Yeah, if you're looking to clear bonuses, work up to where you have enough to do a substantial bonus. Why use up a first deposit bonus with a $40 deposit when you could wait until you have $100 or $200 or $500 and really get a boost out of it? You can use other sites for their bonuses other than just stars and ft. FTR's section has a few other sites that accept US players. Then just move your balance to stars once you can be at a level where you'll gather VPPs/FPPs at a decent rate.
Another option for right now is that stars just had a reload bonus with SCOOP promo going on, not sure if that's over? When they do one like that it's only 20%, but hey, why not?