Restaurant.com Update: $25 Certificate For Just $1

Hey people, I know it's a long long time but I am here with a great news. I wrote a post about how you can save money and enjoy your favorite eat-out times at the same time by purchasing gift certificates from Restaurant.com.

If you have not noticed already, today is September 9, 2009 or 9/9/09 ;) so the good people at Restaurant.com might have thought of this magical number and spread out a great coupon code - NINETY. So now you can get a $25 gift certificate for just $1 after applying this code. Almost all coupons are valid for one year from date of purchase so this is a great opportunity to stock up some for yourself ;) I am nost sure when this deal will be taken off so hurry-up and get going ... NINETY @ Restaurant.com

Update: I just confirmed, this offer will run through Sunday, September 13, 2009.

A Phone Call And HSBC Waived My Late Fee

I could not imagine a late credit card payment, but nothing is impossible as they say. And when I was enjoying in Albany, NY with friends I forgot my due date was also passing-by, the next day I check my HSBC credit card account and I see a $20 late penalty. Believe me I am not that irresponsible, get this: my statement balance was $3 and I was just 1 day late. Well yeah I know thier policy is policy so they had to charge me but somewhere inside I wasn't comfortable with this whopping $20 fee for a mere $3 just a day past due and this was my first default in last three years.

I discussed this with a friend and came to know that I can get this fee waived if I call HSBC customer care and request them to consider my situation. Thus I did so, I called the HSBC customer center same day:

I said: "Hey as you can see from my account details, I am charged $20 for being a day late for payment on my card. I have been with HSBC for last three years and never missed a single payment, is there a chance to revert the late fee?"

While I anticipated a little negotiation, this is what I heard next:

The Customer Rep. replied: "We thank you for being a wonderful customer for three years. I have initiated the credit and you will see the $20 off of your account in the next few days."

Oooo man that was simple, wasn't it? Just a phone call and I saved $20 ;)

Grocery Shopping: Thinking Of Total Bill The Moment You Enter A Store Helps

With nothing much left to do on weekends, grocery shopping is one of my favorite activities. While I suffice the shopper in me, I also fill-up the items for the week to come and thus many of my posts deal with grocery shopping. In Quicken Reveals - II I discussed how I escalated my grocery bills by misjudging the actual needs and this time it's something different.

I usually shop with my friends and the fun part comes when we eventually go to checkout counters. Every time my question will be: "So who wins today?" I compare the total billed amount for all of us and declare the winner ;) While this sounds funny at first, this became a motivation for us after their few competitive shopping experiences with me. When you focus on your total bill from the moment you enter the grocery store, it changes the way you shop for each and every item on your list resulting in a lowered total.

I realized the importance of this seemingly funny activity of mine when I went alone to Walmart a few weeks ago to get a small list of items, four to be exact. When I go for the weekend shopping my list would be somewhere from 10-12 items and believe me for a single person that's more than enough for a week. So this time it was petty four count and I lowered my guard because I thought my friends are not with me and anyways I am getting only four items. Guess how much I paid? $12. I came home, thought about it and felt ashamed of myself for being so carelss.

Now when I said focusing on the final total bill changes the way you shop for every item, I meant that in a practical way. I would not go to get an item on my list and pick the cheapest one available on the shelve; every individual has different tastes and preferences for every other item and thus it is your prudent call which item should be picked the cheapest and which ones you would not compromise. For example, though I could get cheaper ones but I will always buy my favorite strawberry shortcake; however I had to buy a floor cleaning agent yesterday and I bought the cheapest as any one is good as far as it has detergent base.

Do you adopt any such fun yet beneficial activity when you go shopping? Do leave a comment and share your views.

My Monetary Snapshot - July '09

Here's what it looks like at the end of this month:

Emergency Funds (High Interest Savings): $7663
Checking Accounts (Non-Interest Earning): $254
401K: $707.72
CD: $2000
Interest + Other Earnings: $73.59
(amazed how come it's $73.59 ;) all added up by paid surveys and free money)

Car Loan Balance: $11,838
Credit Card Balance: $206

July 2009: Total Assets: $10,624 Total Debt: $12,044

You Gotta Try Restaurant.com !!!

For two weeks under the work load that wasn't all I was left to do. One of my colleagues had guests and it spurred another eat-out plan. It wasn't the first time I used Restaurant.com nor I do any kind of advertising for them but the continued feeling of pleasure, fun, taste and savings altogether prompted me to pen this article.

