LIFEMILES 40K BONUS: Thanks to Gary at View From The Wing for letting us know about this 40,000 mile signup bonus currently being offered for the Avianca LifeMiles card from US Bank. Before you decide you’re not interested in this card, take a look at this. I don’t know any more than what’s in that post, so you’re on you’re own in trying it out.
$400 FROM CHASE: Hustler Money Blog points out that there are coupons on Ebay that let you get $400 for opening a checking and a savings account with Chase, though please note that $15,000 is required for the bonus.
DELTA AWARD PROGRAM CHANGES: Am I the only one who just doesn’t care about any of this? It seems like the biggest impact is on people who do mileage runs, which is a small minority of a small minority. Southwest has a revenue-based system, yet plenty of free flights are available via their credit cards. And from a travel-hacking perspective, the Delta program wasn’t all the great to begin with. Yawn!
TAX SOFTWARE REVIEW: Speaking of New York, the times has a review of three software packages: TurboTax, H&R Block, and TaxAct. Their conclusion:
If you want ease and speed — always a relative judgment when struggling with taxes — TurboTax is the choice. It imported the most information — W-2s, investment reports and all of the nonnumeric entries from our 2012 return — and did so with just a few clicks. Mr. Meighan said the program could import information from more than 400,000 outside sources.
I haven’t used the other programs, but I’ve used TurboTax for years and I love it.
HOW MUCH MONEY DO NEW YORKERS MAKE?: Based on the salaries I’m seeing, the answer would be “not nearly enough” for such a high-cost area. An interesting read from New York magazine:
“It’s not so bad as it used to be,” says Lorraine Shanley, a publishing recruiter, “before Harry Potter.” Publishers have been suffering brain drain, with promising talent defecting to the Internet or other more glamorous businesses. Random House’s recent move to a $30,000 starting salary may have turned the tide…
You may do better in garbage-hauling:
City-employed sanitation workers — whose job requires a high-school diploma or a G.E.D. — start at $27,842 and peak, after five years, at $44,441 (though raking in overtime increases this “significantly”). Not paltry pay — just about $4,000 less than a cop or a teacher makes — except that in the private sector, without the diploma, sanitation workers start out pulling in $44,200.
…but at least you’re doing better than most of the people in show biz:
“You never feel that you’ve got enough money to live,” says Sean Martin Hingston, a featured dancer in the Broadway hit Contact, who’s been earning a living as an actor, singer, and dancer since he was 18. “When we startedContact, we were doing a workshop, making $311 a week. Now that it’s a hit, I’ve been stashing the money away because I don’t know when there’s going to be a drought.”
The minimum weekly salary for actors on Broadway last year was $1,215, and Off Broadway minimums range from $440 to $763. But Actors’ Equity confirms that fewer than 15 percent of its dues-paying members work during any given week and the average annual earning for an actor in 1999 was $14,936.
That’s all for now, have a great weekend!
When I was exploring possible cities to move to a few years ago I was surprised to see how expensive cities like New York (or San Fran or LA) were. I always assumed, yeah stuff is more expensive there but people get paid more, so it all kind of evens out.
Not even close. They do get paid more (I seem to recall about 30% more than the national average) but the cost of living is nearly TWICE the average.
My home city of Cincinnati was actually pretty good – salaries were about 7% above average and cost of living was about 10% below. From what I remember, Dallas and Houston were the best among the bigger cities that I looked at
The 40k Avianca offer looks dead to me. Anybody getting it to work? There is also a $150 offer from Chase which doesn’t require a coupon code for eBay.