Manufacturing transactions is harder than you think

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There are countless methods of manufacturing credit card spend, but the basic principles are simple: generate a credit card purchase (usually at some cost), liquidate the purchase back to cash (usually at some cost), and use the cash (plus any costs paid) to pay off the credit card balance. If you generate more in credit card rewards than you pay in costs, the technique is profitable.

In some cases these techniques are still profitable to the banks and merchants, and in others they’re unprofitable but travel hackers are too small a share of customers to be worth completely rooting out, so only half-hearted and incomplete efforts are made to remove the very hardest hitters.

A central feature of credit card manufactured spend is that it relies on spending as much as possible: more spend equals more profit. Debit card manufactured spend is often just the opposite: the goal is to generate transactions, not spend, and this creates surprising difficulties.

Why manufacture transactions?

There are a few main reasons you might want to manufacture debit card transactions. Some accounts charge fees for inactivity, and a $0.01 debit card transaction is enough to avoid the fee.

Other accounts, like the Consumers Credit Union Rewards Checking account that I use as my petty cash account, require a certain number of debit transactions to trigger their higher interest rates. Note that there are other, higher-interest-rate options available; I find DepositAccounts.com quite reliable for tracking them.

A product that, as far as I know, never took off in the travel hacking or personal finance community is the round-up savings account. These accounts have high interest rates but can only be funded by “rounding up” your change on debit card purchases. To achieve a meaningful balance in the account, it’s necessary to make an arbitrary number of debit card transactions with a cent value as close to 1 as possible, resulting in a 99-cent deposit.

Why is manufacturing transactions so hard?

I found it a bit counter-intuitive at first that manufacturing transactions profitably is as complicated in its own way as manufacturing spend. In both cases, the issues come from the fact that we’re using tools we don’t control for purposes they aren’t designed for. Here are some of the main problems I’ve encountered.

  • Per-transaction costs. While many financial services have lower fees for using debit cards than credit cards, that’s primarily by charging flat fees rather than lower percentage fees, and flat fees make manufacturing transactions more expensive.

  • Transaction minimums. A lot of options require transactions of at least $1. This is an obstacle to scaling, since even if you’re recuperating 100% of your transaction value, the larger each transaction must be, the more money you need to have tied up in the system at any one time.

  • Processing rules. If a service processes your transaction as "PINless debit,” instead of as a credit card, then it may not count towards monthly transaction requirements. For round-up transactions, there may be rules about how far apart transactions have to be spaced.

  • Closed loops. A lot of obvious options do work, but the money goes into a closed ecosystem where it has to be spent. Your Amazon gift balance can only be spent at Amazon, payments to your electric company have to be spent on electricity, etc.

  • Automation. Arbitrage opportunities are so persistent not because they’re particularly complicated. Most of them could be learned by a person of average intelligence over the course of a light lunch. The reason they last so long is that most people already have a job and don’t want another one. Automation is a solution, but researching ways to safely automate large numbers of financial transactions is yet another job.

These constraints can interact with each other as well. Your cable provider might allow you to automate payments with a minimum of $1, which looks like a tidy solution until you realize that your cable bill can only be spend on cable, which puts a soft ceiling on the number of transactions you can generate with that method each month.

Here’s a roundup of the options I’ve looked into and some thoughts on each.

Plastiq (grandfathered)

I’ve used the Plastiq bill payment service on and off for years now. It’s changed so much that instead of using it overwhelmingly to manufacture spend, I now use it primarily to manufacture transactions. Under their old pricing model, using debit cards had a low fixed fee, so I scheduled twelve $1 payments per month until sometime in mid-2026. If I fall into a coma, at least my money will still be earning 3% APY.

As far as I can tell it’s no longer possible to get access to the old pricing, but this highlights the kinds of feature you want to look for as these services continue to pop up: low per-transaction price (I pay $0.01 per transaction, so $0.12 per month), easy liquidation (the $1 “payment” gets deposited into another account a week or so later), and long-term automation.

Peer-to-peer payments

I’ve had great success manufacturing round-up savings transactions with Venmo. They have a $0.01 minimum transaction and no fees for debit cards. The $0.01 has to go somewhere, and I’m not comfortable running multiple accounts and risking losing access to the tool entirely, so I send it to another person. This does generate a lot of annoying e-mails, so you probably want to set up some filters so those e-mails don’t drove you or your teammate crazy.

Cash App works as well, but has a $1 minimum transaction, which makes it a cumbersome way to generate round-up transactions. It works well for manually generating monthly transactions, so I do use it to meet the 15-monthly-transactions requirement on my Andrews FCU Kasasa Cash Checking account to earn 6% APY on up to $25,000.

Neither option has built-in automation. There used to be a way to interact with the Cash App ecosystem by text message, which would be a convenient way to automate transactions, but I couldn’t easily find any current documentation of that feature so my guess is they retired it at some point.

Store credit

I reload my Amazon gift card balance $1 at a time to meet some of my monthly transaction requirements, and I was pleased to discover that my $7 monthly Prime membership is charged first against my gift card balance, so I don’t need to worry about storing up too much unused Amazon credit.

I say store credit instead of Amazon credit because a lot of people have several services that have this feature. If you can load your transit pass, Starbucks balance, or cell phone balance $1 or $0.01 at a time then you can meet transaction requirements without the risk of locking up money you’ll never end up spending.

Conclusion

I understand that people feel themselves at a constant shortage of time and attention, even for the things that give them great joy and satisfaction. They are not only uninterested, but often almost offended by the suggestion they’d waste those precious resources on the essentially meaningless task of pushing buttons on their phone for a few minutes a day.

