Raisin is giving away up to $1,200 if you open a high-yield savings account or CD with them before the deadline. The deadline is in days. Not weeks. Days. This is how they choose to market their product—by creating a sense of urgency around free money that requires you to lock up your own money first.
The phrase "up to" does a lot of work here. Up to $1,200 means someone gets $1,200 and everyone else gets considerably less, probably $50 if they deposited their rent money and agreed to seventeen email subscriptions. But retail traders see four digits and lose their minds. They'll move their emergency fund into a CD that matures in 2029 just to chase a bonus that doesn't cover the interest they'll lose by locking their cash in a product they'll panic-sell the second the market dips three percent.
Raisin is a savings marketplace. That means they're a middleman for your savings account. You're trusting a middleman to connect you to a bank so you can earn an extra 0.3% APY, which over the course of a year on a $10,000 deposit nets you about thirty bucks. But sure, the $1,200 bonus makes it worth it, assuming you're the one person who qualifies for the maximum and not the thousands who get the promotional mousepad.
The timer creates urgency. Urgency creates poor decisions. Poor decisions create customers who don't read terms and conditions. This is not a flaw in the marketing. This is the entire point of the marketing.
Somewhere right now, someone is Googling "can I withdraw from CD early without penalty" eleven minutes after funding their account, and the answer is destroying them.
Photo by Andreas Haslinger on Unsplash
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