Tag Archives: Travel

Volunteer to Help Pay Student Loans

If you are like me, you paid a pretty penny for your college education. I however, decided to finance most of my education in the form of student loans (private and federal). It amounts to a great sum and I wonder how I am going to pay it off every day. Looking back, I know I would have been able to pay for college with cash and yet didn’t.

Do you find yourself searching for topics such as this every day? By subscribing to this site, you can get FREE updates in your inbox daily. Why not give it a try? You can unsubscribe at any time and it’s FREE. You can subscribe via RSS or you can subscribe via email.

I know it’s going to take a lot of hard work and dedication to pay of the majority of the loans but I am always looking for other avenues. Volunteering is one of those avenues. As you will see, there are plenty of ways to get your college education paid for by volunteering. As a bonus, you are doing good things to help around your community and the world. Here are some resources for paying off your student loans while volunteering:

AmeriCorps

Each year, AmeriCorps offers 75,000 opportunities for adults of all ages and backgrounds to serve through a network of partnerships with local and national nonprofit groups. You can volunteer in various areas such as education, business, housing, disaster relief, health, technology and more. You serve for 12 months and receive a living stipend up to $7,400. At the end of your service, you receive a $4,725 education award to be used toward your federal student loans or your tuition if you are currently in college. AmeriCorps is also the group that offers the VISTA program.

Personally, I looked around the site and found a few good positions that I would be interested in. There were several positions in financial education, foreclosures, and housing. Check it out because there is something there waiting for you!

Peace Corps

Peace Corps volunteers serve in 74 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Collaborating with local community members, Volunteers work in areas like education, youth outreach and community development, the environment, and information technology. The Peace Corps provides volunteers with a living allowance while they are serving. It enables them to live in a manner that is similar to where they are stationed. After completion of the program, the Peace Corps provides volunteers with a $6,000 payment to help with the transition back to a normal life.

While serving in the Peace Corps, volunteers are able to defer their federal student loans until they are finished with the program. If you have a Perkins loan, you will be eligible for a cancellation of 15% for each year you spend in the program. If you spend more than 2 years, you can have 20% of your loan cancelled in years 3 and 4. In all, you can have up to 70% of your Perkins loan cancelled.

Teach for America

Teach for America is an American non-profit that enlists America’s future leaders to help end education inequality. The program will place you in a low-income school in various locations around the country where you will teach students (you do not need an education degree). The great thing about the program is that you receive all of the same benefits as other professional teachers in the school district. In other words, you receive the same salary and health benefits as beginning teachers.

During your two years as a teacher, you can receive forbearance (they still pay the interest) of your student loans. Plus, at the end of each year you will receive a $4,725 education award that can be used to pay off federal student debt.

Military

The military offers many great education benefits while you are in the service or after you leave. With the active duty and verterans GI Bill, you can receive up to $1,075 per month for education and training. If you are in the reserves, you can receive a reduced benefit of up to $297 per month.

Charity for Debt

Charity for Debt offers a unique program in which you can volunteer your time with various non-profits in return for the payment of parts of your student loans. The program is still in the pilot stage and is currently only being offered in Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Washington DC. Basically, you volunteer your time at various sponsored non-profits and you receive anywhere from $15 to $20 per hour (tax-free) that is then used to pay your student loans.

Personally, I have signed up for this progam since I live in the DC metro area. I will keep you informed on how the process goes and if it even takes off.

Does anyone else know of any other ways to volunteer your time and have you student loans paid?

Thanks to AAA Travel, We Are Heading to Jamaica!

I am a pretty frugal guy so when it comes to travel, I like to shop for it myself. However, over the past few months, I just couldn’t focus on planning for our honeymoon (which is in July). We knew for sure that we wanted to go someplace tropical and that was about it. When looking for places to go, I always had questions running through my mind like these:

  • Is the local neighborhood safe?
  • Is it all inclusive or do we have to pay for food?
  • If we have to pay for food, how expensive is it?
  • Where do we need to fly out of and do we have long layovers?
  • Do they allow kids at the resort?
  • Etc., Etc., Etc

See how that can make someone like myself go INSANE! To help thwart off the straitjacket, we decided to go to a travel agent and couldn’t be happier.

Our Decision to Use AAA

As soon as I received my drivers license at 16, I joined AAA. It was a pretty easy decision for me as my grandparents were members for over 50 years (they now receive a free membership because of that) and my mother has been with them for quite a few years as well. However, when I moved to Texas for graduate school, I let my membership expire and I have not renewed.

