March 25, 2019
New cards since March 2018
Quick notes:
- I had my sights set on some kind of an international trip next year, possibly Japan, but that will only happen if a very close friend can dogsit because Seamus is showing his age this year and it’s tugging our heartstrings. Otherwise we’d like to stay close to home with him.
- For the purposes of figuring out whether we’ve wasted money on a card or not, I’m estimating the total value of our miles or points for each card to make sure that we are earning at least our minimum profit per churned card but we won’t know the true value until we actually redeem them.
- We haven’t been respecting the “no annual fee” rule for the past several cards as long as the miles or points bonuses were at least worth twice as much as the annual fee, preferably 3-4x as much.
- We ALWAYS pay the card balances in full. No exceptions.
- We time our churning activity with necessary spending. We never manufacture unnecessary spending for a card bonus. I keep a spreadsheet to track expected large expenses for this and generally plot out a bevy of expenses with pen and paper before I commit to a new card.
Current totals
AlaskaAir (miles valued at 1.3 cents): 204,001.
Chase Ultimate rewards: 308,930
Starpoints: 161,620
Citi Premier Thank You, his
Cost: $0
Bonus: 50,000 points (value $500)
Profit: $500
Status: Active, cancel before June 1 2019
Worth it? Yes, this was pure profit.
Chase Sapphire Reserve, hers
I took care of the travel credit in December, ahead of schedule I thought, BUT they didn’t credit it properly so it was just a “$300 purchase.” I followed up on that once early in January and was told that I had to call back after my statement closed. Then I called at the end of January, and the request had to be escalated to marketing, which should have been done the first time I called. What a pain. My annual fee was due to hit on February 1st but this solidified my intent to cancel once I get that fixed. What kind of lazy customer service makes you call twice when they could have submitted the request in the first call?
Alaska Air, his second of 2018
Cost: $75
Bonus: 30,000 miles (value $390) + 1406 miles (value $18)
Free Companion + taxes fare offer good 2019: $479
Profit: $812
Status: Active, cancel before January 1, 2019
Worth it? Yes.
Alaska Air, his first of 2019
Cost: $75
Bonus: 30,000 miles (value $390) + $100 statement credit after first $1000 spend in 90 days
Free Companion + taxes fare offer good until 2020
Free checked bags: $?
Profit: TBD, $415 so far
Status: Active, cancel before January 1, 2019
Worth it? The extra statement credit made this a no cost to us churn, we’ll have to see what the total profit is.
***
Keepers
We’re keeping our Chase Sapphire Reserve for one more year because I blew the timing of the cancellation.
We still have our Starwood AMEX (RIP) because I absolutely love the American Express customer service but I have no love for what the Bonvoy program brings. I need to make a decision on this.
We still have our Costco Citi card which pays for itself in the Executive Rewards but sometimes only just.
Cards to be cancelled
We will bid farewell to at least one of the Alaska Air cards before the year is up and gets charged another annual fee.
The Citi Premier we’ll keep for a few more months in case it comes in useful but it’s not at the top of my use-list.
:: What cards are you using and/or keeping at this time?
March 11, 2019
I’ve been impatient and grouchy.
Reading Work Optional brought me back down to earth a bit. I should be grateful for being where we are today, after so many years of work and saving and fighting.
Truly, I am! I’m ever so grateful for the opportunities we’ve had, for the fruit our hard work has borne, for our little family, for our wide network of loved ones. For the useful things we have, like running water and plumbing, for a sound roof over our head, for a furnace. For the pain relief that my diet has brought me so that I can actually move day in and day out without more than a trace of a limp or a cacophony of crackling when I actually bend my joints. We even tackled the garden as a family over the weekend and may I say, we ripped out an impressive amount of weeds and weed roots. There’s enough blessing and joy to fill a week of gratitude journals. So … whence the crabapple attitude?
It finally struck me on a drive home. It’s the number. The number that’s lingered in the back of my psyche for these past several years like a whisper you can’t quite hear. (I didn’t try to hear it, naturally, I’m really good at blocking out subtle noises to concentrate.)
Mom got sick when she was in her 40s. She had several chronic problems, including dementia which is incredibly hard to handle on every level. We struggled to get diagnoses and/or treatment but nothing was terminal. (Feels familiar.) Then at 55, she died of sudden cardiac arrest.
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February 25, 2019
When I was 7, my parents took all of our money, my life savings from New Year gift packets included, and sank it all into Dad’s business venture. I would call it “theirs” but we all know it was Dad’s brainstorm and his thing. Though I had no use for the money other than buying postage stamps, I was still sad about losing my stash. Even then, I was a saver (*cough* money hoarder). Though, I could have blown the whole thing on books if I’d known how to get myself to a bookstore. I figured out how to take the dog to the vet for shots when I was a preteen, I think the bookstore mystery would have been solved in a jiffy with money in hand.
Once in a while I idly wonder how much I’d have today if my savings had been invested back in 1980-something. It was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $2000 or $3000 by the time I was seven. Our family tradition tends to gift young kids a lot of cash in your earliest years when you have the least use for it. It’s confusing but a proper steward of that money could have made a real difference with that money.
In any case, that money went to funding a business venture that supported our household for almost ten years and then it all disappeared. The money going away as easily as it did impressed on me the importance of saving relentlessly. That and my health problems.
Today, we make good money. We also live in one of the highest COLAs. Go us. *snort* It wasn’t intentional but it is what happened. (more…)
February 18, 2019
How would you spend…
The dogs and I were walking enjoying a rare spot of sunshine while my mind wandered over to J. Money’s post on what you’d do with a windfall of $50,000. He reminded us of a movie I hadn’t seen before, Brewster’s Millions, where the main character had to spend $30M in 30 days and wasn’t allowed to buy anything that was an asset that could be sold later.
