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Sounds like easy money: go test drive a Smart Car and get a $25 Target gift card. So I decided to drop into the Smart Center in Sugarland, Texas to do a test drive and qualify for the gift card. What a waste of time that was! Turns out they only do test drives between 9am and 2pm and by appointment only, meaning the only way I or any other person with a typical job working business hours could do a test drive is to take off of work. So I guess if they only do test drives during a short window during business hours the target market for these things must be unemployed pot-smoking hippies eating granola and wearing Birkenstocks?
Moral of the story is that Smart Center Sugarland sucks, much like the cars they sell. Unless you are going for that Euro-trash chic look you can certainly find something better than these glorified go-carts.
Right now through December 31, 2009 (yup, today) Lending Club is offering borrowers a $150 Amazon gift certificate for a new loan. Here’s the details from the email I received:
Have you considered applying for a low, fixed-rate loan from Lending Club?
As a Lending Club investor you already know that funding loans is confidential, quick & easy. As a holiday bonus to current Lending Club Members, you’ll get a $150 gift card to Amazon if you get a loan in the month of December!*
Whether you are looking to transfer credit card balances or consolidate other debt, a loan from Lending Club can be the perfect solution. Here are just some of the benefits of a Lending Club loan:
Low, fixed interest rates. Unlike credit cards, your interest rate will never change.
No hidden fees. Period.
36 equal monthly payments. Payments automatically deducted from your bank account.
No pre-payment penalties. You can pay off the loan at any time with no penalty.
Private & Confidential. Your personal information and identity is kept completely private and confidential.
Apply in just 3 minutes and get an instant decision >>>
As a Lending Club investor you will need to create a new account, using an alternative email address, to apply for a low, fixed rate loan.
Sincerely,
The Lending Club Team
There is no prepayment penalty on the loan, however there is a small origination fee based on your credit rating. With what they referred to as an A2 rating, my fee was $12.50 on a $1000 loan. $1000 is the minimum you can borrow. The process was pretty easy and I’ll end up netting $137.50 less whatever interest accrues on the loan in the short time before I pay it off (a few days at 7.4% shouldn’t be much). Slick deal!
Click here to apply and get in on this deal. Enter in the referral code Member_596953 and you’ll earn us a bonus as well and help support this site. If you want to sign up as a lender with that code you’ll get a $40 bonus, but I don’t think we earn anything from the referral.
Many of us have them: unused credit cards that we opened for whatever reason that we don’t use anymore and just have stuffed in a sock drawer or a desk. We may keep them because we think it will hurt our credit scores to cancel them, or for emergencies, or just because we are too lazy to call and cancel them. Now it looks like the credit card companies’ never ending quest for profits could make keeping these cards rather expensive.
According to this article on Bloomberg, Fifth Third Bank has instituted a $19 charge for NOT using your card. Additionally, Citi is starting to charge some customers with low activity levels on their accounts higher interest rates. On top of that many issuers such as Bank of America are starting to experiment with charging annual fees on credit card accounts where there may not have been one before.
For those of us that have built up a pile of unused accounts over the years, this may be a good reminder to cancel many of those accounts we no longer use. It helps reduce the possibility of being blindsided by fees and reduces you risk of fraudulent activity as well. On top of that, it eliminates all those mailings from the credit card company and leaves you with fewer accounts to have to track.
Will there be a credit score hit? Perhaps, although it may be smaller than you would expect, especially if you have several other accounts that are open and active. Just remember that the length of your credit history and the percentage of your credit lines that are utilized are the main factors here, so it is better to keep older and larger accounts. Two things to consider doing are to request changing your card to a different program instead of closing the account entirely and consolidating existing credit lines with the same issuer.
Since we have no plans to apply for credit in the near future, we made the decision that downsizing to only a handful of accounts is our best course of action. The extra peace and security that comes from having fewer accounts is worth the hit of a few credit score points in my opinion.
Anyone who has known me over the years knows that I usually have a lot of magazines laying around my house. However, this personal finance blogger has made a decision that may surprise many: I am not renewing any of my personal finance magazine subscriptions. I have several reasons for doing this besides eliminating the expense:
- I don’t care about their investing advice, which is about a third of the magazines’ content. In any given personal finance magazine, typically the middle third of the magazine is dedicated to columns on mutual fund and stock picks. I don’t even bother reading these columns, mainly because I am a proponent of index funds as opposed to managed mutual funds. Also, in the digital age if you are getting your stock picks from a print magazine you are probably way too late to the game. Think about how many people know about the virtues of these great stocks by the time it makes it into a printed magazine, and if you are reading it in print how many people read it in an online edition before you and how many other people are reading the exact same article you are.
