The Sun's Financial Diary

After posting an entry last week on consolidating several Chase credit cards and reallocating the credit lines to a new Chase Freedom card* in order to take advantage of the 0% balance transfer offer, I got the following comments from John regarding the practice: When you consolidate the credit limits from various cards do you [...]

I called Chase last night to consolidate credit lines on some cards that I no longer use so I can take advantage of 0% APR offer from the Chase Freedom card, though the offer is only good till the middle of November (I made a mistake about the length of the introductory period in my [...]

In March, I applied for a Chase Freedom card after seeing their $250 bonus after first purchase ads. It sounds like a pretty sweet deal. However, when I received the card, I was a little bit confused about exactly what was offered as incentive. It wasn’t clear to me whether I will have to spend [...]

Well, not exactly a virtual bank, but Virtual Bank, the bank that I used for about a year. As part of the plan to simplify our finance, I called Virtual Bank yesterday to close my account (they are quite nice to call me back to confirm with me after I sent the request via bank [...]

I have noticed recently two “direct” online banks that offer competitive rates. Though both of them have decent introductory rates, the high minimum balance required to get rates make them less appealing if you have a small deposit. One is WT Direct, a division of Wilmington Trust. For balance of $10,000 or more, the bank [...]

Somehow I have the feeling that ING Direct has lost its luster as the leader of online banking, the position that it held for several years before everybody in the banking industry started to offer “direct” banking with similar products. My reason is the rates of their Orange Savings Account have consistently fallen behind its [...]

I have been using internet banks for more than eight years. The first internet bank that I remember I used was NetBank in 1999. At that time, there aren’t many banks that offered savings accounts with decent rates. My local bank, Summit Bank (then Fleet Bank, now Bank of America), had a rate that was [...]

A year ago, when I opened a Discover Miles card to use their 12-month 0% balance transfer, I thought I also get 12,000 bonus miles, except that that bonus never came. As the promotion period is expiring, I called them last week to confirm the exact date that I will have to pay off the [...]