Looks like you must set up direct deposit of $50 or more per month to avoid the $5/mo maintenance fee, and you must "load" (different from direct deposit? not sure) $500 per month. Their "simple" fees sure seem like marketing doublespeak.
Nonetheless, it's risk-free $300/yr of interest on $5000, and FDIC insured.
You could even forego the fee-avoiding hassle, accept the $5/mo fee, plus the $10 fee to withdraw via check when you're done with the account, and you'd still be reaping almost 4.8% APY. But I guess you do have to direct deposit *some* money to qualify for the 6%.
I wonder how long it will last?
Update Aug 30 2012:
Instead of making every new reader read through the whole thread to figure out my gradual discovery of some tricks (and some changes made by Mango), I'll summarize them here:
- You can bump the limit to $10k by having your spouse/partner open an account
- You can actually open an arbitrary number of cards to further increase the limit, but each one needs a unique phone number.
- Sign up
- Find your Mango routing+account numbers on the direct deposit "form" on their website
- Use ING Person2Person or other ACH "push" function to put in $5005 (the account starts at negative $5 to cover the first month's fee)
- In Mango, move the $5000 to the savings account. (We had to move $4090, and then $10, due to some weird glitch)
- Set up monthly ACH push for $50 (I do it manually each month with ING Person2Person)
- Each month, $5 will be debited for the monthly fee.
- Each month, move the remaining money from the prepaid account into the savings account OR spend it with the card to avoid accumulating unwanted money in the account OR send it to another one of your Mango accounts that has room to spare. (the portion of the balance over $5000 in the savings account only earns 0.1%, so I try to keep each account at exactly $5000 or less.)
- Open additional accounts to increase the amount of money that can earn 6% and repeat the above process for each. (Each account needs a unique phone number.)