Reports - Free Money Collection in Quarter 1 of 2006

[This post is written and copyrighted by FIRE Finance (http://firefinance.blogspot.com).]

Figure 1 : Free Money Collection for Quarter 1 - 2006

We collected $499 (approximate figure) worth of Free Money from various deals available from banks, brokerages and credit card companies in the first quarter of 2006. Figure 1 shows the details of the collection.

• Amex has one of the worst cash back payment programs so we seldom use their cards. We got around $4 as cash back for the entire year of 2005 !
  
• Chase Rewards Credit Card (deal) gave us a $100 account opening bonus which accounted for a greater part of the $120 cash back bonus that we received from them.
• Citibank's EZ (Easy) Checking account gave us $100 (upto a max of $200 in 4 quarters per account) as account opening bonus. The condition to continue to receive the bonus of $50 per quarter is to maintain a minimum balance of $1500 in the EZ Checking a/c and continue to make a couple of bill pays (which is a free service) every month.
• Citibank's Driver's Edge Credit Card gave us 6% cash back as well as credits for the miles accumulated on our cars. So we used this credit card the most and earned around $204 in cash back.
• Etrade gave us a special $25 bonus for enrolling in online bill pay and making a couple of bill pays from our Etrade Brokerage account.
• The $50 a/c opening bonus from NationalCity Bank was a local deal and is not available online (to the best of our knowledge).

Well we did pretty well by our standards and hope to do still better by God's grace in the second quarter of 2006. Since there have been quite a few natural disasters on this planet in the last couple of years we have decided to give away our entire collection of $499 from Free Money Deals in Charity to help our fellow brothers and sisters get back to their feet.