homeskillet

I have the Chase Sapphire and have used points for a car rental. I have points saved for a future vacation.

Sometimes I get a better rental car rate through the site than I can even with my corporate discount code.

For a lot of airline flights, you are better off transferring the points for miles at a 1-1 ratio. I know they do this with United. As an example, from my home, a flight to Hawaii is a minimum of $900, and that is if you are effing lucky. You can get there on 40k United miles most of the time. Those 40k points are free to transfer, and would only equate to $480 towards the purchase of a ticket through their system. The points I was talking about having saved are going to be used exactly like this. 120k gets my family to Hawaii next business trip I have there.

Similarly, if you ball out w/ points, if you saved 320k and transferred to Marriott, you would get a week at a Category 7 hotel, plus 120k airline miles to your airline of choice. Again United is usually best on points, so you are looking at about a 2-3k hotel stay, plus enough airline miles to get you where you need to go more than likely.

Also, make sure you book what you can through their site when paying because you get an extra point per dollar. However, keep in mind that you always pay up front when doing that.


In summary, save the points, plan with the points, and compare to see if you are better off transferring them to a loyalty program.

if you do online purchases from Home Depot or Lowes, or if you have the time to start doing some, you can always get 5%, sometimes 10% cashback on your Discover. When I have a big project I am planning, or when I buy a new tool that is 100 or more, I order online and do in-store pick up. You have to plan to do this though, otherwise, it will just slow you down.

Also, in my experience, your airfare is separate from an AI resort cost.

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True story. Several years ago I bought 300 shares of Apple at $15/share. Gradually over 6 months it climbed to $22 or 23 a share. One day it dropped a coouple of points, and worried that I might lose my profit, I called in a stop loss at $20/share. Next day it dropped to $19 and a fraction for a vey short time. Poof there went my 300 shares of Apple. It never hit $20 again and you know the rest of the story. Use this to decide if stop losses are good for you.

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The opposite is I bought 106 AAPL at 372. A 10% trailing stop loss would have had me sell at 630 for a roughly 27k gain. I still have the shares at today's price, holding a neat 7k or so gain.

We have 529 plans for each kid (2). They will probably fund a year of college at Alabama or another state school. Our deal to them is if they earn a scholarship, they go where they earned it. If not, it is two years at a community college, living at home, then two more locally at a four year college, living at home. That should lower our college burden quite a bit.

I also won't saddle me and my wife with debt for them to be a teacher or some other career with a low earning ceiling, it doesn't make financial sense for anyone involved.

Belt Link

Entire Show Link

First is the company's website, second is the entire show. Don't know what order the belt pitch was, so you will have to fast forward and find it.


His belt is much better than military ones, first off, they look a hell of a lot better, second, they ratchet instead of catch with the little bar in the buckle.

$350 Lowes Gift Cards with Discover
4 nights @ a Marriott (no CC points, just stays)
160GB iPod Classic w/ Citi

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Some of you guys haven't hit a huge downturn in the market yet. It also looks like some of you started investing when the market was down. I can see your optimism. My experience is most companies offer limited choices in their 401Ks. If you have the knowledge like some of the guys on this Money Board do then invest in a Roth IRA where your investment options are limitless. You can still invest the company minimum to get your match but if all your money is in a company sponsored 401K you will likely feel a market downturn. That's just my opinion as an old timer. Good luck.

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Correct on my part. I got out of the service in 08 and started then, so the largest portion of my contributions came after the market started up (not intentional, just the way it worked). And correct again on the options, I like the Vanguard approach. The best I have in my 401k account is a S&P 500 index fund. It has a low expense ratio and beat the rest of the options the last 2 years. I have been begging our benefits department to switch us over to Vanguard, but no luck yet. Until then, I am just keeping it in the index fund and limiting what I give the brokers.

50k about 28, will hit 100k and then some this year. My company match is pretty sick right now (15% regardless of my contributions, which I max)

Edit: am 30, turning 31 this year.

LINK

third one down :banghead: