I procrastinate on a lot of things.
I also drag around a lot of papers in the briefcase that I carry to and from work every day. I have used briefcases of some sort or another since embarking on a rather difficult and challenging career about twenty-six years ago as an Adult Probation Officer.
One of the items that I carried around in my briefcase for nearly all of this year was a flier from Fifth Third Bank offering $400 to open a checking account with a minimum of $500 and then add another fifteen grand to it within some amount of days.
By the time I came across this offer, it had expired by a few months and I was kicking myself a bit for not taking advantage of it. After all, receiving a "bonus" of $400 for depositing fifteen grand and five Benjamins for six months sounds like a fairly good rate of return.
Especially considering that my family's combined accounts have lost at least seven grand in value over the past couple of weeks as the market as struggled due to the current President's comments and Tweets.
Two months ago, I searched out the offer online to see if it was still valid, and indeed it was.
If you have the inclination to make $400 by opening an account with this amount at a Fifth Third Bank, consider me having helped you if you did not know about it already. The link is right here and I do not get a dime from it if you do or do not.
I requested a code from this site a few months ago and, wouldn't you know it, they knew that I was the Money Mensch and sent me a code to get four Benjamins.
Without beating the topic to death, I finally made an appointment with a banker at a nearby Fifth Third Bank branch today during my lunch hour.
I spent about a half hour with him filling out paperwork and getting solicited for everything from money market accounts to a mortgage to another credit card to investment advising services.
In past years when I may have been less patient and more easily irritated I would have dismissed his efforts to become my "personal banker" rather rudely. As it is now, I realize that the only reason that a bank would give someone four Benjamins for parking fifteen grand for six months is for marketing purposes.
After all, just leaving the same amount of money sitting in my online Capital One savings account, which now pays out two percent, would pay out one hundred and fifty bucks over the next six months. Thus, an extra two hundred and fifty spent to not only have me view some commercials on TV or ads online, but to have my butt sit in a private office for over a half hour (more like forty minutes) and get all of my personal information from my social security number to my place of employment, my cell phone number, my email address and personal information that Fifth Third will likely use and sell for years to come.
I almost turned around thinking that it is not worth the four hundred, but pressed on anyway.
For what it is worth, I have already earmarked the four hundred that I will be collecting the first week of next July for my daughter's spending money for her marching band trip next December. Their trips are fairly major. Think Disney World and Miami for a week or New Orleans for a week and playing in the Sugar Bowl.
A well-appointed, motivated and upwardly mobile high school girl should have about four hundred to spend on such a trip, and I intend to give it to her.
Thus, my first thought was to write about how I am working smarter rather than harder on this and making four hundred bucks for a half hour worth of "work" which was more like filling out paperwork and listening to a pitch for financial products, none of which I want or need from Fifth Third. Not that I never will, just that I do not want a second credit card or financial advice from a guy who sits in an office in a retail bank for a salary less than mine.
It dawned on me that I am not really making the four hundred in a half hour. After all, I do not have it now and I now have fifteen and a half grand tied up for the next six months. It is not the grand total of our savings, mind you, but it is a fairly significant amount for me.
So, it is more like six months that I will do my regular living, working, being a good husband and father, being a good son and brother, being a good friend to my few friends and trying to launch an e-commerce site of some sort while these funds sit quietly in my new account waiting to be credited an extra four hundred.
Something even further dawned on me then. It is not really even a six month process because I am sure that most people would gladly park a small percentage of their savings in an account for a few months to get a "free" four hundred bucks.
Some people have to work an entire week at a difficult job and still make less than four hundred dollars. Some people do not even have four hundred to their name.
How privileged am I, then, just to make a deposit, listen to some weak pitches, and then return six months later to collect $15,900?
But was I just given the money that I invested today? Is it because I am a Jewish mensch that I have a secret store of extra money? Was it proceeds from a trust fund that I received by merit of being born?
No, no and no.
