I don’t know how useful this will turn out to be, but a virtual credit card startup is offering 5% cash back on all purchases for a year to the first 10,000 consumers to sign up here, so I signed up just in case. From ArgoPay’s press release: [Read more…]
$275 in bank bonuses, internet reselling, a travel hack and a tax haven
$125 CHECKING ACCOUNT BONUS FROM REGIONS BANK: Here you go. Open only to residents of AL, AR, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KY, LA, MO, MS, NC, SC, TN, TX, VA. (Thanks FWF)
$150 BONUS FROM PNC: Have fun. This one’s open to residents of AL, DC, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, MD, MI, MO, NC, NJ, OH, PA, SC, VA and WI.
BUYING AND SELLING STUFF FOR FUN AND PROFIT: Being an internet reseller is a niche some people have figured out to the point where they can make a living at it. Other people do it as a side gig, sometimes for profit and sometimes for points, and Frequent Miler gives you some ideas on how the game is played. This is an area where being a credit card geek can serve you very well since you can work stack credit card bonuses and portal bonuses, not to mention coupons. FM’s sources for resale items: Kohl’s, Staples, OfficeMax, Lowe’s, and Drugstore.com.
HOW TO BOOK A ONE-WAY DELTA AWARD FLIGHT: It’s not possible to book a one-way award flight on Delta using Delta’s system, but it is possible using somebody else’s system. Points, Miles, and Martinis reports on a nice little travel hack. In a nutshell, you convert Amex Membership Reward points to Flying Blue points (that’s the Air France / KLM frequent flyer program), then check availability and book the reward from the Air France website. Very clever!
PUERTO RICO’S BID TO BE A TAX HAVEN: I stumbled across this while perusing FWF and thought it deserved an item of its own. Apparently, Puerto Rico is trying to position itself as a tax shelter for Americans:
Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States, but for tax purposes, it is treated differently. Most residents of Puerto Rico, with the exception of federal employees, already pay no federal income tax. A person needs to live 183 days a year on the island to become a legal resident.
…The new tax breaks are a radical shift in that they focus on financial, legal and other services, not manufacturing. Puerto Rico slashed taxes on interest and dividends to zero from 33 percent, and it lowered taxes on capital gains, a major source of income for hedge fund managers, to zero to 10 percent.
The incentives work with existing United States breaks. While residents still have to file a federal tax return, they do not have to pay capital gains taxes of 15 percent on assets held before moving and sold after 10 years of island residency.
You could certainly do worse than spending 183 days a year in the Caribbean.
Then again, this isn’t a sure thing. Fortune would like the billionaire readers of my blog to know a few things:
The U.S. territory has a bevy of social and economic problems that appear to be getting worse by the day, making it an inhospitable place for a wealthy individual seeking safety and stability. Crime broke through record highs in the last few years and has started to spill into the wealthy neighborhoods of San Juan, the capital. The violence and economic malaise show little sign of abating. It’s a long way from the financial paradise the Puerto Rican government is trying so hard to portray it as.
…Politically, Puerto Rico is in a state of flux, which means its new investment law could be countered or revoked. There is a reason why Puerto Rico hasn’t tried this beggar-thy-neighbor kind of tax war with the U.S. in the past — it makes Washington angry. That’s a big deal given that Puerto Rico receives around $22 billion from the U.S. every year in the form of aid and subsidies. That makes up around a quarter of the island’s GDP. It could see some of that aid sliced off if it nails some big billionaire fish like Paulson.
Well, shoot. Where the heck is a guy supposed to flee to these days?
Free Hyatt suites, making money with livestock, a tiny house, and a Lamborghini police car
HOW TO GET TWO FREE HYATT SUITE NIGHTS: Over at Frugal Travel Guy, The Miles Professor tells you how to get two free nights in a suite at any Hyatt anywhere in the world. If you need some inspiration, here are some good ideas (and by “good” we mean “expensive”) for ways to use your two free nights.
Our only quibble with the FTG article is that the author includes a link to the MilesQuest hack that allows you scam gold status out of Hilton by entering a fake credit card number. We’re all for transferring money and vacations from large corporations to ourselves, but this particular trick doesn’t sit right with us, though we suppose it’s debatable. But there are perfectly legitimate (and easy) ways to get gold status with Hilton, namely the Amex Hilton Surpass and the Citi Hilton Reserve, so let’s stick to that.
In any case, the article will tell you exactly how to get two free Hyatt suite nights. Credit card, status match, another credit card, and you’re done!
IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER: Pauline over at Reach Financial Independence gives an account of her extra income earned selling livestock. We always love to hear of offbeat (for city-dwellers like us, anyway) ways of making money, and Pauline does not disappoint, giving the numbers for each of the 56 head of cattle. A 38% annual rate of return sounds pretty nice, although we’ll caveat that her boyfriend does own a cattle ranch.
TINY HOUSE UPDATE: We’re suckers for stories of tiny houses, especially ones that people can live in for just $350 per month including utilities. These two happy campers are doing just that, and it’s a big savings from their previous $1,500 per month. The article has pics of the inside if you’re into the whole tiny house thing.
HOW MUCH MONEY DOES DUBAI HAVE?: This much. Yes, that’s a Lamborghini.
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:
- Buy Amex gift cards directly from Amex using the BigCrumbs (1.4% cashback) or TopCashBack (1.5%) portal.
- Reduce gift card shipping costs by $5.95 using promo code AFLQ12013.
- Pay with a non-Citi rewards card (Citi classifies these transactions as cash advances).
- 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)
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