The Sun's Financial Diary

That’s a pleasant surprise. I didn’t realize that I have been using my AMEX Costco TrueEarnings card for a year already until I found a check in the mail tonight from AMEX. It’s a rebate check of $74 for spending $5,228 with the card in the past year for eating out, traveling and shopping at [...]

I know Citi bank has a very simple procedure for cardholders to request a credit line increase, which can be either an automatic amount or a cardholder specified  number, all on one page. However, with Discover card, every time when I happened to speak with them asking for a credit increase, they told me that [...]

I have an AMEX Costco TrueEarnings card, which I use to shop only at my local Costco and once in a while at restaurants to get 3% cashback (higher than the 2% universal cashback I get from my Fidelity 529 Rewards card). I don’t use it at grocery stores, I don’t use it at gas [...]

the 0% balance transfer business, that is. Last month, I applied and was approved for a new Citi PremierPass credit card. I usually don’t (in fact never) try to get a card that carries annual fees, but the promotion for this card was too generous to pass over: no annual fee, 15,000 bonus ThankYou points, [...]

The last time I checked my credit score was last June and it was 699, largely due to the more than $50,000 0% balance transfers I put on four cards. At that time, I used FICO’s Score Simulator to estimate what my score will be if I pay off all the balances by the end [...]

A little over a week ago, I applied a Citi Elite PremierPass credit card after seeing some discussion on FatWallet forum. What interested me were the promise of no annual fee, which is usually $75, 15,000 bonus points after 1st purchase, and 0% balance transfer for 12 months At the time when I applied for [...]

A couple of days ago, I read an article on MSN Money with the title “Credit card companies’ evil tricks.” The article is interesting because it reveals what the author, Liz Weston, considers as “foul play” between credit card companies and us, the card holders. Here’s the summary from the article. For details, use the [...]

This deal is from FatWallet. It seems to be a good deal, with the only question being whether the fee is waived permanently or only for one year. If this is a concern, you can always cancel the card after getting the bonus points. The fine print says the balance transfer is good within 12 [...]