Routine Order

Here’s a great website for financial information: Bankaholic. The site has a section devoted to the best credit card offers. In addition to a very good coverage of the best credit card deals, it also offers tips on how to use the cards, and how to improve your score. There’s an example of how the author started with a $500 limit AmEx student card. After a few years, the credit limit is now $30 K!

There is also a separate section that provides the best rates for money market accounts. This is similar to the credit card offers section and has the low-down on money market accounts, which I briefly mentioned here previously. The list of money market accounts and the rates makes it easy to compare the deals and the deals are also star-rated. Money market accounts can be tricky, since unlike CDs the deposits are not FDIC insured. However, due to the higher returns and the increased liquidity, they are quite popular among investors. They are just like a savings account in that you can withdraw the money at any time. However, it bears repeating that unlike savings accounts, these are not FDIC insured - meaning, if the bank goes belly-up, your money does too. Then again, what are the chances of that happening, really? When you are at Bankaholic, do check out the finance section for good budgeting tips. I am pretty much sporadic when it comes to writing at this blog, but the bankaholic site seems to be more regularly, and more frequently updated.

Continuing the results of my research on credit cards here. So I got turned down for the AmEx Business Card too. I thought I should be saving some money at the gas pump. BP had an ad at the pump promising some discounts for the first few months I use their card, and I made a mental note to check if there are other cards with better deals. I wanted to save the trouble of getting the BP card, using it till I get some benefits, and then canceling it to get a new card, and so on, ad infinitum.

Best Gas Credit Cards is a site dedicated to only gas credit cards. They have a cool table to compare gas credit cards. Of all the cards, the Wawa Visa Card looks really good. The APR is kinda high, but the rebates are the highest at 10% for purchases at Wawa, and rebates for purchases elsewhere too. The Chase BP card looks good too, but like I said before the rebates are top-heavy, so as time goes by, I might forget to cancel the card, and get less rebates. The Discover Gas Rebate card is good, too bad Discover doesn’t get accepted everywhere, like VISA or MasterCards.

There’s a coffee shop in our office complex where they don’t accept credit cards for less than $3. I have been going there every single day and he declined to give me coffee on my card. I was really eager to try out my citi credit card, to find out if I’d get 3% or 1% cashback at that coffee shop - the one I visit most frequently. The usual lady wasn’t around, so I waited for her to come back and asked her what the deal was with the $3 minimum anyways.

Turns out, credit card services have the cake, eat it, and then sell it. They charge you and me and call it “APR” and then they charge the merchants. Dealers sign up for merchant accounts. These services charge fees so the dealers can accept cards and get the money after these fees are deducted. Some merchant services providers don’t charge some of these fees components, like application fees, but there are some charges associated with all of them.

So the lady was telling me that for a sale of $3, after deducting her credit card charges, and he cost, and the pay for the folks that work for her, she actually could be making a loss. Wow!

From the outside it always seems like everyone else is making easy money. Not so, not at all so. Some credit cards give you cash back on purchases, I should really try and find out how they manage to make a profit after this - but my guess is, they just wait till you miss a payment and then they make money off of you - after all, since it’s really not easy to make money, everyone will have bad patches. I suppose they want you have their card when you hit your rough patch. The citi credit card that I picked up the other day is one such - lets see if I can keep myself on the positive side with citi!