I’m in a bit of a pickle, and wanted to share some of my thoughts on spend with you today. The challenge is to accept clean, or dirty spend, and to explore the nuances of each. My scenario is twofold. Firstly, I’m setting up a new business that is turning out to cost a ton […]
Tech Solutions to Estate Planning for Manufactured Spenders
Estate Planning seems to be a terribly boring subject, however, it really comes down to being something that many people either don’t understand, or don’t want to understand and therefore find ways to avoid.You need an estate plan.I’m not talking about some complex dynasty trust, or other technique to avoid taxation, I’m just talking about […]
Forward Shifting Spend
Forward Shifting is a concept that allows us to prepay for certain items now, in order to reap present day benefits. A good example of this in personal finance is to over pay state income taxes, because your annual Federal deduction is calculated by the question “How much did you pay this year?” rather than “How […]
How much MS do you need for 5 years of fancypants travel?
I asked this question last night on twitter, and got a couple of responses, and I’d like to dive into it further in this post. Let’s say you are starting out today with zero miles and want to cover 5 years of travel like a rockstar.. how much do you need to MS to achieve […]
Check your RedBird accounts for unusual activity
This is one of those things that I don’t want to blow out of proportion, but I’ve heard enough weirdness in a day to suggest you go out and take a look. Earlier today esteemed twitterer Saianel mentioned that his accounts had unusual entries in the phone number field. This has been corroborated by many […]
The Hamster wheel of Manufactured Spend
I’ve said on many occasions that I’m not a fan of Manufactured Spend (MS). It is a means to an end. Certainly, there is some fun in cracking a system or finding a new pathway, but that is not an exclusively MS related activity. I see MS as a job, sure it can pay relatively […]
Thoughts on Killing a $25K MS Deal
I raised this question in the forum recently when a deal came across my table from a very nice member of the MS community. He had just found something that was somewhat new, and pushed through his first trial payment. I decided to try this myself too, as it was a simple $18K transaction (random […]
My #travelcon Presentation
Note that I have changed the hashtag…. I had a great time in OC for TravelCon. And somehow finding myself in debt to Tahsir again as he hooked me up with some tickets to the UFC. I attended with Dan who won a raffle for the prize and we had a blast that evening.My presentation […]
The Squeeze
Having finally watched Interstellar I can call myself something of an expert on the space time continuum. Today i’d like to share some of this high brow stuff with you in order to help improve your quality of life.The notion in the movie that stuck out was how to fold time using a wormhole to […]
Gift Card Economics – Everyone’s a winner!
A common question among the masses is, how can American Express pay you to buy gift cards? There are rebates that vary between 1-2.25% currently, and 4% or so have been seen in the recent past. That’s on top of Credit Card rebates. Let’s dive into some economics and see why they would do it, […]