Stephanie, Author at Poorer Than You

Amazon.com Visa – Is There a Catch?

By Stephanie, updated February 19, 2007 22 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

I’ve been meticulously checking the sites that my traffic has been coming from the last few days, so that I can thank all of the people that have been linking me. It’s a tad bit on the obsessive side, but I want to make sure people know how grateful I am. While doing this, I noticed one visitor came upon the site by doing a Google search for “amazon visa $30 off. Is there a catch?”

I don’t know if you’re still around, Google-searching-visitor, but I wanted to answer your question. Yes, there is a catch. The catch is that you’re applying for a credit card! I don’t know how much you looked into the offer, but I’m going to explain everything I know about the card from having it for the past year and half.

When you look at your shopping cart on Amazon.com, they’ll try and tempt you by saving “Save $30 on this order by signing up for an Amazon.com Visa!” But is this a good idea? The answer: absolutely maybe. (Yeah, I stole the term “absolutely maybe” from Stephen Colbert.)

If you’re already in the market for a credit card, like I was when I got this card, then it might be a good idea – if you shop at Amazon a lot. The card offers Amazon points for every dollar you spend – 1 point per dollar for normal purchases, and 3 points per dollar spent at Amazon. When you reach 2500 points, Amazon will automatically mail you a gift certificate to their site for $25. In other words, it’s 1% “cash” back on normal purchases, and 3% on Amazon purchases (including money spent on shipping!).

This is good if you’re a regular Amazon shopper. But if you rarely shop at Amazon, your return is only going to be 1% – you can find cards with better rewards than that, cards that offer 3% on groceries, gas, and other everyday purchases.

The card carries no annual fee, by the way. The interest rate is 0% for the first six months, including balance transfers and purchases – after six months, it will be about 17%, which is variable, although I will say it hasn’t moved in the time I’ve had it, for what that’s worth.

There are actually three versions of this card, but from what I can tell, they’re exactly the same. Besides the regular version, they also offer a student card and a business card. I don’t think they offered these at the time I signed up, or else I would have applied for the student card. They really aren’t functionally any different, they might have different designs on the actual card, I really don’t know.

If you apply for the card during checkout, it will apply the $30 off to your purchase immediately. If you apply any other time, it will credit your first bill for $30 – so if you spend $30 on the card the first month, your bill will be for $0.

So, back to the catch? It’s a credit card! If you’re not responsible with credit, then it’s a big catch. Can you still get this card for the $30 off if you’re bad with credit? Yes, but you have to do it very carefully. Get the card, get the $30 off, pay any extra on your bill when it comes, and CUT UP THE CREDIT CARD WHEN IT COMES AND NEVER USE IT (or use some other method for not using your card). If you use it anyways, and get yourself into trouble, it’s not my fault. I told you how it is!

Upromise – Easy College Savings

By Stephanie, updated February 18, 2007 5 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

Upromise is another one of those companies that I simply adore. It’s a free service that helps you save money for college. If you’re not familiar with the program, it goes a little something like this: you register your credit, debit, and grocery savings cards with them, and when you make qualified purchases (in the supermarket, you’ll sometimes notice some price tags have the Upromise logo on them), Upromise tracks the purchase and puts a small amount of money into your Upromise account. The money earned in the account can be put towards student loans, or deposited in a 529 account.

It’s a very small amount of money indeed – but it adds up over time. My mom signed up for Upromise, for me, when the service was very new – around the time I was 12 years old or so. She registered her cards, and then we forgot about it for 8 years. During that time, her credit and debit cards expired and changed, so the service was no longer receiving any information from those cards. However, her grocery card stayed the same, so for 8 years, it registered all of her qualified supermarket purchases.

A few months ago, we suddenly remembered the account and logged in. Sitting pretty in the account was about $42. Sure, that’s only the cost of about a textbook. But remember, that’s just the grocery card. If we’d actually kept all of her information up to date, and if we had actively encouraged friends and family to sign up, the amount would have been much, much greater. Yep – you can invite anyone you like to set up a Upromise account to benefit the person you’ve set it up for! I even have some of my own friends contributing to my Upromise account (I love you guys!).

