If you’ve read my posts in the past, you know I’m a big fan of ING Direct. One of the best decisions I ever made was to open an Electric Orange checking account from ING Direct to complement my ING savings accounts. As part of the account, I got a debit card that allows me to instantly transfer funds from the ING savings account to the ING checking account, which in turn allows me to use money from my emergency fund or other savings category instantly. I don’t have to wait 2 days for the money to transfer to my primary checking account.
I also love that the ING Electric Orange account has NO overdraft fee. It simply charges you a very low daily interest rate for every day that you’re over based on the amount you go over. It makes it a great account for doing automatic Bill Pay because you don’t have to worry about having the exact amount in the account to cover bills on auto-draft. If it overdrafts, simply transfer money over from your savings account and pay just a few pennies in interest.
To add to the fun, I recently got an email from ING Direct that got me pretty excited. Here are the details:
The cash back promotion only lasts for two months, but I am hoping that ING is using this as a testing period to see what the response is so they can compete with the PerkStreet Financial debit card which offers 2% cash back on purchases.
Needless to say, I’ll definitely be putting a lot of small purchases on my ING debit card. Even if ING doesn’t keep the 1% cash back rewards, it’s still a great online checking account that you should strongly consider.
