MyCardBlog

Last weekend, I received two phone calls from survey companies. One is from GfK (Growth from Knowledge, the 5 market research company worldwide.) and another one is from WB&A Market Research. GfK asked me many questions about financial institute. It took me about 15 min to finish the survey. WB&A asked me some questions about my car insurance. Of course, they have to get your permission to proceed the survey. If you are not interested in the surveys, you can say NO and they will not bother you. After 2 days, I came across a financial blog which said that he got paid (a $75 check) by surveysavvy.com by taking online surveys. This post makes me think about how to get paid by taking surveys? As I have already taken two short surveys without any rewards. Time is money! I did a lot of research online. Then I found it’s really possible to take surveys and get money. Although the amount is not so huge, it will give us some free buffets. So I joined surveysavvy.com last night. Here I want to introduce the new way to get money other than from banks. There is nothing to do about your credit history!

SurveySavvy is part of Luth Research, LLC., a market research leader since 1977. Based in San Diego, Luth Research, LLC. has conducted countless interviews, focus groups and surveys for their clients. They have over 3 million members across 190 countries earning cash by participating in their online paid surveys.

I have seen a lot of positive reports about this survey company. Some websites rate it as the NO. 1 place to take surveys. The payout is also very impressive, usually $2 to $30 for each survey (Based on the length of the surveys.). As I have mentioned above, there are millions of members. How can you be specifically targeted to participate in the surveys? Here are some tips for you: 1). Put your job as computer or information science related; 2). Put your position as a manager or business owner; 3). Always say “yes” to the first few questions before they send surveys to you; (You might get a few screeners every month.) 4). Take every chance they send out to you. 5). They send out the surveys based on demographics. You can redeem the earnings at anytime without minimum requirement. At last, you can refer your friends to join this program. (Click there to take the chance.)

Try to get money other than from banks. As you may have heard a lot that most US banks are reporting loss in the third quarter, not to mention Citi. I have become more and more dissatisfied with Citi. Even at day time, I will get an Indian customer service representitive. This is really bad!

Stars left a comment and asked how I earned so much money. I think it’s necessary to write a post about how much I earned during the last 5 months or so. Here I list the bonuses:

BOA MyAccess Checking: $100+$100 (I don’t know why they give me twice? Don’t ask me.) ;

BOA Rewards American Express Card: $50 ($50 appeared as credit in two weeks);

Chase Free Checking: $100 (I use ING to make direct deposit);

ING:$25+$10*3 ($25 is sign-up bonus and $10 for 3 referrals. If you need a referral email, please let me know.);

Chase Amazon.com Platinum Visa Card: $30;

Chase Sony Card: $100 (expired now);

American Express Starwood Preferred Guest Card:10,000 bonus points (assume I can get $100 gift card);

CapitalOne: $25 (MoneyMarket Account);

Chase Freedom: $10 (I requested CLI and got rejected. Then I called them up to ask why. The credit analyst gave me $10 bonus.);

I’m also playing balance transfer ($8,000). However, I will neglect the profit from those money because I have to pay $100 balance transfer fee.

Citi Dividend Select card: $54 (This is a cashback check.);

Household Bank Platinum MasterCard: $25 (This is also a cashback check.);

Total amount is $670+$54+$25.

I monitored my credit score daily by using NationalCity Identity Protect. The FAKO score from TransUnion dropped from 718 to 640. I have more than 10 hard inquiries in my credit report. Credit inquiries lowered my credit score from 718 to 670. Balance transfer amount appeared on my credit report lowered my credit score from 670 to 640. If you have an American Express card, you can use Credit Secure from American Express, the cost is $11.95 per month plus the first 30 days free. You can get 3 FAKO scores from 3 credit bureaus compared to only one FAKO score from TransUnion in NationalCity Identity Protect. Personally, I prefer Credit Secure from American Express.

CapitalOne launched a new website——www.capitalonecardlab.com. According to CapitalOne, this site allows you to choose the credit card offers by fitting the application criteria of CapitalOne. They claim that this is the first America’s “Do-It-Yourself” credit card offer. However, I think I should write a post about this new website. You might find a great offer from them.

