My Money Blog

Plynk is a standalone brokerage app that is quietly a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Fidelity Investments. It seems to be a place where they can experiment with a younger target audience with tools like automatic recurring investments, simulated trading, educational tools, etc. They’ve also offered a few worthwhile bonuses in the app. Plynk just underwent another design reboot, and – surprise! – the interface now looks a lot more like Robinhood.

Plynk also just added a new promotion called Dividend Match (hat tip DoC), which pays you a bonus of 25% of the dividends your taxable brokerage account holdings earn each calendar month, up to $250 max per year. Important highlights:

• Dividend match is available to both existing and new customers. No opt-in required.
• Eligible shares. For common stock and non-daily accrual mutual funds and ETFs, you must hold for at least 30 calendar days prior to the ex-dividend date to receive the Bonus. For mutual funds and ETFs that accrue daily interest and generally pay a dividend at the end of each month, there is no required holding period.
• Formula: Eligible_Shares × Dividend_Per_Share × 25% subject to the $250 annual cap on Bonus amount.
• The annual cap resets on January 1 of each year.

An interesting bonus that would seem to incentivize customers to maintain their (dividend-paying) holdings at Plynk. The S&P 500 dividend yield is only around 1% now, but if you moved over around $100,000 and normally would get $1,000 in annual dividends, now you could get an extra $250 in dividends.

iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF (SGOV) is a daily accrual ETF that holds short-term Treasury bills and can be a useful approximation of cash. Right now, SGOV has a 30-day SEC yield of 3.54%. If you got a 25% bonus on that yield, you would be getting 4.43%.

You could also do this with Vanguard 0-3 Month Treasury Bill ETF (VBIL) which has a slightly lower expense ratio and thus slightly higher SEC yields, but a tiny bit higher bid/ask spread at times (although it is pretty much one cent like SGOV).

You’d have to hold a little over $28,000 in SGOV/VBIL in order to reach the $1,000 in annual dividends to max out this promo.

I’m guessing the money would be reported as 1099-MISC, so the tax rate would also be higher than normal interest.

This would be nice if it was a permanent or guaranteed feature. I’m considering it especially as I already have an open account, but I’m afraid Plynk will end the promo quickly even though it is meant as an ongoing offer with no set expiration date.