If you have $250 and are willing to become a customer of ING Direct, you have the opportunity to earn $275 on top of your deposit. It will take some work, but not too much. Here’s how it works.

First, open an account at ING Direct using one of the links at the bottom of this post. There are five links listed for the savings account, but choose only one. You must not currently be an ING Direct customer and you must provide an initial deposit of at least $250 in order to receive a $25 bonus for opening the account.

After your account is created and funded, you will eventually see a link at the bottom of your account information website. This feature might not be available immediately for new customers, but with time, the option will be present. Click on the “Earn $$$: Refer a Friend” graphic to receive the opportunity to refer 25 of your friends. Each successful referral will earn you $10. If you don’t have 25 friends, you can email me. I’ll post your referral links once mine expire so you can benefit from the power of the internet.

Use the following links when opening the Orange Savings Account with at least $250 (in addition to your $25 account opening bonus). Updated May 13, 2008.

OSA1: Deposit at least $250 with this link
OSA2: Deposit at least $250 with this link
OSA3: Deposit at least $250 with this link
OSA4: Deposit at least $250 with this link
OSA5: Deposit at least $250 with this link

If you do not have $250 to deposit initially, please use this link instead.

If you click one of the above links and see this message on the first page, then choose a different link and let me know via email or comment below which link number has expired.

We’re sorry, but the referral link within the email you received has expired and is no longer valid. We recommend that you contact the sender and ask them to re-send the referral email.

I’ll receive $10 for every successful account opening, and when you receive your referral links and give them out, you’ll receive $10 for each referral as well. Your referral links might not appear immediately after opening your account, but when they do, you should take advantage of them.

ING Direct is one of my favorite banks, despite their lagging interest rates. The current rate on savings accounts is 3.0% and the rate on checking accounts is tiered with a maximum of 3.40%. These rates are better than most brick and mortar banks you’ll find.  I’ve had my account with them since 2004!

Yes, here’s yet another new financial service vying for your attention. This time it’s RevolutionMoneyExchange, which is a person-to-person payment system similar to PayPal. It’s free to send, receive, and withdraw money, but the only funding source allowed is your bank account (no credit cards). It will be interesting to see if it gains some traction (and if eBay allows them as a payment option). Currently, they are offering a $25 bonus just for signing up. Here’s mine:

However, you’ll have to submit your Social Security Number to verify your identity, so I had to do a little digging first. According to this article in American Banker, it is backed by Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank AG, which participated in a $50 million venture capital round. The parent company was formed by bajillionaire Steve Case, co-founder and former CEO of AOL, and the son of the former CEO of Mastercard. Also mentioned in USA Today.

Also, there is no hard credit check done using your SSN. It says clearly at the top “This information is not used to review your credit history or to establish new credit.”

You also get $10 for referring friends. So be sure to sign up using my link to get your free $25. Then generate your own referral link that you can send to your friends, etc.

Also, just as proof here’s a screen shot of my withdraws so far ($75 total). You can get up to $500 in referrals, which I’m shooting for! These funds have already been put into my checking account, so this is definitely not a scam!

I just wanted to give all of our friends/family/visitors a heads up about some new posts you’ll see here. Being the Internet gurus (read junkies) that Jen and I are, we come across lots of interesting things. One of those things are links/referrals to get free money online. Generally we’ll pass these along to friends/family via email so that they can take advantage of these good deals, and we get some kind of referral bonus too.

Anyway, I’ve decided that there’s no reason we shouldn’t post such deals/opportunities up here so that they can reach more people. Ultimately these deals will help you and then help us. For example, we’ve been using ING Direct, an online only bank, for years now. It’s a fantastic bank that has great interest rates (much better than you generally find from your traditional bank). Well they always have the ability to refer friends so that they can get $xxx free when they open a new account. These generally result in you (the referrer) also getting a bonus for referring a friend. These are obviously not scams or anything, they’re just one person telling another about a good service that’s worth checking out, while getting some free money at the same time.

So, you can expect to see a post ever so often describing such offers. If you think it would be useful, and you like to get FREE money, hopefully you can check them out.

These posts will all be filed under the new category “College Fund”