Aspiration Announces New Online Accounts, Features

Lately I’ve been going through a lot of the reviews I’ve written for both Money@30 and Dyer News and making sure everything is up to date. Between pricing changes, new features being adding, and my opinions sometimes evolving as a result, it made sense to me to go through this process while the year is still relatively young. However, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a case where a review I was planning changed significantly before I even had a chance to write it. Well, that’s what happened with Aspiration as, recently, the online bank announced some major changes worth noting.

I actually signed up for an Aspiration account about a month ago and briefly mentioned it when writing about how my wife and I were mapping out our money flow chart. Beyond the 1% APY that institution offers, what really attracted me to the company was their free ATM anywhere in the world policy where, true to what it sounds like, the bank will reimburse any ATM fee you incur domestically or abroad. Thus, I had intended on testing this feature when I head to Hong Kong next month and sharing my experience after that.

Thankfully that aspect of Aspiration isn’t changing. Furthermore I was delighted to see that they’re upping their APY to 2.00%. That said, while taking a closer look, there are a couple of details to note regarding that offer. While the 1% APY was guaranteed under the old system, users will need to do one of two things in order to earn their 2% APY: 1) make a deposit of at least $1 into your Aspiration Spend or Aspiration Save account in a given month or 2) have a balance of at least $10,000 or higher for a minimum of one day per month. Admittedly that first goal is fairly easy to attain, although failing to meet either of these requirements will result in you missing a month of interest.

There are a few other changes coming to Aspiration as well. For example the bank will now offer cash back on purchases made with their debit card. At the same time, several things are remaining the same, such as the banks “pay what’s fair” monthly fee policy. Additionally, speaking of debit cards, current account holders like myself will still be able to use their existing cards and retain the same account number.

On the whole, it sounds like the changes coming to Aspiration are a win. Having not spent too much time under the old system, it may be hard to say for sure but, considering the main selling point for me is staying intact and there’s now an opportunity to earn even more in interest, I can’t see myself finding complaints. That said, we’ll have to wait for my full review of Aspiration to see if these changes make this online banking option more attractive.