Believe it or not, I don’t find it especially fun or meaningful to push buttons on my phone for a few minutes a day either. But that’s a pretty high bar to hold every minute of your day too. I don’t find it especially fun or meaningful to brush my teeth either, but I’d like to still be chewing with a few originals by the time I’m 80 so I do it anyway.

Whether it’s earning the highest interest rate possible on my liquid cash in high-yield checking accounts, or dumping as much money as possible into my best savings accounts, I just don’t mentally categorize it as something that’s supposed to be fun. You fill out your timesheet in order to get paid, not because it’s going to bring about world peace.

Interest rates are starting to get more interesting

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One of my favorite resources is DepositAccounts, which performs the simple, essential function of aggregating interest rates across a vast array of savings products. As you’d expect, the site is financed by ads and affiliate links, but in my experience the data is extremely accurate, so they’re a great first-stop when you’re exploring what’s the best place to put your money. All of that is just to say, most of the datapoints below come from DepositAccounts, not any original research of my own.

Yes, higher interest rates are passed along to (vigilant!) customers

There’s a stale cliche that when oil prices rise, gasoline prices jump immediately, but when oil prices fall, gasoline stays elevated. Of course there’s no mystery there: when gas prices rise satellite vans park outside gas stations doing live interviews with regular folks complaining about the price of gas, and when gas prices fall the media move on to the next crisis.

Most people are even less conscious of how prevailing interest rates change over time. If you only buy a few houses in your lifetime, your awareness of mortgage interest rates is limited to may four or five snapshots in time. Even someone who replaces a car as often as every 3 or 4 years has much less awareness of auto loan interest rates than they do the price of gas.

Finally, most people don’t shop around for higher interest rates on their savings even as much as they do for lower interest payments on their loans. That’s why whenever I hear people complain that banks don’t pay anything on savings anymore, I ask them, “have you checked?”

Series I Savings Bonds are already interesting

A lot of folks have written about this deal already (myself included), but to summarize, Series I bonds have their interest rate for the next 6 months set twice a year, in May and November, but each reset is known several weeks in advance. For example, we’ll know the November, 2022 interest rate on October 13, 2022, when September’s consumer price index reading is announced.

This creates two opportunities, in April and October, to know the interest rate you’ll earn on new Series I bonds for an entire 12-month period. My favorite tool, although I’m sure there are many others, for tracking these interest rate adjustments is the very primitive Tipswatch. There you can see the rate you’re guaranteed to earn for 6 months on all Series I bonds purchased through October 31, 2022 (9.62% annualized), and the 4 known monthly components of the November rate adjustment, which you’ll earn for the second 6 months of your first year.

I have mixed feelings about long-term holding of Series I bonds, but I have unalloyed positive feelings about using them for medium-term savings in April and October, when you know the interest rate you’ll be paid for the entire initial 1-year holding requirement.

Rewards Checking accounts for high rates, benefits, and liquidity

While I was cruising around DepositAccounts I checked, as usual, what rates they were reporting on Rewards Checking accounts. These are federally-insured, fully liquid checking accounts that, when you perform a series of requirements each month, offer elevated interest rates and usually a few other potentially-valuable benefits, like refunded ATM fees (which can be worth more than the interest during months you’re traveling extensively!).

I was immediately confused because my beloved Consumers Credit Union Rewards Checking account, which has been at the top of the list as long as I’ve been checking it, no longer appeared at all!

Thinking I might have missed an e-mail announcing they were no longer offering those accounts, I hurried over to Consumers’s website and immediately discovered the reason for the omission: the site had been updated with new, even higher interest rates, and the new page must have broken the scrubbing tool DepositAccounts was using.

The highest rate is now 5% APY on balances up to $10,000, which is not quite as high as the 5.09% on up to $20,000 the account could earn when I first opened it, but still higher than any other accounts we’ll be looking at today. The requirement for 12 debit card transactions and $500 in ACH credits or mobile check deposits, plus $500 or $1,000 in Consumers credit card spending for the highest two rates, remains the same.

The next highest rate listed is 4% APY on up to $20,000 at Elements Financial. Besides the usual gimmick of requiring 15 debit card transactions, there’s one huge asterisk: you’ll only earn that rate for 12 months, before it drops in half to 2% APY. If you have $20,000 you want to keep liquid and an easy way to automate your 15 monthly transactions, that may be worth doing for a year (no direct deposit is required), just be sure to set a calendar reminder for 12 months from the day you open your account!

Certificates of Deposit are on the verge of being interesting

Next I scooted over to DepositAccounts’s CD page, which besides scraping rates off countless bank websites, also groups them by term. You can see how obviously helpful this would be when building a CD ladder, since it makes it instantly obvious which CD-issuer you should choose for each rung of your ladder. One thing to note is the system does group CD’s into approximate terms. This is important because many of the highest-earning CD’s are of odd durations, but DepositAccounts engine sensibly lumps a 49-month “special term” CD in with the 4-year CD’s instead of breaking it out separately.

With all that said, let’s look at what’s going on with CD rates by looking at the highest rates offered in each of the DepositAccounts term buckets:

A few obvious things jumped out at me here.

First, in nine term buckets, there are nine unique institutions, so if were purchasing CD’s for multiple terms from a single issuer, you would be virtually certain to be leaving some interest on the table.

Second, these interest rates are almost high enough to begin looking competitive with rewards checking accounts. Earning 5% APY on $10,000 in liquid cash is great, but if you have somewhat more money you’re unwilling to risk losing, and are willing to give up just a little liquidity, earning 4% APY on 6-month and 9-month CD’s from Sun East is at least worth thinking about long enough to decide if it’s the right move for you.

