Investing with Credit Cards

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A few years ago you could easily make a few bucks by getting a 0% credit card deal and putting the money in the bank at 5% but those days are gone. You are lucky to get 1% on your money now. And the credit card companies seemed to catch on to this trick and now have uncapped transfer fees of 3% to 5% to get your 0% money. I recently received a deal for 0% money for one year with only a 2% fee and decided that was good enough for me to make some money. Please note that I’m not recommending that anyone else do this.

The cost of the credit was $160 for $8000. My plan is to use about $3000 of this money to take advantage of bank bonus offers. I’ve already made $115 from a local bank bonus offer. I’ve also received the $25 Betterment.com bonus. A US Bank $50 bonus should be arriving shortly and I’ll receive another $50 bonus in one year. A $100 Sharebuilder bonus and $25 Discover Bank bonus are in the process of being earned. I still have about $1000 left to take advantage of other bonus offers. The bonus offers by themselves will cover the cost of borrowing the money.

Another $3000 of this money went into the stock market. I’m not a market timer but with the stock market dropping so much Thursday it looked to me that I could get some dividend stocks cheap. I put about $3000 in three stocks today and the stocks are already up. My plan it to keep the stocks and pay off this portion of the money from my monthly cash flow. If that doesn’t work out I’ll just sell one of my losing stocks for tax loss harvesting.

I’d like to use the remaining $2000 to buy another website. That might be a little crazy since I’m having trouble keeping up with the blogs I already own. Websites can be one of the best investments. When I bought MyRetirementBlog.com I was nervous about the amount of money I spent on it but I made about 75% of the purchase price back in the first year. The earnings have gone up since then and I’ve probably made more than the purchase price this year alone. If I can’t find a reasonably priced site I’ll just pay down the credit card loan or look for other investment opportunities.

If you have a personal finance blog or related website for sale or know someone who does please contact me.

September 2011 Goals Progress

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For the month of September I set goals of writing 100 posts/pages, running/walking 100 miles, and investing 100% of my extra money. We are now halfway through the month of September and I have written 21 posts, walked 19 miles, and invested more than 100% of my extra money. Overall, I’m not doing very well on my goals. The savings goal was easy to meet, I just had to move some money from my bank account to my stock account. The other goals require a lot more work. I’m not anywhere close to halfway on those goals. I thought I would be able to put in some big days in the last half of the month but that will be extremely difficult. We got our first client for our offline business and will have to travel out of state a few days in the next couple of weeks. Plus we are going to my enrollment ceremony and the Financial Blogger’s Conference. There won’t be a lot of time left for writing and walking but I’m still going to work on them and get as close to my goals as possible.

Saving Money with Staple Ink Cartridge Recycling Rewards

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We have saved quite a bit of money this year by taking advantage of Staples’ ink cartridge recycling program. Staples allows you to recycle up to 10 ink cartridges a month and receive $2 in Staples Rewards for each cartridge recycled. This gives us $20 a month in Staples Rewards to spend. So far this year we have used them to get a printer,router, toilet paper,paper towels, and lots of office supplies. By combining the monthly rewards with coupons,rebates, and the 1 cent back to school items we have been able to really stretch our rewards.

To get started recycling ink cartridges at Staples you need to sign up for their Staples Rewards program. It is a simple form and should only take a few minutes to complete. You also need cartridges to recycle. If you don’t have enough cartridges of your own to recycle you can buy cartridges for about 25 cents each on Ebay or Craigslist. That still leaves you with a nice profit on each cartridge. After recycling your cartridges you will receive your rewards online the following month. You can either redeem the rewards online or print them out and use them in the store.

There is a limit of one Staples Rewards account per household plus there a few items for which the rewards are not valid. Office Depot and Office Max also have ink cartridge recycling programs. Office Depot limits your rewards to the amount of what you spend in their store limiting the usefulness of their program for me. They do allow 20 cartridges a month to be recycled for rewards though which might make their program worthwhile for others. I don’t have any experience with Office Max because they have more restrictions on their ink recycling program and they don’t have any stores in my area.

Recycling ink cartridges with the Staples Rewards ink cartridge recycling program is an easy way to save money on office supplies and household items.

I Passed the Bar

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I apologize for the off-topic post but I know some people are interested in this, I’ll be posting a personal finance post later tonight.

The bar exam results came out yesterday and I was pleasantly surprised to find out I passed the bar exam. There were several factors that made me a longshot to pass the bar exam. It had been over two years since I finished law school classes, I did self-study rather than a bar exam review course, I was near the bottom of my graduating law school class, and I worked while preparing for the bar exam. Despite all that I managed to pass the bar exam.

I really didn’t think I was going to pass since I was sure I bombed a couple of the essay questions. Examining my bar exam results I was correct that I bombed two of the essay questions but I did well enough on the remaining questions to bring my score up to average. I did slightly below average on the MBE which I felt that I had done well on but it was good enough for me to pass. It is difficult to predict how well you have done on the bar exam.

My enrollment ceremony will be later this month. After that I’ll be a licensed attorney. I’m not sure what I’ll do after that but I am going to do something as an attorney.

Online Income Report – August 2011

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Here is a breakdown of my online income for August 2011.

Google Adsense – $292.83

Affiliate Income – $252.25

Brokered Ads – $55.17

Amazon – $11.31

Direct Ads- $1774.26

Total – $2385.82

August was another great month for income.  I thought the direct ad deals would slow down but they are still going strong.  I have actually canceled a couple of my low paying month-to-month ads to make room for better paying ads.  I’d like to diversify my income more so that direct ads aren’t such a large percentage of my income but my efforts at making affiliate income haven’t produced much results.  I probably need to work smarter and harder on increasing my affiliate income.   I’m not complaining, I’ll take the direct ad money as long as it continues.  I’ve already made about a thousand bucks this month so September will be another good month.