- Most personal finance magazine articles are geared towards those with relatively low levels of financial literacy. This may sound very arrogant of me, but one of the things that drives me nuts with a lot of personal finance magazines is that it seems like most of the content is geared towards the Dave Ramsey struggling with the basics crowd with very little geared towards those of us that already have the basics of personal finance down and are looking for ways to reach that next level of financial savvy. This is where I think the personal finance blogosphere is filling a huge gap left by the traditional media. I can learn a lot more from browsing a day’s worth of postings on pfblogs.org than I can from an entire year’s worth of Money magazine in part because…
- So much of personal finance magazine content is repetitive. How many times do I need to read that rewards credit cards don’t make sense if I have to carry a balance because of higher interest rates, or that energy efficient appliances can save me money in the long run? These are just a few of the topics that seem to get written about over and over in personal finance magazines. Can’t they at some point come up with some original insight?
- So much of the content is available online for free. I started finding recently that by the time my print copy of the personal finance magazines would arrive in the mail and I got the chance to sit down and read them I had already seen most of the content elsewhere. This is because most of the articles in these magazines are posted online on their own websites, often before the print magazine actually hits newsstands or subscriber mailboxes.
Ultimately I think the better financial education can be found online on personal finance blogs and forum, so personal finance magazines only produce unnecessary expense and clutter.
Everyone is looking for a little extra cash around the holidays, and here is a great opportunity for some easy money. Chase is offering a $125 bonus for opening a free checking account with direct deposit. To get in on the offer you will need to logon to your existing Chase online account and click on this link. There you will get a coupon for a $125 bonus when you open a Chase checking account between now and January 15, 2010. It is best to print the coupon early since Chase often takes down these coupons before the expiration date.
Here are the main points to remember on this offer:
1. Minimum deposit of $100 in new funds not currently held by Chase.
2. The $125 bonus will be deposited into your account within 10 days of your initial direct deposit.
3. Within 60 calendar days of account opening, you must initiate a monthly direct deposit which includes payroll, pension, Social Security, or other government benefits.
4. There is a limit of 1 personal checking account-related reward per customer, per calendar year.
5. Your checking account must remain open for a minimum of 6 months, or the reward will be debited from the account at closing.
6. Chase Checking has no monthly service fee when you have a direct deposit or 5 or more debit card purchases post to your account each statement period.
I have done these bonuses multiple times without issue. You can read about previous Chase bonus offers here.
No direct deposit? No worries! Read about how to fake the direct deposit and get the bonus money on this post.
Want to make another easy $50? Open an ING Direct account! Details here.
As you can tell by a look at my homepage, it has been a while since my last post. By brother-in-law posted a link to the annual pumpkin contest in October, but my last real post before that was September. I’m sorry for the inactivity, but I do have some good excuses:
1. In early October, my wife gave birth to our third child. Since we already have two-year-old twins, this has made life much more hectic.
2. Around that same time, we signed a purchase contract on a house outside of Houston. Dealing with Realtors, mortgage companies, and the like is always a time consuming experience.
3. We closed on said house in mid-November and moved in before Thanksgiving. With three small children and a 4 bedroom house full of crap, this isn’t an easy task. In fact, we are still unpacking stuff a month later.
So there are the excuses. I will work on some new postings inspired by current trends in the financial world and our own experiences with purchasing our new home. Stay tuned!
Hi folks! The 2009 Pumpkin Contest has a new sponsor this year BurgerTyme.com seeking out the best burgers in the World!
But Today we are seeking out the best Pumpkins in the world.
Please visit HERE to place your vote!
http://www.burgertyme.com/2009-annual-halloween-pumpkin-contest/
Nearly all of us fight the battle against clutter, and allowing clutter to reign can cost you financial in a number of ways. The most common one that comes to mind is paying bills late and being slapped with fees because the bill got buried underneath some pile on your desk.
Here is an unusual real-life example of clutter costing money. My wife’s great aunts, both in their eighties, share a house that had become an enormous mountain of clutter. Well unfortunately one of the great aunts fell and broke her hip, and to allow her to be able to move around at home with medical equipment and such the house needed to be decluttered. The Louisiana family spent over a week helping to get the house in condition, sorting through mounds of old clothing, mail, and other items.
They found a lot of interesting things in this decluttering exercise, perhaps the most frustrating of which was a $60 paper gift certificate to Maison Blanche department stores. It was piled amongst some books and other gifts that they had received many Christmas seasons ago, still in the gold gift envelope. Never heard of Maison Blanche? There is a good reason for that: it was bought out in the early 1990s by Dillards and has operated under the Dillards name ever since.
I have sent an email to Dillards customer service to see if they can in some way honor the certificate or exchange it for a Dillards gift card:
To whom it may concern:
As long as Dillard’s Department Stores have been in business and knowing the many other department stores that have been acquired and added into the Dillard’s family of stores, I am hopeful you can appreciate this story and assist with our request.
