Tag: Credit Cards Posts

Best Travel Reward Card For 2014

 Travel

One of my main strategies for earning free airline travel that I discuss in my eBook is leveraging a travel rewards card. For most people simply using a travel reward card for day-to-day purchases is enough to earn a free vacation each and every year. I’ve been using a few different cards for three years now, and I’ve earned a full return trip to Machu Picchu in Peru, a free return trip to Auckland, New Zealand, and enough for another trans-continental trip already accumulated. And all I had to do was sign-up and use it monthly. Almost all travel reward cards include health-insurance for short-term trips (usually two weeks or less) and often flight-cancellation or trip-interruption insurance. If you were to buy these items yourself you’d often spend $50-$100 for each trip, so these cards can save you money there as well. Best Travel Reward Card in the United States […]

Tips For Traveling For A Year Or Longer

Tips

I’ve been a ‘world traveler’ for almost two and a half years now. Back then I hadn’t really been away from Canada for very long before, and the thought of spending multiple weeks, let alone multiple months, in a foreign country was a pretty strange idea. Now the idea of loading a backpack up and heading to a new country feels about as foreign to me as doing a load of laundry. If I saw a plane ticket somewhere for a good price, I could probably be at the airport in three hours, ready to go on a new adventure. One of the pains of being away for an extended period of time though is figuring out how to accomplish many of the things you normally do at home (such as paying bills) while away. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and there are lots of different tricks I […]

Using The Square Credit Card Reader in Canada

Product Reviews

So last month when I was in eastern Europe I saw that Square released their Square credit card reader that plugs into the headphone jack on iOS devices and can be used in Canada. Apple has always had a mobile credit card system at their Apple stores, but it’s something that’s been harder to obtain for the rest of us. I look at this type of device as a potential game-changer, since it essentially puts commerce into all of our pockets. I have quite a few friends that have written books – now they can sell them at events and take credit cards there. Other friends of mine are in bands – they can sell merch themselves at events now. Have a restaurant or a pub – you can now impress customers by letting them pay using an iPod or an iPad. Today was the day I got to take […]

Money, Credit Cards, The Safe and a Passport

Tips

One of the hard parts of traveling around is deciding what to bring with you and what to leave behind. That’s relevant before your adventures, and it’s also relevant while you’re traveling. Despite Buenos Aires having a relatively high petty crime rate, I spent my first week and a half here walking around with my wallet in my back pocket and basically every piece of ID and financial card in there as well. It wasn’t until I lost my bank card a few days later that I started to really think about the stupidity of carrying everything I have on my person at all times. So, I’ve made a few changes, and here are the results. My Wallet I’ve basically taken everything of importance out of my wallet and stuck it in the apartment safe. That includes my British Columbia ID, my credit cards, health cards, and the majority of […]

Some Simple Math

 Journal

I ran across this article this morning about credit card debt, and started trying to figure out what it meant in terms of numbers. Nearly 80 percent of American families have at least one credit card, 44 percent of families carry a balance on their credit cards, and Americans pay about $15 billion a year in penalty fees, according to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s office. The current population in the US is around 305 million (2008 census). I don’t know how many families are in the US, but let’s take a rough stab and there are about three people per family, or around 100 million families. If 44% of those people typically carry a balance on their cards, then we’re left with about 44 million families that carry a balance on their credit cards monthly. So, if we take $15 billion dollars and spread that out over 44 million people, […]