When we were looking for a travel agent, I really could not find anything in the area that looked reputable. All of the local companies websites looked like they used a computer running Windows MS DOS to set it up. They also probably worked out their home which I wasn’t completely comfortable with. I then thought about my AAA days and remembered that they offer travel services so we decided to give them a try. The greatest part about them was that you do not have to be a member to use their services!

Our Travel Agent

When we got to AAA, we were immediately greeted by the receptionist. She told us that it would be about a 15 minute wait (there were only two agents) and we said that we didn’t mind. When the agent, let’s call her Pam, became available, she was was very professional and asked us the typical questions. What was nice about using Pam’s services was that she had been to most of the places we were looking at! She told us the places to avoid (ironically the ones we were looking at) and where the best deals were at. Of course, the best deals right now are in Mexico. We kindly said no thanks to that! Oink, Oink!

Overall, the experience was great and we are glad that we went. We ended up going with an all-inclusive resort in Jamaica that also has a “clothing optional” beach. Don’t worry, you won’t catch me there! 😉 She also helped us with the flight and got us a non-stop out of Baltimore. I would have never been able to do all of this on my own (without spending HOURS). The resort allows us to drink, eat, etc. as much as our hearts desire. The All-inclusive part just relieves the stress of having to watch every penny you spend on those things.

We didn’t make a decision while there (she didn’t pressure us at all) so we could go home and check stuff out on the web. I ended up searching for a lower price for the resort and could not find one. That was the deciding factor right there and I called back and booked. We even got a free one year membership to AAA out of it!

Have any of you had a similar experience with a travel agent? You like booking travel yourself? Tell us your story!

Weekly Roundup – May 10th

Hope your weekend is going well! Ours started off with a bang yesterday when we booked our honeymoon! Heading off to Jamaica at the end of July (during hurricane season of course) for an all-inclusive extravaganza. I am working on a post for tomorrow detailing our experience with AAA travel. I’ll just say that it was a good one.

Now for a quick plug for the Carnival of Money Stories. Tomorrow is the last day to submit for the return of the carnival. It will be hosted by Gather Little by Little on Monday. You have until 5pm EST today to get your submissions in!

Great Reads From the Week

J Money from Budgets are Sexy wants to grant you one luxury wish. What would you pick? My answer is in the comments!

Bob at Christian Personal Finance explains the art of phishing scams with a great video that he found. That’s one of the things to avoid in my list of identity theft tips.

Free Money Finance tells you how one bad experience can ruin a company.

One Caveman’s Financial Adventure has a great list of 8 things new parents don’t need. I hope I don’t have to worry about these things for a few more years!

Make sure you check all of them out and I look forward to a great week of discussion! 🙂

How to Choose Credit Cards With Rewards to Save Money – Part 2

This is the 2nd part of Mr Credit Card’s guest post. In the previous post, he focused primarily on how to choose a cash back card to save money. In this post, he is going to discuss more about reward cards that let you earn points. His site has lots of information and you can apply for a credit card there.

In this post, I am going to give a few tips on how to choose a credit card to earn reward points. The decision you have to make is what rewards you want to earn with your points. There are a few broad categories of rewards that are available with most credit cards.

Travel Rewards – These include airline tickets, hotel stays, car rentals, cruises etc.

Merchandise – Most credit card reward programs have partnered up with various retailers and brands to offer their products to their card holders who exchange them for reward points. For example, you may exchange a certain amount of points to get, say, a Nikon Digital Camera.

Gift Cards – You can also exchange points for gift cards. A typical example would be to exchange 10,000 points for a $100 Best Buy Gift Card.

Charity – Most reward programs also allow you to donate points (for cash) to charities (though I doubt that is the intention of most reward card holders).

Travel Rewards

Most people looking for a reward credit card want to redeem points for airline tickets. The decision they would have to make us whether to get an airline credit card or a credit card with reward programs.

This dilemma is probably the toughest to resolve in any credit card decision because it involves so many factors. You have to ask yourself the following :

1. How Often Do You Fly?

2. Do You Fly with Just One Airline or Many?

3. Do You Spend A Lot on Your Card?

If You Just Fly on One Airline

If you just fly on one airline, then it make sense just to get a frequent flyer credit card.