To start with, I like their tag line: "EAT. DRINK. SAVE MONEY."

• What You Need To Do?

It's easy and quick! Visit Restaurant.com and look out at the top right corner.

Step 1 is to Find a Restaurant. You can search a restaurant in your area by zipcode, state or city name. You can also select the diameter within which you would like to travel. Once you have the list of all participating restaurants, look for your favorite one. One of the features I like about the listings is the small banner at the bottom of each restaurant pic reading what kind of cuisine you can dine there.

Step 2 involves Purchasing A Gift Certificate value. Simply select the gift certificate value you want to go with, I almost always go for $25 certificate as it seems to be sufficient for 3-4 people. Buy a gift certificate of your chosen denomination.

Step 3 is to Print The Certificate, take it to the restaurant and enjoy your food ;)

• So How Do You Save?

Every participating restaurant will feature different denomination. So take $25 certificate for instance. Restaurant.com itself discounts the initial price to $10, and the rest of the price cut comes from various discount codes.

Restaurant.com would run weekly discount schemes typically every week (NAPKIN will work through Tuesday, try it). These discount codes could be obtained from several discount code/coupon websites and usually result in 60-80% reduction on the $10 price. I am planning to post the playing discount code every week on Let's Be Curious!!!

• Crunching The Numbers

Having said that I usually go with the $25 certificate, let me share my recent experience. After applying the discount code the price was $4. The total on the check after dinner was $48. So after applying the gift certificate at restaurant, total bill came to $48-$25 = $23. Adding the cost of certificate itself makes it $27. If you go with friends, splitting $23 left me to pay $7 ... what do you say, isn't it worth it ;)

• How Does It Work?

Well I honestly don't know the complete inside story but mainly the participating restaurants gain publicity and advertising through Restaurant.com. Additionally there is a chance that a customer who is just trying out today would come back more often later.


However it works, it definitely works with me :)

• What To Keep In Mind?

Finally the part asking some attention guys, always read the regulation on your certificates before taking them to lunch/dinner. Here are the pointers which I could gather:

a) Mostly you may use Restaurant.com's gift certificate in a participating restaurant only once a month
b) Sometimes you will need to present the certificate while placing the order
c) There is always a threshold total party order value. The certificates are valid only on order reaching these thresholds. For eg. I had to spend $35 or more to use my certificate, not a tough job is it? ;)

Let me know if you know something that I missed out. If you haven't already, try these gift certificates, they are excellent value for a few bucks. Please leave comments and experiences below.

A Long Lull And I'm Back ;)

Yeah I know, it was July 8th then and it is July 22nd today, but guess what I'm Back :)

As many of you might know I work full-time and if you follow me on twitter then you might be aware that for the past two weeks or so I was heavily loaded with office work. Sometimes it doesn't make complete sense to overkill the 'quest to perfection' syndrome, and that is what happened to me.

While I started to struggle with more important my supervisor calmly said to me
"I had always wondered and still find it difficult to decide when is it good enough".

It was all that took me to realize that I better channel my efforts in the areas of more demand. Doesn't this also sound like a personal finance aspect demanding some prudent thinking?

Facebook + Starbucks + Friend => A Free Icecream Pint

Free stuff never ceases to pop :)

Here's another people! If you are on Facebook and love ice cream then this deal is for you. Visit Starbuck Icecream's Share app page on Facebook and share coupon for a free ice cream pint with one of your friends. Remember you can share just one coupon so decide it before hand.

This is how it works:

• Starbucks is giving away 20,000 free icecream pint coupons everyday
• you share this with your friend and your friend gets the coupon
  
• you get $1 rebate coupon for sharing
• ask (bug :P) your friend to return the favor
  
• scheme to run through July 19th
• coupons are given starting every hour
• that means over 800 coupons every hour
• they go really fast so act fast at the strike of next hour
• recipients may not reside in CO, LA & TN :(

So act fast at the next hour and bag your free icecream .... I just got my friend get me my free icecream coupon. Thanks for the deal @acheapchick

Let me know when you get your coupon and share if you know of any other cool scheme.

... And So Copying Isn't Worth It!

