I thought of an idea to take advantage of a credit card contract, but it only works for people who have self control. If you are one of those people who can never hold onto cash without spending it, then don’t do this, because you will probably only get yourself into debt. I’m sure some other people think of these things, but very few actually carry out the plan. I feel good when I think I have outsmarted the banks, though.

Things you will need to sign up for:

1. Bank of America World Points Card

2. A citi e-savings account and EZ checking account (the site will lead you to open both of these)
Alternatively, an HSBC savings account will work too and get you even more interest, but I find Citi’s online banking a lot easier to use.

So, what’s so special about the Bank of America card? Aside from a $50 statement credit after you start using it, 2000 bonus rewards points valued at $20, and no interest for 12 months, when you get the card, you will also get three convenience checks that the bank will waive the transcation fee of if you use. I couldn’t believe this at first, because I had never seen a free cash advance. Since I’ve been known to misinterpret fine print, I deposit one with a couple hundred in one of my checking accounts as a test. Sure enough, I was only charge the face value of the check. Whatever you do, don’t get a cash advance at an ATM or bank and say this doesn’t work, because only convenience checks are not subject to the transaction fee.

Side note: make sure your conveniene checks say something like There is no transaction fee for cash advance checks. I think the contract should be the same for most people, but make sure the convenience check can be used without a transaction fee before you use one for a large deposit.

Deposit whatever amount you want, 30% to 70% of the credit line, with a convenience check into the citibank e-savings account. There, watch the money grow at 4.75% APY. Do NOT use the money in this account for anything other than paying off the credit card. If you value your credit more, then it would probably be a wiser decision to use up just 30% of the credit line. However, there are people who could preserve a good credit score while using up to 70% of their credit lines. If maximum profit is your goal, then you may even want to try near 100% of the credit line. Get a little bit less than that, because you may want to use the card for a purchase in order to get the $50 statement credit offer. No matter what amount you put on the convenience check, try to avoid using this card for multiple purchases, unless you are planning to pay for the purchases in full each month. There’s a nice rewards program with the card, but you can always use that after the 0% APR promotional period.

There are two methods to paying this cash advance off:
Method 1 (more profitable): Pay the minimum payment each month until the last month of the 0% interest promotion. At that last statement, transfer enough money from your e-savings account to your EZ checking account to pay off 100% of the balance, and use a check from the EZ checking account to pay off the card.

Method 2 (better for credit): Divide the amount you charged by 12 and pay that amount each month. If necessary, then transfer whatever amount you need each month from the e-savings account to the EZ checking to pay each month’s statement. You will get less interest, but this method is slighly better for credit score purposes.

After you pay off the card in 12 statements, the e-savings 4.75% interest, $50 statement credit, and 2000 bonus reward points are yours to keep. You also did a good job paying off a medium-sized debt that will show up on your credit report.

I’ve seriously been thinking about moving my blog to the root directory of my domain instead of having it at this domain/wordpress. I can just put the important parts of the current root directory pages as pages in the blog that are shown on the top navigation menu. It seems like my main traffic is located at the wordpress blog, and I really don’t have much in the current root directory. The main drawbacks would be losing some backlinks that are currently linking to http://clairechiang.net/wordpress which may hurt my search engine ranking. What do you guys think?

It’s been a while since my last update, hasn’t it? Instead of updating, I’ve been wasting time experimenting with Slash My Search for my regular searching in place of google or yahoo. The small amount of money that pay originally drew my attention, because I decided that getting paid for my searches, which I do anyway, isn’t too shabby. However, a few minutes after I signed up, I became more interested in the algorithm that determines how much we get paid. They say 25 cents per hour, but I still haven’t quite figured out what qualifies as an hour. An hour of searching? An hour of having their site open? What? I’ll just use their service to search over the next few days, play with the numbers, and hopefully draw a conclusion from the numbers (for those of you who don’t know, I calculate just about everything a little too meticulously). I guess this once again proves my theory. I become interested in few things at a time but seldom continue staying interested in my new hobbies for an extended period of time.

Past time wasters:
1. Chess-live (need I say more about this?)
2. Aimless IM conversations
3. Selling junk on ebay
4. Trading junk so that I have even more useless junk in my room
5. Selling unwanted media items on Amazon
6. Making websites low in quality
7. Opening credit cards and bank accounts to get that introductory gift (or as Mr. Garbosky would say, lagniappe)
8. Make a few cents online

1. I will skip ranting about that chess server for now. Enough said in the secret to my downfall. Ok, I was probably exaggerating there, but I’ve had it with online chess.

2. I think this one also stemmed from my number one time wasting interest. Since I started chatting on chess-live, I also happened to meet some people there, who I eventually started contacting through instant messengers. Pretty soon, I was hooked.

3. After I got a paypal account, I decided that I wanted to do something with it. So, I dug out some junk that I neglected the existence of to sell. I actually made a decent profit from this if you neglect what it cost me to buy the stuff. Oh well, since the stuff I sold was completely useless to me, I’ll just think of the sales as free money.

4. Less popular media items were typically difficult to sell on ebay. I decided that I wanted to get rid of them anyway, so I joined a bunch of junk trading sites. If you’re interested, then visit my page on junk trading. Trading isn’t profitable, but it helped me build up even more garbage :). If you count the value of everything I traded and received, then I made a profit…

5. After I traded junk for more valuable junk, I decided that I could actually sell some of it. I did manage to get some more valuable things when I was lucky, such as a copy of Final Fantasy VII for playstation (which I paid a lot of switchbucs for) and some newer DVD movies that were decently priced on Amazon. I also sold some AP books from last year that I was planning to burn at an AP book burning party. Too bad (or too good?) we didn’t have that party.

6. I did have a brief interest in web design. I made a few sites and invested some money in web hosting, but most of them didn’t look too professional. I’m still kind of interested now, but I haven’t been updating my sites that often anymore, because I actually find web design kind of tedious. It’s a good way to kill time, though. Ad revenue has also been providing me with lunch money every day.

7. Ok, I’m a little crazy, but I’ve been signing up for credit cards or bank accounts from banks or stores that give me something for signing up. I now have 7 bank accounts and enough credit cards to give me enough of total credit potential that make me potentially high risk. Well, the truth is, there’s no way I would be able to pay everything back if I maxed out all my credit cards. However, I’m not planning to. Credit line is good to have, but I have a little bit of self control when it comes to money…

8. Yes, I’ve been doing little things online to make money. I know the pay per hour is only a small percentage of minimum wage, but each payment brings me an inexplicable false sense of accomplishment. Right now, it’s slash my search, but I was also posting in a number of paid forums.