My Financial Journey

Late last week I received a letter for both of my Chase Cash Plus Rewards credit cards stating that I would no longer be earning 5% back for my purchases made at superstores, warehouse clubs, and discount stores. This really sucks because my family and I do almost all of our shopping at Wal-Mart and it was just amazing how fast we racked up the rewards. Nearly all our Christmas shopping, home supplies, etc getting 5% back was a big deal.
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Well my blog has been around for over a year now so I guess I can start highlighting some posts from a year ago. I think this is kind of nice because I can occasionally see what I was thinking a year ago. See if my attitudes have changed, if I’ve learned anything new since then, etc. I probably won’t do this too often as well my blog hit a dry spell for a while last summer, but one year ago this week was a pretty good one for my blog.

• It’s common sense, but I’m an idiot - realized how to do simple math to decide whether to pay off HELOC or not
• $100,000 by Age 30 - came up with my first financial goal. It’s been a popular post for me.
• PFBlogs.org - Site was born about this time last year and MFJ has been a friend of ever since - best aggregator around
• Credit cards better for my net worth than high yield savings like ING Direct? - Realized the joys of rewards cards
• Wal-Mart wallet photos for a whole lot less - Method I came up with to save money on wallet photos.

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Well I had an experience with my Chase Cash plus Rewards card lately that got me thinking. Well you know that bright idea I had with purchasing about 3 playstation 3s at launch and trying to turn them around for a profit on Ebay, well yeah it failed miserably and I ended up returning every single one of them shortly after Christmas. Well here’s where the arbitrage comes in. I bought them at a normal Wal-mart so when I purchased them I got 1% cash back. Well I ended up returning them to a Super-Walmart on which I get 5% cash back on all my purchases because it’s considered a grocery store. Well when I returned them they took 5% off my rewards statement for each one. All in all I lost $72 cash because of my return process.

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Seeing as how I just opened a new Chase Cash Plus Rewards Card, I figured if I’m going to do the balance transfer thing I might as well apply for that card right now too so that the ding on my credit score all happens at one time. I believe they group credit requests in a short period of time as one single inquiry, dunno we’ll see.

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Well I maxed the $300 annual reward limit on my Chase Cash plus rewards card and I was dissappointed to find out that you can no longer get the card online anymore. Well through a friend I found out that you can still get this card by going into the actual Chase branches. I did so this afternoon and have my 2nd Cash Plus Rewards card on the way.

The great thing about this card is that it pays 5% back on gas and groceries and 1% on everything else. What’s even better about this card is that it treats every single purchase at my local Super Walmart as Groceries and thus I get 5% back on all my Walmart purchases. Seeing as how I am already a Walmart junky this comes in very handy. (more…)

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When we bought our house last summer, I ended up taking out a $16,500 Home Equity Line of Credit to satisfy the 20% down rule and eliminate any PMI charges and secure a lower rate on the 30 year fixed mortgage I was taking out. Well I’ve widdled this down to a little under $6,000 in the first year, but I’ve kind of hit a wall now. Basically last two months I haven’t been able to make anything but the minimum payment on my HELOC and well the damn interest rate keeps going up, so I am thinking about playing the balance transfer game to pay off the HELOC for at least the next 12 months go give us some breathing room and save us about $42 a month in interest charges stemming from the HELOC. On top of that technically my HELOC will owe my Roth IRA accounts about $8,000 come Jan 1, so my HELOC still has some bite in it at this point and I’d be earning interest off of some credit card companies money rather than paying the mortgage company hard earned cash each month.

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