September 11, 2015

Credit card churning: a plan!

or in ye olde Fatwallet lingoe: App-o-Rama! The last time we did this was for a handful of cards at once, in 2013, before our wedding.

We just finished the minimum spend ($3000 in 3 months) for a United mileage card earning a 50K mile bonus but we need at least another 40K miles to book flights for the family so I’ve lined up a second United mileage card with another 50K mile bonus. It’s taking forever to reach us. *taps foot impatiently*

I’ve also decided to make this an actual routine rather than taking it as our trips are dreamed up. My nerves can’t take wondering if we’ll hit the right number of award points or miles in time to book before the awards rooms or flights run out.

Our regular large expenses that can be charged on a card are mapped out in a spreadsheet so that we can line up our cards for churning against our regular, required purchases so we don’t find ourselves “needing” to spend oohhh say $500 just to hit the bonus and find ourselves the proud and chagrined owners of, I don’t know, some ridiculous thing we wanted. Right, that’s not likely but one can get caught up in the chase for awards.

I’d love it if we could charge our property taxes but I’m pretty sure the city or county still charges some silly non-insignificant percentage if you pay by credit card and that narrows our profit margin on the bonus too much to be worth it.

Instead, we have regular auto, property, and life insurance policies that come due in the fall and the spring. In fact, one just came in the mail! Hello, bill. Also food. We eat a lot of food. Food will go a long way to meeting our quota.

Leigh & Mrs. Crackin’ raised excellent points in the comments: look for cards that waive the annual fee for the first year and don’t pay with CC over cash unless the rewards are overwhelmingly profitable.

September 9, 2015

Can we retire in 7 years?

Seeing our net worth climb a little, even after a few months of reduced income, I got really optimistic about possibly hitting some of our goals, like a milestone net worth and maybe being able to target retirement in oh, say, 7 years? I totally pulled that out of thin air, because why not?

This here spreadsheet will tell you why not!

I don’t like what Version 1 tells me, maybe I should go to Version 2!

I played around with J.Money’s early retirement spreadsheet, the simple one, because I just wanted a quick snapshot without messing around with all the detail of version 2.

There’s a lot to be said for reducing your annual expenses. There’s more to be said for putting away more money, though, as I notice reducing our annual expenses by 10,000/year didn’t produce any drop in retirement age, whereas increasing our investments by $5,000/year dropped it by a year.

The assumptions

Income produced: Originally J used an 8% return rate, while I’d rather be more conservative and assume a 7% return.

Annual expenses: If you’re thinking “you need HOW much per year???” Yes, our expenses are high. We pay for the living expenses of 4 adults, 1 child, 1 Seamus, save cash (saving to spend) and save for retirement. Should I drop the expected expenses? I say no. Because even if our own personal expenses drop any substantial amount, we have huge variables: raising LB, or Dad’s eventual failing health, my crappy health. These could cause huge spikes in expenses even should we drop them a good amount. Heck, they could put us over the $90K mark, who knows!

Annual investments: I’m committing us to maxing out a 401(k) and an IRA every year but now that I look at the numbers, I want to add an IRA for PiC too.

Age now: I took an average of our ages. Maybe not the best idea, maybe I should just take one age and go with that.

This doesn’t take into account our rental property but since that income isn’t disposable income yet, that’s fine.

Looks to me like I’m going to have to get creative (or strike it rich through a solid business plan) to hit all our spending and saving and early retirement goals.

ER’s a fantasy in the world I came from where even retirement isn’t certain but it’s a luxury I’m happy to aim for. While I enjoy working, my health is always kicking me in the shins. I want to be around for LB for a long time and am finally conceding that my health improves when less stress and less work sucks up the lion’s share of my energy. So why not make that a goal?

September 4, 2015

What I wish I’d known about Swagbucks

I’ve been using Swagbucks for a few years now but Rookie Me relied entirely on Search and Earn in the early years. Naturally, earning was hit or miss and the whole enterprise was unsatisfying.

