Quantcast

Personal Finance Digest

Former blog

40,000 miles from an unusual source, and 3 million miles from an even more unusual source

By





40K MILES FROM AN UNUSUAL SOURCE: Courtesy of Flyertalk, here’s rare offer: 40,000 LAN miles through October 15 when you sign up for the LAN visa. The downside: it’s issued by US Bank, which is known for being finicky about approving credit card a. Here’s the LAN awards table: coming from the U.S., it’s 48,000 milesfor a roundtrip to Brazil, 70,000 to Argentina, and 100,000 to Easter Island.

I had hoped there’d be some discussion on boardingarea.com about how to use these miles, but no such luck, alas…

[Read more…]

Best Buy cuts elite benefits! Perhaps a free BusinessWeek subscription would ease the sting?

By

BEST BUY REWARDZONE CUTS BENEFITS: This just arrived in my inbox last night–apparently Best Buy is rolling out their new rewards program:

Dear PFDigest,

Thank you for being a loyal Reward Zone® member. I’m pleased to announce that after a decade, the program you love is getting even better. We’re reinventing the Reward Zone program as My Best Buy™ — delivering more rewards, more exclusives and an improved mobile experience.

Uh oh. Without reading any further, my first thought was, “I bet ‘more rewards’ is corporatespeak for ‘less rewards’.”

As one of our most valued Reward Zone Premier Silver members the change is easy — you’re already enrolled in our highest rewards level: My Best Buy Elite Plus. In fact all of your account information remains the same, including your member number, point balance and any available reward certificates. Even the points you get with every purchase stay the same. Also, Elite Plus members like you enjoy the following benefits:

  • 25% Point Bonus on top of the 1 point for every $1 you already get…

There it is! Premier Silver members used to get a half-point bonus (effectively an additional 1%), whereas now it’s a quarter-point. So add that to the 5% you get for the Best Buy credit card (fortunately, that hasn’t changed) and it’s 5.5% instead of 6%. The spending level required for the highest tier is now $3,500, whereas it was $2,500 before.

None of which is a big deal, of course. Best Buy has a business to run, so they have to do what they have to do. Obviously I’d prefer they not cut benefits, but I’m sure there will be more Best Buy deals in the future.

(Incidentally, if you happen to have any purchases to make there and don’t want to bother with a cash/points portal, I’ve got a Best Buy affiliate link for you to click on.)

FREE BUSINESSWEEK SUBSCRIPTION: Via My Money Blog, here’s a link for a free subscription to BusinessWeek. The subscription is via something called RewardsGold.com, and apparently the link I’m passing on to you is a page which gives you either a free subscription or 5,000 RewardsGold points. All I did was enter my info and it told me I’d have my magazine in 8-10 weeks. The whole thing seems slightly sketchy, but the downside–more junk mail, perhaps?–is minimal.

INTERNING IS FOR SUCKERS: Apparently free labor is all the rage these days among cutting edge companies! Priceonomics casts a skeptical eye on the internship phenomenon:

Internships are a means to hire employees for no wages. Maurice Pianko, an attorney and founder of Intern Justice, told New York Magazine that he became interested in the internship issue after reading job postings where “so many descriptions sounded similar to a salaried position, except on the last line it said ‘unpaid.’”

Internships are the scourge of some 50% of college graduates – not just of privileged twentysomethings whose parents support them. A survey by Intern Bridge found that students and graduates with parents making $40,000-$80,000 a year were most likely to work an unpaid internship, whereas the children of parents making over $120,000 were least likely.

Obviously, Disney’s going to be involved with this racket:

Disney runs one of the world’s largest internship programs. Each year, between 7,000 and 8,000 college students and recent graduates work full-time, minimum-wage, menial internships at Disney World.

The interns work entirely at the company’s will, subject to a raft of draconian policies, without sick days or time off, without grievance procedures, without guarantees of workers’ compensation or protection against harassment or unfair treatment. Twelve-hour shifts are typical, many of them beginning at 6 a.m. or stretching past midnight. Interns sign up without knowing what jobs they’ll do or the salaries they’ll be paid (though it typically hovers right near minimum wage).

“Get back to work, intern!”

Bottom line: unless you’re volunteering with a charity, don’t work unless somebody’s paying you to do so.

Internships are not a good way to land a job. One survey found that graduating seniors with unpaid internship experience did no better than seniors without internship experience at finding a job. Another concluded that a measly 17% of surveyed students received a job offer after their internship. The exception is paid internships, which did lead to job offers.

THE PEOPLE WHO RUN POWERBALL HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR: You may have heard that the Powerball lottery is up to $400 million for Wednesday’s drawing. While checking out the odds and the payoffs, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the wacky letters page, wherein Powerball management prints some of the strange correspondence they’ve received over the years as well as Powerball’s responses. For example:

FROM Debora W: i don’t remember my powerball numbers. my name is debora w—-

The number is on your Powerball ticket. Your ticket is under the seat of your car, between the seat and the car door.

And my personal favorite:

FROM DAVID R: The cord of my power ball has become tangled inside the unit. I have removed the protective rubber belt and two baby screws and the lid. I can’t pry the two halves apart. Please help me solve this problem.

I would recommend running down to your local convenience store to buy $10 worth of Powerball lottery tickets. Then, if you win, you can buy a new one. You might also try this site for help.

http://www.powerballs.com

[two days later]

Your advice is of limited use. Please put me in touch with your firm’s technical department if it has one.

