United 50,000 Mile + $50 Offer

United Airlines 55,000 Mileage Plus Miles + $50 Statement Credit

I became a really big fan of United when we were easily able to redeem miles to take our entire family (and in-laws) to Hawaii last summer. The trip was funded in part to different credit card offers with United and Continental prior to the merge.

I have been sitting back and have not opened up the United Mileage Plus credit cards simply because we have had no need to at this point. We are sitting on enough miles and points in other programs to travel for free and simply do not have enough time to use them. With another baby due any day now, and being short on vacation time, there are no immediate plans to be using miles.

However, there is a great targeted offer for United customers right now.

In the past, as long as you signed into your United Mileage and had a couple miles in there, you could often see the best deals.

United 50,000 Mile Offer

For example, when I sign into my account, I see a 50,000 mile offer with no annual fee, which is still a pretty standout offer. Where else can you open up a credit card, pay for an auto repair, and receive enough miles to fly to Hawaii or Europe, or other places on your bucket list?

United 50,000 Mile + $50 Offer

However, a better targeted offer appears after you sign into your United account, and then search for a flight. Then you might find a nice little box showing 50,000 miles + $50 statement credit.

The 50,000 bonus miles is awarded after $1,000 in spend within 3 months.

The $50 statement credit is awarded after your first purchase.

Ready for the best part? Earn another 5,000 miles for adding an authorized user to the card. Making this version of the United Mileage Plus card valued at over 56,000 miles after spending $1,000 on the card. That is a great offer in my opinion!

Additional benefits of the card include free checked bags, priority boarding, two United lounge passes, double miles on United purchases, and your miles will never expire so long as you have the card. The $95 annual fee is waived the first year.

I am in the midst of possibly doing a refinance on our rental house. So I am a little skeptical of opening up another card right now. I just opened a second US Airways card a month ago, and while the impact to my credit scores has been minimal, I do not want to interfere with something as important as a mortgage refi.

We do have some major pending auto repairs coming on my older vehicle, so hopefully this offer may still be around in a couple months, as we will easily meet the minimum spend for this offer.

Remember, the game is all about properly managing your credit. Think you will be taking advantage of this promotion?

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Source: HansDKNY via FT

We have no affiliation with Chase or this United Mileage Plus card offer. The details are the best current promotion that we are aware of that can simply help fund your families next vacation.

CreditKarma

Credit Karma Discontinues Daily Score Updates

CreditKarma

We have been paying off some bills with our tax refunds, and I have been anxious to see what kind of positive impact that will have to my credit scores. The first step I took was to log into my Credit Karma account and pull up my latest score (for free), which is determined based on the TransUnion credit bureau information.

The first major thing I noted was the layout of the Credit Karma pages had been redesigned. However, what ultimately really surprised me was to see that there was no place to “update” my credit score. The site automatically updated my score for me. Ok, I am fine with that.

Credit Karma Weekly Score Update

The thing that alarmed me though was the little note next to my score.

There in front of me was a new note that said I needed to wait a week until I could update my score again.

Credit Karma was always founded on the principal of being able to update your credit score once per day. The great thing is that checking your score with Credit Karma had no bearing or impact on your scores performance.

So I reached out to Credit Karma to check on why the system was being redesigned.

When you log into your Credit Karma account, your score will automatically update if it’s been more than seven days since your last update. All you have to do is log in to initiate this update.

In your dashboard, you’ll see the date when your score was last updated as well as when a new score will be available for you.

Creditors send updates to the credit bureaus once a month, so credit scores typically do not change daily. We decided to make the Credit Karma experience more seamless by automatically updating your credit information for you weekly when you log into your account.

If you receive a credit monitoring alert about something important changing in your TransUnion credit report, your score will be automatically updated the next time you log into Credit Karma.

All of this makes our score updates more intelligent and keeps you focused on only important changes to your credit. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

While I agree that creditors update your information once per month, it is not standard when in the month this happens. Therefore, on Monday of one week XYZ could send updated account information to the credit bureaus, and on Tuesday company ABC could also do the same thing. The problem I see with this new weekly score update is that there is no longer a way to directly see which reportings directly impact your score.

If on Wednesday of the week where several creditors updated your information, you now might need to make a guess at which line item raised or lowered your score, where as before you could track daily which creditors information effected your score positively or negatively.

Upcoming Credit Predictions

What I discovered Credit Karma now includes, and maybe it was there prior and I just never noticed it, is a prediction of when creditors will be reporting your new information. If you go to your Alerts page, you will see a calendar view. By either scrolling over each day, or viewing the list below, you can now determine when creditors expect to report your information to TransUnion. Credit Karma is sitting on a huge pile of data not only from you, but everyone else, that I would venture to say pretty accurately can determine when new information is transferred over.

Credit Karma Alerts Calendar Predictions

By using this tool, you now might want to plan out your logins to Credit Karma to accurately capture the most recent data and prevent you from missing that one creditors information in your weekly pull.

Wrap-up

I value a free system to monitor people’s credit, and am really appreciative of Credit Karma’s existence, as it is a powerful tool for the consumer and those of us who like to use our credit to its maximum potential by opening up new lines of credit for rewards.

The reality of what is really going on, I presume, is that Credit Karma is trying to curb some of its costs. They purchase your credit report from TransUnion and calculate your score on a similar method. By cutting down to only pulling your report weekly, there was some cost savings on Credit Karma’s part. Credit Karma makes their money off of the associated products you get pitched while researching your own credit. If less people are opening up lines of credit than are pulling their reports, the math simply needs to be revised, which is at the heart of what is really going on.

Regardless, I am still happy to see Credit Karma is still able to offer their credit score system for free to the consumer. What could really do wonders for Credit Karma is if they could work some exclusive deals with the credit card issuers, similar to what CreditCards.com is currently doing. Until then, I think the educated consumer will continue to use their free credit information to hunt out the best offers possible, which is happening with affiliates everywhere.

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Source: InACents

TurboTax Price Increase March 2013

TurboTax Prices Increasing March 23, 2013

I noticed the other day in my email that TurboTax (affiliate link) alerted me that prices are going up on Saturday, March 23, 2013. Why they are increasing the prices mid-season and what they are increasing to, I do not know.

TurboTax Price Increase March 2013

We actually have ours pretty much finalized, I am just always reluctant to hit submit because it seems some late tax forms always end up trickling in. I even just received a late revised form from my bank only a week ago. Seeing as we already have a relatively complex tax return between our rental home, side business income, and occasional stock trades, I like to minimize any chance of getting audited or having to redo a tax form as possible. So I will be buttoning up all of our Federal tax forms this week prior to the increase.

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Source: TurboTax via email

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