Third, this combination of terms and rates has a peculiar feature: the longest-term rates are lower than the shortest-term rates, while the medium-term rates hover in a tight range. I say it’s peculiar because commonsense would say that long-term deposits are more valuable to a bank than short-term deposits, so banks should be willing to pay more interest to lock in those funds for longer. Instead, over the longer term we see rates collapse.

The reason is simple: when banks guarantee interest payments on a deposit, they’re not just betting that they’ll be able to make a profit while paying that interest rate today, but that they’ll be able to make a profit paying that rate across the entire term of the deposit, in other words, on the future course of interest rates.

Since the cost of your money is fixed (the interest they pay you), the profitability of the deposit depends on how much it earns them (the interest their borrowers pay them). If interest rates go up, the cost of the deposit remains the same, but interest revenue and profits increase. If rates fall, then your deposit earns the bank less money, but costs them the same to hold.

Limiting the premium they’re willing to pay long-term depositors is a way of hedging that bet on interest rates. If banks expected rising interest rates over the medium and long-term, they’d reduce their hedge and be willing to pay more to lock in long-term deposits at today’s (compared to the future) cheap rates. The more worried banks are about falling interest rates, the shorter a period they’re willing to commit to paying today expensive rates for.

Treasuries may already be interesting in high-tax states

I was glancing over the Vanguard Fixed-Income page and was genuinely a bit surprised at how much rates had risen recently:

Over the short-term these rates are already close enough to compare favorably to CD’s, especially if you prefer to keep all your fixed-income in one place like a brokerage account rather than scattered all over the country.

But even over the longer term, remember that the interest treasuries pay, unlike CD’s, is taxable only at the federal level. In a high-income-tax state, a slightly lower interest rate may leave you with more disposable income after taxes.

Conclusion

To offer some quick takeaways:

  • Both higher and lower interest rates are passed through to customers.

  • Shop around. No one financial institution is going to have the best version of every product.

  • The interest rate structure shows that banks are betting on flat and falling interest rates in the long term. If you think they’re wrong and that rates will rise instead, then keep your money in higher-interest shorter-term accounts to take advantage of those rising rates. If you think they’re right and that rates will in fact fall, then lock in today’s relatively high rates for as long as possible.

How I would (and might) maximize the current Series I Savings Bond deal

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There’s an interesting deal available right now for folks who have extra cash lying around they are sure they won’t need for a least one year, and ideally won’t need for five.

Fixed-rate inflation-adjusted Series I Savings Bonds

When I first learned about this deal at Doctor of Credit I admit I scoffed. The high interest rate he described is on an annualized basis, but you’re only guaranteed the reported rate for 6 months, meaning you don’t even get a full year at that rate; it could drop to 0% for the second half of the year before you’re eligible to redeem your bonds, meaning you froze up to $10,000 in cash in a security earning nothing for 6 months of the year!

But, the more I thought about the deal, the more I came to appreciate the potential possibilities. So let’s take a closer look.

Series I Savings Bonds have 4 curious features:

  • When issued, they have a fixed rate of interest that is known at the time of issuance and lasts for 30 years or until the bond is redeemed;

  • added to that fixed rate is a variable, inflation-adjusted rate of interest that is calculated in November and May of each year and applied to outstanding bonds every 6 months (so a bond purchased in January has November’s rate until July — this will become relevant shortly);

  • bonds earn interest starting from the first day of the month they’re purchased, so bonds purchased November 30 will earn interest from November 1;

  • with limited exceptions, they must be held for 1 year, and redemptions are penalty-free after 5 years (you sacrifice 3 months of interest if redeemed between 1 and 5 years after purchase. I’m genuinely unsure whether the 1-year holding requirement is to the calendar date or to the calendar month of purchase — if you know, leave a comment!)

Finally, you’re limited to $10,000 in purchases through Treasury Direct per calendar year. You can purchase an additional $5,000 in I bonds through your tax refund, although which fixed and inflation-adjusted rate you get will depend on when Treasury transmits the order to the “Treasury Retail Securities Site in Minneapolis,” so you may not be able to get November’s rates if you file for an extension or your refund is delayed for any reason.

Why do I keep talking about November’s rates?

The fixed rate on Series I Savings Bonds, the minimum rate you’re guaranteed to earn for 30 years, is 0% APY, and has been for most of the last decade. But due to the method Treasury uses to calculate the inflation component of the interest rate, bonds purchased from November 1, 2021 through April 30, 2022, will earn a guaranteed interest rate of 7.12% APY.

Now be careful to understand what’s happening here: APY is calculated on an annualized (that’s the “A”) basis, but you’re only guaranteed to earn that rate for the first 6 months you own the bond. After 6 months, the inflation-adjustment will change to May’s rate, and 6 months after that (when the bond is eligible for redemption with a 3-month interest penalty) it will change to the November, 2022, rate.

Series I Savings Bonds are a highly optioned contingent bet on future inflation rates

One way of assessing a bond investment is to look at its “yield-to-worst,” which refers to the yield you would receive if, for example, a corporation or utility exercised a call option at its face value on a bond to refinance its debt at a lower interest rate before the end of the bond’s term. For a fixed-rate, zero-risk, United States Treasury bond, the yield-to-worst is simply the yield on the bond.

The inflation-adjusted interest rate and possibility of early redemption essentially means Series I bondholders are making a bet on the future of inflation rates, but one in which they have all the power.

