Stacking >$500 Sign Up Bonuses

Get free $30… then over $500 for using Rakuten

Downloading the Rakuten browser extension lets you double dip on sign up bonuses. The site is marketed as automatic cash back on spending and shopping, but its better use is for cash back on investing and saving. Not buying something saves you 100% so I try to not ever buy something because of a sale. But I love “sales” on things I want to do anyway — investing and saving my money.

Bitcoin

You can get up to $200 for signing up for Coinbase (COIN) and an additional $12.50 cash back from Rakuten. Coinbase has recently rolled out BTC futures trading on their platform. You can get another $40 back from signing up for eToro, where you can also trade Bitcoin. What percentage of your cash should be in Bitcoin? I’ve long favored 10%, my approximate allocation for over a decade.

Running cash back total: $52.50.

Saving

Get a high-yield APY with no account fees at SoFi; get $175 cash back with this link. Get $50 cash back at Axos Bank here. You can earn up to a $300 bonus if you apply this month. Chime gets you $50 cash back. I keep a significant amount of my assets in savings accounts chopped up into federally insured increments. These have no downside as I await opportunities to put the money to work.

Running cash back total: $327.50.

Stocks

You can get free stocks for just signing up for Robinhood and linking your bank account. Get an additional $50 of cash back from Rakuten by using this link (or their extension or app). You can get a $5 bonus from Stash and another $40 cash back here. Get up to $50 back from Magnifi. If you need a stock idea for new brokerages, I like this one. When I’ve needed to make trades to accumulate sign up bonuses, I buy SHFS.

Running cash back total: $467.50. Rakuten is currently offering an extra 10% cash back for the next seven days so depending on your speed, you can get >$500.

Caveat

This is a terrific IRR and risk:reward but not scalable. I like picking up free money (it is a hobby I find fun) but others might balk at the bother. Solution: each couple can tax-efficiently gift $34k to each individual beneficiary this month. If you have young adult kids, gift the money with instructions to do these. They get $34k, sign up bonuses, and a nudge towards saving and investing as opposed to spending and wasting the money.

Conclusion

Rakuten is a new discovery for me. I may have missed other investing/saving opportunities to stack cash back by using the site/extension/app but will keep looking. Please let me know if you find any others. These are particularly attractive as they require de minimis steps to suck out the cash. You can deposit trivial amounts and get a huge percentage back in cash.

TL; DR

I use Rakuten; if you want to too you can get $30 for signing up and over $500 for going through their site to open investing and savings accounts that are good ideas anyway. Even if you already have such accounts, additional savings accounts are good for federal insurance and brokerages are good for odd-lot opportunities. I have literally hundreds of accounts so that I can keep my cash insured and scale odd-lot trades.

Personal note

Why do I do this? I obsess. I obsess over investments. I obsess over health and fitness. I obsess over bargain hunting for even trivial personal purchases. It is just who I am. I probably violate minimum wage laws over how much time I spend relative to savings, but I love the idea of others getting to reuse my IP profitably so that I’m not wasting my time. I like to be as optimized as possible and sharing my best ideas is part of that.