Credit One Bank just announced a new NASCAR credit card, and if you want to save yourself some time and skip my full review: it’s a lousy card. Don’t get it. [Read more…]
Chase wants to give you a referral bonus! Also: what’s the best card for car rental insurance?
5,000 UR POINTS FROM CHASE: Chase has a new referral program wherein you can get bonuses when you get your friends to open Chase accounts. Enter your information here to see what bonuses you’re eligible for.
WHICH CREDIT BUREAU DOES YOUR BANK USE?: Valuable information for credit card applicants–The Points Guy has the details.
BEST CARD FOR CAR RENTAL INSURANCE: Thaks to Frugal Travel Guy for making me aware of something I didn’t know:
Car rental coverage is one perk where things get a little complicated. Most credit cards will cover CDW (Collision Damage Waiver), but the problem is, they only offer secondary coverage. While it doesn’t matter for your overseas travel (where whatever insurance you have becomes primary) it means that if your rental car gets damaged during your travel in the US, you will have to file the claim with your own car insurance company first. I don’t think I need to explain why this is better to be avoided.
Having primary insurance coverage provided for by your credit card removes that predicament. You won’t have to risk getting your premiums hiked, and you won’t have to pay any deductibles. It’s a great thing to have for piece of mind. The only problem is that very few cards offer this coverage
UNITED HONORS MISTAKE FARES: Points are one way to travel for free; another way is via mistake fares. Some quick-acting individuals pounced on $0 fares from United last week and United has decided to honor the prices:
Friday afternoon, the airline said it would honor tickets sold for $0 fares, plus $5 to $10 in taxes and fees for many flights.
The airline said there was an error on the United reservation system on Thursday, resulting in the free fares. United has since fixed the mistake, but not before many customers took advantage of the free fares.
United might not have had a choice in the matter. U.S. Department of Transportation policy indicates airlines must honor any tickets once a purchase has been confirmed, even if the price was incorrect, and may not increase prices after the customer receives a confirmation.
Bye bye, PerkStreet! And how to break Experian’s credit score model
$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.
How to earn air miles without an annual fee. And free apps from Apple!
HOW TO EARN AIR MILES WITHOUT AN ANNUAL FEE: This Flyertalk thread alerted me to something interesting: it’s actually possible to earn miles from several different airlines at a respectable rate without paying an annual fee. The key is the no-fee Wyndham Rewards card, which earns two points per dollar spent.
For most airlines, you get 1 mile for every 2.5 Wyndham points. So if you’re earning 2 points per dollar spent, you’re effectively getting 0.8 miles per dollar. That’s not too far below the 1 mile per dollar a lot of cards give, and you’re not paying an annual fee.
Wyndham’s domestic partners include AeroMexico, Air Canada, American Airlines, Delta, Frontier, Southwest, USAir, and United. Moving abroad, you have Air Berlin, Czech Airlines, Saudia Airlines, Air China, and a few others I’ve never heard of.
Obviously, most readers of this blog (to say nothing of the author) are more inclined to sign up for an airline card, get the bonus, enjoy the first year with the annual fee waived, and then hope for a nice retention offer. But if you know somebody who steadfastly refuses to pay an annual fee but wants to earn miles–or who maybe just needs to top off an account–you could do worse than to recommend this card.
CAPITAL ONE QUICKSILVER: Speaking of cards you can do worse than, Capital One has a new card out, the Quicksilver. It offers a simple, non-gimmicky 1.5% cash back, and good for them for doing that. If it weren’t for the 2% Fidelity Amex card, plus the fact that Capital One is known for pulling from all three bureaus for a single credit card application, I could totally recommend this card.
FREE APPS FROM APPLE: Apple has several quality apps for free this week as part of the iOS 5th anniversary celebration. Slickdeals has a good list of the free apps.
BEST APPS FOR RICH FOLK: Of course, if you’re one of those snooty upper crust types, you probably turn your nose up at free apps since they do nothing to signal the status you hold so dear. Fortunately for you, TechCrunch lists the top apps for the 1%. The most interesting one to me was OneFineStay, which lets you stay in rich folks’ houses. Kind of like Airbnb but, you know, rich. And if you’re really rich, you’d obviously think nothing of dropping a grand on an app.
NOT A BAD IDEA: If you’re going to drink your way through college, you may as well figure out how to get paid for it. That’s apparently the reasoning at Blue Ridge Community College in Hendersonville, NC, which will offer an Associate in Applied Science Degree in Brewing, Distillation and Fermentation.
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