What it really represents is more like three years of diligently socking away four to five hundred per month in a savings account during the Recession when I earned about eighty grand, my wife was a stay-at-home mother, we had two young children and growing expenses, and still automatically invested a thousand on the first of every month to pay for our son's college that he now attends and the college that our daughter will attend.
The fifteen grand came at the expense of going on vacations, doing home repairs, buying good cell phones, purchasing new vehicles, watching the old tube TVs (that we still have) and by faithfully putting money away for a rainy day.
I should have put the money into my own IRA during those years, but that is easy to write now that I survived at work throughout those years and was able to keep feeding my family and keeping a roof over our heads.
Had I known then that I would remain gainfully employed throughout the Recession, that money would be growing in my and my wife's IRA account instead of parked with Fifth Third.
It probably took me three years of setting money aside whenever I could to come up with that fifteen grand (plus five hundred) that I deposited today and acted as if there was plenty more where that came from.
I hate the term, "saving like a Jew," but I am one and that is how I saved it. I would be much prouder to write that I saved a million dollars, but I have not. My younger brother, who earned over half that magical number this year alone, will soon amass much more than that amount if he has not already.
But he is an up-and-coming attorney who has his own firm and I am but a humble public servant, working in an IMRF employer and hoping, dreaming and scheming for FatFIRE55.
So I ask you.
That $400 that I will hand to my daughter next December like it is no big thing.
Is that the result of a mere half hour of sitting in an office and then another five or ten minutes six months from now when I cash it out?
Is it the result of six months of patience, during which I continue working, Paying Ourselves First and striving to get grittier and enjoy life more?
Or is it what I think it is? A few extra bucks as the result of sacrifice and hard work that I made ten years ago or more, in my mid- to late thirties, when the economy was bleak, before I had an outlet like this for my thoughts, and when I thought nobody but me and my wife would ever know or care about what we were doing.
God Bless You...
And get this code and get yourself an extra Four Benjamins for next summer.
I also drag around a lot of papers in the briefcase that I carry to and from work every day. I have used briefcases of some sort or another since embarking on a rather difficult and challenging career about twenty-six years ago as an Adult Probation Officer.
One of the items that I carried around in my briefcase for nearly all of this year was a flier from Fifth Third Bank offering $400 to open a checking account with a minimum of $500 and then add another fifteen grand to it within some amount of days.
By the time I came across this offer, it had expired by a few months and I was kicking myself a bit for not taking advantage of it. After all, receiving a "bonus" of $400 for depositing fifteen grand and five Benjamins for six months sounds like a fairly good rate of return.
Especially considering that my family's combined accounts have lost at least seven grand in value over the past couple of weeks as the market as struggled due to the current President's comments and Tweets.
Two months ago, I searched out the offer online to see if it was still valid, and indeed it was.
If you have the inclination to make $400 by opening an account with this amount at a Fifth Third Bank, consider me having helped you if you did not know about it already. The link is right here and I do not get a dime from it if you do or do not.
I requested a code from this site a few months ago and, wouldn't you know it, they knew that I was the Money Mensch and sent me a code to get four Benjamins.
Your requested offer
code for up to $400 is here!
Fifth Third Bank <FifthThirdBank@offers.53.com>
To: the Money Mensch October 8 at 8:03 AM
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|
Get your $400 bonus
in 3 steps:
|
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|
Without beating the topic to death, I finally made an appointment with a banker at a nearby Fifth Third Bank branch today during my lunch hour.
I spent about a half hour with him filling out paperwork and getting solicited for everything from money market accounts to a mortgage to another credit card to investment advising services.
In past years when I may have been less patient and more easily irritated I would have dismissed his efforts to become my "personal banker" rather rudely. As it is now, I realize that the only reason that a bank would give someone four Benjamins for parking fifteen grand for six months is for marketing purposes.
