Tag: Credit Cards

How To Avoid Extra Credit Card Fees During International Travel

Going on an international trip is very exciting but it can also be very expensive. Using a credit card to pay for purchases when traveling internationally is often the best way to get a good exchange rate and the rate your bank gets will be better than the one you’ll get on your own if you exchange cash. Using a card also means that you don’t have to carry around a bunch of cash with you. However, many cards will add on a “foreign transaction fee” to any transactions made with anything except your home currency. Here’s an easy way to keep from paying that extra 2-3 percent on all of your purchases while away.

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Our Weekly Recap: 7/23/17 – 7/29/17

Hi everyone! It’s the weekend! Woo HOO! Here’s a quick recap of our posts this week:

Joe wrote about:

Sharon wrote about:

Like this post? We have plenty more just like it and would love if you decided to hang around and clicked the button on the top of this page to follow our blog and get emailed notifications of when we post (it’s usually just once or twice a day). Whether you’ve read our posts before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!

How To Get the Most Reward Points When Buying Amusement Park Tickets

It’s well into summer vacation season and that may mean it’s time to make a trip to your local amusement or water park, or it may be the time of year you pack up the family and head to Walt Disney World for the week. Finding discounts for some places can be easy, such as saving on admission for Six Flags parks by bringing a Coke can (They’ve been doing this promotion since I was a kid). Finding discounts for the Disney parks can be much more difficult and here are some hints of where to look (and where not to).

Wherever you decide to go, you can also maximize the points you earn for the tickets by paying with the right credit card. Here’s how:

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Great Deal! Stay 3 Nights For The Price of 2 at Hilton’s Waldorf-Astoria, Conrad & Curio Brands

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Lobby of Waldorf=Astoria in NYC

Ah, the Waldorf Astoria. The name alone conjures up thoughts of exquisite accommodations, unparalleled service and high end everything. Joe and I were lucky enough to stay at the original Waldorf=Astoria in NYC earlier this year, just before it closed for a 3-year renovation, thanks to what was, essentially, an offer that we think never should have been approved (from a business standpoint) before it was published. That was when they advertised “Stay two or more nights and get one night free, AND receive a $75 Visa gift card” and we grabbed the offer before it was pulled :-). So we stayed at the Waldorf=Astoria for 2 nights, got one of the nights for free AND got a $75 Visa gift card, because yup, that’s how the ad could be interpreted. WINNING!

Almost unbelievably, the offer has been introduced again, and
Continue reading “Great Deal! Stay 3 Nights For The Price of 2 at Hilton’s Waldorf-Astoria, Conrad & Curio Brands”

Our Weekly Recap 6/11/17 – 6/17/18

Hello, friends and HAPPY SATURDAY! Here’s a quick recap of our posts this week:

Joe wrote about:

Sharon wrote about:

Like this post? We have plenty more just like it and would love if you decided to hang around and clicked the button on the top of this page to follow our blog and get emailed notifications of when we post (it’s usually just once or twice a day). Whether you’ve read our posts before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!

Chip & PIN cards and why you should have one

By now, I’m sure you have a credit card with a chip, or EMV chip to be specific, in your possession. It’s that thing on your card that makes the person at the checkout tell you, “You need to use your chip in the bottom thingie,” or makes them say when you try to insert your chip card, “We don’t use that chip thing yet, so you need to swipe your card.”

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That thing on the left side of the card is the “chip”

In the U.S.A., we like the think we lead the world in just about everything, but when it comes to credit card security we are decades behind the curve. EMV ( Europay, Mastercard and Visa) chip technology was introduced back in the 1990s and rolled out throughout Europe in the 2000s. The chip in the card is used to confirm the information instead of reading the information off the magnetic strip on the back. This technology is harder to counterfeit and, supposedly, cuts down on fraud. The banks in Europe rolled out this technology first because credit card fraud was, at the time, much more common there. When the chip cards were introduced and helped prevent fraud, the criminals went to the least protected market, the USA, so they could continue with the scamming. Lucky us.

Continue reading “Chip & PIN cards and why you should have one”

Our Weekly Recap: 6/4/17 – 6/10/17

Hello, friends! In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap of our posts this week:

Joe wrote about:

Sharon wrote about:

Like this post? We have plenty more just like it and would love if you decided to hang around and clicked the button on the top of this page to follow our blog and get emailed notifications of when we post (it’s usually just once or twice a day). Whether you’ve read our posts before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!