MyCardBlog

$5 from Sears by signing up email ad alerts. This may be the easiest $5 to get so far. Click this link to sears.com and then click “get email alerts” to registration page. Fill in your name, address and email address, you’re expected to receive the $5 sears gift card in about 4 weeks. NOTE: Offer is valid from 01/30/2008-04/06/2008. Limit one free gift card per household. If you have more than one address/email address, you can get more!

$5 from Ebates.com. Click this link to ebates.com. After registration, you will get $5 in your ebates.com account. In order to make this $5 payable to you, you should finish online shopping through ebates.com before a certain time. Why choose ebates.com? Ebates.com is a large online shopping rewards site. It’s very similar to Chase Rewards Plus. You click their link to buy products online, then they will give you a certain amount cash back (from 1% to 25%). You have to remember that you can still earn cash back from your credit cards! If you accumulate more than $5 in your account in 3 months, a check will be mailed to you. Of course, you can choose to use PayPal to receive the money. For example, if you you want to buy a Canon S850 at Staples.Com ($200). You can login at ebates.com and then click the staples.com link at ebates.com to finish this transaction. Within about 2~3 days, the 2% cash back will appear in your account ($4). If you use a simplycash business card to buy this camera, you can still earn 5% on that card ($10). If you make a lot of purchases online, ebates.com is a good choice. Another feature is they offer free coupons! This will save you a lot of time. This feature makes ebates.com one of the most popular online shopping cash rewards site.

Some featured online merchants: 4% at Target, 6% at Adobe, 1% at BestBuy, 4% at CircuitCity, 2% at Dell Home and 1% at Dell Small Business, 2% at Staples, and 4% at Sears.

Register now to save money!

Following this link, you can get $20 Amazon.Com gift card by taking a short survey. The questions are very simple. You can finish it in about 2 minutes.

Dear Librarian Gateway User:

We are asking for your participation in a short online survey regarding communications between publishers and librarians.

Your feedback is highly valued. The questionnaire will take just a few minutes to complete, and your contribution will play a significant role in our decision making.

Your participation is entirely anonymous; responses will be analyzed in the aggregate only, and will never be associated with individual participants.

Please follow this link to complete the questionnaire.

To thank you for your time, participants will have the option to receive either a £10 Amazon.co.uk® gift card or a $20 Amazon.com® gift card*.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

If you want to get more gift cards, all you have to do is to clear the cookie. Then you can start over again!!! At the end of the survey, you have to fill in your contact information. (E=Email, T=Telephone.) Hurry up!

It’s time to prepare your tax return for 2007. I believe a lot of people will buy a copy of TurboTax or TaxAct from retailers like Staples, WalMart or other places. Hereby I’d like to provide an amazing deal to get a free TurboTax Basic or Deluxe. (I got this deal from slickdeals.net. Credit goes to echostorm at slickdeals.net.)

Use this link to intuit.com: http://turbotax.intuit.com/affiliate/06tycmep

Click “downloads” at the top tabs.

Choose whatever version you want (Deluxe is recommended.):

Basic and Deluxe: FREE
Premier: $20.00
Home & Business: $45.00

And then you can choose check out to place the order to download this software directly from intuit.com for free!

Of course, use the following username and password to login the online account.

tax@trashmail.com
irssucks (Please, please don’t change the username and password there, thank you!)

This is a deal for statefarm customers, however, I don’t know how that guy can make it. Anyway it’s a good deal for all of us. You can also fill state tax return for free! What’s more, you can use State & Federal E-File Free! (e-file works for some states only) This will dramatically accelerate your tax return process!

Here is what I got!

I have copy this deal to my forum. Or see the discussion at slickdeals.net at here.

As an effort to promote the communication with my readers and provide a forum for us to discuss specific topics, I set up a forum at mycardblog. You can access to the forum at www.mycardblog.com/forum. This forum is dedicated to discuss personal finance. I think it’s also a good way to expand your knowledge about money management. I think this forum will also cover some topics that I don’t post here at my blog. Another advantage of forum is all the members can bring latest news, deals and ideas. In this way, you can get the latest information as soon as possible. Anyway, thank you for your support!

Below is a screen shot of the forum:

Another important news I want to put here is ” Banks Are Going to Close Accounts of Risky Customers”.

Given the current state of banks, we have enough reasons to believe that they will shift the aim from mortgages to other risky products. Not to mention that more than 60% Americans carry balance on their at least two credit cards every month. If you are not a profitable customer to them, you are also in the queue. In the next few months, if the credit card issuers close you credit card account or reduce your credit limit without notifying you, don’t be surprised. I also strongly suggest you guys not play AOR recently.

Here is the report from Yahoo.