I could do that easily! I have these daydreams a lot about random things I care about.
This time, I started thinking of what I’d do with free millions. The answer: outfit rural libraries!
Coordinate with the librarian of a rural area like one that my friend Andrea lives in to gather the reading wish lists of everyone in the county.
Buy
– $1M worth of physical and ebooks,
– $0.5M in electronic equipment: computers for the library itself, e-readers and laptops for checkout.
– 3 electric vans
– A lot of comfortable chairs for reading in at the library.
Hire three drivers (paying a real living wage) to drive those vans as mobile libraries, delivering and picking up books for kids, people who aren’t mobile, or can’t get to the library for any reason. Ensure the librarian is paid a living wage and that the place is adequately staffed with people to service the mobile libraries. Network all the rural libraries together for an interlibrary loan system.
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February 11, 2019
Two pairs of leggings, four dresses with pockets, a new rug, two serving bowls, a toilet brush, coffee filters and a platter, a set of glass bakeware with lids. A tablecloth and garden shovel. What’s the theme here?
Let’s see… I bought all but one of them using gift cards. They are useful. We’ve needed most or all of them for months and we’ve been making do without. We now need to declutter 15 MORE things to justify adding so many things to our cabinets and closets. All true.
The biggest thing they have in common: They don’t erase that lingering uneasy feeling about how we’re going to weather the next recession and what further job cuts at our jobs may do to our nascent retirement plans.
Discussing my post and this barely contained feeling of discomfort last week on Twitter with Mr. SSC, he pointed out: one has to have a plan but also have faith that it’ll change, so embrace flexibility. Yeeeeees, but that requires a bendiness of mentality and I’m not yet that evolved.
In part, the crux of this being ill-at-ease is my own fault, not the recession’s. Not that the recession isn’t a big thing, it is, but the bigger problem is we have a couple huge life decisions we can’t seem to get a grip on. They’d likely have an equally, or more, enormous impact on our lives as the recession or a job loss or change in careers. Our waffling is doing neither of us any good but I’m not ready to get into it because I can’t make out head or tails of how I really feel about it. My inner turmoil on those points remains a roiling mass of fog.
Mr. SSC also shared that he’s a stress shopper and boy howdy do I empathize. I’ve been scrolling Amazon deals in a badly concealed panicked state, on a quest to get everything we need for emergencies as if that’ll solve the massive problem of not knowing the shape of the next five years. Thankfully my personal money history means that I’m just wildly window shopping with abandon, but not buying anything. Good habits FTW?
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January 28, 2019
In 2017, we took on a HUMONGOUS loan. (Was that really two years ago??)
After we signed those papers, we sold our previous home and applied a small chunk of those sales proceeds toward our loan with an eye on recasting the loan – recalculating a new monthly payment based on the new principal amount while keeping the same terms (interest rate and length of loan) at no extra charge.
I made sure, when we were researching loans, to confirm that Chase would do this at no charge and there were no limits on how many times we were allowed to do it.
That first recast, and the second one with double the payment to principal when more sale funds were available two months later, brought down our monthly payment a total of $700. Not TO $700, reduced it BY $700. The remaining payment is still in the multi-thousands. That gives you an idea of how high our mortgage is! YEEKS.
Making those two moves not only reduced the total balance and our monthly payments, it also saved $102,599.54 in interest! (I used this calculator to figure that savings out.)
I continued to pay a little over the monthly payment due to cut down the principal further, little by little, and made the equivalent of half an extra payment last year.
We don’t have any huge chunks of money coming in this year (that I know of. Feel free to bless us, universe) so I was only aiming to pay down a set amount to principal this year but then I got this email from Chase inviting me to enroll in their New flexible mortgage payment options!
Ok, I’ll bite.
I went in to explore and see if they could offer me anything better than we could do on our own. (I can never resist a do better with money challenge.)
(more…)
January 21, 2019
I’m having a bit of a patience problem.
- I’ve almost closed out the 2018 budget but there’s one last check to be cashed from December 1st (when is it ok to tell someone to take their damn money already??)
- I was fortunate enough to have a choice between maxing out our IRAs this year right away or investing more in our brokerage so I did the former to get it out of our hair.
- I’ve calculated our expected cash flow for the first three months of 2019 and scheduled automatic savings to reflect that.
- I’ve calculated our expected large expenses for the year and scheduled automatic savings to cover them over the course of the year.
What’s left?
Mostly the everyday things.
- Working my job every day with attendant frustrations so I can keep earning that paycheck that feeds our savings and investing.
- Feeding my family – meal planning, grocery shopping, thinking about diet stuff.
- Walking the dogs – training Sera, making sure Seamus has every possible health need covered.
- Making sure to the best of our abilities that JB grows up to be a good and decent human. We also need to get zir into some sports and activities to be a bit more well-rounded and make a few more friends.
- Reading all the good books I can reach (more more more!)
- We’ve got one big trip for later this year to be planned out. After that? Probably staying close to home for a while. Now that Seamus is showing his age (his hearing is suspect, his eyesight seems to be less sharp, he’s definitely much crankier) we’re going to curtail international travel so we can spend this time with him.
These are good things. I’m enjoying them. I’d like to enjoy more of them. I’d like to be out in the garden ripping out the rest of those weeds now that the rains have softened the previously rock hard ground.
I should be pretty content.
Instead, the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessively sitting here staring at our accounts, glaring at them to sprout 100x their income as if Power Stare is a method of investment growth (it’s not). I’ve been cranky and impatient. (more…)