How I made $1,000 just from opening bank accounts
I made $1,000 just from opening bank accounts. Not from investing, not from a side hustle — from sign-up bonuses that banks hand out to get new customers through the door.
The nickname for this is bank account churning. You open an account mainly for the bonus, do whatever the bank asks you to do to earn it, and then decide afterward whether the account is worth keeping. People who do it a few times a year can make thousands.
The whole thing lives or dies on one skill, and it isn't really a money skill — it's reading. Every bank writes its own rules, and the only reason I've come out ahead chasing bank bonuses instead of losing money on them is that I read every requirement before I open anything.
What do banks usually make you do to get the bonus?
The offers I've looked at are all worded a little differently, but most of them come down to two hurdles.
- Direct deposit. Most banks want you to set up a direct deposit with a minimum amount landing in the account each month. What counts as a direct deposit is defined by the bank, not by you, so that definition is the first thing I look for in the fine print.
- A holding period. Usually you have to leave money in the account for a set stretch of time. Three months is the window I run into most often.
Because of that second hurdle, I never use money I might need next week. Before I sign up for anything I make sure I can park that cash somewhere and leave it alone for the whole period, because pulling it out early is the easiest way to do all the work and still miss the payout.
The other thing I check is whether the bonus is even open to me. Some offers exclude people who've held an account at that bank before, or who already got a bonus from them in the past few years. That's the kind of detail that's easy to skim past and expensive to find out later.
Fees are what turn a bonus into a loss
Some banks charge monthly maintenance fees, and those fees are what quietly eat a bonus. A payout that looked great can shrink to almost nothing if I'm paying a monthly charge for the months I'm required to keep the account open.
So I look for two things: what the fee actually is, and what I have to do to get it waived. Sometimes it's a minimum balance, sometimes it's the same direct deposit that unlocks the bonus, sometimes there's no way around it at all. If I can't clearly see how the fee gets waived, I treat that as part of the cost and decide accordingly.
Anyone can look up bank bonuses on their own — they're not a secret. The work is checking all of the requirements first, so you know exactly what you're agreeing to before the account is open.
The account I use as my checking has a bonus too
My favorite version of this is when the account is worth keeping after the bonus is gone.
The high-yield savings account I use is one I run as my everyday checking account, and it happens to have a sign-up offer on it too. When I looked, it was $50 up to $400 for opening an account and setting up an eligible direct deposit.
What makes it a nice two-in-one for me is that the money sitting there earns interest instead of just waiting around. I've made hundreds of dollars in interest using it the way most people use a plain checking account, on top of the bonus I got for opening it. Whether that setup makes sense for someone else depends on how they actually move money month to month — mine happens to sit still enough for it to be worth it.
Bonus money is income, so I plan for the tax
One part of this that's easy to forget: any income you make is taxable, and bank bonuses are income. That $1,000 wasn't $1,000 free and clear in my mind — I treated it as money I'd owe some tax on.
So I don't spend it as if it's found money. I keep track of what I've earned across accounts through the year and factor it into my tax planning, and if my situation ever got complicated I'd rather ask a tax professional than guess.
Churning worked for me because I'm willing to read the fine print, keep track of dates, and leave money untouched for a few months at a time. If any one of those three things sounds like a headache, that's honest information about whether it's worth doing at all.