Lazy Man and Money

Don’t Forget to Get your Free $50 from CollegeAdvantage

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Since my servers have been having staying up today, I’ll just give a quick update to remind everyone to get a free $50 for opening a 529 educational plan. You don’t need to have children to take advantage of this. We don’t have children and I signed up under my own name. If we have children some day, I’ll transfer it to their names. If not, perhaps I’ll go back to school myself or give it nieces and nephews.

CollegeAdvantage has one of the best 529 plans out there, so I can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t sign up. (Well, unless your own state gives some tax advantages to using your own state’s 529 plan.)

Get a Free $50 for Opening a 529 Educational Plan

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Every now and again Ohio’s 529 Plan, CollegeAdvantage, offers a nice bonus program to bring in new customers. If you have kids opening a 529 plan is smart money management. If you are like me and only have nieces and nephews it is a great gift to give. Getting started with them may be difficult, so I’d recommend my guide to choosing a 529 plan. That analysis lead me to go with Ohio’s plan – even though they didn’t have offer the bonus program. So they’ll start you with $25 if you follow these directions below. (You guys get all the luck!)

  • Go to Ohio’s CollegeAdvantage and open an account before December 15th. Note: They allow themselves the ability to end the program at any time, so I would act NOW.
  • When asked for a referral code use 2481398 to receive the bonus
  • Deposit $25 or more to qualify for the bonus
  • You should receive your bonus in in 7-10 business days

Since I already accounts in my niece and nephews name, I signed up last time and just made myself the beneficiary. I was too Lazy to sign up get my wife to sign up. This is a good time to take right that wrong.

I love when a great product offers a great deal. That’s quite a rare find. However, it gets even better! If you set a recurring monthly electronic transfer before January 31st, they’ll give you another $25 bonus – $50 in total free money. You just have to make sure that you transfer $25 a month, have a minimum of 3 transfers in a 90 day period, and still have the transfer active after the 90 days. So the way I read it, you could spend $75 to get $25 free. That’s a nice 33% return on your investment.

Weekend Personal Finance Links (sore muscle edition)

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My wife persuaded me to go her gym’s Body Pump class yesterday. Not only was my ego hurt by the women doing heavier weights more times than me, but even my finger muscles hurt. That being the case, I’m going to cut right to the chase and get you the links.

From The Money Writers:

From others:

Credit Cards as a Money Tool

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Much of America has is in debt. Sometimes it’s good debt and other times it’s bad debt. I wrote about good debt vs. bad debt last week. Credit cards that you don’t pay off are an example of bad debt. Many of them charge upwards of 20% interest. For that reason some people have decided to not to use credit cards at all.

It doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom with credit cards though. For those with the means and fortitude to pay them off every month, there are definitely rewards. Just be sure you can you handle the responsibility before you try. Here’s a list of the benefits that responsible users of credit cards enjoy:

  • Free Money/Rewards – I get 5% back on gas with my credit card. With my local gas prices at $4.55 a gallon, that’s nearly 23 cents a gallon. (My credit card doesn’t seem to available, but the Chase PerfectCard seems to be a good alternative with 6% for the first 90 days and 3% after that.) I get the same 5% off of grocery and drug stores. I get 3% off of restaurants, home improvement stores, and office supply stores. Every few months Chase sends me couple of hundred dollars. That’s one piece of mail I don’t getting. It is a lot better than using a debit machine that rarely gives you rewards.
  • Free interest – The extra time that I have to pay off the credit cards is time where I’m making a small amount of interest by keeping the money in the bank. Admittedly this is a very minor, but real benefit.
  • Enhanced warranties – Many credit cards double the warranty of many consumer products.
  • Consumer Protection – Have you been wronged by a merchant? Often times the credit card company will go to bat for you. I don’t use this benefit very often. I don’t want to be the one that cries wolf. However, once every 12-18 months, it proves to be a very valuable perk.
  • Building Great Credit – By paying off my credit cards each month, I have been building great credit for years. It paid off when it came time to get a mortgage and I qualified for the lowest rate – the teaser rates that very few people qualify for.
  • Emergency Protection – You never know when something is going to come up. I don’t want to carry that much cash on hand. Debit cards help, but I like to keep money earning the most interest possible. As such, I don’t keep a lot of money in accounts where I have debit cards.
  • Spending History – I can give a service like Mint, or Quicken my credit card transaction file and it will analyze where and how I’m spending my money. If I see I’m spending too much on eating out, I curtail it.

This is just another example how emotional control can add up to very real, tangible gains.

Get a Free $25 – Expires Tomorrow (5/15)

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Last month, I wrote about Revolution Money Exchange and how you can get $25 for two minutes of your time. The 10,000 foot view is that the company has some very important people in the banking industry trying to start-up a competitor to Paypal. Paypal has been around a long, long, time and has the power of Ebay behind it. This company realizes it’s facing an uphill battle, so they are willing to buy users with a free $25 for those willing to take those two minutes to sign up.

I signed up and I’ve used it to send a small amount of money transaction-fee free. That’s important to me since Paypal makes me pay around 3% on other transactions. Last month, at least 50 people signed up through my this referral link and made themselves a quick $25. Some people commented that they referred their significant other as well – getting $60 for the couple ($25 for each and $10 for referring someone) – that’s a decent dinner out. In total, Lazy Man and Money readers made over $1300 by me writing that post. From my perspective, I never felt happier about a post. It’s very rare that I can directly quantify the value of my writing to the readers.

The free ride ends tomorrow though. There’s no way that Revolution Money Exchange can give out that much free money forever – especially when they aren’t collecting it back from fees. Tomorrow, May 15, it looks like they’ve finally decided to end the promotion. Click here to take advantage before the opportunity is gone.

Side comical note: My wife called it Revolution Monkey Exchange last week. I’ve been having fun with her asking if she thought that they exchange monkeys and/or if we can somehow work the system to get a monkey butler.  The joke is still funny for me, but I think it’s getting a little old for her.