$25 WALMART GIFT CARD WHEN YOU SEND $100: If you need to send money to a foreign country, there’s a Xoom/Walmart promotion right here. Limit one $25 gift card per customer. (Thanks to MaximizingMoney)
MEANWHILE: “Who’s to say what’s right these days, what with all our modern ideas and products?”-Homer Simpson
Who’s to say what’s right these days? Bloggers, that’s who! Specifically, this one, as recent events have taught us some important lessons. Let’s start with the closure of Perkstreet:
PerkStreet Financial, an upstart quasi-bank that aimed to offer generous cash-back debit-card rewards, announced Monday that it would cease operations next month because of a lack of financing
The company discontinued its perks cash-back rewards program and canceled all reward balances as of Monday; redemptions already requested will be processed, it said.
Customers could receive the rebate on gift cards, including Visa cards that could be used at any merchant. “Glad I cashed out my perks as I earned them,” a customer named Debra Barrett on Facebook said Monday. “This is a really bad way of treating your longtime customers.”
The moral of the story: don’t let your rewards sit for too long before cashing them out. (This was also the moral of the story with the Citi Preferred 5% debacle.) What happened with Perkstreet is an extreme example, but rewards can also be devalued, as most major hotel chains have shown us in the past year.
Did you realize that this was the only debit card endorsed by Dave Ramsey? The page has been taken down, but the cached version says, “With rewards like these for spending responsibly, it’s no wonder Dave Ramsey endorses PerkStreet.” I can’t fault Ramsey in this situation, as PerkStreet was a reputable company and I’m not sure that its demise could have been foreseen by Ramsey.
Nonetheless that brings us to another moral: The financial interests of Dave Ramsey, not to mention everybody else on TV and the interwebs, are not aligned with yours. (And yes, that also goes for obscure blogs that nobody reads!) Which is not to say he’s a bad guy, or a selfish guy, or anything like that–just that’s he’s not on your team. He plays for Team Dave.
Playing for Team Dave doesn’t mean he’ll give you bad advice, it just means that you have to consider the possibility that he stands to make a profit by giving sub-optimal advice. Likewise for other financial blogs and websites.
Find the sites that give good advice and don’t hype their affiliate links at the expense of providing good information. I’m always happy to put in a plug for Frequent Miler, who has plenty of affiliate links but doesn’t let that get in the way of doing the right thing for his readers. Hack My Trip and Rapid Travel Chai are consistently good as well.
For our next lesson, we turn to Rick, aka the Frugal Travel Guy. He writes:
Several months ago my credit score, as provided by CreditSesame, inexplicably dropped from my normal 730-780 range to a paltry 528 credit score. It seemed unusual as my long time credit monitoring service, Truecredit, still showed me with great credit. I have never been late with a payment.
Rick finally got an answer from CreditSesame. Here’s what they wrote:
Hello Richard,
We have been in contact with Experian’s resolution team and have just recently been updated as to the cause for your account not generating a score. We have come to a conclusion that the credit scoring model we use, the National Equivalency Score, has a system exclusion that restricts the maximum number of Trades, Inquiries and Public Records (TIP) to 99. You seem to be one individual of a very small group of users that exceeds this TIP limit seeing as most users do not have such an extensive credit history. This does not mean that you do not have a credit score, it just means that based on the credit model we use, Experian is unable to generate one for you at this time. We are currently working with Experian to figure out a resolution for users in your situation.
The lesson from this: if you can live within your means (and that is admittedly a very big if for a lot of people), there’s no such thing as too many credit cards. Why do I say that? Because Rick is succeeding in the metric that counts: credit card approvals:
I did my July credit card applications and got three out of five approvals, one that requested more info on my business and a NO for the Club Carlson card because of too many inquiries.
Not bad for a guy with so many lines and inquiries he broke the scoring model.
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