For the past 6 months, I have talked to scores of people, mostly in real life, and have tried to give them free money. None of them have accepted. Not one! What I am talking about today is the ING Direct $25 Referral Bonus. If you sign up for an ING account after a friend or an individual has sent you a referral code, you get a FREE $25 with your first deposit of $250. The only catch is that the $250 has to stay in your account for a month.
The whole process to set up the account takes about 10 minutes. That’s $150 an hour. I know a handful of folks that are pulling that down (and you know what, they already have ING!), but for the rest of you, this sounds like time well spent.
The return on your money in one month’s time is 10%. Try finding that in the market these days. The past months have been good, but a guaranteed 10% return? How can you beat that?
Maybe its because I associate with the younger crowd that still rolls their eyes when I talk about personal finance. Maybe my friends are all living paycheck to paycheck in an expensive city and can’t afford to park $250 for a month. Or maybe they are all just a bunch of lazy whiney brats that think spending 10 minutes of their time is not worth “the hassle”, “the extra account”, “the <insert lame B.S. excuse here>”.
I know most bloggers run out of these referral codes. Tell me bloggers, what’s different between your audience and mine? Tell me readers, why the hell aren’t you taking advantage of an amazing deal?
I’ll close with a thought from a conversation I had with a CFP recently. He suggested his job is to optimize every single dollar of his clients. He doesn’t keep $1000 of stock in an inferior investment just because he is working on an $8,000,000 portfolio. In the spirit of optimizing every dollar, we should take advantage of these types of deals. Speaking of which, Contact Me Here for a referral code. I obviously have plenty.