Easy Money from Staples Gift Card Deal

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Until 3-21-15 Staples is offering a $20 rebate in the form of a Visa gift card when you buy $250 or more of Visa gift cards. The purchase fee for a $200 gift card is $6.95. If you buy 2 $200 gift cards you will have a profit of $6.10. That doesn’t sound like much but when  you combine it with the credit card rewards you can get for purchasing the cards it is a good deal. I know at least one of my readers has a Chase Ink card that pays 5x at Staples which would mean they would get 2000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points in addition to the $6.10. I only have a 2% cash back card so my profit will be $14.10. That is a pretty good deal for just a few minutes of my time to buy the cards and submit the rebate.  In addition to making a little money this is also helpful if you need to meet a minimum spend requirement to get a credit card bonus. There is a limit of one rebate per household for this deal.

Next week, 3-22-15 to 3-28-15, Staples is offering a $20 rebate in the form of a Staples gift card when you buy $250 or more of Mastercard gift cards. The math for this deal works the same.  The big difference in this deal is that the rebate is for a Staples gift card which can only be used at Staples rather than for a Visa gift card which can be used anywhere that accepts Visa. This isn’t a big deal to me since I buy stuff at Staples on a regular basis.  I’m in Staples at least once a month to get free stuff from recycling ink and they frequently have free after rebate items so using the Staples gift card will not be a problem.

February FIRE Numbers – 33.20 Months of Expenses Saved

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My February FIRE (financial independence retire early) numbers were down slightly from the month before. This was disappointing since this is the time of year I am supposed to make the best progress on my numbers. Part of the reason for the poor performance was that I didn’t get some money moved from checking to savings. That money will get moved this month which will make this month look better.

My safe withdrawal rate declined slightly from 35.89% in January to 36.13% in February. Either way it is a long way to my goal of 4%.

I have 33.20 months of expenses saved which is slightly less than the 33.43 months of expenses I had saved in January. My goal is to have 300 months of expenses saved.

March should be a much better month financially and I expect to see significant improvement in both of these numbers.

February Expenses – $946.17

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for February.

Household $429.55
Entertainment $79.30
Transportation $58.02
Food $100.77
Student Loan $106.00
Travel $0
Phone $26.81
Health $145.72
Total $946.17

 

My February expenses were fairly low. I managed to make my stretch goal of keeping my expenses under $1000 a month for the third month in a row.  The streak will end when I have to pay for my dental implants. I’m hoping I can keep the streak going until them.

My food expenses were low since I managed to keep my fast food expenses under $50.  There are also some dinners out with my GF that I put in the entertainment category. Those were kept fairly cheap with coupons and/or gift cards. I did pretty well in that category considering Valentine’s Day and my GF’s birthday were in February.

My health expenses were a little higher due to getting sick and needing some prescriptions. The total would have been much lower if I hadn’t paid $53 at CVS for a drug I could have gotten for $4 at Walmart. I won’t be filling any more prescriptions at CVS. I can’t complain about the overall cost of the sickness. My GF being a nurse managed to get me a couple prescriptions from her nurse practitioner and doctor without having an official doctor visit. I will have to pay some lab fees this month, but they won’t be too much.

March should be another low-cost month. We do have a vacation to Las Vegas coming up at the end of the month. The airfare was free and the room is free other than the resort fee so the vacation shouldn’t cost too much.

February Income – $2161.46

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Here is a breakdown of my income for February.

Online Income

 $243.82
Interest

$14.53

Cash Back

$12.35
Amazon FBA $0
Jobs $1890.76

Total

$2161.46

 

February was a decent month for income, but not as good as I hoped. Missing three days of work due to being sick resulted in my job income being a good deal less than I planned. Online income went down by quite a bit. This wasn’t a surprise since it was unusually high the month before.  I didn’t manage to make any money from bonuses or Amazon FBA. I actually lost a little on FBA which I will take off this month’s total.  My interest income went up a little since I loaned my GF $10,000 to buy a car. I might write more about that later.

The job income should go up this month and hopefully I will be able to make a little more money from my alternative income streams. I’m hoping to not work at a job the rest of this year once I finish my tax job so I need to bump up this income.

 

If you haven’t joined Mr. Rebates yet you can get a $5 bonus for signing up through my referral link and I’ll make a little money for referring you as well.
Mr. Rebates

 

Double Sickness Week – Shingles Plus…

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This was not a good week for my physical health.  I’d had a rash on my chest by my underarm for about a week which I had thought was just a rash. It started hurting last Sunday night which made me think it was not just a rash.  When I told my GF about it the next day she said it was probably shingles. My GF is a nurse and got her friend who is a nurse practitioner to look at it and she agreed that it was shingles. Although the shingles was annoying and caused me to lose some sleep I could deal with it and work through it.

Tuesday the plan was to get my shingles prescription after I got off work. After lunch Tuesday I started to feel unwell. I ended up leaving work about an hour early and by the time I got home I was sick as a dog. I had a fever, nausea, chills, aches, and fatigue. Looking at shingles symptoms I saw that it could cause flu-like symptoms so I figured that was what I was experiencing. This was worse than any flu than I’d had for many years though.

Sick as a dog
Sick as a dog

I didn’t get much sleep that night and in the morning I felt even worse. I decided I needed to tell my GF another symptom I was experiencing. It really hurt when I peed. This is not something you want to tell your GF. 🙂 Since I knew it couldn’t be an STD we figured it must be a urinary tract infection and I started taking an antibiotic for this infection.

Having shingles and a UTI seems bad enough but things were actually worse. After taking the antibiotic Wednesday and Thursday I felt only a little better on Friday. My GF decided I should go to her office so she could run a urinalysis which confirmed I had an infection and that it looked more serious than just a UTI. Her doctor sent me to get some blood work done which confirmed I had prostatitis. I’d never heard of it before, but it is a bacterial infection of the prostate which can be pretty serious. With the new diagnosis we switched to a different antibiotic and it seems to be working.

My theory is that these illnesses all started with my oral surgery a couple of weeks prior. The dentist prescribed me a steroid to keep the inflammation down. One side effect of the steroid is that it can weaken your immune system. Apparently, it really weakened mine. When I have my dental implants done later this year I will be sure to let them know I do not want to take a steroid.

Although I was off work three days I didn’t get any blogging or much of anything else done. I felt so bad I all I wanted to do was sleep or sit on the couch and watch TV. Now that I’m feeling almost normal again I should have a better week this week.