copperhead

Before I go any further I need to say this - to anyone reading this thread, if you're credit score isn't in the 700's, or you have problems being responsible with credit cards, or you don't have the ability to move money around, or you have a very limited income, then this thread is NOT for you. Please hit the back button because this stuff can get you into serious trouble financially if you don't know what you are doing or are in a situation where you can easily get in over your head. A lot of this involves applying for a lot of credit cards, and getting denied will hurt your credit. The credit check for applying will also give you a small ding, but in the long run will help your credit, seeing how it will improve your credit to debt ratio so long as you keep the cards paid off. If you are in the process of building your credit score then start off by reading my building credit sticky in this forum. It's probably not the best guide out there for building credit but its a start. Now, back to the show... If you are on Facebook go to these pages and hit the like button: https://www.facebook.com/BoardingArea https://www.facebook.com/MillionMileSecrets?ref=ts Boarding Area is a website that hosts a ton of travel blogs, and whenever someone posts something new the Boarding Area FB page posts it up, easy way to keep up with stuff. If anyone decides to get an Amex Hilton card, please PM me for a referral first. Since you are an independent contractor it would be simple for you to pick up business cards. Aim for the Chase Ink Bold and Chase Ink Plus. These give 5 points per $ on purchases at office supply stores, some of which sell gift cards. Depending on what you are going after, UR points can be worth more than straight Hilton points. Gift cards are an EASY way to rack up points either this way, or a lot of cards have bonuses for spending at groceries which also sell lots of gift cards and give discounts on gas in the process. My no-fee Amex Hilton gives 6 points/$ at groceries. Lets say I spend $400 a month on groceries and $300 on gas in a month. I go into Kroger, load $400 onto a Kroger gift card to keep things simple, then pick up $300 in Shell gift cards. That $700 is 4200 points for stuff that I'm buying regardless. The Visa and Mastercard gift cards are also great for other expenses if you don't mind the $4 or $5 fee to buy it. Avoid the reloadable debit cards, they are targeting people with poor credit and no banking accounts, and they shut down people trying to use them for anything else. If you ever get denied on an app, call the reconsideration line immediately. Especially with business cards, those are generally denied until they talk to you on the phone. They will want to know how much money you make, spend, etc. More info on that here: http://millionmilesecrets.com/2011/08/15/credit-card-reconsideration/ One reason they may turn you down is they generally have a hard credit limit that they will extend to you overall. Let's say they will give you a total of $100,000 credit, and you have 4 cards with $25k limits each. They won't give you anything else, but what they can usually do is reduce the limits on existing cards, or you have the option of cancelling something to make it work. You won't know this until you talk to them. If they do this and you can prove that you move more money through cards than they will give you a limit for, then sometimes they will adjust your hard limit up. As far as bank rewards go, Chase is really good so long as you have a card that has an annual fee, this allows you to transfer points to other rewards clubs. If you don't have an annual fee card, you can only use ultimate rewards on stuff in Chase's rewards mall. Citi ThankYou points are crap, as well as Capital One Venture points. Amex points are good but not quite as good as Chase. Do you decide what hotels you will be staying in when traveling for work? I would suggest making one chain your primary target. You will want to first spend on sign up bonuses, then go after whatever gives the biggest points payout. For Hilton, the Citi Reserve card gives 10 points for every $ spent at a Hilton, the Amex Surpass is 9. Get one or both of those and stick with them. Every other hotel chain except Starwood only has cards through Chase, so have fun with that. Traveling abroad, I'd probably stick with Starwood or Hilton anyway. Also consider Radisson abroad, but their US hotels aren't so hot. They tend to be old and a big run down, yet still charge a lot. They do occasionally run a promotion where you can get a ton of points for staying at 3 different branded hotels in their chain, and the good thing about that is their points don't expire and they have a resort in Orlando and one in Cancun that's only 9,000 points a night. I got about 145,000 points from staying 3 nights, so you can see why that was worth spending some money on. I'd also use this in Europe if I were to ever head that way. When flying in and out of Columbus on domestic flights its usually cheapest to go with Southwest or Airtran so check them first. Southwest bought Airtran so eventually it will all be Southwest anyway. Airtran rewards are set up weird and will probably get merged with Southwest anyway so don't worry too much about them. Southwest is pretty decent, they have Chase 50,000 sign up points cards, including business cards so it would be pretty easy to hit 100k with them. I'd hold off though until they run a promo for a companion pass, sometimes they will offer if you hit 110,000 points they will let a companion fly for free with you for a year. When flying international look at United, their program is suppose to be a bit better than Delta I believe. Citi has American Airlines cards than used to have 70k sign on bonus but I think its gone way down. AA is probably the third choice for domestic flying, after SW and Airtran. When flying, its generally cheaper to fly nonstop than to have layovers. Besides, layovers suck unless you are trying to rack up miles, which is another game entirely. The easy way to figure out what airlines fly where is to bring up the airport's wikipedia page, it shows what carriers fly where so you know where to look first for the cheapest air fare and shortest possible flight. So I guess the best plan of action when playing this game is to figure out what you want to do and where, then figure out the route to make it happen, rather than just rack up as many miles as you possibly can since most points will expire after a year or so of inactivity. You can track most of your rewards points accounts through http://www.awardwallet.com Another way to get easy points or cash back is to go through portals when making online purchases. Chase has one through their Ultimate Rewards program, Southwest has one here: https://rapidrewardsshopping.southwest.com/ which is nice because so long as you use it once in a while your points won't expire. I'm sure there are plenty others that I don't know about to build points. For cash back, there's http://www.bigcrumbs.com/crumbs/ and http://www.topcashback.com/ Unfortunately it's very hard to find a portal for Amazon. Otherwise, whenever buying online check all the portals first for rewards. There's no reason to leave money or points on the table when it costs nothing but a little time to get it.

