I know it seems early to be bringing up Christmas (especially with the economy possibly crumbling around us), but the displays are going up in stores, so I guess it’s never too early to starting thinking about it. For the last few years we here at the Debt Defier household have been funding our Christmas shopping with our Cashback rewards from our credit cards. We both have a Discover Card and until we recently decided to start paying for a lot of items with cash, the cards were how we bought everything. One good thing about buying everything using plastic, [...]
Read MoreOctober 2008
As I was in the line at Home Depot with all the supplies to redo our bathroom, I did something I haven’t done in years The seed was planted by an extremely helpful employee in the bathroom section and by the time I was about to check out with $400 worth of materials the frugal side of me couldn’t resist the 10% off savings of $40 if I signed up for a credit card. After a short walk to the customer service desk, few tidbits of information, and about 10 minutes I had a new credit card with a $10,000 [...]
Read MoreI feel silly. I just found out that there is already someone out there blogging under the name “The Debt Defier.” Here is her blog She hasn’t posted anything since May. But she cold start up again at any moment since she’s already took a year long break from the blog while she was living in Thailand. I found out about her when I googled “Debt Defier” and up popped her site. I should’ve done this a long time ago, but to tell you the truth when I got into this whole “blogging thing” I didn’t know much about it [...]
Read MoreOver the past holiday weekend my family stopped by my wife’s parents house for a quick visit. We had a dinner and were able to catch up a little. One of the things that was brought up was that the neighbor girl (who was my wife’s childhood friend) and her husband had just declared bankruptcy. Actually they declared bankruptcy back in February, but the family just found out about it now. And while it’s not newsworthy that a couple declares bankruptcy, that happens all the time. What makes this case a bit odd in my book is that it seems that it [...]
Read MoreI wanted to share this well written article by one of my favorite authors Seth Godin. He eloquently writes about why we easily fixated on getting lucky and path of personal effort. Is Effort A Myth? It seems that the bigger the hole we dug for ourselves or the larger the distance we need to travel to reach a goal the more we tend to wallow in hope. I think this is partly because it becomes harder to tie the small actions we can do now with so huge checkpoint in the future. So instead of action, we grind ourselves [...]
Read MoreBack in March I dissected the best cash back credit cards to see which one would net me the most free money. My calculations had me receiving $345 dollars of cash back each year from the Chase Freedom card. Well in about 5 months I had the necessary 200 points accrued to request a $250 check, which included the free 50 points($50) after the first purchase. The $250 check arrived without incident after requesting the the cash out through the Chase website. We now average around 40 points a month, because I started routing more purchases through my credit card [...]
Read MoreI received a ton of good comments on my last post about my bailout option. They were loaded with valuable input. I am constantly thankful for how nice it is to have such a knowledgeable and sharing group to ask these kind of questions to. And then totally ignore their advice That’s right folks, we took the bailout. From the comments most people were worried about how taking such a gift would affect my relationship with my mother, understandably so. But it was my wife who ended up having the final say in the matter. She made a very compelling [...]
Read MoreWhen I look at both Obama and McCain and compare them to common sense personal finance, I realize that both candidates are the same. Neither of them get it. Both candidates have plans that are so far away from fiscal responsibility that it scares me. Let’s take a glance at how the candidates stack up against some basic tenants of personal financial success : personal responsibility, spend less than you earn, get out of debt, have an emergency fund, and make your money work for you. Personal Responsibility – I think the ridiculously huge pork laden bailout bill says about [...]
Read MoreAnother page has been added to our selling the van story. You long time readers can skip ahead, but if you want to catch up here is the first part, and here is the second part. Now for the third installment of “Will They or Won’t They?” I was having dinner at my parents house a couple of weeks ago and my Mom asked how we were doing financially. I gave her my pat answer that I always give her, “Just fine.” But then I made the mistake of offering a little more. “But we’ll be in much better shape [...]
Read MoreA co-worker shared this blog post by Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team, with me and I thought it was fascinating. For those that don’t know Mark Cuban is a rags to riches stories who went from broke and jobless in 1982 to a wildly successful entrepreneur worth 2.8 billion dollars in about 25 years. In this article he shares his tips to becoming rich. Here is my ultra quick summary. Develop personal discipline Live frugally Avoid debt Have cash Find a niche in an area you love Use the cash to seize opportunities when it [...]
Read More
