Wait a minute - so if I go buy something that costs $0.01, they are going to give me $0.99 (matching) in the first 3 months? What's to stop someone from sitting there and just buying a bunch of 1 penny items (from themselves, if they have a store) and making money? You could pay a kid $5/hr to do this for you, and if they buy 50 items an hour, you're making $45/hr (or $44.50 if you don't want the 1 penny items). Granted, you need to find a 1 penny item first. But you could also do it with a $1.01 item, as long as you would need the item eventually anyway.
Guys, I have both ING and Emigrant Direct savings accounts. Both are very similar in that they're purely online and link to your checking accounts. The key difference is in Emigrant Direct's interest rate, 4%. Check it out at www.emigrantdirect.com I've since shifted all my savings on over to emigrantdirect.
I had seen Emigrant Direct's rates on bankrate.com, but didn't know you could do the linking. Good information - thanks!
Yeah, feature-wise, both ING and EmigrantDirect are similar, other than the interest rate. I stumbled onto EmigrantDirect's website through bankrate.com. The difference between their interest rates has been consistent for the past several months since signing up with EmigrantDirect. In fact, the current difference in interest rates, 3.4 versus 4.0, is the largest so far. Usually it had been a few tenths of a difference.
Well, if you have repeating big spending such as kids in day care, try citibank dividend card. It is a credit card and you get 1% cash back (5% on your spending in supermarkets). Just remember to pay your bill every month. I set it up so that they draft the payment automatically from my bank account. If you don't mind calling them, just tell them that you want to cancel the card because you do not need it anymore, they will increase the rebate to 5% on everything for 6 months. It works every time. There is a $300 limit per year and you hit that limit pretty quickly.
Sacrafice...and unfortunately, this decision needs to be made in the late teens very early twenties, not when your 30, single and with four kids; this is with the assumption the person is working two jobs and has absolutely ZERO free time.
Better yet, why don't you buy money/aka coins. then you get the lose change and technically don't lose any money. I think we have some kinda pyramid scheme.