I think he's talking about doing this as a work practice to make a couple extra bucks. If you travel for a living then its a good way to pad your paycheck, but it doesn't help the casual traveler.

If I had some liquidity I'd be churning cards for the sign up bonus. Generally its safe to do 3-4 cards every 4-6 months. You want to do all of your sign ups on the same day. Generally if you get multiple cards from the same bank on the same day they will combine credit pulls into one so its less of a hit on your credit. Chase is very strict about their programs, you can only get one personal and one business card at a time, and have to put some time between apps, like 4 months. They don't allow you to get bonuses from the same cards ever again. Citi will let you get rewards over and over, except with their American Airlines cards. BOA lets you churn but doesn't have much. I've got an AMEX basic Hilton card and love it, it got me 40k points and I've used it some since then. The Amex Hiltons give you AXON rewards which give you discounts if you book with points for 4 day increments at 5, 6 or 7 category Hiltons. For example, the resort we are going to stay at is a category 7 so basic rewards stays there are 50,000 a night. Our 4 day stay would take 200,000 points but AXON drops that to 145,000. By then, I'll probably get the Amex Surpass Hilton card which will give me another 40k plus gold status for a year. If we were able to schedule our stay over a weekend then I'd skip the Surpass and grab the Citi Reserve Hilton instead, their bonus is two free weekend certificates but they expire in a year, plus free gold status for as long as you keep the card. I'll probably pick that up when the Surpass status runs up. I'll always keep the basic Amex Hilton, the AXON awards are worth it and no annual fee. I've got two of the Citi basic hilton cards, finishing the spend here in the next couple weeks. You can get two more of them every 4 months for 40k each, but this is if you aren't signing up for other better stuff. Citi is generally the only one you can get multiples of the same card at the same time from, just be sure to use two different browser's so the site doesn't think you accidentally tried to refresh the page and ignore one of the apps. I've not found much in the way of cruises but I'd like to. The approach you take will vary depending on how much you like to travel and your credit score and how much you spend a month. I'd like to be able to have one nice vacation a year, so I'm only focusing on Hilton, and eventually airfare to get down to south Florida or the Caribbean. Professional travelers seem to prefer Hyatt, but the easiest bonuses to get are Starwood which you already have and Hilton. Starwood doesn't have very many hotels in the US so their points may be better used when transferred to airlines in 20,000 point increments (gives you a 5,000 point bonus), although you are better off spending money on sign up bonuses. As for sign up bonuses, gift cards are your new best friend so long as you have the cash to pay it back off. This is why I'm not gaming it like I'd like to. I'll post more as I think of it, I gotta get to work now.

