Day In The Life of Baz

Well someone told me some time ago that I should be more sociable and try to make more friends. So when some of my coworkers offered to have me over for poker night, I figured why not?

So this is how night one goes. There’s a $20.00 buy in . That’s what everyone pays to have a stack of chips in front of them for the night. Now, from here it varies depending on how many players there are, but usually the 1st place winner gets most of the money and the 2nd place gets $30.00 back .

Now, night one was the 1st time I’ve played this game. I even brought along, what I now call, my lucky cheat sheet. It’s just a list of hands and stuff, nothing useful. I actually managed to stay in until 2nd place and got back $30 bucks. So I’m $10 up and loving it.

Night two, didn’t go as good. I can’t remember when I got knocked out, but it was way before 2nd place so I was out $20.00, for a net effect of $10 under.

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Extra Bucks

As you guys should know by now, Lava is my resident Personal PF blogger. Yesterday morning, she gave me a call ranting and raving about this crazy lady that bought $250 worth of groceries for $10 . Needless to day, I was a bit intrigued. After doing a bit of research myself , I found that the story goes like this:

1. You sign up for CVS Extra Care program and wait 2 weeks to receive the Extra Care card .
2. You stalk the store a little bit and get some Extra Value booklet or something like that. This book is supposed to list all the items that are available for Extra Bucks for that week/month.
3. You buy stuff that gives you Extra Bucks. It’s sort of like an instant rebate .
4. You use the bucks your got to buy more stuff that gives you bucks.
5. Rinse and repeat.

Here’s a typical example: You’re first purchase may be some deodorant that normally goes for $3.00 , but this week there’s a special where you get $3.00 extra bucks on that purchase (Yeah, so technically, it’s free - just pay sales tax). Now because you just started this, there’s going to be no initial savings , except if you used some other coupons or something.

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I’ve had my Chase rewards card for about four (4) months now, so I decided to call them up to see whether or not they’d be able to reduce my interest rate. It was at a ridiculous 23% At first, I didn’t really mind since I use this card as a rewards card only. That being said, I pay off the balance in full every month.

Now there’s a lil’ catch 22 with whole reward card thing. Since it’s a reward card I want to get the maximum rewards I can. Therefore, I use this card for everything. That makes it a little bit harder to pay off the balance every month. I had to pull some money out of my savings last month to pay it off.

So just in case, I called up Chase and asked for a reduction in my APR. Great news! There was a “promotional reduction available” on my account. So I asked, “What’s the promotion?”. The guy on the phone (Juan I think his name was) told me that today they would be able to reduce the APR on my card to a whopping 21% from 23%.

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Wait, What Do I Want?

One problem that I’ve always had, is that I’m a very practical person. My significant other has asked me countless times, “What do you want for Christmas?”. Although there is quite a large laundry list of things that I want. The problem is, I can’t pick one thing that I can justify getting, since the pit of money that we’re both rolling in has a very distinct and visible bottom.

For a long time, what I’ve always wanted was a wide screen LCD monitor. Earlier this year I made myself happy with the purchase of my new computer. Since then, what I’ve wanted was another wide screen LCD monitor. Who ever invented the dual monitor set up is a genius! This Christmas, I’ve already budgeted money for that gift to myself. But the question remains, what would I like someone to get me?

Redefining The Word Want

A long time ago I seem to have confused the word want with thing like beneficial, need, etc. Although the second monitor was usually a bit more pricey than I would go, I’ve already justified the purchase.

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Here’s another classic example of how Bank of America needs to get some people with brains to programming their Online Banking website.

As you know, I have a Bank of America credit card. This isn’t by choice, by the way. I started out fine with the MBNA guys. Everything was good, then they got bought by BoA and here I am.

I recently stumbled onto Bankaholic’s website and saw a promotion for the Bank of America checking account for their current credit card customers. Now since I’ve moved, I haven’t gotten a local checking account yet, so I figure why not get $75.00 for free? It’s a free checking account, there’s no monthly maintenance fee when you sing up online, so it’s a win win. Once again, I was dead wrong.

This morning I tried to log into my credit card account. It’s the beginning of the month so I’m trying to organize finances and pay some bills. I was greeted by the screen above. They need me to enter my new ATM/Check card number and my PIN. Well, there’s only one problem, I filled out this form online and I haven’t received anything in the mail yet.

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