Quick Tips
Every Friday I post a new Quick Tip covering a wide range of topics, including ways to save money, travel tips, personal products/services I find interesting, and more.
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Square’s Cash App Now Offers Fractional Stock Shares
If the massive shift toward zero-free stock trading we saw among discount brokerages a few weeks ago wasn’t enough, there’s now another option for buying and selling stocks: Square’s Cash app. Known mostly as a peer to peer payments platform, Cash has previously branched out by offering their own debit card and allowing users to…
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SoFi Money Adds Lyft Cash Back Perk
It’s always nice when, instead of taking away benefits like some people, a company decides to add some perks to their offerings. That’s what happened to me this week as SoFi announced that customers can earn 20% cash back when they use their SoFi Money debit cards for Lyft rides now through February 18th, 2020.…
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Disney+ is Here — Is it Worth Your Money?
After months of hype, this week The Walt Disney Company officially launched its streaming service dubbed Disney+. While the platform experienced some hiccups on Tuesday (the day of its debut), the company announced that it had already reached 10 million sign-ups by Wednesday — although it’s worth noting that this isn’t the same as paid…
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Rakuten Now Lets You Earn American Express Membership Rewards Points
Have you ever been in a situation where your loyalty to a person, product, or brand seemed like it was actually a hindrance? Take, for example, how cable companies like to offer special deals to new customers while raising rates for their existing ones. Or social media giveaways where the winner is the 10,000 follower…
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Barclays Just Ruined My Favorite Credit Card
Welp. Part of me knew this day would come, but it’s tremendously disappointing nonetheless. Earlier this week, Barclays and Uber announced some major changes to my beloved Uber Visa card. This included a multiplier decrease in my most-used category, the removal of another useful spending category, and the discontinuation of the $50 per year streaming…
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Is Delta’s New SkyMiles Select Worth It?
After years of hopping on any airline that would have me, the last few years have found my travels mostly consolidating to one carrier: Delta. Aside from the few times I’ve taken advantage of Allegiant’s convenient direct routes, my wife and I have happily turned to Delta for our increasingly numerous flights domestically and abroad.…
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The Latest Brokerage Price War is Good News for Newbie Investors
How quickly things can change. In just the past two weeks or so, there’s been a sea change in the brokerage business. It started when Charles Schwab announced that it would be dropping its trade commission fee to $0. Almost immediately, TD Ameritrade and E*Trade followed suit, with Fidelity also coming around to this new-normal…
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Apparently Not All “IRS” Mail is a Scam
As much I love USPS’s Informed Delivery service, it can sometimes cause me anguish. Specifically, there have now been two times when seeing what was headed to my mailbox led to several stressful hours. I should probably explain… A few weeks ago, I saw that I had some piece of mail coming from the Internal…
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Bonus Star Bingo is Back at Starbucks
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Okay, that’s a bit of a stretch — but it is at least a moderately exciting time. That’s because Starbucks just rolled out its latest Bonus Star Bingo game, enabling the chain’s loyalists to earn free beverages and more. As I’ve previously written about, I’ve found Bonus…
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SoFi Invest Takes on “The Latte Factor” With Limited-Time Offer
We’ve all heard of the so-called “Latte Factor” that seeks the quantify how much you could be saving sans Starbucks trips and, in turn, how much you could earn by reinvesting said funds. It’s a theory that makes a lot of sense to some but has also been criticized for not taking into account what…
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Why I Just Paid $550 for a Credit Card
Since starting this blog, I’ve made plenty of proclamations. For one, I’ve stated that I didn’t need any more credit cards on several occasions, only to eventually open an Uber Visa and, more recently, an Apple Card. Similarly, I’ve also stated that I wasn’t sold on the idea of having a credit card with an…
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Covering Your Cash Back Bases
Over the past three years, I’ve learned a lot about money and how to manage my finances. Although I’ve found myself to be a “money nerd” who takes interest in even the most mundane of topics, one of my favorite aspects of personal finance has been figuring out ways to maximize savings on items I…