As you are probably aware, Dillard’s has purchased a number of department stores with locations in south Louisiana over the years, including Maison Blanche stores in the early 1990s. Considering how long it has been since that acquisition, imagine our surprise when we recently came across a gift
certificate to Maison Blanche!
While helping to declutter our great aunt’s home after her recent hip surgery, we found an unused $60 gift certificate buried amongst books and other items she had received as Christmas gifts that year. Obviously there are no longer any Maison Blanche stores at which to redeem the certificate, and in the age of gift cards we would likely receive very odd looks trying to redeem a paper certificate in a Dillard’s store. However, as the certificate bears no expiration date we would like to be able to redeem the certificate or have a gift card issued in its place. Please advise as to how we can redeem this very old certificate.
Sincerely,
BillyOceansEleven
Unfortunately my email received only a standard “we will forward it to the proper executive for handling” response, and after two weeks we haven’t heard anything else so I am assuming the certificate is ultimately worthless (thanks for all the help there, Dillards!). So there is a real-life, albeit unusual, example of how clutter can cost you money.
In an effort to simplify my finances a bit, I decided to finally rollover my 401(k) from the job I was laid off from last year. I had put it off waiting for the old employer’s last annual match to hit this past February, and then put it off after my experience rolling over the last employer’s 401(k) in 2008. The last rollover required the old plan to send the check to me and for me to send in the check and other paperwork to Vanguard. Since I requested the rollover only a few days before Hurricane Ike came and knocked out power for nearly two weeks, this ended up being a very long process but one that ultimately saved me a loss of 9.1% since the power outage coincided with the beginning of the financial collapse.
Anyway, I finally called Vanguard to initiate the rollover today and was pleasantly surprised with how easy and quick the process was. Granted part of this was due to my old plan’s willingness to send the distribution directly to Vanguard, but the whole thing took less than 17 minutes. I simply called Vanguard and let them know I wanted to roll over balances in an old employer’s plan and provided them with the custodian name and phone number, and they conferenced in the old plan representative and provided them with the check payee name and forwarding instructions. This won’t even require any paperwork on my part. Super easy!
Like I’ve mentioned before, I am a fan of Vanguard’s funds because of their low expense ratios and the makeup of their life cycle fund I chose for my rollover IRA. As evidenced by my experience today, their customer service is excellent. I would highly recommend Vanguard.
Rollover IRAs are a great alternative to leaving balances in an old 401(k) and can result in more investment choices and potentially lower fees. Just make sure you request a direct rollover and not a cash distribution or the old plan will be required to withhold taxes from the amount.
Being a blog that focuses on personal finance, we talk a lot about money here. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that this blogger wants to make some money off of this blog. I’ve tried a few things before with very limited success (I’ve probably made enough to cover the costs of maintaining the site). Which leads to the obvious question: “Why?” Low traffic levels and poor ad placement probably have a bit to do with the limited success. The lack of selling of services and products as part of my content is probably another cause.
After thinking of what I’m doing wrong, I started thinking about the one thing that has been moderately successful: ING referral links. What makes this different? A few things:
- The referral offer provides a benefit to the reader ($25) and to me as the blogger ($10).
- I’ve talked about online savings accounts in other posts on the site and it fits well with the overall theme.
- I am actually a user of the service I am promoting, have first-hand knowledge of the service, and lend some level of credibility to the offering by posting customer referral links rather than banner ads or other forms of affiliate advertising.
That third point I think is the most important, and will shape my money-making efforts on this blog going forward. I maintain a small section on the right hand side of the page with rotating ads, and in that space I will only promote products and services that I use and would honestly recommend to others. To further emphasize that I use and believe in the product or service, I will post customer referral links to these services when available. Hopefully by doing this I can provide information on products that are more relevant to my users.
At this point I have two services I am promoting. The first is the aforementioned ING Direct Orange Savings and Electric Orange Checking accounts. I have been an ING customer for years and believe that they provide a great product in the Orange Savings account, although I would like to see their interest rate a little higher. The other service I am promoting is Coupons.com, which I use quite often to print coupons to sweeten the grocery and drugstore deals I c0me across. As expensive as Sunday newspapers are becoming and the hassle of keeping up with the inserts, this is becoming my primary source for coupons. I’ll probably add more in the future as I find referral or affiliate programs for services and products I use.
Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered about the promotional links I put on here or were curious how you can support the site, hopefully this post helps answer your questions. I don’t ever expect to make enough here to quit my day job, but I would be very appreciative of your support through checking out these services nonetheless.
I will note that unless this strategy becomes very successful, I will likely keep the Google Adsense bars on the site for the time being. This doesn’t bring in a lot of money (I finally receached the $100 payout level about a month ago after about 18 months of using the service), but every little bit helps.
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