much, if any. However, if you are concerned about the impact on your credit, you can stop the process right there.

After your identity is verified, you will proceed with your application by selecting how much you want to put in your account as initial deposit and how you would like to fund your account. To avoid monthly account maintenance charge ($8.95 a month), you will need at least to have $5,000 in your account, but the minimum balance required to open the account is $1,500.

There are several ways to fund the account, including ACH, which is the method I chose. If you also choose to ACH, you will need to provide your bank’s name, routing number, and account number. Before you can use ACH to transfer funds between your EverBank account and external accounts, EverBank again needs to verify your ownership of the account by making two small trial deposits into accounts to be linked to EverBank. That will take a couple of business days.

After you finished the online application, your account won’t be active until you send a printed form with your signature back to EverBank to complete the process. EverBank will send you an email once they receive the paperwork to let you know that the account is now active. That will take some time, depending on how fast they process your paperwork. For me, it took about a week, so it isn’t too bad.

Oh, one more thing. During the online application, you will not be able to set up access to your account. Rather, you will have to enroll in online banking after the online application is completed. To set up your online account access, you will need to provide your account number.

Well, this is the whole process of opening a savings account with EverBank. As I mentioned earlier, the process is a little bit longer than what other banks have and it asks you to mail the application back to the bank, plus a hard credit inquiry. If you think you EverBank is the bank you want to have, the bank is actually pretty good after going through the application process.