Financial Comedy

How sad it is that the program I use to keep all my accounts straight is being discontinued. Now I have to find a new solution and even though I like the online options, they won’t do everything I need. So I’m looking at Quicken 2009 and will probably go with Quicken Home & Business 2009.

For more details, click the below link.

Important notice: Microsoft Money Plus will not be available for purchase after June 30, 2009. All purchased Money Plus products must be activated prior to Jan. 31, 2011

Found this offer at Slick Deals. It’s a great deal if you qualify but it expires on May 31. They reimburse ATM fees, have better interest than a lot of banks and free rewards plus more.

Open up a bank account with USAA and get $100

USAA emerged from a tumultuous 2008 strong and growing — well positioned to meet whatever challenges lie ahead. Our 2008 Report to Members details our exceptional results:

USAA remains profitable and returned more than $857 million to our members, a portion of which were bank rebates and rewards.1

We have taken no bailout money.
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Pretty simple offer.

The Chase bonus ends 6/23/09

The Wamu offer ends 6/16/09

To qualify for the reward, you must open a new checking account with a $100 minimum opening deposit of new money (money not currently held by this bank). Also, within 60 calendar days of account opening, you must initiate a monthly direct deposit such as payroll, pension or Social Security, or have at least five debit card purchases (using your PIN or signature) posted to your account. The reward will be deposited into your new account within 2 weeks after the initial direct deposit or the five debit card purchases have posted to your account.

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Recently I posted that I had found an unbelievable site for cigarettes titled Saving Money On Cigarettes and realized I didn’t give an update on the order.

If you read it, you probably had the same thoughts that I did.

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I just ran across Swag Bucks which is a search engine that you can win prizes by searching. When I found the site, I thought this is all well and good IF the results are decent. Needless to say I was happy when I noticed the results come from Google and Ask. So I get the same search results as usual but I get to win gift cards and other prizes by doing what I usually do.

It’s pretty much a no brainer.

Yes I admit it, I smoke and with the price of cigarettes going up I started looking for a cheaper place to buy quality smokes. Today I found K2 Smokes.

As of today these are some of the carton prices that impressed me.

Dunhill Full Flavor $8.99
Dunhill Menthol Lights $8.99
Marlboro Lights (US Version) $21.99 or 19.99 With Auto Ship
Capri Light Superslim (US Version) $6.99

The only catch is you have to order 2 or more cartons at a time but the shipping is the same price for 2 or 3 cartons which is $9.90. And it takes a little planning to allow for the delivery which may take about 3 weeks.

I think I can live with planning ahead to smoke Dunhills.

During the month of March you can get a 2 year subscription to some great magazines and receive a $5 or $10 gift card for a future purchase at Amazon.

There’s 56 magazines that have a $10 bonus and 105 magazines with a $5 bonus.
Magazines with $10 Gift Cards

Magazines With $5 Gift Cards

Some of the listed include

• GQ
• Smart Money
• Maximum PC
• Self
• Forbes
• Golf
• Sports Illustrated
• And a lot more.

I’ve recently discovered that it’s possible to find free money on the web. Not only is it free money, but you can loan the money to others to get rid of credit cards and other high interest rates so it’s a good thing on multiple levels.

Lending Club brings together individual investors and well-qualified borrowers who want fair credit (for everything from paying off high-interest credit cards to growing a small business).

With Lending Club you can diversify across many borrowers with good to excellent credit ratings. Lending Club lenders have earned annual returns that average over 9% in the past 18 months. Borrowers with excellent credit have been able to borrow at rates as low as 7.88%.

In case you’re interested, Lending Club offers a $50 welcome bonus to new lenders just for getting started. In addition, each time someone you invite borrows through Lending Club, you earn an additional financial reward that you can choose to keep or donate to a non-profit organization.

Lending Club has been in the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, CNN, NPR and the New York Times.

I ran across an interesting story over at Life Hacker about how our minds perceive numbers and while I don’t believe that all people suffer from this, it would explain how some people get deeper into debt while knowing it’s bad.

Bigger Numbers Trick Your Mind Into Buying

There’s dozens or hundreds of stories about the bail out package in the news and it seems like you can’t open the paper, turn on the news or surf the web without reading about it. This blog wasn’t started to cover this type of stories, it was started to rant and go nuts over so called experts who give vague, generic advice to unsuspecting people who believe they are looking out for the public.

However, since I started Financial Comedy the whole system went down the tubes and I’ve been scrambling to keep up.

The thing that comes to mind for me is why not reset every man and woman’s credit score to perfect so that everyone who has been screwed by the banking and credit system get’s a mulligan or a do over? The system has become so complicated that we need help managing our scores and although I haven’t read the new plan, the old plan would actually lower your score if you tried to pay an old collection account. You can also have rates raised if you were late on an unrelated bill. For example, your credit card could raise your rates if you were late on the electric bill regardless of if you were ever late on a credit card payment.

On top of how confusing the rules were, you couldn’t get the most important number in your credit life, your score without paying or joining a monitoring service and there were 3 different companies with 3 different scoring systems all of which were private.

Ok enough about this. I’m probably going to go back to my original plan and only touch on the bail out insanity from time to time but in the mean time, here’s a couple of stories I found interesting.

Senate Democrats promise to change stimulus bill

Why the bank bailouts are doomed

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; I’m not blaming Democrats or Republicans, actually I’m blaming them both. They both are to blame and I don’t know which party is more at fault. I am optimistic that President Obama has good ideas and can improve the situation and hope that I’m proven correct.