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Home > A new credit card bonus to work on....

A new credit card bonus to work on....

March 28th, 2015 at 11:26 pm

I got my new US Bank Flex Perks Travel Rewards Visa Signature card in the mail today. Gosh, what a mouthful.

You have to spend $3,500 in the 1st 4 months of getting the card to get $200 back in gift cards (or travel).

That's $875 a month, which is a lot, but if I make sure to charge everything to this one card through July, I think I'll do it.

I already spent $90 at Trader Joe's, $17 on gas and $35 on cat food at Walmart.

It was snowing all day today (crazy!) but not sticking to the roads. Tomorrow it will be back in the 40s so it should mostly melt.

My mason estimates thus far are as follows:
1st mason: $12,767, later reduced by $1,000 by cutting some materials.

2nd mason: haven't gotten the written estimate yet, but looks like no more than $8,000-something for an admittedly different configuration of the front stair/wall redo.

3rd mason: coming tomorrow

I wrote an unfavorable Amazon review about Goddess Garden Organics Sunny Body sunscreen, mainly because it's thick and pasty and is difficult to rub on and makes you look like a ghost. Someone from the company asked me to call them in a reply post, which I did, and they offered to send me some samples of other sunscreens in their product line and then if I called them back after trying them they would send me a full size replacement for the sunscreen I have. So I thought that was pretty cool, not to mention media-savvy.

I also thought I would get some estimates for weekly lawn mowings here. I just am NOT looking forward to the lawn-mowing season. It's more and more exhausting as I get older, and it takes up way too much of my time on the weekends. I had someone come over and while he guessed maybe $40 or $45, which I thought was a good price, considering all the obstacles in my yard and its size, he said he'd need to come back when the snow was gone cus he wants to see the terrain and make sure his 60" wide blades will be able to get around my yard. Mowings from May thru October at $40 a pop would total $960, not a small sum of money but something I think I'm ready to spring on. The price includes trimming and blowing.

I will call some other guys too, when the snow melts.

I see that Birdman is finally playing at our local $2 movie theater and I really want to try to see it before its show there ends next week.

Also can't wait for the annual cacti and succulent show at a local college in early April. I plan to spend a little money there and sit in on some lectures. It's a nice way to get in the spring mood.

I've mostly decided to pull up the fencing around my vegetable garden and put down grass seed where my veggie garden has been for the past 5 years or so. It was a good run, and I got some great tomatoes and many other things from it, but that garden also represented a lot of manual labor I'm just not in the mood for. Especially in the heat of summer when it was too hot to weed, it got overgrown and nearly impenetrable. And it slowed down my mowing. I will still try to grow dwarf tomatoes, herbs and maybe a few other things in pots in my driveway, which bakes in summer, but they will be easier to stay on top of there.

Of course, if someone else is mowing, I will have more time to do the garden, but I'm still not sure I want to do it anyway.

2 Responses to “A new credit card bonus to work on....”

  1. rob62521 Says:
    1427585247

    Yucko on the snow! It was sunny here and I think the appropriate word would be "crisp." We are about 20 degrees below where we should be. Brrr! Good luck on getting the rewards on the card.

  2. snafu Says:
    1427618106

    With expensive masonry work you'll easily be getting rewards on the new VISA. If you plan to pay cash, will you ask for a discount based on the 3% VISA charges participants? Alternatively, I wonder if mower service would give a discount for paying in lump sum on VISA. The downside is if you're unhappy with the quality of their service, you can't easily fire them. [Who actually does the work?]

    If you like the idea of having a small garden, would you consider hiring a high school student to do maintenance at 'X dollars' per hour, 4 hours per week for example. Only a suggestion as teens find it hard to earn sums for desired items. Our DSs and friends operated a small 'Landscaping' business for experience as entrepreneurs and learning trials and tribulations of running their own business. It's a wonderful experience for teens in the 'real' world; mostly a good experience for their clients.

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