You may believe, as I do, that May, 2022’s inflation adjustment will be sharply lower than November, 2021’s. So, what’s the yield-to-worst? Since the inflation adjustment is never less than 0%, and the fixed-rate is 0%, you would earn 0% in interest during the second 6-month holding period. In that case, your yield would be 3.56%. That’s not a shoot-the-lights-out great investment, but it’s a solid return on a completely safe investment. After 12 months, you can pull the money out (sacrificing 3 months of 0% interest) and do something else with it.

But however much you think inflation (technically the CPI-U measure of inflation) will fall between now and May, 2022, it probably won’t fall to 0%. Say it falls to 1.9%, which was fairly common prior to the pandemic — now you’ve earned 4.035% on your investment (after sacrificing the last 3 months of interest), which suddenly starts to look pretty comparable to the rewards checking accounts I regularly write about and use.

Optionality is very valuable

When you take this exercise a bit further, you can see the possibilities are even more lucrative than I’ve suggested, since after one year, you always have three options: “letting it ride,” “trading up,” or “cashing out.”

Every November and May, when the fixed rate and inflation adjustment are announced, you can see what the composite rate will be for the next 6 months:

  • Let it ride: if the inflation adjustment remains higher than your other investment opportunities, you can leave the money to earn for another 6 months until the next adjustment, bringing you 6 months closer to the 5-year penalty-free redemption threshold;

  • Trade up: if fixed interest rates soar and inflation crashes, then you can redeem your current 0% fixed-rate bonds and buy new, higher fixed-rate bonds;

  • Cashing out: if fixed interest rates stay low and the inflation adjustment crashes, you can redeem your bonds and do anything you like with the money.

Obviously this is just another way of saying money is fungible and Series I bonds can be redeemed after one year. What makes this interesting is that this series of options continues every 6 months for 30 years!

What’s the optimal strategy to maximize optionality?

Due to the $10,000 Treasury Direct and $5,000 tax refund purchase limits, I believe the optimal strategy looks something like this:

  • buy $10,000 in bonds by December 31, 2021 through Treasury Direct;

  • in April, 2022, when the March CPI-U data is announced and the May, 2022, inflation adjustment is finalized, you’ll know the total annualized interest rate you’ll earn (6 months at November’s rate, and 6 months at May’s rate), and can decide whether to purchase another $10,000 through Treasury Direct based on that composite annualized rate;

  • finally, by April 15, 2022, decide whether to lock in an additional $5,000 in bonds at the November/May composite rate, or file a tax extension and wait until October, when the November 2022 rate will be finalized, and decide then.

Obviously this represents a lot of corner cases and attention to detail, so it’s not for everyone. November’s rate is so high it would be perfectly rational to just lock it in with $10,000 this year and next year through Treasury Direct, and $5,000 next year through a tax refund. But since the genius of these bonds is their optionality, this is one way you can maximize that value.

Mixed (overall negative) changes to Consumers Credit Union Rewards Checking

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I wrote recently over at my personal finance blog about my favorite high-interest checking account, the Rewards Checking account offered by Consumers Credit Union. In case any readers are as big of fans of the account as I am, I wanted to discuss some upcoming changes, and my reaction to them.

The bad: rates are dropping

I’m putting this first because there’s no sugar-coating these changes: each interest rate tier is dropping by one percentage point: the lowest tier from 3.09% to 2.09% APY, the next from 4.09% to 3.09%, and the highest from 5.09% to 4.09%. For an account with a maxed out $10,000 balance, this will drop your annual interest income by $100.

If you only meet the lowest tier requirements each month (or have more than $10,000 in cash savings), then you should seriously consider moving your balance over to a competitor like Western Vista, which offers 4% interest on balances up to $15,000 (for now).

If you’re meeting the highest interest tier requirements, then while the reduction in rates is painful, there’s little you can do about it: 4.09% APY is still significantly higher than any other current offers I’m aware of.

The good: deposit and transaction requirements are changing

There are a couple moving pieces here but all three changes are positive:

  1. in April and May, you need only make 6, instead of 12, signature debit transactions in order to meet your debit transaction requirement.

  2. Beginning immediately and going forward, your total signature debit transactions do not need to add up to $100 per month.

  3. Beginning immediately and going forward, you can meet the $500 monthly deposit requirement through mobile check deposit, in addition to direct deposit.

The 3.09% and 4.09% interest rate tiers will still require $500 and $1,000 in Consumers CU credit card spend, respectively.

Conclusion

On balance, these changes are negative: the reason to use a high-interest checking account is to earn as much interest as possible, so any reduction in the interest you earn is a negative change!

But they’re not entirely negative: I meet my debit transaction requirement using the Plastiq bill payment service, which previously meant making eleven $1 payments and one $89 payment to reach the $100 monthly transaction requirement. Starting in June I’ll be able to make twelve $1 payments, which will make both my Fee-Free Dollars and my student loan balances last longer.

I use my Consumers Rewards Checking account as my primary bank account since it offers unlimited ATM fee reimbursement in addition to the high interest rate, and I’ll probably continue to do so for now, although I’ll continue to re-evaluate as the situation evolves, and will of course keep my beloved readers updated.

Money is fungible, but only if you funge it

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Back in October, over at the Saverocity Observation Deck podcast Joe Cheung interviewed Noah from Money Metagame and they discussed a post Noah wrote last year asking the question, "Is Anyone Actually Saving Money By Travel Hacking?"

Read the whole piece, as they say, but rather than respond directly to him, I am going to be more proactive and explain how how you really can save money using the tools of travel hacking.

