NEW 2% CREDIT CARD: It’s not necessarily new, but it’s new to us anyway. Someone over at Fatwallet dug up the Kinecta Credit Union Visa Platinum. It’s 2% cash back when you redeem in increments of $100.

That said, we would advise you not to get this card. There’s an annual fee of $25, and the Fidelity Amex and Priceline Visa both have 2% rewards with no annual fee (note that we don’t receive any referral income for those links, they’re just good cards).

What we do advise you to do is to pay attention to your local credit unions and small banks–you never know where you might find a hidden gem. Plenty of financial institutions require that their customers live in particular area, and nobody on the internet has much incentive to promote localized financial products, so it’s a lot easier for them to go unnoticed than it is for, say, the Chase Ink Bold.

For what it’s worth, we’ve never found a great deal–though we did find out about iPad loans–but other people have, and we’ll always be on the lookout.

CHEAP PHONE CALLS ON SALE AT OFFICE MAX: Yesterday we mentioned the 20% off coupon at OfficeMax, and today Slickdeals has pointed out that you can get yourself an Ooma internet phone for only $120.

We happen to have some user testing experience in this area. Mrs. PFDigest happens to be from Central America, so cheap phone calls are a source of great interest in the PFD household. We’ve used three different internet phone systems: Vonage, Ooma, and OBi. In terms of call quality, all three of them have worked equally well for us, so no concerns there.

Vonage is expensive relative to the other two. We dropped that and got ourselves an Ooma, which was much cheaper–after you pay for the unit, you only pay local taxes, which for us are a little over $4 per month.

Of course, $4 and change works out to be $50 a year, so we decided to try the Obi. Obi is a little different; set up is not as user-friendly as the Ooma (though the device is cheaper) and you have to have a Google voice number to port to the device. But once you get the initial setup done, it’s no more trouble than Ooma or Vonage, plus there is no monthly charge for the Obi.

So if you have even a modicum of tech savvy, go with the Obi. Otherwise, the Ooma is perfectly acceptable. We gave Oomas to a couple of Mrs. PFD’s family members overseas and they’ve worked out great, as has our Obi.

Incidentally, the Slickdeals wiki for this deal has information on other services we’ve never even heard of. Ipkall.com and sipgate.com offer free incoming calls via IP, while onesuite.com and localphone.com offer cheap international calling.

We’ll leave you with a question: why isn’t Best Buy selling a really helpful device like the Obi? We’ve searched their website and they don’t carry it. There may be a perfectly good reason, but you’d think a struggling electronics chain would want to offer an awesome product which could help reduce their customer’s expenses and even improve their lives by letting them keep in touch with loved ones more easily.

We started this blog a few months ago mostly because we like to follow and expound upon personal finance, credit cards, and other related (and unrelated) topics. The first few weeks of the blog there were so few readers that we could usually figure out who had read it on any given day, since the only readers were a few friends and family members.

The numbers started ticking up slowly–very slowly, actually–until one day Frequent Miler linked to us, and then Frugal Travel Guy linked to us, and then some Chinese website which we’d never heard of before but which is apparently much bigger than FM and FTG combined linked to us. We still don’t have too many readers, but certainly more than we did two months ago, so we figured it was time to cash in.

And in this case, “cash in” means “make enough money for hosting fees.” If you remember our 2012 annual revenue statement, you may have figured out that the big fat zero we posted for 2012–and have maintained to this day–does not cover certain fees associated with maintaining a blog. We recently signed up for some advertising and will hopefully be able to bring in a little bit of money.

All of which is to say, if you see us sticking links to financial products, travel products, or anything else which might be of interest to readers of this site, that’s what’s going on. We realize that it’s possible for too much of that to degrade a site’s quality, not to mention its editorial positions (we suddenly realized that the Bank of America Worldpoints program is AMAZING!!!!) so we’ll try to keep that in mind.

If something we’re doing is terrible, feel free to drop us a line or leave a comment. You can also speak up if we’re doing a good job, because we’re suckers for flattery. Honestly, we’re not always sure what people like or don’t like here. It takes a certain critical mass to get comments going, since only a very small percentage of readers leave comments, and we’re not there yet. Any publicity is good publicity, and likewise any feedback is good feedback.

And finally: thanks to all of you for reading! We never expected anybody beyond a few people we know would actually read this site, so we’re humbled and appreciative.

We try to post every weekday, but… stupid viruses. Back tomorrow.