Much has changed in the past eight months! I’ll first explain the changes to each of the accounts along with my thoughts on those changes, and then we’ll discuss my current strategy for optimizing interest and other free money from these accounts. If you haven’t read Part 1: The Basics yet, be sure to check it out to familiarize yourself with the basic structure of each of the accounts first.

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice, and the best way to manage your money will always depend on your own personal situation.

Updates

Buffs

PrizePool

• The grand prize has been reduced from $25,000 to $10,000, and that surplus $15,000 has been used to increase all the other prizes available in each 4-week period.
• Debit card and Crypto Savings coming Soon™.

Really great change. $10,000 is still large enough that we can enjoy fantasizing about it, and the median earnings will be much higher now. I like that they are thinking about the customer.

The company is not as responsive as Yotta, likely due to a smaller staff. For the most part, they seem to be following Yotta’s footsteps in terms of new features, which isn’t a terrible place to be in.

My only complaint about PrizePool is that the more popular they become, the more diluted the earnings will be, since it’s a fixed prize amount regardless of the number of tickets. For now, I’ll keep the mathematically optimal amount of money with them and no more.

Yotta

• While the debit card is not new, many people have been admitted from the waitlist, making it more accessible. The card yields an average of 10.5% tickets per transaction, with up to a 1% chance for any transaction to be COMPLETELY FREE, aka reimbursement for the entire amount you spent.
• Crypto Savings Buckets were released to the public this week. Unlike the regular savings bucket, which earns 1 ticket/week per $25 in your balance up to $10,000, the crypto bucket earns 1 ticket/week per $10 on your entire balance! Note that it is not FDIC-insured.
• The waitlist is open for their credit card, which will offer up to a 2% chance for reimbursement, plus 20% tickets back on each transaction.

Yotta was already one of my favorite companies on this list, but my opinion of them has continued to grow. Their customer service is always timely and helpful, they are constantly adding new features, and their CEO regularly engages with the community in AMAs on Reddit.

Since there are many avenues for manufacturing debit card spend without any fees, I have been earning tens of thousands of free tickets by transferring money to myself and back-and-forth with my friend. My friend has already had one free transaction, and we each have a 1% chance for any transaction to be free. I dedicate an entire section below just to the different ways to artificially create spending on this card.

I see the Crypto Savings Bucket as a safe, frictionless way to enjoy the higher yields from crypto staking without manually managing any crypto investments or worrying about transaction fees. I trust Yotta as a counterparty because of their responsiveness, customer focus, and transparency.

HMBradley

• Only $1500 monthly direct deposit is required instead of $2500 to qualify for the Savings Boost.

This change was made in response to user feedback that the higher amount was inaccessible to many people. I really love how this company puts the users first in everything they do.

Nerfs

HMBradley

I don’t mind this change very much, especially when combined with the lower direct deposit requirement. Since I’m currently in Tier S already, I won’t need to change a single thing about my setup, and I’ll only lose 0.50% from my APY. While this is bad news in a vacuum, it’s actually reassuring to me to know that a more drastic change isn’t happening. There was initially a lot of speculation that HMBradley’s high rates wouldn’t be sustainable and they would surely reduce them, so I’m glad they reduced them in a way that allows optimizers to keep the 3% on the full $100,000 balance with minimal effort.

Porte

To qualify for the 3% APY, you now need:

• $3000 in direct deposits per quarter
• 15 debit card transactions per quarter

This change killed Porte, as far as I’m concerned. This is much harder to automate than HMBradley, and for much smaller reward. The only reason Porte made the original list was that it was the only hassle-free 3% account. Now that they’ve added significant hassle, it’s dead.

In addition, Porte had some of the worst customer service I’ve ever seen. The rep didn’t even realize that they offer a Savings account when I called to ask when my interest would be paid out. I also got some weird emails from them that didn’t contain Porte’s name, making me fear that my identity had been stolen again, and they were very unhelpful when I called to clarify.

Unchanged

OneFinance

No changes, but they’re still great! I’m still building my balance here with each paycheck. Good set-and-forget account.

