There’s a new player in the FinTech (Financial Technology) space that recently popped up on my radar. It’s SoFi – short for Social Finance, Inc. I did some research and found the reason I had ignored them before is at the start all they did was loans and at the very beginning it was only student loans.
Over the past few years, they have added many new things to their selection of accounts. The ones that are most relevant to most people are their hybrid checking/savings accounts – SoFi Money, and investment accounts. SoFi Money has an interest rate usually reserved for high yield savings or money market accounts – 1.6% as of this writing. It also gives you a debit card to easily make purchases using the money you saved up.
Deposit $150, Get $75
Why are these interesting? SoFi recently received a large portion of investment dollars and they have decided to use some of these dollars to offer signup bonuses and referral bonuses to give people a good incentive to signup for accounts and share SoFi with their friends. Most signup bonuses require keeping hundreds or thousands of dollars in an account for six months to keep the signup bonus. As of right now, there appear to be no strings attached to getting the signup bonuses. This is just SoFi trying to get people to try out their services.
As of this writing, all you need to do is sign up for an account and deposit $100 in a SoFi Money account and you will receive an additonal $50 in your account. Once you are signed up with SoFi, you will be given a referral link and can send this link to your friends. If they sign up for a SoFi Money account with this link, you will get $100 for each person who signs up for a SoFi account. This amount is currently capped at $10,000 per year. You can even get a referral link without having a SoFi account, you’ll just need to set up a link to your bank account you want SoFi to deposit your referral bonus into. If you want to go ahead and sign up, use this link: sofi.com/share/2746122?src=copy If you want more info, read on…
The SoFi Invest accounts also have a signup bonus. They have a similar set up but you only get $25 for opening a new account but you only need to deposit $50 into the SoFi Invest account to get the bonus. SoFi has two types of Invest accounts – Active and Automatic. The Active account lets you pick which stocks or funds you want to buy and you can even buy fractional shares – such as $50 worth of Amazon stock or the VTI (total stock market ETF) instead of having to save up and buy a whole share.
What’s Different About SoFi
I did some research into SoFi before signing up. My first concern was I hadn’t really heard of them before and afraid they were some new startup that might disappear. It turns out they started in 2011 with just student loans and have grown over time. They also have enough funding from investors and capital they have decided to build a football stadium!
Their original business model was having alumni fund student loans for students they believed would be likely to pay back the loans. They’ve kept the core idea of that model as they’ve grown: good rates on loans for people who seem to be likely to pay the loans back. This means good rates and low fees for those with good income or good education.
Speaking of low fees, the SoFi Money account has no fees. They reimburse any ATM fees from using your debit card, including foreign transactions fees. Currently this account has literally no fees: https://www.sofi.com/money/fees/
SoFi also appears to have built helping people be financially successful into their core. There are multiple articles on their blog and site about a variety of topics within this theme. One main one is helping people learn how to negotiate salaries. This just makes sense – the more people make the more they will be saving or spending which will make their bank of choice more money over the long run.
Give SoFi A Try
There is no downside to trying SoFi out. Sign up for an account, deposit $100 and you get $50 within a few days. You can kick the tires, try SoFi out and see if their accounts fit your needs. The no fee SoFi Money account will be great for anyone who travels or wants a good interest rate on money they keep in the bank and the SoFi Invest account’s ability to buy fractional shares in many things, including index funds, makes it great for saving for many goals.
Give it a try by signing up here sofi.com/share/2746122?src=copy