This summer, I finally got my act together! When I’m paying attention, I can earn an average of 30-60 SBs per day with minimum effort. At the higher end, about 1800 SBs in 30 days is 80% of the way to the monthly discounted 2250 SBs/$25 gift card redemption. With a little more effort, say qualifying for a few surveys a month, we’re regularly getting one GC redemption a month. It’s mostly been Amazon cards since we use it regularly for diapers and wipes but if I ever get enough saved up, I can switch over to PayPal and that’d be all savings. This isn’t a steady income by any means but it saves a tidy sum over time.

I’m probably not the only one who floundered getting into Swagbucks so I’m sharing what I do or have done. There are lots of ways to earn, though, these aren’t the only ones.

Because some SBs can only be earned on one or the other, I’ll break it down by Desktop and Mobile.

Desktop

I spend a lot of time in front of the computer for one reason or another, so I either run this stuff in the background or on my (really old, first generation) iPad. It just depends on what makes life easier for me.

• First, the Daily Sidebar for regular points: hit the Daily Poll [1 SB], the Daily Offers [2 SB], and sometimes the Daily Crave works too. It doesn’t run smoothly on my computer but it’s worth doing if it does for you. Daily Crave cannot be run on mobile. [average: 3-8 SB].
• “Most Popular Ways to Earn” section: there are usually a few Watch & Earn activities (Watch & Earn, nGage, Take a Discovery Break) that are worth 2 or 3 SBs per activity. Some of them only require one or two clicks. Since I’m busy, those are the ones I go for. If I’m just puttering around online waiting for something more important to happen, then I do all of them. There have been times these made up a full day’s haul up to 80 SB from one activity alone! Take a Discovery Break works on the iPad but the others aren’t mobile-compatible. [average: 2-12 SB]
• Surveys: Qualifying for surveys can also be hit or miss but it’s worth giving it five good tries because even if you don’t qualify at all for any surveys, you’re still getting 1 SB per DQed survey up to 5. If you do qualify, you can earn anywhere between 50-200 SB per completed survey. It’s possible to do surveys on the iPad or even your phone but I’m not a fan of doing it on the phone. Too hard to see. [average: 5 SB-???]
• Play: If you pick your game right, every 2 games nets 2 SB. I like Swag Jump and Swagasaurus Run. I’m weird. Make it quick and don’t get sucked in!  🙂

Mobile

I finally downloaded the Swagbucks and Swagbucks TV apps on my phone – it’s well past time for this smartphone to earn its keep!

• SB Mobile TV: This has been my bread and butter.  It doesn’t always tell me what the earning limit is but it can be anywhere between 36 SB to 100 SB. I just set it and mostly forget it: 5 videos earns 2 SB. At some point, it’ll say you’ve earned everything you can, but once in a while, it says you qualify for a Bonus, so let it run even longer and rack up those ‘bucks! [average: 36 SB]
  • Hints: I keep the screen brightness down to save battery life and keep the phone plugged in when possible so that it can just keep going and going and going.
• SB app: You’ll get notifications of where to find Swag Codes. When they’re doing a promotion, this can be up to 30+ SB for just entering a code on your mobile app. On days when I’m running around like mad and don’t have time to look at Swagbucks, this can save me from a zero earnings day.

Other things

• Shop and Earn: I think you get better cashback, most of the time, from Mr. Rebates and Ebates, but from now until November, your first purchase each month through Swagbucks Shop and Earn will net you an extra 500 SBs, in addition to the per dollar SB payout. There is fine print which Abby summarized so clearly I’m quoting her:
  • Your order needs to actually generate Swagbucks
  • The bonuses won’t appear until December 1st and will expire on December 31st
  • You can’t redeem them for GCs less than $5: remember that your first $25 GC of the month is now discounted to 2,250 SB. Meaning that if you have all five months’ bonuses (2,500 SB) and you redeem them for a $25 GC first thing, you’ll end up with 250 SB that you can’t use.
• SwagButton: This is an extension you download and install onto your browser. I have problems with my computer so I avoid adding any extensions to it but some Swag Codes are only redeemable through the SwagButton.
• Setting your browser: They’ve done a few big pushes to get people to default their search engines to Swagbucks. I’d wait til they have another promotion for this, personally.
• Swaganigans: They run activities on the blog where you can compete for prizes. Usually it involves some kind of clever or witty thing, like this. I’m too lazy busy for this.

