After a profitable run with Citibank’s Credit Protector program, including duplicate sets of retention rebates, I called the other day to cancel our coverage. I’ve been doing this with a ‘dormant’ Citi AT&T Universal Card whose rewards we had already maxed out for the year — since Credit Protector charges based on your closing balance, [...]

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‘Tis the season to be charitable. So if you’re in the giving mood, but aren’t sure which charity is worthy of your donations, I suggest that you check out the Charity Navigator. This site provides independent evaluations of a wide range of charities, and appears to be a great source of information. The main limitation [...]

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Just in time for Christmas… Tips for the gift that keeps on giving (or at least being given). First off, the numbers… According to a recent survey, close to four in ten people are re-gifters (i.e., they re-give a gift that they’ve received in the past). In general, women re-gift more than men (41% vs. [...]

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Fed up with wading through layer after layer of automated answering systems when trying to get in touch with a (gasp!) real, live person? Then here’s a link for you… Paul English’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Cheat Sheet. On it you’ll find not only phone numbers, but also touchtone shortcuts for getting straight to a [...]

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While on our way to and from our recent Disney World vacation, we found out just how handy 1-800-FREE-411 can be. On the way down to Orlando, we realized that we had forgotten a few things (including our one year old’s shoes). Thus, we needed to find a convenient place to shop along the way. [...]

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We recently spent the better part of a week on vacation at Disney World, and I thought that I’d write a few words about how we got a ‘discount’ on our park tickets. First off, I should say that Disney is pretty stingy when it comes to getting a ‘deal’ on park admission — people [...]

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I’ve always been amused by the fact that mall jewelry stores seem to run perpetual sales, with pretty much everything selling for 70% off pretty much all the time, but this takes the cake… I just saw a Zales commercial on TV, and a bit of their fine print caught my eye… “Original prices may [...]

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I’ve never been one to pay for things that I can easily do myself, so I’ve always rolled my own spare change rather than cashing it in at a Coinstar machine. But according to a commercial that I saw the other day, you can now have Coinstar count your change without the service fee, which [...]

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Yesterday I received what is perhaps the most convincing phishing e-mail that I’ve ever seen. It was supposedly from ’support@irs.gov’ and it offered information on how to check on the status of your tax refund. It was relatively clean from a grammatical standpoint, and it offered several links for more information. Two of these led [...]

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I just ran across a fun (albeit ugly) site that lets you send e-mail to Santa Claus and receive an instant, personalized reply. Good stuff. If you have kids, you should definitely check it out: E-mail Santa.

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