Smart Money Blog

While I’m still fine tuning my design skills, I figured I’d make another credit card site, but this time, focusing on cash back, and travel rewards.

I’ve given them all new ratings, and I guarantee you can probably find a card that will put more cash back in your pocket than the current card you’re using for purchases.

You can find the new site at: http://www.creditcardrewardzone.com

The site is new, so if you find any problems, or see something that I need to change, please let me know!

Many times I’ve mentioned the $40k milestone as being a goal for many of us using the balance transfer strategy. After quite a few questions on how you’d achieve that goal, I decided to dust off the math book and show some examples.

The common rule for figuring your allowed credit line, is taking your claimed household income (HHI) and multiplying that by 5. Your household income can include your spouse, children, roommates, or many times, simply an embellishment.

Let’s start by saying you claim a HHI of 170k.

$170,000 X 5 = $850,000 (Your available credit line)

850k x 89% = $756,500 (Cash available to transfer using an 89% utilization to keep your credit score safe)

756.5k x 5.4% = $40,851 (Interest after sticking it in a Countrwide account getting 5.4% interest)

That is a simple way to calculate how you can make $40,000 a year with balance transfers. There are obviously a lot of variables to consider, but I think that will give you a good idea on the steps to take.

Please share your experiences in the forum so we can all expand our BT knowledge!