I am the technical department here. Really, try the link (note the “s”). That is the company that sells the gyro Powerball. We sell Powerball lottery tickets here.

I will be buying exactly one ticket for Wednesday’s drawing. Sadly, my local gas station stopped accepting credit cards for lottery tickets, which makes the expected value of the lottery ticket purhcase even more negative, but oh well.

Student loans and moral hazard… Plus a sweet Best Buy deal!

By

$25 OFF $250 AT BEST BUY WITH AMEX: The latest and greatest Amex Sync promotion gets you a one-time $25 statement credit on a $250 purchase at Best Buy. The T&Cs say, “Limit 1 statement credit per American Express Card across all American Express offer channels,” as opposed to one statement credit per customer, so register all your Amex cards if you’re so inclined.

And before you even ask, the answer to your question is: a $200 Visa prepaid debit card and a $50 Kindle gift card. (H/T: HustlerMoneyBlog)

FREE BOOK ON SMALL BUSINESS TAX DEDUCTIONS: If you’re the kind of person who has a Chase Ink card, you may be interested in this book.  (H/T: My Money Blog)

THE INK GAME AT STAPLES: Saverocity has a great primer on how to work the ink reward system at Staples. It’s very much worth your time if you’re into that sort of thing.

WHY CAN’T STUDENTS ACT LIKE DETROIT?: Salon touches on a pet peeve of mine, namely the nondischargeability of student loan debt. Author Tim Donovan of The Suffolk Resolves has some interesting history I wasn’t too familiar with:

First, in 1976, Congress instituted a fairly reasonable reform to bankruptcy laws: To prevent unscrupulous students from amassing a number of expensive post-graduate degrees (only to immediately declare bankruptcy and simply wait out the seven years without credit), a five-year delay on bankruptcy protection was implemented for student loan debt. In 1990, that waiting period was extended to seven years. Hypothetically, by forcing students to delay dischargement, they would be given the necessary time to build equity, earn a good credit score, and acquire some wealth, which would in turn provide a key disincentive to the “moral hazard” that immediate bankruptcy might present to younger, less stable graduates.

And yet, for the banks, this wasn’t enough: In 1998, the law was changed again, this time ensuring that federally backed student loans would be made completely and permanently nondischargeable through bankruptcy. But for the banks, even this wasn’t enough: In this system, private loans could still be discharged — albeit after a seven-year waiting period and the self-inflicted destruction of one’s credit and assets. Still, the banks continued the push to deregulate: In 2005, the law was changed a final time, shielding private student debt from bankruptcy just like their federally backed kin.

Since the article mentioned the phrase “moral hazard”, let’s print Wikipedia’s definition so that everybody’s clear on what we’re talking about:

In economic theory, a moral hazard is a situation where a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could incur will not be felt by the party taking the risk. In other words, it is a tendency to be more willing to take a risk, knowing that the potential costs or burdens of taking such risk will be borne, in whole or in part, by others.

I understand the moral hazard issue, and it’s certainly reasonable and just to treat student debt differently because of it. You want to have a delay on bankruptcy protection to prevent youngsters with nothing to lose from charging off their student loans? I’m fine with that.

But there is a countervailing moral hazard at play here: student lenders, since they are shielded from the threat of bankruptcy, will have a tendency to take risks–that is, make loans that they really shouldn’t be making–because they won’t incur the costs. Somebody else will.

It’s the same sort of moral hazard that helped bring about the credit crisis of 2008: people acting foolishly with money because they think somebody else is picking up the tab.

I’m all in favor of financial responsibility, paying back your loans, truth, justice, the American way, all that stuff. I’ve certainly paid back my share of student loans. But financial responsibility is a two-way street, and lenders have a duty not to make silly loans, even if somebody else is going to pay for it. On student loans, the balance has swung too far in favor of the lenders, and order needs to be restored.

Get 10% back on your spending through July 27!

By

I got some mail from a certain yellow and blue electronics retailer yesterday! And look what was inside:

3x

You may recall a post about the same deal two months ago. Why is triple points so awesome it deserves multiple blog entries?

Because triple points at this particular retailer means 10% back for those of us with a credit card and 6-7% back for everybody else.

You normally get a base of 2% back on all of your purchases, so triple points means 6% back. If you’re Premier Silver (meaning you’ve spent $2,500 in a calendar year), then you get an extra 1% back, which brings you up to 7% back. (If you’re not Premier Silver, this is an excellent time to earn that title.)

And if you have the credit card associated with this particular retailer, you’ll get an additional 3% back, bringing you to a nice round 10%.

The verbiage on the back of the 3X coupon says, “Bonus points not awarded for gift card purchases.” Purchases of other sorts of cards are fair game, however, and I had no issues last time around.

And you know what else the card says? It says “limit 1 bonus offer per membership, per transaction.” That’s one per transaction, not one total. So rinse and repeat may be in play here depending on how they set things up.

This may have been a targeted mailing, BUT the coupon does not seem to be linked to my membership number. The mailer was addressed to “PFDigest or current occupant.” So if you have any friends who received this coupon who would be willing to part with it–or if you can find one on eBay–then it may be worth your while. The coupon is valid July 17 through July 27.

Best of luck with your buying!

Recent Comments

Disclosure

The owner of this website may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website.

Disclaimer

Saverocity is Journalistic in Nature, please obtain Professional Representation prior to attempting anything discussed herein. Opinions expressed here are author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, airlines or hotel chain, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities.