Credit & Loans

Discover Card currently has two promos going that can get you up to $150. It's pretty easy:

Step 1. Earn $50 just by signing up and starting to use the card:



Step 2. Earn a $20 gift card each time you spend $200 at a Mall.

Discover will let you earn up to 5 gift cards for a total of $100. If you sign up, please help support Young Professional Finance Blog by clicking the link below:

Get $50 Cash Back Bonus with the Discover® More Card!

It's 2008, time to take advantage of free credit reports from AnnualCreditReport.com. You're allowed one copy of your credit report from each of the 3 big agencies once every 12 months. They can all be reviewed at once, or you could space them out through the year.

I've found in the past that there are differences between each of the 3 credit agencies, but after checking them all the first time I have elected to check them one at a time every 4 months.

Remember, it's important to make sure you don't have any bad marks on your credit report if you can avoid them. Also, you might be surprised by how many credit lines you had open and didn't even know about!

If any of you sign-up to become lenders through this article's links and loan money, we will each receive $25. Give it a try!

I just recently signed-up with Prosper, a web site that lets you lend money to or borrow money from other people. This is kinda like Kiva, except it's for profit.

Lending

You win the right to loan borrowers money by offering an amount of money for a specific interest rate. You can choose to loan any amount from $50 to $25,000. Once 100% of the loan has been won, the money will be lent out and the borrower will make payments every month for 3 years.

Borrowing

You can post a borrow request onto Prosper for a particular amount of money. Prosper will require you to provide personal information for a credit check and once bidding is over will give you the loan amount in as soon as 2 days.

More to come. I plan to lend money for now and will keep everyone updated to my progress.

I'm amazed by how many ads I see for cars in the paper and on TV that only mention a monthly payment amount instead of the price of the car. Just because I can afford the monthly payment does it really mean I can afford the thing I'm buying?

Ask yourself: How much will this product cost me if I finance it? How much will it cost me if I don't finance it? Sometimes neither price will seem that good if you think in terms of parting with all that money in one, fell swoop!

I've been going with this idea lately of never financing anything else in my life. What's this mean? It means I definitely need to save my money if I ever want to buy a car, or even a house. Now, the idea of buying even a moderately nice used car for $10-$15K seems like a huge amount of money to me. If I hate the idea of even parting with that much money for that car, how could I even consider the idea of a nice, sporty new car like a BMW or Lexus, or even a Porsche?! Yeah, a nice new car is a lot easier to get when you write a check for only $300 or $400, but think about how much you're paying for it. Not only are you paying interest, but you're losing the interest you could have gained if that extra money you paid was instead saved.

Visit OptOutPrescreen.com and the Direct Marketing Association's Consumer Assistance website to stop all those credit card offers, insurance offers and other junk mail from being sent to you...

OptOutPrescreen.com is the official website to accept and process removal requests from the bulk mailing lists of the Consumer Credit Reporting Industry. I signed-up through this service last year and had forgotten about it until my received mail volume dropped dramatically. I hadn't realized just how much of my mail was junk and enjoy spending less of my time at the end of the work day going through useless mail. Read on for how to remove yourself from this and other service lists!

How To Stop Receiving Junk Credit And Insurance Offers

1. Visit the website - Go to OptOutPrescreen.com


2. Decide for how long - Via the website, you can choose to stop receiving the bulk mailings for 5 years. You can choose to permanently stop receiving mailings, but it requires filling-out a form and mailing it in via snail mail. Make sure you don't accidentally choose their Opt-In option!


3. Provide personal info - Name, Address, Date of birth, and Social Security number are required

Stop Receiving Junk Mail, Calls, And Email
There, that first one was easy. Now, to stop receiving even more junk mail and telephone calls check-out the Direct Marketing Association's Consumer Assistance site. It lists ways to remove your name from mailing lists, telemarketer lists, email lists, and more!

• Stop Junk Mail


• Stop Telemarketing Calls


• Stop Commercial Email

Results
I haven't tried the Direct Marketing Association links yet, but I'll be interested to see how well they work and I'm interested in if anyone out there has had success with them in the past.