money

I posted back when I began to dip my toes into the vast world of credit card churning in October of 2017. (For those of you who don’t know, it’s the practice of signing up for credit cards that have attractive incentive offers (tens of thousands of points for spending $3,000 in the first three months, typically), and then chaining those offers together to gets tons of free points for, well, free.) I posted another update about four months later, saying that so far, it had been going well. How are things looking now? Still peachy keen. Really, my only

It’s March, which means it’s high time for me to be working on my taxes. Part of that process is taking an accounting of everything I was up to the past year from a dollars and cents perspective. Two data points stood out to me this year that I thought would be interesting to you as well. First off, a candid look at the high flying life of an author. I think there’s a fair bit of misunderstanding out there on just how much you make as an author. I’ll tell people that I got a book deal, and they

I’ve always been a firm believer in the power of product reviews. I don’t write too many myself, but I love looking at what other people say about something before I buy it. If there’s something I need to buy, I’ll scour the Amazon reviews before I pick the thing that looks Just Right. At least, that’s what I’ve done in the past. Over the last few months, however, my faith in those Amazon reviews has really been shaken. Right now, I’m at the point where I no longer firmly believe a product with a ton of great reviews must,

I’ve had to send a few packages over the last week or two, and I was looking for the cheapest way to ship them. Now that we’re in the holiday season, my gut told me some of you might be in the same boat, so I thought a post on the subject might be helpful to some of you. My specific goal was sending Magic: The Gathering cards across the country. Since I was selling a large quantity of these cards, I wanted to save as much money on shipping as I could. More money saved there meant more profit

Back at the beginning of November, I let you all know I was going to dip my toe into the world of credit card churning: applying for credit cards one after another to get their sign-up bonuses and rack up points and miles. The goal was simple: I use my credit card almost exclusively for everything I buy, and I pay it off in full each month, religiously. So why not put all that credit card usage to work for me? I read all about how easy it was, and how it wouldn’t hurt your credit score, yada yada yada.