Originally Posted by
diesteldorf
You are correct. You just need the MS Platinum, and the Cash Plus Account to get the Engagement Bonus. Paying the $55.00 monthly fee is fine, without locking up $25,000.
I am not sure about how everything will affect your 2023 engagement bonus, but the issue you may have is finding an MS employee that is willing to open a Cash Plus account for someone with no existing relationship. In the past, having some sort of existing relationship with MS was necessary, not only for getting the MS Platinum, but also for opening a Cash Plus account. It's one reason why you may need to open an AAA account and pay the fees for the first year. However, if you can find someone that is willing to help you, everything you said about qualifying for the engagement bonus is accurate. Good Luck.
Morgan Stanley is really aimed at customers with larger amounts of money at the bank, and when I opened my card(s) I found it quite difficult to navigate the various requirements as different people there (all extremely nice and trying to be helpful) said different things, and no one seemed to be really all that sure what the requirements were.
However, what I THINK is the correct answers to these questions are the following:
1) You need to talk to the virtual advisors group (as someone with a "small" amount of money to park at the bank - $25,000)
borgs
2) You DO need to have an additional account beyond just the CashPlus account. It is NOT possible to open a CashPlus account by itself.
3) You CAN open a CashPlus account AND an AAA account with zero balance at the same time, and this DOES satisfy the requirement of a "pre-existing relationship". Multiple virtual advisors told me this and one was kind enough to open both accounts for us (my wife and me). You need to deposit $25,000 in the CashPlus account to start with. However, you don't need to keep $25,000 in there unless you want to avoid the $55 fee (you knew this already).
4) Multiple virtual advisors told us if we do not put ANY money into the AAA account, they would not charge us a fee. They were wrong - I got charged a $150 fee after 1 year. HOWEVER....
5) You can ALSO use an IRA retirement account to satisfy the "existing relationship" rule. And, as it happens, because we had ALSO moved some retirement funds into Morgan Stanley, that ALSO qualifies as the "other account" for the purposes of allowing us to maintain the CashPlus account. When I called the virtual advisor department about this, they took the $150 fee off of my AAA account and supposedly were going to close my AAA account. However, here it is a few months later and my AAA account is still there, even though I don't need it anymore and they said they were going to close it. I suspect I will need to call them again to ask them again to close that account so I don't get charged $150 at the end of another year.
I find the fact that Morgan Stanley folks are all very helpful yet at the same time don't really know what the rules are for all this to be kind of charming in an old school sort of way. It's just designed for a different, less digital era of banking. For example: you cannot move funds between a cash balance and an interest-earning savings balance (both still inside the same CashPlus product) online. You actually have to call in. Originally I was going to keep some money in the savings to get interest, but my balance fluctuates up and down a lot and I wanted to be able to make sure i wasn't overdrawn on the "checking-like" balance. But because I have to actually CALL to move money between the two types of balances, I gave up on this as it was just too much hassle. But, I don't mind.