If You Have Fly on a Few Airlines

If you fly on a few airlines and are a member of a few frequent flier programs, there are a couple of alternatives. For example, the American Express Membership Rewards allows you to transfer points you earn on Amex charge cards to 17 frequent flier miles. This is very valuable and is the reason why Amex is so popular.

The starwood preferred guest program allows you to convert Starwood points to air miles on a one for one ratio for most frequent flyer programs and you even get a bonus 5,000 miles if you transfer 20,000 points. Many frequent travelers carry the Starwood credit card.

If You Are Not a Frequent Flier But Want to Use Points for Airline Tickets

For those do not travel but want to earn points for an airline ticket for a family vacation, most regular reward credit cards should work. These days, most programs allow you to book your own tickets and use points t0 cover for them. That is the advantage they have over frequent flier programs because there are fewer restrictions like blackout dates, etc. that come with regular frequent flyer programs.

Merchandise

Choosing a reward credit card for merchandise redemption is a little tough because it is very difficult to compare the breadth of products available in their catalogs as they are always changing. Furthermore, some programs require less points for certain items but more for others. But generally speaking, after much research, I’ve found the Membership Rewards from AMEX to have the best selection of merchandise in their catalog.

Gift Cards

For those who want to use points for gift cards, the best card to get is probably the Discover Card as it has over 100 partners. The Discover Cards allow you to earn cash rebates and if you redeem them for gift cards instead, you double the value of the gift cards you redeem for certain merchants.

Donating to Charity

If you are a charitable person and would like to donate to charities by your credit, most reward programs allow you to do that. Some have many partners while others have just a few. The better ones like American Express allow you to set up your card such that you automatically donate to charities every month.

Shopping With Your Credit Card

Most credit cards today have their own shopping site and partnerships with online retailers so that you can actually earn more points or get discounts when you use your card.

For example, Discover has this feature called shopdiscover.com. The way it works is that you can shop at say bestbuy.com (but going through the discover website) and you can earn 5% rebates when you use your Discover card to shop at their site. American Express has a shopping comparison site called shopamex.com, which lets you compare many items with different retailers. You can then shop at the cheapest online store and even use your reward points to shop.

Most card holders do not use this feature. But you should, since you can save quite a bit by doing so.

Other Considerations

When you are researching credit cards, other things to consider are:

1. Do reward points expire

2. Is there a cap to how many points you can earn?

3. How many points you do earn for every dollar that you spend on the card? For most, it will be one point, but many cards lets you earn more points for certain category in spending.

Final Note – While savvy frequent travelers have always used reward cards to their advantage, most credit card holders don’t. To fully take advantage of credit cards (rather than let them take advantage of you), make sure you pay in full, get a card with rewards (whether it be cash back or reward points). You will enjoy savings and perks in many interesting ways.

How to Choose Credit Cards With Rewards to Save Money – Part 1

This is a guest post by Mr Credit Card from www.askmrcreditcard.com. Mr Credit Card reviews credit cards on his site. He also has a blog and you can subscribe to his blog here. Mr Credit Card will post a 2 part series on how to choose a credit card with rewards to save money on your spending.

Hi everyone! Firstly, I would like to thank Adam for the opportunity to guest post on his blog. Friends of mine inevitably ask me what credit card they should get when they find out that I actually run a credit card review site. This is a tough question to answer without first finding out about someone’s spending patterns. But the thing that always makes me shake my head is that fact that folks who pay in full every month carry a “vanilla” Visa or MasterCard. Worse of all, some even pay an annual fee to do so. If you pay your balance in full (or carry only a small balance occasionally), then you should be making money from credit cards by a getting a reward card, instead of letting credit card companies make money from you. It should be a two way street.

But how does one go about doing it? First, you have to be aware that there are two types of rewards. There are cash back credit cards that will pay you a certain percentage of cash rebates for every dollar that you spend on the card. Then there are rewards credit cards. These cards allow you to earn points or miles for every dollar that you spend on the card. You can then redeem your points for things like airline tickets, merchandise, gift cards etc.

Cash Back or Rewards?

The first decision you have to make is whether to choose a cash back card or a reward card. For this, the decision really comes down to preference. What sort of rewards do you prefer? Many travelers who fly frequently prefer to get an airline credit card with their favorite airline. Many folks who do not travel and do not want the hassle of redeeming points prefer to earn cash rebates instead.