Strategic Optimization

This is where it gets fun! Now that we’ve laid out the details of each account, we have a complex system of mathematical equations to optimize. I’ll assume that your resources are not unlimited, but that you have a decent income to be able to afford to put money into multiple accounts. If not, prioritize paying off any debt first, and then go through as many as you can in order from this list.

As with all things in life, I focus on efficiency and automation. I spend at most ten minutes per week total on all of this combined. I believe in investing time up front to build a resilient system so that I don’t need to constantly spend time later.

Direct Deposit

I receive biweekly paychecks. For simplicity, I assume this is equivalent to bimonthly, since I’m guaranteed to receive at least two paychecks per month, and only very occasionally three. If you are paid monthly, then double all of these amounts.

0. Enough money to my 401k to receive my maximum employer match.
1. $750 to HMBradley. This ensures I have $1,500 in monthly deposits to qualify for the 3% APY. I value this above even avoiding fees in my checking account.
2. $20 to Yotta. This could even be $1, as I just need to activate the enhanced chance of getting a free transaction. By including the extra $19, I earn one additional ticket (5% of direct deposits).
3. $250 to Chase. I need $500 of direct deposits per month or a $1500 minimum balance. I usually stay above that minimum, but I include this just to be safe. Also, this ends up serving as my discretionary “spending money”, so it’s a reasonable amount. Your specific details of your primary checking account might differ, so read the fine print.
4. Enough money to my 401k to max out the federal limit.
5. Additional money to Yotta to earn more tickets from direct deposit, to earn tickets in the Crypto Savings Bucket, and to fuel my weekly manufactured transactions.
6. $5000 to OneFinance. The monthly limit for deposits to your Auto-Save Bucket is $1,000 so you would need $10,000 in monthly direct deposits to maximize this. I don’t earn enough to actually max this out, so this amount is aspirational for me. If you happen to earn enough that you can afford to max this out, then swap the order of this and the one above, putting your entire remaining balance into Yotta for free tickets.

PrizePool

The weekly drawings are grouped into 4-week cycles. The grand prize is only available in the 4th week of every cycle, but tickets accrue over the course of the entire cycle. This means a ticket earned in the first week is worth more than twice what a ticket earned in the fourth week is worth, since it will be entered in all four drawings, not just one. We should therefore deposit extra money into the account 5 business days before a new cycle starts, and withdraw that money later in the cycle (we can more productively allocate it elsewhere). According to PrizePool, the total pool APY is currently 3.35%, so the APY of a first-week dollar will be much higher than that. The maximum weekly transaction limit is $30,000, and daily is $10,000, so that’s the amount I recommend allocating. Set a recurring event in your calendar to remind you every four weeks to deposit, and another to withdraw.

HMBradley

In order to qualify for the highest tier, you need to save 20% of your deposits each quarter. Conversely, you can safely withdraw up to 80% of your deposits without losing your tier. This is valuable because we want to maximize liquidity in case of an emergency without sacrificing earnings. Spending on the credit card doesn’t count against this 20%. Set a recurring event for a few days before the end of each calendar quarter to withdraw exactly 80% of your deposits, and another on the 1st day to redeposit.

Make sure you automate the required monthly $100 spending too. I’m fortunate that my gym membership is exactly $100 per month. You likely have some existing expense or combination of expenses that you can use to reach at least $100 – gym, phone, internet, other utilities, or even rent. Under no circumstances should you rely on manually thinking about this each month. Keep in mind that if all your spending falls within the same category, you’ll earn 3% cashback on all of it.

I’m nowhere close to $100,000 in my account yet, but if you have this good problem to have, then you’ll want to move the excess money elsewhere, as it won’t be earning any interest. If you have natural spending to put on the credit card, ideally mostly in a single category, then that’s one easy way to get the money out. Otherwise, withdraw money at the end of the quarter but do not redeposit it.

