NO MORE FUNDING CD’S WITH A CC AT NWFCU: A sort-of-well-known-but-not-too-well-known gravy train has ended: Northwest Federal Credit Union has stopped letting people fund large amounts of CD deposits with credit cards.

This particular trick has been spoken of in veiled terms on FlyerTalk for quite some time, and it’s amazing that it never blew up in the blogosphere, as I’m sure I’m not the only blogger who was aware of it. Meanwhile, Chasing The Points is agonizing over whether to reveal the details of an exploit he recently found, and I imagine there are others who are holding back on deals for the same reason. No doubt the Flyertalk denizens will praise us for our self-restraint!

It’s not easy to know if or when a blog post will have an effect on a deal, or what the effect will be. When Frequent Miler first posted the Vanilla Reload thing (a perfect perpetual points machine, indeed!) a while back, I thought for sure that deal would be dead in a month or two, but I was wrong. It took Socrates a lifetime to learn that he didn’t know very much, and I’m coming around to his point of view.

SEVERAL DEALS POINTED OUT BY MAXIMIZINGMONEY.COM:

• $10 in ExtraCare Bucks from CVS when you purchase a $50 prepaid debit card.
• $5 credit from Amazon when you subscribe to a magazine
• Up to 75,000 Marriott Rewards points from chase when you get a mortgage with them. New mortgages only, no refis. Odds you’ll get a better mortgage rate elsewhere, but it never hurts to look.

HOW TO USE ULTIMATE REWARDS POINTS: The Points Guy has a very good guide to the best uses of Ultimate Rewards points. And this is completely coincidental and has nothing to do with the TPG link, but there’s a 60,000-point bonus for the Chase Ink card for this week only.

HOW TO RESPOND TO A CEASE AND DESIST LETTER: Even if you’re an honest, law-abiding citizen, you may still find yourself having to deal with legal messes through no fault of your own. A man named Jake Freivald found himself at the receiving end of legal harassment from the township attorney for West Orange, NJ. Fortunately, he found himself a really smart pro bono lawyer with a wicked sense of humor. His response is below; you can read the whole story here. The letter is so funny I’m embedding it below–let’s hope this works.

Stephen Kaplitt: Cease and Desist Response Letter

THE REAL CAUSE OF THE HOUSING BUBBLE: Apparently Freddie Mac had mythological creatures in its employ, as this 1984 American Bankers Association Journal ad shows:

It does explain a lot, yes? From an interview with Borrow author Louis Hyman:

Only the gnomes know. It’s hard to describe it over the radio. But it’s an image of gnomes advising the head chief financial officer of Freddie Mac and saying even he does not understand how these things work. Only gnomes know. It’s terrifying to comprehend that no one understood what they were doing. But the truth of the matter was that they knew what they were doing in that what they thought that they were doing. What they thought they were doing was taking together a bunch of risky things, combining it in different ways using magical alchemical transformations, and in the process they thought they were reducing the overall level of risk. And then they were making those sellable in the form of bonds to people who ordinarily would not buy them.

Fortunately there’s no more financial alchemy going on and everything in the finance world is sane now, right?