Reports - Free Money Collection in Quarter 4 of 2006

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

Free Money is so enticing! Here is a report of our collections for the fourth quarter of 2006. Since we were very busy professionally we could not spend too much of our time and efforts in free money collections in the last quarter of 2006. However we managed to rope in $504 with a few hours of effort put in sign-up and referral bonuses!

Figure 1: Free Money Collection for Quarter 4 - 2006

The details of our collections as shown in Figure 1 are furnished below.

• Citibank's EZ Checking a/c deal gave us a quarterly bonus of $100.
• Wachovia gave us $25 for signing up for their checking account.
• Bank of America's Regular Savings Account brought us another $50.
• A couple of referrals for the great Orange Savings account added $20 to the kitty.
• Citibank's Amex credit card added a neat $100 sign-up bonus.
• Google's Checkout bonus added a tiny $9.
• Chase gave a heavy boost to the collections by giving us $200 in sign-up bonuses for their Rewards Master Card.

Now the question is how much Free Money did we collect in 2006? Lets do the math. The first quarter brought us $499, while the second one added $770. The third and fourth quarters gave us $910 and $504 respectively. That adds up to $2683 for the entire of 2006!

There is another interesting yet simple way of looking at this tidy sum of $2683 that was collected in free money.

• Say at the beginning of 2006 we had a principal of $10000.
  
• Now let us put this $10k in a CD for a year offering a rate of 26.83% APY compounded annually.
• At the end of the year the CD's value would have been = $10000 * (1 + 26.83/100) = $12683!
• Net Earnings in Interest = $12683 - $10000 = $2683!

Best Part of The Analogy

• We did not have $10000 at the beginning of 2006 to invest in a one year CD!
• Even if we had the money, there was no CD in the market that was offering a 26.83% APY compounded annually.
• Starting with $0 at the beginning of 2006 we collected $2683 in sign-up bonuses and deals!
  

Now that is a winner! What do you think of it? Please leave your comments. We would love to read your views and improve further.

The best part of the free money jackpot this year was our blog FIRE Finance. Through our blog we could share all the deals we signed up for with our audience so that everyone could take advantage of the free economy!

Food for The Soul - We donated our entire collection of $2683 to different charities to lend a helping hand to those in need.

This year we intend to pursue the free economy more aggressively so that we can donate much more to our favorite charities. We shall post the deals at FIRE Finance in real time. The best way to stay tuned for the Free Money Deals as we unearth them is to subscribe to our feed so that the deals fall into your feed reader the moment we post them without you having to bother about visiting our blog.