Oh, decisions, decisions… Which direction do I go this week? Another attempt at insulting a major demographic? Dive into Part II of my major interaction with neuroplasticity and the American Healthcare System? Or maybe, just to stretch a bit, maybe a deep dive into minor punctuation. Ooh… The apostrophe! Yeah, that’s it.

“It should be easy to see,” wisdom learned from Frank Zappa’s classic 1974 song Stink Foot that “The crux of the biscuit, is the apostrophe”. In fact, this little adumbration of linguistic variation does some heavy lifting for many grammatical needs. It can indicate possession, a la the tiger’s tail’s spot’s fur’s color; to stretch credulity. It can be a second level nested quote. Frank said, “Bill said, ‘Tracy said to just use your Visa’.” Far and away, it’s most common use, across languages and continents, is to indicate that something is missing. 

Like we wish you would?

“Do not” becomes “don’t”, “will not” turns, rather unexpectedly, to “won’t”. Ad nauseum.

For our purposes today what’s missing is “gible”.

Then why isn’t the blog title “Wasn’t that diri’?

You make a solid point. But today we’re not going to talk about ill-fated airships or wax historic over advertising blimps. We’re going to talk about one of my favorite subjects: Free money from banks.

YOU TRICKED US!

You betcha.

You bastard.

So, the “fun'” in the title is short for fungible. Fungibility, while looking quite like it should have something to do with mushrooms, is a hallmark feature of end stage capitalism. And it comes about because now, as Adam Smith’s invisible hand is barely floating, decks awash, everything is valued in money. Everything.

It may make sense to revisit concept of fungibility. Let’s say you and I meet on the street, and I ask to borrow a quarter. You give me quarter and I throw it in a bucket with a lot of other quarters. You say, “Hey, I thought you needed that for gas!”, reach in, pluck out a quarter, and storm off. You probably didn’t get the same quarter back that you gave me, and you don’t care. Because, as money, all quarters are exactly the same. Exactly. As is all money.

Thanks for that, Captain Obvious. How does that make everything fungible?

Since money is fungible, and everything is valued in money, then everything is fungible.

One of the things I’ve always been interested in obsessed about is how to get from the pittance that flows into my bank account each month courtesy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to my goal to roll like a rock star. To understand this we must drift into my way-back-backstory. 

There was a time in my life when Things Were Hard, I had a Debt-to-Income ratio that made Greece look like a neophyte. Everywhere I turned – banks, finance companies, Louie the Greek down on the corner – would say the same thing: “Declare bankruptcy. There’s no other way.” Despondent, I went home, got the mail out of the mailbox, and went in to try to figure out how to declare bankruptcy. Procrastinating myself away from the path to financial purgatory, I looked at my mail. Everything was a promotion for a new credit card. The envelopes all screamed, “YOU’VE BEEN PRE-APPROVED”, “ZERO INTEREST ON BALANCE TRANSFERS”. Then the bulb turned on. Despite there being no way that these banks would give me the time of day, let alone a line of credit, they all claimed that they would.

We’ve all heard the old saw “time is money”. That is, in fact, the basis for the entire global financial system. You borrow some money, pay some interest, and eventually pay off the loan. 

At some point, some bright person in a meeting said something like: 

Let’s give out loans, with zero interest rate for six months and after that, we’ll charge them 30% interest.

Someone pointed out the problems with usury laws and the stupidity of a zero interest rate, so that first individual got fired. 

The second person to suggest this was a bit smarter and said the exact thing the first person suggested but added: “using a credit card”.

Banks, being mostly federally regulated, are hamstrung by all sorts of annoying rules and regulations that prevent them from scraping even more money out of your drawers. Credit card companies, being mostly state regulated, are under no such strictures. They can run their business like it’s still the Wild West which is how South Dakota became the center of the credit card industry.

Of course, somebody in that second meeting pointed out the zero interest and risk bits but our savvy financier was ready. They’re people, they said. They’ll forget. And we get 30%. Thus began the Bay-of-Fundy-scale surge of offers in my mailbox.

I gave it a try. Pre-approved, check. Zero interest, check. Balance transfers, check. Only minimum payment for six (or nine or twelve) months, check. I applied for a couple, got approved, transferred the balances, and my payment amounts, now easily made, dropped like a stone. Then the correct number of months later, I did it all over again. And again. And again. I think it took four or five such cycles and I was completely out of debt and paid exactly zero interest to get there. 

The second pitch-person was wrong, not everybody forgets. And I learned the system.

Fast forward. Times change, rules change, and the feds have gotten involved. It seems that more people forgot than didn’t. The simple pre-approved, zero-interest scam collapsed under the weight of a private debt crisis. The number of people who forgot and ended up paying ten grand for their Osterizer turned out to be a significant enough voting block that certain people decided that the banks would have to do something a bit less dodgy.

But not not-dodgy.

Which returns us to today’s topic: fungibility.

The core question is: If everything is fungible, does it matter whether you get something for free by spending a bit of time when you were willing to pay for it anyway, or get the money to pay for it without dipping into your own piggy bank? The answer is no, of course not. 

Especially if what you wanted was travel.

When you sign up for a travel reward credit card, you’ll get a bonus for signing up and then get a dollop of miles (or points) when you buy something. The dribble of miles you get for buying something can take decades to become meaningful. But, if you remember that the big prize comes when you first sign up, you can win the game. 

When you look at the Time-Money-SkyMiles intersection of fungibility you immediately see the possibilities. By optimizing my time, I can minimize the money needed to travel by acquiring points. But, because the game is set up to roll in the bank’s favor, I don’t play in the spirit of the rules, just to the letter. I do this by switching cards as frequently as possible. I get cards, use them just enough to meet the minimum purchase requirement, and then keep them for a year (or you’ll be considered to be gaming the system, which you so totally are but fuck them, they’re banks) and cancel the card. Over and over again.

So, what’s this “optimizing my time” nonsense?

Two hours. Max. Less if you’re scamming banks.

You can scam banks?

You betcha. And this is not free-toaster level cash.

Pick a bank at random and visit their website. Just looking now, Bank of America, Chase, Key Bank, and Wells Fargo will all give you money to open a checking account. Chase will even make it better if you also open a savings account to go with it. The amounts I’m seeing are $300 for a checking account and $900(!!!) at Chase if you open both. I did the $900 deal at Chase back in January. I now have $900 and no Chase bank accounts.

Typically, for savings, you open an account and agree to park some money in the account for a period of time, usually six months. When you do that you wait a few weeks and, presto! the bonus money shows up in your account. Checking requires that you switch a direct deposit into your new account, six months is, again, typical. They pay out when they see the first deposit hit. You wait for the six months to pass, empty the account, and close it. You’ll score over a hundred bucks an hour for your time. Bonus, indeed.

When I do this, I use the money to buy travel – either through points or cash. Points and miles can be used for other things as well – hotels, car rentals, stuff like that. All it takes is a commitment to spend a bit of time, and pay attention. There are deadlines to watch and requirements to meet. If you’re willing to do that you get to leverage the fungibility of Time, Money, and Stuff and come out way ahead.

And doesn’t that sound like fun’ ?