Once you click “Get Started”, you will be beginning the choosing process. According to your credit score, you can choose “Excellent”, “Above Average”, “Needs Improvement”, and “Limited History”. And then, you can choose the from the following card features: “Basic Rewards”, “Additional Rewards”, “Introductory APR on Purchases”, “APR on Balance Transfer”, “Annual Percentage Rate”, and “Annual Fee”. After that, you can choose your card design through 9 beautiful designs. The last step is to review your card features and then click “Apply Now” to file the application form. Actually, at this step, you will be redirected to the CapitalOne site.

I think what you might be interested in is to choose “2x Rewards on Purchases for 12 months” at “Additional Rewards”. (They offer 1% cash back for everything.) SO you will have a card will 2% cash back on everything for 12 months with 0% APR on purchases. Another feature of CapitalOne card is there is no foreign transaction fee.

Following are two cards that I chose from this website. (Actually the ads from Kontera in my blog are introducing the CapitalOne card lab.)
Excellent

Above Average

ost of Americans have at least a credit card on hand. Although they are enjoying the benefits that are brought from using credit cards, it seems there are a lot of complains about credit card issuers. Are they really doing very badly? Or just because they can’t reach our consumers’ expectations? Anyway, a credit card is a must for all of us. There are top 10 reasons to have a credit card as I adapted from http://www.0-apr-creditcards.com. I like this post very much. I just list 4 of them for your reference.

1). Boost Your Credit History and Score
Getting a credit card will help you to establish and improve your credit history, as well as increase your credit score. Your credit score can affect a wide range of payments, and the better your score, the less you will have to pay. A high credit score may mean you pay an interest rate several points lower on a mortgage loan than the rate someone with a poor credit history would pay; this can mean thousands of dollars in savings over the life of the loan.
The same is true with an auto loan. A good credit score can mean paying less on many insurance products, such as homeowner’s insurance and auto insurance. It can even be the difference between getting a job or not, since many employers now pull potential employees’ credit scores and eliminate those with poor credit histories.

2). Internet Purchases
Having a credit card can save you money on the items you purchase. Some of the best deals available are now found on the Internet. In many instances, the only way to pay for these Internet purchases is with a credit card. If you don’t have a credit card, you may have to pay more for the exact same thing you could have purchased online, not to mention the extra cost of driving to get the item.

3). Emergency Money
A credit card provides you with instant access to money in case of an emergency. Most of us carry around the amount of cash we believe we will need for one particular day and not enough for an emergency. If you’re away from home and get stranded late at night and need to get a hotel room, you don’t have to worry about whether you have enough cash on hand. A credit card can provide an instant solution to paying off many unexpected expenses until you have the time to transfer the money from your bank account.

4). Rewards
There are many credit cards that provide a reward when you use them. This can be anything from cash back to travel points good for free airline tickets. By using a credit card that gives you an award, you can actually earn money.

Read the full article, please go to here.

This afternoon an idea suddenly came into my mind. Which gift card would give you best resale value? Since we have a lot of Membership rewards points from AMEX, Thankyou points from Citi and world points from BOA, we might use those points to redeem some store cards. Then here comes a problem. Which card will give you best value? Believe me, different gift cards will have different real values. (I suppose you want to sell the gift cards at ebay for cash.)
Then I did a little search at ebay. I took 5 recently completed auctions for each popular gift card, like Home Depot, Target, Best Buy, Staples, Amazon, GAP etc. I then counted in about 5% eBay auction fees and then calculated the net resale percentage (shipping was not counted) according to the following equation:

Ending Bid x 95%) / Face Value = Estimated Resale %
Even with only 5 data points per store, it will give us a hint.
We all might have known that Amazon.com gift card has the highest resale value. Because you can easily redeem it online, and they essentially sell everything from groceries to electronics. Target and Home Depot followed closely behind. The worst performing out of this limited sampling was Gap. Banana Republic, and Old Navy also hovered about the 80% range.
So if you want to redeem some gift cards, you will know which one will give you best value.
Of course, this post also gives you a hint: use store gift card to save money! For example, you can only get 2% cash back when you shopping at Staples. However, if you use gift cards, you can save as high as 10%. If you use credit card as PayPal payment, you can still earn cash back from credit card!