Yotta

This is really fun. Once I heard that the debit card gives rewards (1-20% tickets per transaction and up to 1% chance of full reimbursement), I realized that this would be much more lucrative than similar rewards on a credit card because debit cards can be used without fees in many more situations. I opted in for the randomized tickets reward instead of the fixed 10% because the average of all the integers from 1 to 20 is 10.5 – they will never give you 0%, so the odds are in your favor. You’ll need a cooperative friend to take advantage of some of these opportunities.

Note: While this feels similar to money-laundering, it is actually 100% legal. In fact, Yotta actually encourages it, as big paydays are good publicity for them. They sent me multiple marketing emails once I received my debit card to call attention to the fact that Venmo and Cash App transactions are eligible for becoming free.

• Debit card transactions don’t reduce your tickets for the week when they reduce your balance. This means you can actually count the same money twice after a roundtrip, although the second ticket won’t be eligible for the numbers drawn on the first few days of the week.
• The above applies even to the Crypto Savings Bucket, so keep your full balance there at all times.
• There’s a daily $40,000 limit on transfers to the Crypto Savings Bucket.
• Try not to have any transactions in-flight on Monday afternoon, as this is when the tickets are determined for the week.
• $5000 is the maximum amount that will be reimbursed, so never generate a transaction larger than this.
• Yotta has daily $10,000 transaction limits on sending and receiving. If you try to receive more than this in a single day, they end up retrying it the next day.
• PayPal is NOT viable for generating transactions, as they charge a fee even on debit cards.

Here are the various apps I use for generating debit card transactions. Some of them allow you to reload your balance and immediately cash out without sending the money anywhere, while others require you to transfer to your friend. It’s up to you to work out whether you’ll split any potential rewards, or let each person roll the dice individually. I also recommend forming a Yotta pool to share your tickets as a fun way to share your fortunes – as I told my friend, “I don’t want you becoming a millionaire without me.”

I recommend creating a Savings folder on your phone so that you can pop from one app to the next, like the below. If you like having an app accessible elsewhere on your phone, such as Messenger, for example, you can create a second app icon by long-holding the icon in the App Library.

Venmo

• $4,999.99 sending limit per rolling 7-day period. Give yourself a buffer if you use this for actual transfers to your friends.
• No balance reloading allowed.
• $2,999.99 per withdrawal, but unlimited withdrawals. I use “2222” for the first transaction to save time by not moving my finger.

Cash App

• $7,500 limit per rolling week, $17,500 limit per rolling month.
• Required to confirm your identity.
• This limit applies to both “Add Cash” and to sending to your friend, so there isn’t much reason to send. However, sometimes it seems I’m able to send even though I can’t add to my balance, so it’s worth attempting occasionally.
• I always use transactions of exactly $2500 to ensure I use up my full transfer limit without having to track how much I’ve sent.

Apple Cash

• You’ll need an iPhone for this.
• $10,000 per rolling week to deposit to your balance.
• Unlike the others, there’s barely any delay when you withdraw. I usually get my money back the very next day, allowing for fast turnover.
• Potentially separate limit for sending to your friend, although I haven’t experimented with this. Please let me know in the comments if you find anything out.

Novi

• Shared $1,000 limit for sending and loading your balance, so don’t ever send.
• No weekly or monthly limits.
• Usually 3 days to withdraw, and you can’t add more money until the withdrawal clears.

Facebook Pay

• You do this from the Messenger app with your friend.
• $10,000 monthly limit once you confirm your identity.

Sign-up Links

As always, I don’t get paid by any of these companies to recommend their products. I’ve included my own personal referral links, which will give me the same rewards that would be provided to any customer. If you happen to have a friend or family member who already has one of these accounts, I recommend you use their referral link instead of mine. I’ve even removed my referral link in Part 1 from the company which I soured on, even though I could still earn rewards for recommending it. I personally believe that all the accounts I recommend will be helpful to readers with adequate cash sitting around.

• HMBradley (not mine)
• Yotta (or use code GAMETHEORY)
• PrizePool (or use code 1J2B6)
• Cash App (or use code KLFFRBR)
• Venmo
• One Finance