Well I don't usually post funny/non-PF stuff but it's second today itself .... and actually I don't need to write a word, just to let you know that I'm a big Alizee fan and Tabata Jalil is considered Mexican Alizee ;)

Alizee's Performance



Tabata's Performance, same song

(Tabata Jalil is a known name in South America and has a good earned position in media through various TV shows)

I'm Sorry Blogger - But What To Do

I have been dealing with Blogger's painful editing and formatting support for more than three months now, it's only my love for my existing 40+ posts at blogger keeps me from migrating to Wordpress :(

While Google remains in the front row for developing cool and innovative products all the time ... we all are error prone ... aren't we?

I included a video for the first time in my post on Independence Day. While I needed to accept the terms and conditions for uploading a video, Blogger wouldn't show me the conditions :) See the screenshots below:

How Banks Calculate Average Daily Available Balance

With interest rates going a sharp downward path, High Yielding Online Savings Accounts and Rewards Checking Accounts are getting very much attention these days. Both these accounts (and several other bank products) pay us interest based on the Average Daily Available Balance (ADAB) on our accounts.

I had been playing with my online savings statements to find out how financial institutions calculate this number and finally I could figure it out yesterday.

Every bank pays you interest at the end of a term. For normal savings accounts this term is typically 1 month, making them to pay interest at the end of every 30 or 31 days period. It is common sense that the more money we have in our accounts the more interest we will get but this is not it.

Banks don't consider our account balance on the last working day of a month for calculating interest, rather what matters to them is how much money was available to them throughout a month. Banks use the term Average Daily Available Balance (ADAB) to mean this, as is clear from the term itself, this number reflects how much money we made available to the bank to be used for their business purposes.

• Formula To Calculate Interest
  

Amount = Principal (1+r)ⁿ

where, Amount is the sum (with interest) you get after n years at r% per year. For eg. if you had $100 in your account for 1 year at 3% per year then

P = $100, r = 3/100 = 0.03, n = 1

This formula will give you Amount you will have after completion of 1 year. When banks calculate interest they replace Principal (P) with the Average Daily Available Balance (ADAB) so the formula becomes:

Amount = ADAB (1+r)ⁿ

• Calculating Average Daily Available Balance
  

I will work with a simple example here. Consider a bank statement below:

Date	Withdrawl	Deposit	Balance
07/01/09		$100	$100
07/08/09	$50		$50
07/15/09		$50	$100
07/22/09		$100	$200
07/29/09		$100	$300

Assuming there was no transaction after 29^th, it would be unfair to the bank if they had to consider $300 as the Principal for calculating interest. And that is true as $300 were not always present in the account. Let's now calculate Average Daily Available Balance for the above account.

The technique is to calculate contribution of an individual account balance towards the months average balance, sum all such contributed balances and divide the sum by number of days in that month. To do so create a table as below:

Account Balance	Days before next transaction	Contributed Balance
$100	(07/01 to 07/07 =) 7	$700
$50	(07/08 to 07/14 = ) 7	$350
$100	(07/15 to 07/21 = ) 7	$700
$200	(07/22 to 07/28 = ) 7	$1400
$300	(07/29 to 07/31 = ) 3	$900
Total		$4050

July '09, the month under consideration has 31 days. This gives the Average Daily Available Balance (ADAB) equal to:

Average Daily Available Balance = $4050/31 = $130.65

You might be wondering whether this is correct given the account balance at the end was $300. Well it turns out that owing to the transactions made as shown above, the account balance never exceeded $100 for 21 days (07/01/09 through 07/21/09) resulting in a lower average balance.

• Factors Affecting Your Interest
  

As we saw above there are three main factors affecting the interest we may get on our account balances:

1. Average Daily Available Balance
2. Rate of interest per year (out of our control)
3. Time in years
   

Factor #2 and #3 are usually out of our control as we can't actually decide the rate and considering per month calculations the time is going to be 1/12 ~ 0.08 years.

Average balance, however, can be controlled and the only way to do that is to leave maximum you can in your account and leave it there for the longest possible.

• Some Ways To Maximize Your Average Daily Balance

1. Get your paycheck direct-deposited into your savings account, why carry check when it gains you nothing
2. Don't withdraw money until it is really needed
3. Use automatic money transfers between accounts. My car loan's monthly due date is 2^nd of every month. The amount is automatically transferred on the 1^st and till then it keeps gaining interest for me.
4. Set aside some extra money if you think you are a addict of intermittent withdrawls.

What ways you implement to maximize your interest earnings? Leave a comment and share your views with other readers.

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