As you may know, this whole AdWords campaign is being done on a very limited budget.  To someone else starting this little business, $100 might be considered chump change.  But to Kate and I, this is a lot of money…and it is our entire marketing budget!  So I had an idea a few weeks back.  Why not turn a few dollars into a few more before starting up the ads?

Noooo, I’m not talking about going to Vegas.  Although I’m sure that would be fun!  I’m talking about taking $100 and turning it into $150 by doing something I already need to do.

As I looked down my list of to-do’s, I could see that I needed to open up a checking account.  Of course we could simply use our personal checking account, but I think that it’s best to keep the business and personal finances separate, so I’m not going to do that.  And I know I’ve read some blog entries out there in the past about bank account giving away free money for opening an account, so I went hunting.

Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog has lots of great posts about finding free money, so I went there and read some great articles that totally sidetracked me.  After hours of reading lots of great posts on his site (I don’t know Jonathan personally, but he seems like a good guy from reading his blog!), I decided to get back to the task at hand, and to open a Wachovia checking account. 

Opening the account was extremely easy.  I filled out some basic info, linked another account and transferred over $100.  As promised, in a very short time, there was a $50 bonus deposited to my account.  Voila!  Free money!  And I needed a checking account anyway, right?

We never intend to write physical checks with the account, so I did not order checks.  So the account is really, truly, free.  I think they charge $16.00 for checks if I actually wanted them, but I don’t so who cares! 

So I now have a $150 budget for advertising instead of $100.  Life is good.

Update: as Mike-S noted, I could have opened up a Citibank savings account, earned almost 5% interest, and still received a bonus.  The only down side to this would be the limit to the number of times I can move money in and out of the account.  It too has a $50.00 sign-up bonus.  Doh!