The Better Balance Rewards card from Bank of America offers $25 per quarter when you pay more than the minimum of your balance or pay it down completely each month.
You can apply for the card directly. Many people choose to product change another Bank of America card into a BBR card. It’s not always easy to do since lots of reps will say it’s not an option, but there have been recent success stories.
Read: Product Change Your Useless BofA Cards And Earn Up To $120/yr Per Card
You can get the $25 as a statement credit or as a deposit into your Bank of America or Merrill Edge checking or savings account.
If you have a Bank of America checking or savings account or a Merrill account, you’ll get an extra $5 each quarter. You’ll end up netting $120 each year instead of $100.
I used to think you need to have to choose to have the bonus deposited into your BofA checking/savings account, but I just learned that so long as you have one you’ll get the bonus even if you choose the statement credit option.
In any case, choosing to deposit it into a checking or savings account makes it easier to automate the purchase and payment since if the $25/$30 comes back as a statement credit, you’ll have to then spend that amount on the card. On the other hand, if you choose the bank option, you can charge a steady amount each month, have it auto-paid, and never have to think about the account.
We recommend putting a minimum of $5 per month on the card so as to avoid the possibility that Bank of America will randomly forgive the balance which will disqualify you from the bonus. There have been a number of reports of this happening.
An easy way to do automate this is to put any recurring subscription, such as Netflix, on the card and have it auto-paid. Or automate a $5 Amazon Allowance load to your account each month and have it auto-paid.
How to Change your Selection
So how do you select where the $25/$30 should go – as a statement credit or your bank account?
I was recently struggling with this and couldn’t find anywhere in the login to do so. Luckily, and informed rep was able to direct me to where it’s possible to do this online with no human intervention.
bankofamerica.com/betterbalancerewards
After logging in, you’ll see this:
Choose the Checking or Savings option, add your routing/account info (it won’t pull up automatically), and click Save Preferences.
