Oink Prepaid Debit Card – $20 Sign Up Bonus, Loadable With Debit/Credit Card

Oink is a new prepaid debit card aimed at teens. It’s similar to the new product offered by Clinkle. It runs on the Discover network and will work anywhere that Discover cards work. The online portal allows parents to manage multiple cards and track the spending of each card. The card is issued by Sutton bank.

While the card is aimed at teens, anybody can sign up as long as you live in the U.S. Those living in Vermont are excluded. There is currently no rewards program offered on this card.

Loading Funds

It’s possible to load funds either online or via the mobile application. The idea is that parents can add funds onto their child’s account on a regular basis (e.g their allowance). There are some restrictions, but lets look at the fees for loading first:

• Loading using a credit card: $1
• Loading using a debit card: $0

A fee of $1 for using a credit card doesn’t seem to bad, but when you read the fine print you’ll see that the maximum you can load at once is $50. You can load up to $250 per day and up to $5,000 per month. You can have a maximum balance of $1,000 at any one time.

Because there is a limit of $50 per load with a credit card, you’re basically paying a 2% load fee at best (and that’s before considering any costs that will be incurred unloading). This means it’s not really an attractive proposition for manufactured spending, but it might make sense for meeting minimum spend requirements.

Some people on this Frugal Hack post have reported that the initial load can be up to $50, but each additional load can be up to $250. This would mean that it’s actually a 0.4% load fee, making it much more attractive for MSing purposes. Obviously if you used a rewards earning debit card, you could load it without any fees.

Fees

• Enrollment Fee: $0
• Monthly Fee: $0
• Annual Fee: $10
• Card Reload: $0 Debit / $1 Credit
• ATM Fee (in Network): N/A (card cannot be used for ATM withdrawals)
• Card Replacement: $5
• Inactivity Fee: $0
• Funds Return Fee on Account Closure: $10
• Statement fees:
  • Online Statement Fee: $0
  • Paper Statement Fee: $5

$20 Sign Up Bonus

At the moment there is a $20 sign up bonus for the Oink card. You need to sign up using this link and activate it at http://www.oink.com/activate to receive your bonus. Thanks to maximizing money for letting me know about this deal.

Final Thoughts

It’s probably worth signing up just to get the free $10 (remember there is an annual fee of $10 which is payable the first year) as no credit check is done. I’m going to sign up and see how easy it is to load and unload and do a bit more testing. Feel free to share your experiences with this product in the comments below.