Money doesn't funge itself

Perhaps after opportunity cost, the fungibility of money is one of the most popular concepts from economics applied to travel hacking. If money is fungible, then it doesn't matter how you earn income: whether from employment, reselling, manufactured spending, or high-stakes poker, every dollar you earn goes into the same pot, out of which you make decisions about consumption and savings.

This is true as a description of money, but need not be true about your own behavior towards money.

Ringfence your profits

One way to turn your travel hacking into asset-building is to identify and isolate your profits from travel hacking and direct them exclusively towards long-term asset accumulation. For example, if you have a Fidelity Visa Signature card earning 2% cash back, you're already depositing your cash back each month into a Fidelity account. Instead of withdrawing it into your regular checking account, where it will funge with all your other money, put it into a separate account (I personally use a Consumers Credit Union Free Rewards Checking account that pays 3.09%+ APY).

The key point is that it has to be additive. If you already have an IRA housed with Fidelity that you would max out each year anyway, you aren't increasing your savings by depositing cash back rewards into it, you're just changing the funding stream. Instead, you could open a brokerage account and use your cash back rewards to fund investments in that account.

Buy travel from yourself (with a friends and family discount)

When I'm booking travel for other people, I normally charge them either the cash value of the points I redeem or the fairest price I can think of, for example one cent per mile for airline miles and half a cent for Hilton Honors points. Since in virtually all cases I would rather have money than miles and points, this is usually a way to get my friends and family big discounts and turn my stagnant balances into cash — a win-win.

I don't pay myself for travel I redeem on my own behalf, but you could! After all, if you treat a 25,000-point Hyatt redemption as "free," instead of costing as it does $250 in transferred Ultimate Rewards points, you might travel more than you really, objectively speaking, can afford to. If you instead sold travel to yourself (with the same friends and family discount you'd give anyone else) and moved money permanently into an investment account or other place you were sure you wouldn't spend it, you might develop a more tangible sense of the costs of your "free" travel.

A related issue arises when you redeem bank points like those earned with the BankAmericard Travel Rewards card, Capital One Venture, or Barclaycard Arrival+ against travel purchases: the redemption really does reduce your outstanding credit card balance, and so is clearly some form of "income," but you never actually see a deposit into a bank account. Instead, you simply don't pay off part of the credit card balance you incurred booking your travel. "Buying" travel from yourself is a way of dealing with this curious situation and converting hypothetical profits into long-term assets.

Liquidate into your net worth, not your bank account

I've written before about using Plastiq to liquidate tiny-denomination prepaid debit cards, like the balances left over on 5% Back Visa Simon Giftcards (you can find my personal referral link on my Support the Site! page). Plastiq has a lot of billers in its database, so you might be tempted to use it to pay monthly recurring bills, like your rent or utilities. But making those types of payments won't help you accumulate assets, they just leave extra cash in your already-funged checking account.

Instead, you could deliberately target those payments towards long-term debt reduction, like making additional payments towards your mortgage, auto loans, or student debt. That way, instead of replacing payments you are already making anyway, you're using travel hacking to pay down those debts more aggressively and both increase your net worth and reduce the interest you'll pay over the life of the loans.

Conclusion

The economics professors in my audience are welcome to tut-tut me for suggesting such degrading psychological tricks, but it seems crystal clear to me that if you don't use one of these or some other method of isolating and investing your profits from travel hacking, then it's exceedingly unlikely to actually improve your overall financial position. On the flip side, a few additional thousands of dollars invested in sensible low-cost index funds have the potential to turn your short-term travel hacking profits into long-term financial success.

The many flavors of negative-interest-rate loans

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A negative-interest-rate loan is one which, over the course of the loan, requires the borrower to repay less than they originally borrowed. Such loans have received a lot of attention in the business press lately since countries like Germany and Switzerland began issuing bonds with negative yields.

But negative-interest-rate loans aren't just for industrial and financial superpowers anymore! Here are three flavors of negative-interest-rate loans available to the enterprising travel hacker (and one bonus flavor), sorted by the duration of the loan, and suggestions for how to maximize their value.

25-55 days: manufactured spend

Most people think of the profit from manufactured spending as coming from the rewards earned on their spend, and that's true if you liquidate your spend directly back into the cards used to manufacture it.

But when you manufacture spend on a rewards-earning credit card, you're also borrowing money that can be used for other purposes. If you manufacture and liquidate spend on the day your credit card statement closes, you may be able to use the funds for up to 55 days, depending on how long your statement cycle is and how many days your bank gives you to pay.

Possible uses: Besides short-term liquidity, you can get even more value from these short-term negative-interest-rate loans by funding bank accounts that require large deposits in order to trigger signup bonuses. For example, Citi is currently offering a $400 signup bonus for opening a checking account with $15,000 in new money, which has to be kept with Citi for 30 days. $15,000 manufactured on a 2% cash back card and 1% "all-in" cost will net $150 in credit card rewards and $400 from Citi. Since the money was borrowed, that's the equivalent of a negative 44% APR loan.

6-12 months: interest rate arbitrage

If you're anything like me, you're constantly getting balance transfer and cash advance checks in the mail from your credit card companies. For the last year it felt like I was getting two or three offers from Discover every week! The offers can take many forms, but usually include a promotional interest rate on the amount you write the check for, while charging a balance transfer or cash advance fee in the range of 2-5%.

These offers are very bad for short-term liquidity because those fees act as an up-front interest charge which can't be avoided by paying off the balance early, as is the case with manufactured spend.