Anything before the 2005 restyle sells pretty cheap. Like $6000 for a NICE one. The 4.7 is fine but a lot of people will claim they sludge, engines sludge because idiot owners don't change the oil. Service records would be nice. Try to get one with the transfer case that allows you to go into 2wd instead of requiring full time 4x4 for the sake of gas mileage. Headlights fog up/yellow pretty bad. I've heard rumor of electrical problems but nothing difficult. Overall, they are a good deal for what they are so long as you don't mind shit gas mileage. If I was looking for a cheap SUV I'd look at them first.

You mean grand cherokee?

I've been researching like crazy for months now, but haven't been in quite the right financial situation to properly game it. Right now I'm building Hilton points and I'll be shooting for gold status next year so I can take the woman to a resort in Destin, Florida. What kind of info are you looking for? The best source of info I've found is http://www.millionmilesecrets.com A lot of the deals out there are luck and timing, which is where forums like flyer talk come in, but a lit of people there are hesitant to share the really good deals because they don't want them to get shut off. I usually drive everywhere so I care more about hotels than air fare, but once I'm set with Hilton for a while I will probably go for southwest points, they have some good programs and fly out of here. That, and the places I like to fly to have dirt cheap tickets anyway

sears outlet is the shit, just inspect before you pay I have front loader HE's, they clean just fine but the washer doesn't completely drain. This can sometimes leave a smell in the room. There's really no good benefit to a front loading washer. The washer takes about an hour to wash, the dryer takes about a half hour on auto and medium heat. edit - if you go to sears outlet, look stuff up online and print it out before you go. I bought a fridge there and it was priced higher on the floor than online, I brought it up on my phone and they honored the online price.

good price if free shipping, if not just go to vance's/buckeye outdoors

what's the difference between the different kinds of tint?

Its a rebadged jeep liberty I test drove one, and went for the grand cherokee instead, waaaaaay better suv the one I drove handled like shit, was underpowered, way too narrow, same shitty gas mileage as my grand cherokee with two less cylinders, and I don't remember for sure but I think the 4x4 was strange, like it didn't have low range or something. My GC is still for sale btw, for a bit less now than before if you are interested. I want a BMW.

http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/replicate/EXID15166/images/southpark.gif

Samsung does make a great tv. That being said, keep an eye on http://slickdeals.net/ until the right deal pops up. Or wait until the pre-Christmas price wars begin.

So long as you have a good backstop and you don't have any illegal weapons then they can't do much. If cops are called they will probably show up and say hi but so long as there's nothing illegal going on they won't stay long. I'd also ask them to explain to the person calling them that nothing illegal is going on so stop being that guy.

You mean more like this one? http://autopolis.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/1982-cadillac-cimarron_100171607_l.jpg?w=600&h=408

As for the first gun you listed http://www.chuckhawks.com/savage_99.htm Its a Savage 99c, chambered in .308 Check to see if its numbers match: find the manufacture date here: http://www.savage99.com/savage99_dates.htm possibly more info here: http://www.savage99.com/ gunbroker listings: http://www.gunbroker.com/All/BI.aspx?Keywords=savage+99+308 Marlin .22's are pretty inexpensive. Probably shoot for $150 to be honest, someone might pick it up on http://www.armslist.com/ pretty quick. If I had any money to spare I'd pick it up, I'd like a .22

for a rough guess check out gunbroker.com, its the ebay of guns

They pick and choose what businesses are affected by this, and what drinks are affected. You can buy a 32oz double dew at the gas station to guzzle down on the way to work but if you sit down at a restaurant you have to get a dozen refills. I've read the ban also covers sweet tea and possibly sports drinks, but not diet drinks. Because that artificial sweetener is soooooo much safer for you than sugar. Yet, muggings and violent crime are up in the city. Obviously their priorities are on target.

Keep the t100

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/08/31/first-death-linked-to-new-swine-flu-is-ohio-woman-61/?intcmp=obinsite

Sounds like some young lawyer looking to make a name for them self needs to take up this case.

If you never agreed to the charge, how can they send you to collections? So can I send a $5 million bill to the owner of the company that does this, charging him for being a dickwad, and when he doesn't pay up I can send him to collections? Because to me its the same principal.

u-haul trailer, borrow something that can tow?

Santa came early this year!

G19 and one other 9mm model, forget which, is all that seems to be affected

fuck calling, they can't ignore you if you walk in the door and start bugging them