Checking, high yield savings and trading (II)

OK, let me finish this post before it gets too old. So if you follow my last post, and park the precious 25 grand green in your cash equivelent accounts at BoA in order to get free trades, here comes a bonus. In most states, BoA offered a souped up package for these cash rich customers. It is called "Advantage Checking", and the minimum to qualify without monthly fee is exactly 25 grands. I did not intend to run a commercial for BoA, so I won't copy the whole promotional material from BoA's website. But I personally enjoyed the following service offered by advantage checking:

1. Free checks -- this becomes less and less attractive due the fact that the new online bill pay are becoming more and more practical and efficient.
2. Free cashier check. This comes in handy sometimes. I suspect that you've got free money orders as well, but I never tried.
3. Free domestic wire transfers. This is indeed very help if you need to pop money into some brokers with slow ACH clearing. You will never miss another big surge on the market...
4. Free overdraft protection. With this feature, I will make a direct deposit in my high yield money market savings. Bravo!
5. This is really not a feature of *advantage* checking but all BoA checkings. But I still list it here in case that you don't know. BoA has entered into a lot of exclusive deals with overseas banks and you can actually withdraw money from a lot of foreign ATMs commission/exchange fee free! They called it Global ATM Alliance. For the full list, see BoA's website.

OK. Enough is enough. I really don't want to run a commercial for them for free. But now if you think this advantage checking is even more attractive than the brokerage free trades, you actually don't need to pop $25k cash to get this account for free. The balance counting toward the advantage checking is different from that of the free trades. In fact, both checking, savings, credit cards and brokerage present value in BoA brokerage count. For example, if you have $10k SPY ETF in BoA investments, $10k balance transfer on a BoA credit card and $5k in a savings account, you actually qualifies to get this service for free. Not bad, huh?

See Part I:
Checking, high yield savings and trading (I)