Some news from around the web:
-
How to Remove Escrow From Your Mortgage and Save Hundreds Each Year by Moneymetagame. Interesting read for optimizing your mortgage and potentially getting some extra credit card spend out of it. I wouldn’t calculate credit card spend as 10% due to signup bonuses since I’d meet the signup bonus other ways, but even calculating at lower amounts could make sense for some.
-
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: What Are Merrill+, FlexPerks, UBS Points Worth? by Uscreditcardguide. Nice graphs for optimizing your redemptions with the Merrill+, Flexperks, and UBS cards.
-
House Republicans to drop debit rule repeal by Politico. Looks like debit card fees will remained capped for now.
-
Bad Groupon Codes purchased from PayPal Digital Gifts by Giftcardtalk. Some/all of the Groupon gift cards sold in a recent PPDG sale are coming up with a $0 balance. Easiest way to fight this is probably to file a return/chargeback within the eBay system. I’ve had success in similar scenarios without ever having to lift the phone.
-
Vendor negotiations with Amazon.com by Windbagmiles. We’re used to thinking about Amazon from a buyer’s prospective and a seller’s prospective. This is an interesting look at a third angle: those supplying Amazon with products sold by Amazon themselves. I’m pretty surprised Amazon caved, would have thought they’d boot a small-time supplier without blinking.
By not escrowing you get to use credit cards to pay your mortgage, and you can use postal money orders or official billpay sites to bypass Plastiq. If you have CSR or Ink Preferred that codes as travel this wouldn’t apply, but many people don’t.
Why not just keep it safe and simple, use escrow, and then pay your mortgage with plastiq?
If you have a CSR, it is likely more profitable NOT to remove escrow now that Plastiq codes as travel…
Good point
Yes, I was thinking just that. Until CSR stops paying 3x for this.
what’s going on with PayPal Digital Gifts? I had a couple thousand dollars worth of gift cards last year that went $0 balance and it took forever to get the money back.
I thought they got that all straightened out (from what I recall, it was some kind of hack)…
ha for once I’m thankful I got Paypal blocked out of getting those GC’s