Bonus ways to earn

• Team Challenges: These come along every few weeks or so. Keep an eye on the upper left hand corner of the home page – they will promote the link to the sign up for Team Challenges there. Sign up for a team first thing and then go on your merry ‘bucks earning way. SBs you earn during the Team Challenges counts toward the team total and you get the teams that earn the most together gets bonuses.
• Daily Goal Bonus: When you hit the daily goal of earning per day, it kicks in another set of SBs depending on what the daily goal was. It looks like the minimum goal is 30 SB which earns 3 SB, 40 SB earns 4 SB and so on.
• Referrals: You earn 10% of whatever your referred person earns, not counting bonus SBs. This is pretty awesome, even if I only have a couple active referrals. Since my own earnings have been robust of late, the person who referred me ages ago is getting a nice 10% bonus. I can’t remember if I signed up through Donna or Abby, but I’m hoping it’s one of them. At least I know they’ll put the earnings to good use!

Go forth, friends, and rack up the Swagbucks!  And if you haven’t got an account and would like to, I’d surely appreciate it if you were to use my referral code to sign up.

August 28, 2015

Another attempt at refinancing falls flat

Our interest rate on the mortgage sucks at 4.8%. Because our HOA is engaged in some legal shenanigans and no lender will refinance a property with the exact scenario we’ve got, we weren’t able to refinance when rates bottomed out. My penny-pinching heart bleeds. Yet another reason to thank the HOA. I gave it another go when I found SoFi, a new lender that started out in student loans and recently branched out into mortgages.

I’d forgotten what our break-even number was, so I went searching for a new calculation at the same time. I’ve banked with Citibank for ages so had a look at their rates while I cleared out a checking account. They offered an overly simplistic way of calculating break-even: The typical formula for calculating your break-even point is to divide your refinance closing costs by the amount you’ll save each month with your lower mortgage payment.

For example, if your refinance costs total $5,000 and refinancing will save you $200 a month, it will take you 25 months to break even. If you don’t plan on staying in your house for that long, refinancing might not make most sense in the long run.

That’s shortsighted. Looking at the monthly “savings” misses the point which isn’t just to save a bit per month, it’s to save vast amounts over the life of the loan. And it ignores the fact that in some cases, you can choose to change the life span of the new loan to a shorter one (and probably should) which may cost as much or even more than you’re paying monthly.

That’s the case for us: I’m not going to refinance a 30-year mortgage for a new 30-year mortgage – that’s just going to add to the total interest we’d pay over the life of the loan. I’m looking for a 15 or 20 year fixed rate.

My application was quickly pre-approved but we only got as far as a rate estimate and then stalled. It was looking really good: 2.8% fixed for 15 years.

The break-even calculator cautioned me:

Change in monthly mortgage payment: Additional $29 per month

Um, really? We would happily pay an extra $29 per month to save THIS MUCH over the life of the loan. HAPPILY.

The estimated closing costs, right before I provided documentation, stopped me short though: $10,000. Excuse me?? I shot off an email to them. After several go-arounds, that was revised downward drastically to “only” $3500 give or take, but underwriting said they wouldn’t (sigh) touch our loan for the same reason all the traditional banks wouldn’t.

Drat and blast.

I hadn’t quite started up mentally investing that extra $10,000 a year for the next 15 years that wouldn’t ultimately end up in the bank’s coffers by way of interest but I’d already gotten attached. Can you blame me?