[Expired] Earn Up To $500 With Citibank Citigold Checking

[Update: This deal has now expired, make sure you join our newsletter to keep updated of all the latest offers]

Citibank currently has a promotional offer that is running until the 28th of February, 2014. You’re able to earn a maximum of $500 in bonuses with this offer. Either using the following link. Or quote CZJA if you apply at a Citibank branch or when you apply by phone (1-866-537-0872)

The bonuses:

• Earn $250 when you make one qualifying bill payment followed by another in the next calendar month.
• Earn an additional $250 by depositing $50,000 or more into the checking account within the first 60 days. You must complete the first $250 bonus, stated above to be eligible. The $50,000 you need to be eligible must be funds not already with Citibank.

Qualifying bill payments are defined as:

 Qualifying bill payments are those made using Citibank^® Online, Citi Mobile^® or CitiPhone Banking^®. Bills paid by making a transfer between linked accounts and/or transfer payments made to accounts within Citibank or to accounts of Citibank affiliates do not qualify as bill payments for this offer.

 

What We Like About This Offer

• High sign up bonuses. There are a lot of checking accounts coming out with sign up bonuses (look out for our round up of these) but $500 is the largest one we’ve seen.
• No minimum deposit required. Citibank doesn’t require you to make a minimum deposit to open this account.
• No hard credit pull (source: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Citibank only does a soft pull on your credit report when you apply for one of their checking products, meaning your credit score WON’T be affected.

What We Don’t Like About This Offer

• The account comes with a $30 monthly servicing fee unless you have: an average monthly balance of $50,000 or higher in deposits and retirement balances or $100,000 in combined average monthly balances in deposits,
  retirement, investments, credit cards and loans/lines of credit excluding first mortgage. Most people won’t meet these minimums and as such will have to pay a minimum of $60 of account service fees before they reach the minimum requirements for the first $250 bonus.
• The second $250 bonus requires you to have $50,000 in cash that you can park with citibank. Most people don’t have a spare $50,000 lying around and as such won’t be able to earn the second half of this offer.
• Low interest rate. The interest rate on this account is 0.05% currently. Whereas other savings accounts are as high as 0.6%.

Should You Sign Up For This Bonus? 

If you’ve got a spare $50,000 lying around, this is a no brainer – you should definitely sign up for this account as you’ll be able to get the full $500 bonus and not have to pay any monthly fees.

If you don’t have the spare $50,000, you’ll only be able to earn a maximum of $250 and you’ll also have to pay the monthly service fees. You’ll likely have to have the account open for a minimum of two months to reach the two bills paid requirement which will cost you $60. You may have to have the account open depending on how long it takes for the bonus to appear. This means you’ll make a maximum of $190.

We think this sign up bonus is well worth applying for, as long as you have a regular monthly bill that has to be paid. 

Got $15,000?

Citi also has another bonus currently where you can earn $250 with their regular checking account. You earn $125 for making a bill payment for two consecutive months and another $125 if you have a balance of over $15,000. This means you’ll make the full $250 instead of $190 with the gold account. Click here for that offer.

Hat tip to hustlemoneyblog