Tag Archives: Cash Back

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My Failed Experiment to Cut the Comcast Xfinity Cable Cord

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Good morning everyone.  My wife and I have Comcast Xfinity internet and cable TV at home and I was considering cutting the cord to save money on our cable TV subscription.  I don’t really watch live TV (news or sports), but I do love watching recorded TV shows from our DVR (mostly reality TV and sitcoms).  I have the Comcast Xfinity Stream app on my iPhone and love that I can download any show from our DVR onto the app (also works great on our iPad).  I can watch TV shows on my commute to work (on the train and ferry) and when I travel on a plane.  Having the shows pre-downloaded vs. streaming to my iPhone is really important to me since I do not have unlimited 4G/5G data, WiFi on my commute and on planes is slow, and some spots have no cell or WiFi signal at all.

In my experiment, I tried to replace Comcast Xfinity cable TV with Sling TV, Hulu, and CBS All Access.  My experiment did not go as smoothly as I had hoped, but I will show you what I learned from these 3 streaming services and apps (and their shortcomings, from my perspective).

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Say Hi to Me at the Chicago Seminars Travel Conference (October 18-20)

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Good afternoon everyone.  We are a few days away from the Chicago Seminars travel conference!  It is held every October near Chicago O’Hare at the Holiday Inn Elk Grove.  Tickets are $125 and still available.  Tickets include access to the conference (runs Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon), lunch Saturday & Sunday, coffee/snack breaks, and a complimentary drink at Saturday’s Happy Hour.  Here is the current schedule and speaker topics.  I won’t be presenting at the conference, but some of my favorite bloggers will be (Frequent Miler, Rapid Travel Chai, One Mile at a Time, Bald Thoughts, etc).  If you see me there, come say hi :)

Hopefully I will see a few Travel with Grant readers at the conference.  Safe travels to Chicago!

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How I Did Reselling the WW Presents Oprah’s 2020 Vision Live on Tour Tickets

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Good morning everyone.  I am taking a page out of Miles Per Day’s book and sharing my success with ticket reselling.  Long story short, I purchased 2 tickets to the WW Presents Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus Live on Tour from Ticketmaster during an American Express presale.  Due to a scheduling conflict, I couldn’t use the tickets, so I decided to sell them back on Ticketmaster.  By sheer dumb luck, I ended up making $476.58 after the tickets sold.  Here’s what happened…

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Image source: https://www.livenationentertainment.com/2019/09/oprah-winfrey-and-ww-announce-oprahs-2020-vision-your-life-in-focus-tour/

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Earn $5 When You Sign Up for Acorns

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If you’ve just started paying more attention to your financial health and wellness, you may have heard about some easy ways to start micro-investing. However, it can be difficult to begin when you’ve never had an investment profile before, especially if you don’t have enough capital for a solid play-portfolio.

There are quite a few personal finance apps out there to help consumers get started on day trading and micro-investing, but it’s up to you to figure out which ones are relevant to you. If you are just beginning but want to learn more about micro-investing, I definitely recommend signing up for Acorns.

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My Wife’s Difficult Credit Card Approval Process After Marriage / Name Change

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Good morning everyone, I hope you had a great weekend.  A few weeks ago, my wife Laura decided to apply for the Bank of America Alaska Airlines Credit Card.  Her credit report is great and she is a very responsible credit card user, so I figured it would be an easy instant approval for her.  Unfortunately, it took several weeks and a few phone calls to get approved for this credit card.  The reason?  After we got married at the end of July, she was in the middle of changing her name on her passport, driver license, social security card, bank accounts, credit cards, etc.  She also recently got promoted to a new position, so she had a higher salary than before.  I believe both reasons resulted in Bank of America requiring additional documentation because her new name and new salary were not showing up on her credit report (yet).  In this post, I will share with you the process she went through to ultimately be approved for the Bank of America Alaska Airlines Credit Card.

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