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Bank of America: Keep the Change ... Brilliant

This is a great contrast to the Chase Freedom Card that I wrote about in the last post. Bank of America truly did something new here.

However, the Keep the Change program can be easily gamed to get to the $250 per year maximum reward.

Here's how it works ...

When you use your Bank of America Debit (Visa) Card, your purchase gets rounded up to the nearest dollar and deposited in a "piggy bank" which is paid out at the end of the year along with a matching % which is put in by BofA (a whopping 100% match for the first 3 months and 5% thereafter).

For example if you buy something that is $10.01 your purchase will be rounded up to $11 and $0.99 will be deposited into your piggy bank along with $0.99 from the bank. It is also true that if you purchase something for $10.99 it will be rounded to $11 and $.01 (along with $0.01 from the bank) will be deposited.

Here are some tips for how to maximize this program.
-- Obviously, the fewer the number of cents on purchase amount the better
-- This is particularly good at restaurants when you can engineer the tip so that the purchase amount is $XX.01
-- This is particularly good at gas pumps where you can stop your filling your tank $xx.01
-- I have even heard of some folks filling up their tank in multple increments -- for example ten $1.01 gas purchases to fill up your tank once will earn you a $9.90 ($0.99 times 10) match from BofA (although this may trigger typical fraud software and get your account frozen as this resembles stolen card behavior).
-- Shop like hell with your $xx.01 purchases for the first 3 months and then stop

The only catch ... you have to wait until the end of the year to get your matching amount.

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Comments (1)

It is a great program! I just wrote about it on my site, My Two Dollars and we just got our matching check of almost $200...isnt free money great!

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on December 1, 2006 3:23 AM.

The previous post in this blog was The Freedom Card: What the Hell is Chase Thinking.

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