A Blogger’s Bank – Review of Beam Finance App (2-4% APY)

I’ve been in Beam beta for several months but it is so uninspiring that it took me a while to force myself intro writing this article.

https://meetbeam.com/?r=CASH-Sy-UCRHpKf

if you’re interested in using this app even after reading this review then feel free to use my link to signup. I shall appreciate your contribution to momentarily boost my APY.

Don’t get me wrong, when Beam was first introduced it was a neat concept. They were guaranteeing at least 2.0 % a year and that was a fantastic rate…at that time. Today, you effortlessly find around 2% APY on various saving accounts from several banks. If you’re the type who likes to shop around for a good APY then Beam was never for you because it isn’t terribly difficult to get 2.5-5% APY (see this post by Doctor of Credit).

About Beam

• It’s a financial app where you move/withdraw money from a traditional bank.
• It is FDIC insured.
• There is no fee associated with using Beam.
• There is no website login either.
• It is currently in Beta.
• The Beta version allows you to earn 2 or above APY on up to $15,000 (more on this later).
• It’s currently in invite only mode so you may have to sit in queue for a while.
• As of right now, you can’t do bill pay with Beam. If you want to use the money available on Beam, you’ll have to withdraw it to your traditional bank first.

Beam is a Bloggers “Bank”

Your daily base APY is 2.0% but you can boost your daily APY with something called “billie”. You can claim 1 billie per day and you get 3 billies per referral. Your billies will stick around in your account until it is used. You can redeem 4 billies per day. The billies do stack to give a big boost but next day your daily APY will go back to 2.0 APY again.

So why is this a bloggers bank? Because the only type of people who marginally benefit from Beam are those who’ve continuous flow of new referred users. For the rest of us, your best daily APY won’t be anything amazing.

Here is a list of APY billie had given me (YMMV):

0.67, 0.50, 0.48, 0.31, 0.74, 0.45, 0.73, 0.35, 0.55, 0.30, 0.68 0.47, 0.44, 0.55, 0.63, 0.60, 0.29, 0.34, 0.61, 0.66, 0.40, 0.42, 0.54, 0.54, 0.46, 0.33, 0.56, 0.33, 0.49, 0.65

An average APY of additional 0.65% (i.e. net 2.65%) over 30 days wasn’t too bad but opening an app daily to click on a billie was rather annoying. To make it clear, you can get boosted over 1% (I got additional 1.70% or so boost today but then I also got 0.05% boost today) but on my initial 30 tries, the highest I got was 0.74.

So why is this a bloggers bank? It can’t be difficult for big bloggers/sites to average 1 additional billie/day through an invite. If someone can boost their APY twice a day then that’s pretty good. Imagine if one can boost APY 3-4 times a day.

When the app is fully released, you’ll likely see it blow up in blogosphere. Now you know why.

If you’re still interested in Beam then feel free to contribute to this blog by using my referral link above. My 10 cents of balance could certainly use some boost 😉

Closing Thoughts

I had not used this app in a long time and that is mostly because I find the concept of claiming/activating APY booster on daily basis to be annoying. I understand why it is there but still it’s annoying. I do like that I can save boosters and use multiple of them at the same time.

Now to be fair, another major reason for why I’m not using Beam is because I currently have  a trial account which supposedly limits 2%+ APY on up to $400 deposit.  Booooo.