Andy Hough

Used CC Balance Transfer to Pay Down Student Loan

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I went ahead and used the balance transfer from my credit card to pay down my Grad Plus student loan.  The amount of the transfer was $4900 plus a $75 balance transfer fee.  Since my interest rate will be over four points lower on the credit card I should easily make up the balance transfer fee.  If my math is correct after seven months I’ll come out ahead. The credit card rate is for life and I have other higher interest debt so I’ll be paying only the minimum or slightly above the minimum payment on the card balance. Once I graduate and my income is more certain I’m going to look into paying down more of my student debt in this manner.

One of my goals this year was not to incur any debt other than student loan debt.  Since this is just student loan debt transferred to my credit card I feel it is within my goal.

Using LexisNexis and Westlaw

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*Note-My new posting schedule is for Saturday’s posts to be about law school or law and Sunday to be about goals.  Monday through Friday will be about frugality but there will probably often be some overlap in the weekday and weekend subject areas.

If you’re in law school you probably know all about LexisNexis and Westlaw.  This post is not going to be a tutorial on how to use them.  Instead it is a suggestion to make sure you are getting the rewards out of them.

LexisNexis and Westlaw both have rewards programs that award points for doing various research activities.  They both want to make sure that you become a paying client when you graduate and enticing you to use their research systems now helps ensure that you will keep using them.

There are many different ways to earn points.  The easiest is to do the Fact or Fiction? at LexisNexis and the Daily Trivia at Westlaw.  These are not many points but they don’t take long and since you can do them frequently they add up.  To get the big points though you need to do tutorials or participate in the classes that the reps occasionally have.  These usually provide many more points.  I recently completed a forty-five minute class for 800 points.  That was well worth it since I can redeem those points for a $10 gift certificate and still have points left over.  Of course I also improved my research skills.

I prefer the LexisNexis reward program to the Westlaw one since they have a variety of $5 and $10 gift certificates you can redeem your points for.  This makes it quicker to get value for your points.  Westlaw doesn’t really have smaller items to redeem your points for.  The best choice in their program seems to be using the points for books.  Right now I’m just letting my Westlaw points accumulate and I’ll redeem them for something big when I finish school.  It doesn’t really matter which rewards program you like best since you should participate in both.  Keep your eye out for various opportunities to earn extra points throughout the semester.  These programs are a really good deal since you earn points for stuff you would or should be doing anyway and you gain valuable knowledge at the same time.

More Expensive Does Not Mean Higher Quality

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You do not necessarily get what you pay for.   An earlier post “Cheap Wine is Fine” showed how wine enthusiasts rated wine higher when it had a higher price tag but in a blind taste test they ended up preferring the $5 wine over the $90 wine.  Now there is a similar example in which audiophiles couldn’t tell the difference between music passed through coat hangers from that which passed through pricey Monster cables. The full story is at the Consumerist.   This shows again that quality is often perceived rather than actual.

There probably is a general correlation between higher priced goods and higher quality but you shouldn’t assume that to be true.  Many times even if an item is higher quality it isn’t enough to make it worth the higher price.  Before spending more on an item in order to get higher quality determine if it truly is higher quality and if you actually need the higher quality.

Heating Experiment Successful

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My electric bill came this week and I can now evaluate the results of my heating experiment designed to reduce the cost of my natural gas bill.  My previous gas bill was $103 and the current one was only $69 for a savings of $34.  Quite surprisingly my use of an electric space heater only resulted in a $2 increase in my electric bill making my overall savings $32.  This is enough for me to consider the experiment a success.  The figures were probably helped a bit by the fact that I was gone on vacation for one week of the month.

February Expense

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for February:

Household

$382.10

Utilities

$118.68

Transportation

$623.49

Entertainment

$536.83

Food

$110.06

Education/Student Loans

$120.16

Total

$1891.32

 

My expenses were way too high last month.  I spent $440 on a new clutch for my car which made my transportation expense much higher than normal.  My vacation in Cancun made my entertainment expense abnormally high.  The bad thing about that is I spent almost $100 on entertainment at home.

Those expenses should return to normal this month.  My other expenses should remain in the same ballpark.  I would really like to get my food expense back under $100.  I only went $10 over last month which isn’t bad considering I was on vacation for five days but I would just like to show myself that I have the self-discipline to get my food expense back under budget.  I’m hoping for total expenses of less than $1000 this month.