Possible uses: for medium-term needs, these offers can give you the opportunity to swap out higher-interest-rate debt for lower-rate debt, while generating valuable liquidity. For example, if you have 12 months remaining on a car loan at 5% APR, and are sent a 12-month 0% APR cash advance offer with a 3% cash advance fee, you will not just save money on the total interest you'll pay, but also have the option to swap equal-installment car loan payments for 11 minimum credit card payments and a "balloon" credit card balance pay-off in the 12th month. That added liquidity can be plowed back into manufactured spend, reselling, or any other high-value investment you have available.

12-21 months: savings and investment

There are a range of cards available that offer 0% APR on purchases and/or balance transfers. When those cards are also rewards-earning credit cards, these act as longer-term negative-interest-rate loans. For example, a new application for a Chase Freedom Unlimited will earn 1.5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent and charge no interest on purchases for 15 months. $10,000 manufactured with that card will earn 15,000 Ultimate Rewards points. If you redeem 10,000 points to cover your manufactured spend costs, the 5,000 remaining points are the negative interest on your 15-month loan.

Possible uses: Depositing the same $10,000 in a 4.59% APY checking account will produce another $459 or so per year, driving the APR on your borrowed funds even further below 0%.

This technique may also be useful if you don't have the funds to maximize your annual contribution to an IRA or other tax-advantaged savings vehicle: using negative interest rate loans to cover your expenses while deducting retirement contributions from earned income can generate valuable savings on federal and state income taxes.

Up to 20 years: federal student loans

Whether or not you think college students should have to borrow to pay for higher education, for many students there is in fact a stark choice between borrowing or not attending college at all. The good news is that as long as long as students borrow exclusively from the federal government's Direct Loan program, they're eligible for the income-based repayment plan, or IBR. Under an IBR plan, any principal and interest balances that aren't repaid after 20 years are forgiven.

This too meets our definition of a negative-interest-rate loan: for borrowers whose repayments after 20 years don't add up to the amount they borrowed, the difference between the amount repaid and amount borrowed will constitute the negative interest they earned during the repayment period.

Possible uses: I don't know if there are actually any ways to leverage these negative-interest-rate loans, so just consider this an advertisement for the income-based repayment program and Federal Direct Loans.

On the other hand, no one should ever take out private student loans, which can be almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy and offer few or none of the alternative repayment options the federal government makes available.

Conclusion

For now, we live in a low-interest-rate, low-yield world. Juicing your investment returns and reducing your interest payments with negative-interest-rate loans is one way to squeeze higher yield from a market that has run out of low-hanging fruit.

What's the return on a diversified portfolio of hip alternative investments?

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There's a healthy overlap between people with an outside-the-box attitude towards funding travel and those interested in alternative approaches to savings and investment:

  • Kiva has long been a (controversial) tool used by travel hackers and outside-the-box thinkers to earn miles, points, and cash back by making short-term loans funded with rewards-earning credit cards.
  • More recently, Greg the Frequent Miler has been doing yeoman's work (followup here) reporting out the similar, albeit much riskier, possibility of funding Kickfurther (my personal referral link) "Consignment Opportunities" with credit cards to earn both credit card rewards and investment returns.
  • At some point I must have signed up for a Fundrise account, and they've been badgering me to invest in their "Income" and "Growth" eREIT's for weeks now.
  • Finally, if you listen to any popular ad-supported podcasts you've likely heard about Wunder Capital and their solar power investment funds.

Now, the last thing you want to do is put all your speculative eggs in one basket, so I got to wondering, what kind of return might you get from an equally weighted portfolio of all these investments?

Annualizing "target" returns

The first thing to take into account is that the investment horizon for each of these vehicles is different, so we need to adjust the various returns appropriately. I'll use $1,000 investments in each example for ease of comparison.

  • Kiva loans funded with a 5% cash back credit card might earn more or less than 5% because of the varying term of Kiva loans. A recent search for short-term, high-quality Kiva loans returned 15 loans, all of which had a duration of 8 months. Assuming you wait to reinvest your Kiva repayments until all your loans have been repaid, and you suffer no defaults or delinquencies, you could invest $1,000 1.5 times per year, for a total annualized return of 7.5%.
  • Kickfurther consignment opportunities funded with a 2% cash back credit card will yield 2% cash back, plus your total Kickfurther principal and interest payments, minus 1.5% of your Kickfurther principal and interest payments. In other words, a 12-month consignment opportunity offering a 16% return on a $1,000 investment will pay $20 in cash back plus 98.5% of $1,160 ($1,142.60), for a total annual return of 16.26%. Assuming the four currently available consignment opportunities are typical in both length and rate of return, we can mechanically compute an average annualized return of 14.65%.
  • Fundrise works a little bit differently since you're investing in eREIT's which are designed to be held for the long term and which pay out throughout the life of the investment and then return remaining (potentially appreciated) principal at the end. Under the "accountability" tab for each eREIT, you can see the returns Fundrise seeks from each investment fund. For the Income eREIT they will charge no management fee if the annualized return is less than 15%, and for the Growth eREIT they'll pay a penalty if the annual return is below 20%, so we can use those as the "target" returns for each fund.
  • Finally, Wunder Capital is currently offering a "Term Fund" with a target return of 8.5% and an "Income Fund" with a target return of 6%.

Building a diversified hip alternative investment portfolio

If I were interested in building a portfolio of these alternatives, my model would be diversifying across the four platforms somewhat like this: by putting $1,000 in as many suitable Kiva loans as possible, $1,000 across as many Kickfurther consignment opportunities as possible, $1,000 in each of the two Fundrise eREIT's, and $1,000 in each of the Wunder Capital funds.