Reuters: Web bank Egg withdraws cards from riskier customers

LONDON (Reuters) – Egg, the Internet bank owned by Citigroup, will withdraw credit cards from 161,000 customers following a risk review, a spokesman for Egg said on Saturday.

The company has given seven percent of its credit card customers 35 days’ notice that it was ending their card agreements, he said.

“The credit profiles of affected customers had deteriorated between the time they joined Egg and the acquisition (by Citigroup) in May,” Egg said in a statement. “The decision to end these customers’ agreements was taken after conducting a one-off, extensive risk review of our (customers)…”

The move marks another example of how banks are revising their lending criteria amid the credit crunch.

Earlier this week, Britain’s Financial Services Authority said in an annual review that UK banks face their toughest conditions since the 1990s due to escalating consumer defaults.

The customers affected will not be able to use their Egg credit card once the notice period has ended, although they can continue to make minimum monthly repayments or pay up in full.

“Egg is not asking for immediate repayment of balances or making any changes to their current terms and conditions or interest rates,” the company said.

Citigroup bought the business from Prudential in May, 2007.

(Reporting by Gavin Haycock)

I have a post on how to manipulate your Amazon.Com “Qiuck Picks” to save 5% or more. (Click here.) However, you have to wait overnight to get the relative products show up in your account and get discount. Today, I’d like to spread out one more method on using “Quick Picks” at Amazon.Com. In this way, you can get discounts instantly.

Step 1. Do not log in your amazon.com account. Just open the website and find out something related or just the specific stuff that you want. Make sure you can find the product you want at Amazon.Com.

Step 2. Register a new account at Amazon.Com with another email address. You can have the same name and shipping address.

Step 3. Tell/Fool Amazon.Com that you own that product.

Step 4. Click “Deals of the Day” and the product should be yours with discount.

Here is what I get:

Note: You can add your address later in this new account. But you have to prepare multiple email addresses in order to play this game.

Use Amaon.Com Plstinum Visa Card to save more!

I believe most of us have a lot of junk mails (e.g. credit card application invitations). Believe it or not, identity fraud is very serious in America nowadays. A very important way to prevent identity theft is to properly dispose your junk mails. Then what do you do with junk mails?Because some have our personal information (address etc.) on them. I don’t want to just throw them into the trash can. Instead, I use a Junk Mail Shredder to help me to dispose those junk mails. I got this Junk Mail Shredder last Sunday when I found it was on sale. I got lucky because it’s the last one in my local Staples store. You pay $59.98 and get $40 easy rebate, so the final cost of this powerful Junk Mail Shredder is $19.98. What a great deal! The Staples MailMate Junk Mail Shredder can shred CD/DVDs, credit cards, small paper clips, and 10-fold sheets! To see this powerful junk mail killer, you can click here.

Junk Mails

Credit Cards

I really like this little Junk Mail Shredder! I hope this post will be helpful to all of you.

Recently I made a lot of purchases at Amazon.Com. So I got some discoveries to share with my friends. Today I’d like to talk about Amazon Prime service.

Amazon Prime is a premium shipping service which you can get free two-day shipping without minimum purchase requirement. You can also add $3.99 for overnight shipping. The price of this service is $79 per year. You can share the Amazon Prime with up to 4 additional accounts! So it would be $16 each person.

• FREE Two-Day Shipping on over a million in-stock items
• $3.99 Overnight Shipping
• No Minimum Order
• Share Your Benefits

I really like this service. If you want to make large purchases, you’d better go to Amazon.Com and check the price there. I’m shopping at Amazon.Com primarily due to the tax-free feature and the nice customer service. Plus you can get 5% cash back if you use your Citi mtvU Card, or you can use your Amazon.Com card which will give you 3% cash back at Amazon.Com. Right now, if you sign up Amazon Prime, you can get 1-month free trial. You will need to provide your credit card number. But you can cancel it at any time.

For those who may be not aware of this deal, there is another test drive deal from Ford. If you test drive a 2008 Ford Focus with SYNC, you can receive a $50 Best Buy Gift Card by mail from Ford.

To get the test drive coupon:

Click here and enter your email address for the sweepstakes.

Fill out your information (name, address, etc) and answer 3 questions below. You can answer the questions like this:

A) When do you plan to purchase/lease your next vehicle? ANSWER: 0-30 DAYS
B) What type of vehicle do you plan to purchase or lease? ANSWER: CAR
C) How did you find out about this Ford /SYNC promotion? ANSWER: THRU A FRIEND

Then click “submit” and go to the next page. Answer a simple question about Ford SYNC. (You can search on the web for answers in case you don’t know.)

And then on the next page you will see the “TEST DRIVE” link in the middle of the page. After click it, you can see a test drive coupon with all your information on it. Print it out and take it to your nearest Ford dealers and ask them to fill out the necessary information for you. You actually don’t have to test drive the 2008 Ford Focus. Good Luck!