$25 Bonus at Citibank for Opening the Ultimate Savings Account read and submit comments for this post

Citibank has a $25 bonus for opening its Ultimate Savings Account with a minimum initial deposit of $1,000. A $1,000 minimum balance must be maintained each month for the next 3 consecutive months to earn the bonus. Here's the promotional page link. You can apply online or by phone at 1-877-695-9400. Make sure to mention the code CYA8.

Some important small print of the promo:

• $25 offer is only available for first-time Citibank deposit account customers
• $25 will be credited to your account within 120 days from the date of satisfaction of offer terms
• The amount of any bonus payment will be reported to the IRS as interest earned in the year credited

$25 is not much, but at least the Ultimate Savings Account has two nice features: currently has a competitive yield of 3.50% APY and there are no monthly maintenance fees.

About the fees, their small print is confusing: "No monthly maintenance fee applies when held as a stand-alone account in the Citibank Account relationship package." I'm not sure what this means, but I've had this savings account since December with a small balance and with no checking account, and I have not been charged any fees. A reader mentioned this same thing in my previous Citibank post.

The two downsides to this Ultimate Savings Account is that the yield will probably not remain competitive and it has a very low ACH outbound transfer limit: $2,000 per day and $10,000 per month (Citibank's webpage).

About a hard credit pull, readers have reported that Citibank has a new policy in which they no longer do hard credit pulls for deposit account applications with no overdraft protection. When I opened a Citibank checking account in 2006, I had a hard credit pull.

Citibank still has a $100 checking account bonus. It should be noted that it's not as good as previous promotions (see post).

Credit for this find goes to bksavings who posted it on this FW thread.