I strongly encourage anyone who is planning to go to college, goes to college now, or knows someone who they’d like to help go to college someday (the further off the better – we’ve set up an account to benefit my two-year-old niece!) to sign up for this service. It’s completely free – in 8 years, we’ve never been charged for anything. There is a fair amount of email in the first month – Upromise will send a series of emails, reminding you of all the different ways to earn they offer (sign up your current credit cards, get their credit card, sign up your grocery card, shop online through them, etc. – one email per service) to get the most out of their program. After one month, those “rookie” emails stop, and it’s up to you to remember to update your cards!

Welcome New York Times Readers!

By Stephanie, updated February 18, 2007 9 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

Poorer Than You featured in the New York Times article "Debtors Search for Discipline via Blogs" — The web address is PoorerThanYou.com now, but hey, that’s this site! Featured in a FRONT PAGE article of the New York Times!

I must admit, I’m blushing. I had no idea that the New York Times was going to mention me in their article about debt bloggers – I was caught completely off guard!

I think they just liked that they could describe me as a “20-year-old film-school dropout” (accurate). 😉

If you enjoy what you’ve been reading, consider subscribing to Poorer Than You in a feed reader or by email.

WOWIO Update

By Stephanie, updated February 17, 2007 1 Comment
This post may contain affiliate links

If it’s possible, I love WOWIO more now than I even did before. As I mentioned in my previous entry, WOWIO is a free service for downloading free ebooks, and they are doing a giveaway where if you refer 10 people to the service, you get a free iPod shuffle.

Within five days of receiving an email from WOWIO about the promotion (I’ve had an account with them since September), I had my 10 referrals and I filled out the simple form (just my address and daytime phone number) to claim my iPod shuffle.

During that time, I had a slight bit of trouble with one of my referrals crediting. He did everything right, but it simply didn’t show up. So I emailed WOWIO, and they responded in less than 20 minutes with “No problem. Just tell us his email address, and we’ll credit you.”

WOWIO is by far one of my favorite online services now! If you decide to sign up, please put

vanpattenjames@gmail.com

as your referrer, so that my friend will get credit toward his free iPod shuffle. This goes whether you sign up for the free ebooks or for your chance at the shuffle – either way, you have to sign up, and it won’t help you any to NOT put him as your referral, but it will help him if you DO.

Money Advice for the College Student – Part III

By Stephanie, updated February 14, 2007 19 Comments
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(Read Part I or Part II of this series)

College is an excellent time to start in on your finances, because you have several factors on your side. You don’t have too many financial demands on you yet – your room and board are probably rolled up into your financial aid. But best of all, you have time – “vast acres of time in which you plant crops,” as my hero Joss Whedon would put it. You have about 40 years until retirement age – double the amount you’ve been alive so far! And best of all, most of your peers won’t start thinking about their own finances until five years from now… or possibly later. It’s the perfect time for…

Part III: Getting Your Head Start

Albert Einstein once said “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest,” or possibly “Is the greatest invention of man” – accounts differ – but the point is, he’s friggin’ right! I prefer to put it as “Compound interest + time = WIN!” In any case, the most important ingredient is time. You might think you have no need to think about retirement until after you’re 35 or 40. But, do you know how much those 15-20 years could cost you in interest alone?

Let’s take a pretty easy example. Let’s say your grandparents gave you $1,000 today, because they’re grandparents and that’s what they do. Ok, so you can either spend it or invest it for retirement. If you invest it at 10% (compounded annually), how much would you have in 40 years (retirement time!)?

The answer: $45,259.26

You can bark all you want about how $45,000 won’t “really” be $45,000 40 years from now, because of inflation, but it will be worth much more than $1000, I can tell you that. Ok, so, what if you wait until you’re 35 (assuming that’s 15 years from now)? Of course, since you’re now 35, you decide you need to play catchup, so you invest $5,000 instead of just $1,000, for the next twenty five years. How much would you have at age 60?

