Another money sale, and more outside-the-box thinking

WE LIKE BUYING MONEY AT A DISCOUNT: Thanks to Frequent Miler we learn that OfficeMax is having a sale: $10 off when you buy two $50 MasterCard gift cards. Each card has a $5 activation fee, so it sounds like a wash… except apparently OfficeMax is paying out $10 on each card, not just for every two cards. That means you can buy $100 for just $90. Can you rinse and repeat? That depends on how tight you are with your local OfficeMax staff.

****UPDATE: This deal is now dead. OfficeMax is now only paying out $10 per two cards. Lesson learned: act quickly when money goes on sale.

GET POINTS FOR PAYING TAXES: Another good FM post recently on paying taxes with your credit card. There are some services that let you pay income taxes with your credit card, but the fees tend to negate any benefits accrued from the points you earn. Here’s how you get around that:

1. Buy Amex gift cards directly from Amex using the BigCrumbs (1.4% cashback) or TopCashBack (1.5%) portal.
2. Reduce gift card shipping costs by $5.95 using promo code AFLQ12013.
3. Pay with a non-Citi rewards card (Citi classifies these transactions as cash advances).
4. Pay 1.89% in fees on your tax payment at PayUSATax.

Kind of a pain, but worthwhile you have large tax payments. Read the whole thing if you want to do this.

MAKING MONEY WITH HAUNTED HOUSES: There’s often a premium attached to going where others fear to tread. Take this guy in Hong Kong, for example. Apparently folks on Hong Kong are superstitious about buying residences where the tenant died an unnatural death. This left an opportunity:

Ng Goon Lau, 62 years old, [has] made a career—and a tidy fortune—braving the supernatural. For more than 10 years, he says he has bought and sold apartments where a tenant died an unnatural death, paying a third less than the market price and later selling at a healthy profit. Meantime, he says, he rents to expatriates, who tend to be less superstitious than locals.

Unfortunately for him, the current real estate boom there means prices on haunted houses have been bid up close to parity with non-haunted houses. Alas…

ANOTHER EMPLOYEE GETS IN TROUBLE FOR THINKING DIFFERENT: We recently brought you the story of the hard-working public servant who was fired for having two full-time jobs. But this story is even better: an employee held multiple programming jobs… and outsourced everything to contractors in China. The full article is here. The highlights:

Employee profile –mid-40’s software developer versed in C, C++, perl, java, Ruby, php, python, etc. Relatively long tenure with the company, family man, inoffensive and quiet. Someone you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator. For the sake of case study, let’s call him “Bob.”

…As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less that one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him. Authentication was no problem, he physically FedExed his RSA token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average 9 to 5 work day. Investigators checked his web browsing history, and that told the whole story.

A typical ‘work day’ for Bob looked like this:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

11:30 a.m. – Take lunch

1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.

2:00 – ish p.m Facebook updates – LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.

5:00 p.m. – Go home

….Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually. The best part? Investigators had the opportunity to read through his performance reviews while working alongside HR. For the last several years in a row he received excellent remarks. His code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building.

Awesome. (H/T: Fatwallet Finance)

CHEAP PIZZA: 50% off online orders at Papa John’s when you use the code PAPA50. (H/T: Slickdeals)