How Do You Choose a Cash Back Credit Card?

For the rest of this post, I’m going to focus on explaining how I think one should go about choosing a credit card that pays you cash rebates. In part 2 of this post, I’ll focus on how to choose a reward card instead.

The first thing one has to understand is that different credit cards have different cash rebate formulas. And for someone who is researching it for the first time, it could be rather confusing. But here are the few features you have to be aware of:

Vanilla standard 1% formula – The vast majority of rebate cards fall into this category. They will pay you 1% rebate for every dollar that you spend on the card. While this looks like a decent deal and much better than a standard vanilla card, you can get better deals out there.

More than 1% on certain categories – These are the type of cards you should be looking at although there is less of them these days as credit card issuers cut back on the rewards they give. There are cards out there that pay more than 1% on certain categories that you spend. For example, a card like the American Express Costco Card pays 3% on gas, 2% on travel and restaurant spending and 1% on other regular stuff.

Rebates for online shopping – Some cards like Discover Card allows their card holders to earn between 5% to 20% if they use their card to shop at over 100 online retailers through their site.

Tiered Formula – Some cards also have a tiered formula. That means that you need to spend above a certain amount to earn more rebates. As an example, the Amex Blue Cash lets you earn 1% on gas, supermarket and drugstore spending for the first $6,500 of annual spending. Once you pass that threshold, you earn 5%. Having a tiered formula is not necessarily bad. It just means you have to use your card above a certain amount to fully make use of it.

How to Choose the Right Card For You

1. Figure out how much you spend on your credit card – Yes, go through your credit card bills and figure out how much you actually spend on your credit card.

2. Break down your expenses into different categories – The next step is to breakdown your spending into different categories. You should use the following breakdown as a guide:

Gas
Supermarket
Drugstore
Travel
Restaurant and Dining
Movies
Home Improvement
Others

3. Calculate rebates you can earn on different cards – Now comes the tough part. You have to do some research on the different cards available and use a calculator and figure out how much you will save from using each card. Then, once you are done with this exercise, you will know which is the right card for you. To make your life easier, I have actually created a cash back credit card calculator to save you time. All you have to do is to simply key in your monthly expenses in various categories and the calculator will show you the top 3 cards that will earn you the most rebates.

OK – that’s it for this post. In part 2, I will write about the different types of rewards that are available in reward credit cards, whether you should choose a frequent flier card or a regular reward card and other things to look out for. Remember, you should extract as much benefit as you can from credit cards and not the other way round.

If You Work In Retirement, Are You Still Considered Retired?

Retirement is something that we all strive to achieve. It symbolizes the end of a long career and is the point where you can relax and reap the rewards of life. However, many individuals these days are not prepared financially for retirement. Either they did not save enough or they had unusual circumstances that required them to retire prematurely. This typically means that they need to become extremely frugal (living solely on Social Security) or continuing to work. I’ve always wondered about the later. If you work in retirement, are you still considered retired?

What is Retirement to You?

What does retirement mean to you? Merriam-Webster defines retirement as:

withdrawal from one’s position or occupation or from active working life

With that definition, you can say that after you stop working your primary occupation, you are officially retired. What happens if you decide to go back to work after a few months of retirement? Does that mean that you are no longer retired?

Taking Any Work Possible In Retirement

I feel that if you go back to work in retirement because you need money, you are no longer retired. The ideal retirement for me does not have me greeting customers coming in the front door of a department store. When I retire I want to do the things that I always wanted to do but did not have the time to do it. I want to travel the world but because of work, I cannot do that right now. However, in retirement, I will have the time and resources to complete this dream.

Doing a Job That You Always Dreamed of In Retirement

What if you are set financially but choose to work? Many people choose to work in retirement because there has always been something that they longed to do. Have you always wanted to start a charitable foundation or non-profit company? I feel that if you are working in retirement doing something you are passionate about, you are still considered retired. Isn’t that what retirement is supposed to be all about, doing stuff you love?

In conclusion, I think that retirement is what you make of it. However, if you cannot fully retire for financial reasons, I don’t think you are officially retired. However, if you have a job just to stimulate your brain or get to know members of your community, I think that is an ideal retirement because you are doing what you are passionate about or what keeps you ticking. I just do not think you can officially be retired if you dread going to work at the local grocery store at the age of 75 just so you can eat.

What is your definition of retirement? Do you agree with my reasonings or am I way off base?