These days we all have some rewards card on hand. SO which kind of rewards do you prefer? Cashback? Air miles? Hotel points? Automatic Rebates or Discount? According to the survey conducted by cardtrak based on an online poll of 1,000 people, about 56% of consumers prefer cash back on their credit cars, while 23% said they favored air miles. About 12% preferred points and only 9% selected automatic rebates or discounts as their favorite rewards. Nearly all general purpose credit cards offer some type of rewards nowadays. According to a credit card website, the number of reward credit cards in the US has grown from 290 million in 2002 to 500 million in 2006. For card issuers, the rewards programs will pay an important role on how their consumers use their credit cards. For example, HSBC is a newbie in credit card market. However, we can see the number of their card holders are increasing in the past few months. Their 2% reward cards issued by Household Bank and Orchard Bank are really a good move. Their cards are a must for most of us. Personally, I would vote for cashback and hotel rewards as my favorite rewards. Of course, if I fly a lot, I would get some miles cards. Currently, I will save some starwood points which I think will be useful when I want to use them to redeem hotel stays in large cities like Chicago, New York etc. I encourage you guys to give your opinions. Thanks.

Today I came across an article from USA Today that tells you how to manage the useage of your credit cards. The best suggestion is “Still, choosing the card that best suits your borrowing habits can improve your credit card experience.”

Choosing a credit card that best suits your borrowing habits can help you maximize the rewards you can earn from credit card. At the same time, a good performance from the revolving accounts would help us boost our credit score. The potential benefits of this is we can get low rate car loan and mortgage. Of course, the by product is—App-O-Rama—free tickets, free stuffs and cash.

Choose the right credit cards and maximize your earning/rewards from credit cards. I was surprised to see that my cashback from my Chase Freedom card this month is $4.8. Considering my spending on that card is only $178, I’m prerry happy to have this card for my daily use. I got the HH 2% card this at the end of this June. And I have got $25 from HSBC last month—SO quick. Currently, I’m also use the Starwood Preferred Guest Card from American Express. In sight of the great benefit of free night at SPG program and the versality of transfer starwood points to mileages. I strongly recommend these three cards. Of course, the key point is to match your spending habit with your credit cards on hand. So you might have different ideas on how to use your credit card. Maybe you can tell us what credit cards currently you are using…Thanks.

When I was search on web to find out some interesting articles about credit card, I came across the the story about the first credit card. I think this would be a very interesting topic for my friends. Although we are using credit cards daily, we might not be aware how the first credit card came from. In the early 1900, people were using cash to pay for everything. Although we could see the increase in individual store credit accounts, a credit card could be used at more than one store was not invented until 1950. It all started when Frank X. McNamara went out to have supper with his two friends.

In 1949, Frank (head of the Hamilton Credit Corporation) were eating with his two friends at Major’s Cabin Grill, a famous New York restaurant located next to the Empire State Building, to discuss a problem customer of the Hamilton Credit Corporation. The problem was that the customer borrowed money from the corporation couldn’t be able to pay the money back. The problem came when the customer lent a number of store charge cards to his poor neighbors who needed items in an emergency. It’s too bad that the neighbors were unable to pay the money back to him and then he was forced to borrow money from the Hamilton Corporation. At the end of the meal, McNamara reached into his pocket for his wallet so that he could pay the money by cash. he was shocked that he had forgotten his wallet. He then asked his wife to send money to him and pay the bill. He then sweared that he would never let this happen again.

Then McNamara came up an idea—a credit card that could be used at multiple locations. However, people still needed a lot of cards in order to do shopping in multiple stores. McNamara had the idea of needing only one credit card. McNamara discussed his two friends Bloomingdale and Sneider and then they started a new company in 1950—Diners Club.

Instead of individual companies offering credit to their own customers, the Diners Club was going to offer credit to individuals for many companies (they pay the companies rather than the customers do it).

Previously, stores would make money with their credit cards by keeping customers loyal to them. However, the Diners Club used a different way to make money. They were actually not selling anything. The companies was charged 7% transaction fees while the customers was charged $3 annual fee for a Diners Club card. We should note that this card was not charging interest. (interest bearing cards came much later)

The first Diners Club credit cards were given out in 1950 to 200 people and accepted in 14 restaurants in New York. The cards were not made of plastic; instead, the first Diners Club Cards were made of a paper stock with the accepting stores on the back.

It’s amazing to see the concept of credit card grew and by the end of 1950, 20,000 people were using Diners Club credit card. —-this is the story of the first credit card.