That would produce a $6,000 investment with a target annualized return of 11.94%.

This would be a very stupid thing to do

There are at least two questions worth asking about such a diversified portfolio of hip alternatives:

  • How likely am I to make more money with this portfolio than I would with conventional investments?
  • How likely am I to make any money at all, versus losing some or all of my principal?

The first question speaks to the question of whether the higher target return you're seeking will adequately compensate you for the added risk you're taking with these bizarre, untested investment vehicles. After all, Vanguard will sell you a low-cost mutual fund invested in corporate junk bonds any day of the week. Why buy untradable junk from strangers when Jack Bogle will sell you relatively liquid junk?

The second question is whether you'll be compensated at all, or whether an economic downturn, poor management, and/or fraud will wipe out your investment completely with little or no warning.

But, gambling is fun

There's a painful irony to the fact that these alternative investment vehicles have been legalized and are being aggressively promoted at a time of low interest rates and pessimism about future returns in the stock market, because those conditions have retail investors desperately fishing around for investment opportunities with a higher return than their passively managed index funds. Frantically taking bigger and bigger risks makes the problem of low returns worse for all the investors who pick the wrong alternatives to invest in (and there are a lot of wrong alternatives).

On the other hand, for the dwindling number of investors with a secure path to retirement and enough money left over to gamble with, these alternatives seem like they'd be fund to play with. And who knows? You might even make some money.

Final status report on my personal finance application cycle

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Last June I wrote about my personal finance application cycle, in which I applied for a Chase Slate and Citi Double Cash credit card in order to run up high balances and use the resulting negative-interest-rate loans to finance other projects. Since my 0% APR introductory periods are coming to an end, I thought readers might enjoy a final update.

Did it work?

My strategy worked perfectly, as it had to.

Fees and interest rates, unlike other terms and conditions of credit card agreements, are heavily regulated and cannot be changed by the banks to retroactively apply to existing balances (as long as you stay current on payments). In fact, even if my Chase and Citi accounts had been closed for some reason, I still would have been entitled to continue making only the minimum payments on the two cards until the introductory interest rate period elapsed.

I had no trouble moving my existing Chase credit lines to my new Slate card, as I explained in the original post, and was able to transfer $15,000 in balances to the card at the promotional 0% APR. I also didn't have any problem manufacturing my $5,200 credit limit on the Citi Double Cash, maximizing the amount of cash I was able to borrow at a negative interest rate.

What happened to my credit score?

When reading about this tactic, many of my readers grow agitated about the horrific damage that must have been wreaked on my credit score by nearly maxing out two credit cards on an ongoing basis.

In the 12 months of FICO score history Barclaycard provides, my score has bounced around between 677 and 729. In the last 6 months, Citi has me between 667 and 683. And in the last 12 months American Express has my FICO score between 670 and 720.

But I don't care about my FICO score, and the "damage" didn't keep me from being approved for a new Chase Hyatt credit card.

As should be obvious, everyone's situation is different: if you have just a few cards, or a short credit history, then high utilization on one or more cards might do significant damage to your credit score, potentially keeping you from getting approved for the credit cards you want.

If you have a lot of cards, and a long credit history, it's more likely to have only a nominal effect on your score, as it did on mine.

What did I do with the money?

Not much! I funded my Consumers Credit Union Free Rewards Checking account with $10,000, and used the rest of my newfound cash flow to increase the speed and convenience with which I manufactured spend on my other credit cards. Even if you diligently pay off each of your credit cards with the same spend manufactured with that card, there are still inevitable delays connected with depositing funds and making payments. Having a substantial amount of cash on hand smooths out those inconvenient delays and increases my overall return.

What's next?

This month I paid off the balance on my Citi Double Cash, and have already started using the card to manufacture unbonused spend. It's a somewhat inconvenient product since you have to pay off your balance in full before your statement closes in order to earn a full 2% cash back on your spend each month. Still, 2% is a perfectly reasonable return on unbonused manufactured spend, so the card still has its uses to me.

After I pay off my Chase Slate balance at the end of the month, I'll call to request a product change to the Chase Freedom Unlimited, which earns 1.5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent everywhere, and that card will enter my rotation as a go-to card for unbonused manufactured spend.

Once that's complete, I'll wait a few weeks until I'm safely out from under the shadow of Chase's 5/24 guideline for new account approvals, and apply for another Chase Slate. I'll move available credit from my new Chase Freedom Unlimited account, and start this process over again.

Should you do this?

I don't give advice. I don't know your situation, and have no idea whether a 15-month, negative-interest-rate loan is right for you. But there are a few reasons you might consider it.

First, there are purchases that you might be considering paying for over time, like a car, which will cost less in total if you accelerate your payments using a negative-interest-rate loan.

Second, holding borrowed cash in a high-interest checking account, as I did, can serve as an "emergency fund" to protect you from job loss, emergency medical bills, or losses in the stock market. Even if, like me, you don't find the idea of an emergency fund particularly interesting from a personal finance perspective, you'll still earn more in a high-interest checking account than you will in a fixed-income mutual fund, a subject I've written about elsewhere.

Third, if you're a reseller or the owner of a business that needs access to capital in order to grow, you might consider financing expansion with a negative-interest-rate loan, especially if you work with vendors who only accept cash or give a discount on cash transactions.

Microhacking: ATM fee refund edition

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Even before most travel hackers' American Express prepaid cards were shut down last year, American Express had restricted Bluebird and Serve cash withdrawals to ATM's in the United States. That was a shame since they had previously worked as fee-free ATM cards around the world, and with reasonable exchange rates.

