When we first started looking into this a few years ago, we were able to quite easily find 12 separate charities we believed in and who allowed monthly contributions as low as $1. Donating to charity was the perfect scenario because we got the benefit of feeling like we were doing some good in this world while using the automatic payment setup to help us earn a really outstanding interest rate on auto pilot. Great feeling!

Unfortunately however, before long most of these charitable organizations stopped accepting monthly contributions under $5. Quickly, the same metrics that had applied to other vendors were affecting these charitable organizations as well.

Simply put, the transaction fees incurred from processing our monthly contribution were high enough that a $1 payment had become a negative rather than a positive for them.

It is understandable really. The reality is that when someone signs up to become a donor, the organization assumes that they are doing so because they are truly interested in the cause they are supporting. They are quickly added to that charity's mailing list and the organization will spend money mailing out brochures, information, highlights, a quarterly "thank you" note, etc.

This extra effort and cost is generally well worth their while because the average donor is contributing a lot more on a monthly basis than we are. However, if we are effectively contributing only $12 per year in $1 increments (and each $1 is eaten up significantly by credit card processing fees), then they are probably not even breaking even by the time they pay all their paper and postage fees to keep us as a donor.

With less and less $1 per month charities to choose from, we were forced to start choosing our partners based not necessarily on their purpose and goals but rather on whether or not they would actually accept $1 monthly payments. The nobility of this thing was quickly dissipating and we started to question whether our $1 monthly contributions were possibly doing more harm than good for these charities. NOT a great feeling!

It was clear that we needed to figure out a different direction to go that did not involve charitable giving.

(If the idea of combining this rewards checking strategy with giving to charity and contributing to the greater good piqued your interest and got you excited about the idea of giving, not to worry. It IS still possible to incorporate charitable giving into this strategy. While it will significantly lower your overall return, knowing that you are doing some real good in this world may just balance that out for you. If interested in pursuing this angle, click here.)

In our quest to devise and implement a strategy that would allow us the greatest return on our money in the easiest way possible, we were, unfortunately, back to square one. We still needed to find 12 separate vendors willing to charge us for a service that would generate $1 automatic payments every month. At this point it did not matter what product they were selling or whether it was worth anything to us. We just wanted to find 12 vendors willing to do this. Since we couldn't find even one vendor that would do this, finding 12 was definitely going to be a daunting task.

In a dream world, we'd be able to find just one vendor willing to pull 12 separate $1 payments from our card every month providing one stop shopping and allowing us to set the whole thing up REALLY quickly. If only this existed in the REAL world.

And then, like a ton of bricks, it hit us. What if WE just set up a payment system OURSELVES that would effectively do this? We already had a business license in ShowMeTheirMoney LLC so we could certainly set up and process payments. How difficult then would it be to set up a payment center where we could allow visitors to our website to easily set up 12 separate recurring monthly $1 payments? In return for their 12 monthly $1 payments we would straightforwardly offer them, drum roll please...absolutely nothing!

As long as we had no fixed costs (no product to produce, nothing to mail out) couldn't we accept $1 payments without losing any money? The answer was simple:

YES.

Taking this a bit further, we have been asked by many visitors to our website over the years what our motivation is in providing our Show-Me strategy since we don't charge a penny and explain the whole strategy in detail on this website and for free. We've never had a great answer to that question other than that it simply feels good to help people learn and think about money and borrowing in a different way.

But with this new realization that we would now be helping our readers MORE by charging them than by not charging them, we started putting the wheels in motion quickly. We went to friends and family, explained the concept to them and helped them set up rewards checking accounts. We then gave them access to a portion of our site where they were able to sign up quickly to have 12 separate "subscription" payments debited from their rewards checking credit card each month.

And it works!

For over a year now they have all been on auto pilot, meeting the monthly requirements of their accounts and earning returns more than 4 times the industry average.

And now it's your turn.

We have recently set up an area on our site where any user can now very easily sign up to become a "subscriber" to our website. It costs $1 per month and the payment can be set up to pull automatically from your rewards checking account credit card. Better yet, as soon as you set this automatic payment up, you can quickly and easily set up additional monthly payments in the same way. This is completely voluntary. You get nothing more by being a subscriber than you get by simply continuing to browse our site as a non subscriber.

Over the next few pages, we will go into detail on exactly where to find and sign up for the best paying rewards checking accounts, how to double check with the FDIC that the account is FDIC insured, and finally how to easily set up your automatic payments so that you can earn the high payout with no stress and put yourself on auto pilot.