The answer: Only $54,173.53

Yeah, even though you put five times as much in, you only end up with $9,000 more than if you’d put in $1,000 15 years earlier. If this hasn’t convinced you that time is more important than how much you put in, then I don’t know what will.

If I do have you convinced, I know you’re wondering where the money to invest is going to come from. You’re in college – you’re broke! Oh trust me, I feel your pain. I’m probably poorer than you (hence the name). But the idea is to start looking into things now, which will give you the head start to invest in a couple of years, which will give you the all-important extra time to let your money compound. Here are some tips I have for you to get your head start:

Learn all you can about personal finance. If you’re reading this, you must have at least some tiny interest in it. There are books and especially blogs that aren’t at all boring, and will teach you a lot about money. I started off with The Motley Fool’s Investment Guide for Teens and then a year later, found I Will Teach You To Be Rich. After that I moved into all of those sites you see in my sidebar under “Finance Blogs.” I also recommend Suze Orman’s YF&B (you can read my review here).

Live like the broke college student you are. Now is the time to live off of ramen and free food at club meetings. Or at the very least, get the cheapest housing and car that you’re comfortable with, and definitely don’t run up your credit card debt trying to keep up with your friends who all have new PS3s and DVD collections the size of the Library of Congress. Borrow their DVDs and play their PS3! Live as frugally as possible, and continue to do so after college to continue to save money.

Find some money. There’s tons of free money that you probably don’t even know you’re passing up. Scholarships. Upromise. High yield savings accounts. Selling stuff you don’t use on ebay. Selling your old textbooks. Oh, speaking of that…

Don’t buy your textbooks new. New textbooks should be a last resort. This is especially meant for freshman, who really don’t know any better. Be smarter than the other freshman! And upperclassmen: don’t act like freshman and buy your textbooks new. Tsk tsk.

Build some credit. I already recommended you get a credit card, but I wanted to get into it further. Credit cards are not licenses to buy things you can’t actually afford – they are tools to build credit. Why would you want to do that? Well, I assume someday you might want a house. Or a car. Or a job. Yeah, even employers (sometimes) check your credit score during the hiring process. I’m not saying this to scare you… well, ok, I am. A little. I want you to see the importance of building a good credit score, which, not surprisingly, takes time. But you have time! Hurray! So, get a credit card, and use it for just ONE thing. Here are some examples:

Get a card with cash back for grocery purchases (and no annual fee). Use it ONLY to buy groceries, and don’t buy more than you would if you were using your debit card or cash. Pay the balance in full when the bill comes each month.
Get a card with cash back for gas (and no annual fee). Use it ONLY to buy gas for your car, and don’t buy more than you would with a debit card or cash. Pay the balance in full when the bill comes each month.
Get the Amazon.com Visa card (which has no annual fee), which gives $30 off your first Amazon purchase with the card, and 3% returns (in the form of Amazon gift certificates) on Amazon purchases. Use it ONLY to buy TEXTBOOKS. Ok, maybe a few other Amazon things too, but don’t buy more than you would with a debit card or PayPal. Pay the bill when it comes – with your financial aid (for the textbooks, anyways)! Or even better, have the bill sent to your parents’ house, and have them pay for it. Just make SURE they pay the bill on time, because it’s your credit at stake, not theirs, so it’s your responsibility.

Did you notice the two points I hammered into you in each of those? No annual fee and pay the whole balance when the bill comes. Annual fees are dumb – there’s so many cards without them, there’s no reason for you to get a card with an annual fee. And paying the whole bill ON TIME (not just the minimum balance!) is your key to no debt and a great credit score.

And that’s it. If you’ve made it this far and you’re hankering for more advice, it’s time for you to branch out and check out some of those books and sites I mentioned. And take heart – you have your head start!