Life of Les

Sign up at SoFi today for banking, investing, and a HYSA, and earn up to $300 in a sign-up bonus after qualifying conditions are met, with an extra $25 welcome offer by using this link that can be found here after you deposit your first $50.

These past few years have put a financial strain on Americans like we’ve never seen before. With the hyperinflation that occurred in the housing market, grocery stores, gas pump, utilities, etc., many Americans were left struggling with how they’re going to acclimate their budget to fit the new increased expenses in life. In an effort to fight this inflation, the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates significantly in just a short period of time. What this effectively meant is that money became “more expensive” for banks, so they began charging higher interest rates on mortgages, auto loans, and personal loans. However, these banks were not sharing their profit from increased rates with their customer: the everyday American putting their money into the bank for safekeeping.

Here is the way a bank works at the most basic level: a customer deposits $1,000. The bank takes that $1,000 and loans out $900 of it to a loan customer. They charge that loan customer an assigned interest rate (~7% currently for a 30-yr mortgage, and those rates are far higher for personal and auto loans). A traditional bank will pay you a whopping .01-.03% interest on keeping your money in their savings account for them to loan out. So, over the course of a year.. The bank makes 7% of $900, or $63 profit, from loaning your money. Let’s assume that they give you .02% interest on your $1,000 deposit. Well, 1% of $1,000 is $10, so .1% is $1. which means .01% is $.10! Since the bank is paying you a handsome .02% interest, this means that you will make $.20 throughout the year from keeping $1,000 in the bank. The bank meanwhile makes $63. This means that for every $1 the bank pays you for letting them use YOUR money, the bank is making $315! When I realized this, I started to do research on better options for us. We were using big national banks as our two primary banks (I am not going to name them specifically, but you can reasonably infer who they are based on the big players out there).

Introduce: SoFi Technologies. Leslie and I joined SoFi in May 2022 due to the attractive interest yield on both their checking and savings accounts. I was a little weary because they weren’t yet a household name quite like Chase, Wells Fargo, USAA, Bank of America, etc., but they were/are FDIC-insured (the same type of insurance that all the big banks have). I was also worried about the lack of a physical presence in dealing with customer service if I needed anything, but SoFi has demonstrated to me over the years that they pride themselves in top-class cusomer service. In summary, we moved our money to SoFi and have had zero regrets since then. SoFi is a digital bank, which keeps their overhead costs for operation low… which basically lets them pay their members more for using their money. Currently in March 2025, they pay their customers .5% interest for money sitting in their checking account and a massive 3.8% interest on money in savings. That’s right – they have interest-bearing checking accounts in addition to their competitive High Yield Savings Accounts! Going back to the previous example… If you kept $1,000 in SoFi Savings for a year, you’d make $38 just on interest, a difference of 190x the $.2 a big bank would pay you. That’s a trip to Starbucks each month for free! If you scale my calculations for the amount of money in your rainy day/emergency fund, you’d see how much money you’re leaving on the table each month by keeping your money in a big bank.

How is SoFi able to pay you this much money? Well, remember the beginning of this article- they’re making money by loaning your money out to loan customers. But the difference between them and the big banks is that they’re at least giving you a piece of the pie of profits. Separate from the attractive yield that SoFi offers for keeping your money in their bank, the digital app and online website is a phenomenal tool. In other articles I’ll discuss how I leverage checking account sign-up bonuses regularly to make extra money, but for now I’ll just say that I have plenty of experience navigating the apps of virtually every big player in the banking industry. I can confidently say that SoFi has the premier banking product on the market – the app is extremely user-friendly and can link virtually every aspect of finance into one single app.

My favorite function of SoFi’s banking product is the fact that you can create “vaults” within your savings account. Let’s say that you’d like to save for a car, a vacation, and a home improvement project. Well, you can make a vault for each of those categories within your single savings account. Each paycheck you can automatically have a specific dollar amount or percentage moved from your checking account straight into a specific vault. It’s a simple feature, to be honest, but there is something so nice about being able to visualize your savings based on categories. And I’m not aware of any other bank having that same “simple” feature – in most cases, they just expect for you to have multiple savings accounts (kid’s college fund, house down-payment, etc.). That’s extremely tedious and inconvenient to manage so many accounts, in my opinion. Not with SoFi though! You can do all of that in a single user-friendly app in the same profile!

I’m by no means sponsored or affiliated with SoFi. However, there’s a reason they grew their total amount of members last year by 44%, totaling a 7.5 million member base currently. I am simply a very pleased customer with the experience that I’ve had with them, and I would highly recommend SoFi to anyone due to the superior banking product that they offer and also that they also give their members a portion of their profits through high interest on their savings accounts! You can sign up directly at SoFi here, and if you use the link that I provided, you’ll get an extra $25 to your $300 sign-up bonus for using my link. My link can be found here. I will add that in order to be eligible for the $325 sign-on bonus, you do have to setup a direct deposit from your employer, social security, etc. with SoFi. To qualify for the additional $25 welcome offer, you simply need to fund your checking account with $50 from an external account or debit card. If you don’t want to have all of your paycheck go towards SoFi, you can always set an allotment within your current direct deposit (most employers can manage this without difficulty). I personally have done this strategy to get checking account sign-on bonuses with a number of banks in the past, while keeping my primary direct deposit at SoFi. I hope you break up with big banks this year to get more out of your money! This is one of the easiest ways that you can stretch your dollars just a little bit more, and currently in this economy, those extra dollars might go a long way!