American Express Blue Cash Back Credit Card

Here is the reason I use the American Express Blue Cash Back Card.

+No Annual fee
+Up to 5% cashback on everyday purchases and 1.5% on everything else (see details below)
+0% interest on first 12 months of purchases (don't plan on taking advantage of this)
+Earn unlimited rewards
+Purchase Protection
+Extended Warranty

Blue Cash from American Express has 1 percent cash back on everyday purchases until you spend $6,500. After that, your rebate jumps to 5 percent cash back. On other purchases, 0.5 percent cash back goes up to 1.5 percent cash back. There are no cap limits on your purchases over the year. You can only get your cash back once every year and it they will only give you the cash back in the form of statement credit. The nice part is they put the credit on your account automatically after your year of use. No call, no worries.

Don't Forget Your Auto Loan - Refinance?

With all the talk about refinancing don't forget about your car loan. I don't recommend rolling your car loan into home mortgage refinance. The reason is you just agreed to pay interest on a car for the next 30 years while you may keep it for only 5 years. Looking at it another way. Instead of paying of a 4 year car loan and paying $2000 in interest if you roll this into your mortgage you will pay about $6000 in interest over 30 years. So, what do you do about your car loan? Well you refinance it. Most of the time you can refinance your car loan for basically no extra money. Most banks and credit unions will gladly take on your car loan for better terms. Call them up or look on Bankrate to see what the rates are and what your payments would be. If it is worth the effort then refinance.

Find Real Bargains on Tech Items at Techbargains

If you are shopping for technology, like a laptop, GPS, or IPOD, you need to check out Techbargains. It is in a blog format where new deals pop up every couple of minutes. Some deals are available for a very short time and some or available for a little longer. There are 3 ways you can look for deals. You can monitor the blog and look for deals. The second way to use this site is to do a search. You can search what you are looking for and it will give you all the deals associated with your search. The third way to use this site is to set up an alert. It works a lot like the search in that you enter the keywords you are looking for, but the difference here is it will email you any deals that match your criteria. They won't spam you either. One the sides are other useful deals. The list some more popular items on the sides. They have most popular deals on laptops, desktops, monitors, memory, GPSs and other items.

So, if you are looking for any tech gear check out Techbargains.

Christmas Giveways! Two Free Ipods

You can win a Ipod if you go to the Christian Personal Finance website. Be sure to check out this website. It has all kinds of useful information. Click over and look around.

Credit Unions - Better than Banks

I don't have any checking or savings accounts with traditional banks. Everytime I didn they would change the rules of my accounts after about a year. They would make the interest bearing checking account no longer free or raise the minimum amount required to get interest on my savings accounts. Or they did some other piddly thing to tick me off. They would change the rules to their accounts to raise fees to try make a couple of bucks off me. I just got tired of having to keep track of this months new rules and adjusting my usage of their accounts so I wouldn't get hit with the newest fee.
My solution that I have been using for the last 20 years is to use a credit union. Their accounts are always consumer friendly. No minimum on interest checking accounts. No minimum on savings accounts. Good rates and services. The offer online account access, free check images and free online bill payment. I get my car loans through them and they lower the rate 1/2% if you let them take it out of your checking account. That's a win-win since I don't have to write a check and that is where the money was going to come from anyway. And if you have read any of my posts, I like automatic payment methods.
Setup Your Automatic Savings Plans
Fund Your 401K Then Up the Amount
Organize Your Checking Accounts to Better Manage Your Money

I found one credit union through my employer and the other is in the community. I'm sure you can find one easily. Ask a co-worker, your HR department or a neighbor. I won't go back to a bank anytime soon.

ING Direct - A Great Place for your Savings

Everyone should have some savings in cash to meet short term expenses or available in case you lose your job suddenly. The best place to stash your savings is in a online savings account. I use INGdirect. They pay a good interest rate and you can monitor your account easily online. The interest rate is usually about 2% better than any bank savings account and not too far from a CD rate. After you get your account setup you then link your bank or credit union checking accounts to the INGdirect account. You can then easily transfer money back and forth effortlessly. It does take a few days for the transfer to happen but if you plan ahead it's no problem. The other reason to setup the link to your bank or credit union is to setup an automatic savings account. This way you can have $20, $50, $100 transferred every month to this savings account. I just paid off one car loan and got another. The new car loan was about $100 cheaper than the old. So I setup an automatic transfer of $100 every month so that I really save that money and don't blow it somewhere else. If you have read my other posts you know how much I like to setup automatic money items, especially when they increase savings.

Oh, by the way, the INGdirect Orange Savings account is FDIC insured.

Check out my write up Squidoo.

Watch Mortgage Rates - Options If They Go Lower

Interest rates are hovering around 5%, which is a 37 year low. If they drop much more we will be at levels not seen in 50 years or more. This will be an interesting scenario. One that will definitely have to be evaluated.

So, let's think about it. Inflation over the years has averaged about 3.42%. Stocks have averaged about 8%. Five year CD rates have averaged about 4%. US Treasuries have averaged about 5.5% for 20 year notes. Now let's imagine that mortgage rates drop to 4.5%. You can now borrow money for your house that is only about 1% more than the historical inflation rate. In the future years you will paying your mortgage with dollars that are worth less than you paid to borrow them. Or to look at it another way, you could take out $100,000 in equity on your house and put that money in a 20 year US Treasure (in a few years assuming rates return to more normal levels) and pay your mortgage while you earn an additional 1%. Or you could put it in the stock market and you should be able to earn the average 8% over the next 20 years to pay your mortgage and earn 3.5% every year. None of this takes into account the deduction you will receive on your taxes which will lower the effective rate to at least 4% depending on your tax bracket. This could give us an opportunity to acquire capital at rates not seen for quite some time.

Now with this all said, I'm only a few years away from paying off my mortgage and my current plan is to just pay it off. But these historical rates make you think.