Andy Hough

A Profitable Thanksgiving Trip

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I managed to get three days off from both jobs for Thanksgiving.  I still managed to make some money during that time though.  My mother works at a travel agency located inside a bank and while visiting her I noticed the bank was paying a $50 bonus for opening a free checking account.  Since I run a site on bank bonuses I couldn’t pass this deal up.   It wmas an easy $50 but it appears to be a YMMV deal and it is a small bank chain so I didn’t add the bonus to my bank  bonuses blog.

I also bought a Zune 80gb mp3 player and sold it on eBay.  It looks like I’ll make about $25 in profit after all fees are paid.  If everything goes smoothly in the transaction this will be worth my time.  If there are problems I’ll probably wish I hadn’t bothered.

Of course the main benefit of my trip was getting to see my family.  The Thanksgiving meals were a great benefit as well.

Back In Law School!

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I had my meeting with the re-admissions committee today and I have been re-admitted to law school.  I’ll return for the next semester which starts in January.  I have to retake a couple of classes.  I’m not thrilled with having to do that since it will probably mean it will take me an extra semester to graduate.  Of course graduating one semester later is better than never.  Both of the classes are important bar subjects so I do need to know them.  Taking them a second time should make them pretty easy.  Since this week is Thanksgiving week I have to wait until next week to finalize all the details.  The important thing though is I’m back in.

Transferred Student Loan to Credit Card

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One of my credit cards sent me a balance transfer offer for 6.99% with no transaction fee.  Since my private student loan is at 11.75% I decided to go ahead and transfer it to the credit card.  The loan balance is just a little over $1000 right now and I hope to pay it off by the end of the year.  If I do pay it off that quick the lower interest rate won’t make much difference but since it didn’t cost anything to transfer I figured I might as well save whatever little bit of interest I can.

Opting Out of Christmas

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It is that time of year when people start giving me things I don’t really want or need and in exchange I have to buy them something they probably don’t really want either.  The entire gift-buying thing is crazy to me.  That is why I’ve opted out of it.  I just tell my friends not to buy me anything and in return I will not buy them anything and we’ll come out even.  The only person I get a gift for is my mother because she will get me a gift even if I tell her not to.  The concept of Christmas without gifts doesn’t work for her.  This works ok for me because I still retain a little bit of the gift-giving tradition of Christmas without having to get into the crazy gift-buying thing.

October Income

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Here is a breakdown of my income for October.

Job Income

$1879.38

Surveys

$20

Online Income/Ebay

$15.79

Interest

$1.30

Total

$1916.47

My income was down a little this month.  This was due both to fewer hours at my job and less alternative income.  Both should be up this month and my overall income should be over $2000 this month.