The manufactured spending game is cyclical. For every triumphant moment there is a let down and vice versa. I’ve been riding high of late from all of the wonderful manufactured spending opportunities that opened up all at once. PayPal, green dot,ISIS Serve, loyal3. A couple months ago it was all a Walmart-less embarrassment of riches. But […]
Archive | Isis Serve RSS for this section
Bad Companies
I was lucky enough to do my internal medicine internship and residency at the University of Chicago on the southside of Chicago. This was a fantastic training program for a number of reasons. It was a high-powered academic center with ample research power. The residency program directors were humane and resident focused. Education was stressed […]
Paradise Lost?
The miles game is not meant to be easy. It’s not a drive-through at a fast food joint where you handover a few crinkled bucks, and get back a neatly packaged, hermetically sealed, burger in a box. It’s more like foraging for morels in a burnt out urban forest. Some days it’s easy and you […]
Flowing Information
This post is really a reflection of the evolving nature of the Miles Game. This flowchart to has become woefully obsolete. (What with the death of Vanilla Reloads and the inability to load Vanilla Visa products onto your Serve/Bluebird accounts at Walmart.) So below you will find a more current flowchart. (Though I sadly recognize […]
Current Anatomy
The miles game continues to steam along month after month. There’ve been no dramatic changes to my approach of late but there’ve been some subtle changes that are worth reporting on. My current approach involves: $1000 “spent” in Amazon payments a month between me and my wife’s account. One Isis serve card for both me […]
Manufactured Crisis
There are many interesting questions in personal-finance. And one of them is; how much cash does one need for an emergency fund? There are many schools of thought on this one. Conventional wisdom seems to be that you should have six months living expenses set aside in an FDIC bank account. Others argue that you […]
Better than Sliced Bread
Damn this is fun. Travel hacking in general, and manufactured spending specifically really hit a bunch of high points with me. There’s the illicit pleasure of doing something that you’re not supposed to do. It reminds me of raiding my parents’ liquor cabinet as a 13-year-old with my friends. Ahhh…. Manufactured spending plus geri curl […]
Recent Comments