Faster Funding of your Brokerage Account

Education
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I’m going to expand on this post at a later date but want to create this as a placeholder to put some info while it’s on my mind.

Deposit Settlement Hack(s)

If you use a broker that offers a debit card or ACH deposit information for your brokerage account, you can bypass the normal settlement period of 4-5 business days with a couple tricks.

  1. Initiate Deposit from your Bank [ACH Required] - While initiating the transfer from your brokerage account requires 4-5 days of settlement, initiating the transfer from your bank (using the “pay a person” or “transfer” feature) actually bypasses this settlement period and allows the funds to be fully tradeable the following business day. In order to do this, you just need the routing and account numbers from your brokerage account. The benefit of this method is that it’s only 1 day slower than a wire transfer (wires are typically available within 30 minutes) and saves you the $15+ dollar fee.

  2. Crypto/Cash to Brokerage [Debit Card Required] - This second trick comes from CashApp (possibly other money services but this is the one I’m familiar with). If you have a CashApp account with Bitcoin activated, you can cash out the balance (after selling the Bitcoin obviously) to your brokerage account’s debit card and the funds are available and fully traceable next day just as an ACH initiated from your bank account would be ($1.50 fee with instant deposit to a debit card). This means that if you have Crypto, you can transfer it to your CashApp wallet (as Bitcoin) and get it into your brokerage account without any added hassle. This of course works for just cash in your CashApp wallet as well, but I think the more appealing thing to some is a quicker method of transferring Crypto than the slow deposits that some exchanges have.

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Ugh, I was trying to look for this earlier.
Anybody else here from NY?
This is the 2nd time I tried Wiring, but the funds still didn’t go through same day.

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I’m in PA and have yet to have a successful wire. The ACH may be the trick I need. Slowly transferring my accounts to more cash

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(YMMV with other brokers and in other countries)

In the UK depositing in GBP with IBKR, they only give you the wire transfer option for the deposit expectation. But as long as they provide alternate details such as the acc/sort code you can just use the “pay a person/company” as mentioned in OP post using your mobile/online banking and the transfer goes through without a hitch and no need to pay wire fees.

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Second this, can confirm it’s works and is likely the easiest method for depositing GBP to IBKR from the UK.

If you want to trade options and convert to USD you will still need to wait through the 1-2 day settlement period.

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I can confirm this works, after getting my bank setup to interact with TD Ameritrade - was able to initiate the transfer from the bank side and get credit the next day. Another faster funding trick, that I can only currently confirm works on TD Ameritrade at least: in my experience if you deposit $1000 or less into a cash account (non-margin), even from the TDA side, the money is available to use for stock or options buys the next day.

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