Updated. Robinhood recently held a Steve Jobs-esque product announcement about new upcoming features for their Robinhood Gold paid membership tier ($5 a month or $50 per year upfront). Here are the highlights of the new features:
- 1% match on all deposits. Called “Unlimited Deposit Boost”, Gold members will get a 1% match on all incoming deposits. For example, if you transfer $500 every month to invest at Robinhood, they will give you an extra $5 a month to invest. If you transfer in $100,000, they will give you $1,000. Doled out over a 2-year period if you keep your deposits there during that time.
- 3% cash back on all categories with their new credit card. Redeems directly into a Robinhood account. Can create virtual numbers and extra cards for family members. No annual fee, but does require Gold membership.
- New customizable user interface. One of Robinhood’s strengths has always been it’s modern user interface. That’s always been countered by their fintech-average level of customer service.
Here are the existing Robinhood Gold features:
- 5% APY on cash sweep deposits. (1.5% APY without Gold until May 2024, then 0.01% APY after that.)
- 3% match on annual IRA contributions. (1% match without Gold.) 5-year lock-up period. This is meant to be a recurring thing. See FAQ for details.
- 3% match on incoming IRA transfers and rollover amounts (end 4/30/24). This is a limited-time offer and potentially huge for those with big IRAs. 5-year lock-up period. See link for details.
- Bigger instant deposits. Instant Deposit eliminates the three-day wait period for funds to transfer from your bank into Robinhood. With Gold, customers can get larger Instant Deposits of up to $50,000 depending on their brokerage account balance and status.
- Free premium stock reports from Morningstar. Gold members get unlimited access to Morningstar’s stock research reports. These reports are available for approximately 1,700 stocks and are updated frequently to reflect important company events.
- Level II market data from Nasdaq. Level II market data shows multiple bid and ask prices from Nasdaq for any given security so investors can better determine the availability or desire for a security at a certain price.
In my opinion, the hottest deal is still the 3% match on incoming 401k rollovers and IRA transfers. There is a 5-year lock-up required, but it’s still much more money than any other broker will give you. That deal is scheduled to end soon on April 30th, but they’ve literally added billions of IRA assets with this promo:
The second hottest deal is the new 1% unlimited deposit match, doled out over a 2-year period. It hasn’t rolled out yet, but 1% is pretty solid in terms of deposit bonuses.
Deposit boost is divided into 24 monthly payouts. To earn your full boost, hold or invest your brokerage deposits for 2 years. If you cancel Gold, you’ll lose future payouts you haven’t earned yet.
The third hottest deal is the 3% cash back credit card, even though the credit card is getting the most press attention. 3% cash back with no annual fee is certainly noteworthy, but the card also doesn’t have an upfront sign-up bonus (and technically requires Gold at $50/$60 a year). If you currently have a 2% cash back card and spend even $50,000 a year on your credit card, 1% more is only $500 a year in extra cash back. Meanwhile, I don’t spend that much on any single card (due to other better promos that will earn me $500+ upfront) and I already get 2.6% back from my Bank of America credit card with Preferred Rewards. I like the idea of simple 3% cash back, but not quite worth a credit pull for me (we’ll see how long it lasts, 3% has historically been too high to last).
If you are one of the first 5,000 people to refer 10 people to Robinhood Gold, apparently they will send you a credit card made of actual gold. Even though I am a private person and have nobody to impress, here is my referral link.
In my Robinhood app, I saw that they offered me $5 to “learn about” Robinhood Gold, so along with the free 30-day trial that’s two months of free Robinhood to test these features out. I haven’t taken advantage of the 3% IRA bonus, but am thinking about it harder now.
