Credit Card Musings (er, Woes)

If there is anything that I have learned during all my years of existence, it is that you do not get answers if you do not ask any questions.
So I ask my questions, no matter how silly or how dumb it sounds. Doubt is also an element that I constantly entertain in my mind, so I confirm and re-confirm until the thing has no choice but to sound true.

So on the day that I got my credit card statement and alarm bells were sounding in my head, I picked up the phone and called Citibank direct.

…To read the full article, please click on the title…

On Paypal, Internet Scams and Phishing

I need only to look at my spam folder and my 139 spam emails to realize that these scams are not few and far between, and that the scammers have been getting bolder and that a lot of thought and resources are being put into this. My financial planner emailed one scammer, saying, “it is more fulfilling to do good and honest work rather than scam people out of their money”. To his surprise, the spammer had the temerity to respond: “What if you finally get this fund, what should I do to you? Do you want your payment or not?”

iPhone: Guilty Pleasure

I will confess to one guilty pleasure.
But first, the background.
I have been using a Treo 650 cellphone for as long as I can remember – okay, I used it for 4 long years.  Our story started when I saw it in the hands of my brother and fell in love with it.  I just knew [...]

Citibank Free Movie Tickets: A Lesson In Reading the Fine Print

Let’s begin at the beginning. When I saw this ad one fine day, which took up more than half the size of a newspaper, and no fine print, my savings!savings! antennae went up and I began, consciously, to put more heart (and thought) into my purchases. I had a target, and that is to use my Citibank card for purchases Php1,500 and above. There were times when I would try to sweet talk the salesladies into cutting up my purchases (I remembered seeing in the ad, “a minimum of Php1,500 single receipt”, so I thought there had to be something there) so I would get different transaction receipts for every Php1,500.

Please click on the title to read on.

Crocs: It’s True

9:50 p.m. We were going up the escalator of a popular mall when C suddenly felt her Crocs being pulled by the escalator grills. She tried to pull it but it would not budge. Looking up, she saw that she was nearing the top, the end of the escalator. She had the sense to pull out her feet and hop to safety. Horrified, she saw her Crocs go deeper into the grills, which kept going and going and going.