After all, just leaving the same amount of money sitting in my online Capital One savings account, which now pays out two percent, would pay out one hundred and fifty bucks over the next six months. Thus, an extra two hundred and fifty spent to not only have me view some commercials on TV or ads online, but to have my butt sit in a private office for over a half hour (more like forty minutes) and get all of my personal information from my social security number to my place of employment, my cell phone number, my email address and personal information that Fifth Third will likely use and sell for years to come.
I almost turned around thinking that it is not worth the four hundred, but pressed on anyway.
For what it is worth, I have already earmarked the four hundred that I will be collecting the first week of next July for my daughter's spending money for her marching band trip next December. Their trips are fairly major. Think Disney World and Miami for a week or New Orleans for a week and playing in the Sugar Bowl.
A well-appointed, motivated and upwardly mobile high school girl should have about four hundred to spend on such a trip, and I intend to give it to her.
Thus, my first thought was to write about how I am working smarter rather than harder on this and making four hundred bucks for a half hour worth of "work" which was more like filling out paperwork and listening to a pitch for financial products, none of which I want or need from Fifth Third. Not that I never will, just that I do not want a second credit card or financial advice from a guy who sits in an office in a retail bank for a salary less than mine.
It dawned on me that I am not really making the four hundred in a half hour. After all, I do not have it now and I now have fifteen and a half grand tied up for the next six months. It is not the grand total of our savings, mind you, but it is a fairly significant amount for me.
 |
| I deposited $15,500 with Fifth Third Bank this afternoon. |
Something even further dawned on me then. It is not really even a six month process because I am sure that most people would gladly park a small percentage of their savings in an account for a few months to get a "free" four hundred bucks.
Some people have to work an entire week at a difficult job and still make less than four hundred dollars. Some people do not even have four hundred to their name.
How privileged am I, then, just to make a deposit, listen to some weak pitches, and then return six months later to collect $15,900?
But was I just given the money that I invested today? Is it because I am a Jewish mensch that I have a secret store of extra money? Was it proceeds from a trust fund that I received by merit of being born?
No, no and no.
What it really represents is more like three years of diligently socking away four to five hundred per month in a savings account during the Recession when I earned about eighty grand, my wife was a stay-at-home mother, we had two young children and growing expenses, and still automatically invested a thousand on the first of every month to pay for our son's college that he now attends and the college that our daughter will attend.
The fifteen grand came at the expense of going on vacations, doing home repairs, buying good cell phones, purchasing new vehicles, watching the old tube TVs (that we still have) and by faithfully putting money away for a rainy day.
I should have put the money into my own IRA during those years, but that is easy to write now that I survived at work throughout those years and was able to keep feeding my family and keeping a roof over our heads.
Had I known then that I would remain gainfully employed throughout the Recession, that money would be growing in my and my wife's IRA account instead of parked with Fifth Third.
It probably took me three years of setting money aside whenever I could to come up with that fifteen grand (plus five hundred) that I deposited today and acted as if there was plenty more where that came from.
I hate the term, "saving like a Jew," but I am one and that is how I saved it. I would be much prouder to write that I saved a million dollars, but I have not. My younger brother, who earned over half that magical number this year alone, will soon amass much more than that amount if he has not already.
But he is an up-and-coming attorney who has his own firm and I am but a humble public servant, working in an IMRF employer and hoping, dreaming and scheming for FatFIRE55.
So I ask you.
That $400 that I will hand to my daughter next December like it is no big thing.
Is that the result of a mere half hour of sitting in an office and then another five or ten minutes six months from now when I cash it out?
Is it the result of six months of patience, during which I continue working, Paying Ourselves First and striving to get grittier and enjoy life more?
Or is it what I think it is? A few extra bucks as the result of sacrifice and hard work that I made ten years ago or more, in my mid- to late thirties, when the economy was bleak, before I had an outlet like this for my thoughts, and when I thought nobody but me and my wife would ever know or care about what we were doing.
God Bless You...
And get this code and get yourself an extra Four Benjamins for next summer.
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