Meet the super-switchers who make £1,000s from shifting multiple bank accounts
They may look like ordinary people, sound like ordinary people, hell, even smell like ordinary people (to be fair we’ve not checked). Yet hidden across the UK is a disparate tribe of money-making super-switchers.
Quite rightly they love to share their tales with us, such as this one: ‘We made £1,000 switching banks and used it to do up our garden.’ And read about the battle of the bank switchers. Indeed we even have some of these fiscal Clark Kents who work in MoneySaving Towers.
To do this isn’t simple. If you fancy joining the MoneySaving elite though, here are a couple of quick tips to help:
– The easy route is multiple switches of your main account: You can just repeatedly switch your main bank account, and once you’ve got the free cash simply switch to a new one meeting all the criteria.
– Or grab one or more burner accounts: To get switching cash, you need to use banks’ switch services, and they will close your old account. So if you’re looking to do multiple switches at once, or want to keep your main account, open any old naff account, so it’s a burner account for switching.
Then once you’ve got the new account, meet the minimum criteria until you get the free cash or perks, then use it to move to the next.
– Check if you need to switch direct debits: Most banks want you to switch 2+ direct debits, so ensure you spread direct debits, and funding for them, so they’re coming out of each account (or burner account) that you’re switching. If you don’t have enough, set up a direct debit for charity.
– Bounce cash from account to account to meet min monthly pay-ins: Many accounts impose these requirements, as effectively a way of saying pay your salary in. Yet there’s nowt to stop you bouncing your cash from one to the next to meet the criteria, then moving it out the next day.
Many successful super-switchers do this via standing orders a couple of days apart and use a spreadsheet to keep track of what’s needed.
Be very careful doing this if you’ve a big credit application coming: A single bank switch can be slightly negative to your creditworthiness for a few months as some lenders like to see evidence of longevity. Yet multiple applications and short-lived banking tenure can look really odd. So don’t do it if you’ve, say, an important mortgage or credit card application due.