Fortunately, I have a Consumers Credit Union Free Rewards Checking account, which offers as one of its rewards "No ATM fees - CCU will reimburse all ATM and surcharge fees." I'd never actually made an ATM withdrawal with the card (I bank with a local credit union), so I was eager to see how this benefit works.

My experience withdrawing money in Europe

It works really well!

I made three ATM withdrawals during the two weeks we were in Europe, and incurred ATM fees on each withdrawal:

  • 30,000 Hungarian forint ($109.40), $0.87 ATM fee;
  • 200 Euro ($226.85), $1.81 ATM fee;
  • 200 Euro ($225.96), $2.26 ATM fee.

On the first of July, I received an ATM fee credit of $11.19. Since only $4.94 had been charged to my account in separate ATM fees, that leaves $6.25 in ATM fee refunds unaccounted for.

That $6.25 happens to be the sum of the difference between the first two ATM withdrawals in dollars and the next lowest multiple of $5 ($109.40 minus $105, plus $226.85 minus $225).

Now, maybe that's a coincidence ($6.25 is the sum of a lot of numbers, real and imaginary). But it's my current best hypothesis, although it doesn't explain why the odd $0.96 on my final ATM withdrawal wasn't refunded.

Microhacking ATM fee refunds?

If my hypothesis is correct, that means a simple hack is possible: intentionally make ATM withdrawals that are at least $1 more than a multiple of $5, getting the additional amount refunded the following month.

The only ATM's I've ever seen that allow such odd withdrawals are TD Bank ATM's, which allow you to specify the exact composition of a withdrawal, including $1 and $5 bills.

According to this CNN article, Chase and PNC were rolling out ATM's with this function back in 2013, but some light Googling didn't turn up any more recent information than that.

Have you tried this? Does it work? And do you have a better explanation for my mysterious $6.25 ATM fee refund?

I listened to every episode of "Masters in Business." Here's what I learned.

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In March, I asked on Twitter for suggestions for podcasts about business and finance since I found the Planet Money podcast from NPR and the Slate Money podcast to be infuriatingly juvenile.

One of my followers suggested the Bloomberg Radio podcast "Masters in Business," hosted by Barry Ritholtz of Ritholtz Wealth Management.

Ritholtz interviews some of the most famous names in business and finance and explores their background, philosophy, and investment strategy in wide-ranging, free-form interviews. It's fantastic.

In the last two months, I've listened to every episode of the podcast. Here's what I learned about success in business and investing.

Read books

Personally, I like to go down to the public library and check out dead-tree books. You might prefer to read books electronically on your phone or on a dedicated Kindle or Nook. But every one of Ritholtz's guests has a list of books they've either read recently or are in the process of reading.

Have a list, and find the time to read. Work your way through your list, and always be on the lookout for new titles to add to it.

Own Stocks

Share prices are an inflation-protected asset, in that the revenue and expenses of the companies held in a sufficiently diversified stock portfolio will rise at the same rate as inflation in the overall economy, unlike a portfolio of fixed-income investments.

So own stocks: it's good for you.

Successful businesspeople are obsessed with bad evolutionary analogies

It is embarrassing listening to Ritholtz and his guests make constant references to "the savannah" where human psychology supposedly evolved oh-so-many millions of years ago, with "lions" waiting in the shadows to snatch unwary humans from around their "campfires."

I don't blame Ritholtz and his guests for this, and I don't even really blame the evolutionary psychologists for promoting this nonsense: they're just talking their book.

I blame the cultural anthropologists who have abdicated the field of popular non-fiction to these charlatans who preach that the behavior of early hominids on their mythical "savannah" explains human behavior in the advanced economies of the 21st century.

But let me be clear: the quick resort of successful capitalists to evolutionary analogies is no harmless affectation. If most people make investing mistakes because of their primitive evolutionary heritage, the ability of a select few to achieve success in investing must make them more evolved, more sophisticated, more worthy exemplars of the race.

And that, handily, excuses their worst excesses.

Jack Bogle is the only person on Earth who believes in passive indexed investing

Jack Bogle is the legendary founder and former chairman of the Vanguard Group.

Jack Bogle will sell you and manage for you a market-capitalization-weighted S&P 500 index fund for 5 cents per $100 invested.

If you prefer a wider stock index, he'll sell you and manage for you a market-capitalization-weighted total stock market index fund for 5 cents per $100 invested.

You should take him up on this offer. But you won't. No one does.

Passive indexed investing has one big advantage and one big disadvantage.

The one big advantage is that it's free. Since Vanguard passive index funds are market-capitalization-weighted, they are never rebalanced. If a stock goes up in price, it becomes a bigger portion of the index. If it goes down in price, it becomes a smaller portion of the index. Shares are not bought and sold to rebalance the portfolio, since the price movements themselves perform that function. No trading means no trading costs.

The one big disadvantage is that when you contribute money to a market-capitalization-weighted passive index fund you're buying expensive stocks when they're expensive, and when you redeem shares in a market-capitalization-weighted passive index fund you're selling cheap stocks when they're cheap.

Jack Bogle will tell you the one big advantage outweighs the one big disadvantage, but you won't believe him.

Probably because of the savannah.

Bonus fact: Barry Ritholtz blocked me on Twitter

At the end of every episode Barry Ritholtz tells listeners to follow him on Twitter. I thought this was a pretty good idea, so I checked out his account @Ritholtz, and somehow he had already discovered my subversive tendencies and blocked me: