Greetings and welcome to my brand new blog, the Cashback Cow. “Make the bank’s Moolah your MOO-lah!”.
Here I share my ideas on bonus hunting, cashback rewards, saving, frugality, deals, recipes etc. I will touch on travel rewards here and there but it will be limited as this is a primarily a Team Cashback focused blog which focuses on savings & frugality.
Bonus Hunting. I regularly open new credit cards, bank accounts as well as brokerage accounts for the sign up bonuses; this includes both personal and business accounts. This is quite lucrative and results in an appreciable amount of extra income. In this blog, I’ll share ideas and deals that I am currently working on.
My favorite blog for seeing the latest bonus hunting deals is the Profitable Content blog, filtered by the state I reside in — this is the only bonus hunting blog I know of that has a state filter which is very nice. After Profitable Content, I like Doctor of Credit primarily for the discussions and data points, along with new deals which might not yet be on Profitable Content. I prefer how Profitable Content sticks to a concise and consistent template which gives you all of the details you need to know to get the deal going very quickly. Bank Account Bonus Central is another great resource to consider for bonus hunting. There are also Maximizing Money, Danny The Deal Guru as well as Hustler Money Blog which are on my Favorites page, along with my Feeds page mentioned below.
Check out my new bank bonus Feeds page. This is a compilation of feeds related to bank account & credit card bonus hunting. This includes blogs, vlogs as well as podcasts. This set of feeds is unique in that you won’t find much in the way of travel, deals, entertainment, coupons, fast food etc. It’s meant to be a great resource when hunting for the next bank account or credit card sign up bonus, or for bonus hunting related ideas and datapoints.
Cashback Rewards. I, unlike many others who do bonus hunting, focus on cashback rewards instead of travel rewards. I am not concerned so much about travel points because I rarely travel and my goals are to save as much money as possible to further increase my bonus hunting / emergency fund as well as retirement fund; I am in my mid fifties and I got off to a late start saving for retirement so I am making up for that now. However I do use points for travel here and there for an occasional stay at an affordable hotel — like I did recently at a Hyatt for a medical procedure — or to say book a domestic flight for my boyfriend’s mother to come out and visit us. Chase is my preferred bank for my travel needs and save a small portion of Ultimate Rewards points for travel with Chase — the rest gets cashed out.
When I am not working on meeting the spend requirement of a particular credit card for a sign up bonus, I like to use credit cards which earn me 5%+ cashback as much as possible as I explain in my 5%+ Custom Cashback Strategy article. It doesn’t matter if those cards have no way to redeem their points for travel as 90%+ of the points of all my cards get redeemed as cash anyways. I have an interesting custom cash / rotating category card setup which is super easy to use via an iPhone lock screen wallpaper and Apple Pay, resulting in us only having to carry 1 or 2 cards with us in our physical wallet; I share all the details about my cashback setup in the aforementioned article link just above.
Other forms of cashback include rebate web sites like Rakuten and the Capital One Shopping Portal. I also take advantage of credit card coupon offers from time to time. However, I generally avoid these two methods for a couple reasons: 1) to keep from wasting time, as so many deals are stores I never buy from and 2) to keep my expenditures down — especially the discretionary ones. Browsing for coupons to me can possibly just lead to more unnecessary expenditures getting lured in by the “deals”.
Savings. All of my money goes into savings. I pay my bills and buy necessities from my savings without question. However any time I am about to have a discretionary expenditure, I go over the pros and cons and evaluate if what I am buying truly improves my quality of life or not. If not, then I just keep the money in savings. Currently, I am saving about half of my income each month. I am working on building up my bonus hunting bankroll — which also serves as my emergency fund. After I have achieved my desired bonus hunting / emergency fund, I will then fast pay my mortgage — thankfully the mortgage balance is relatively low and will be paid off soon. After that the excess each month will go into retirement savings, which will be predominantly ETF’s. I do occasionally spend on discretionary things but try to keep those to a minimum as I have some immediate financial goals. I’ll share my savings goals and progress from time to time in this blog.
Frugality. I’ll share various frugality tips I have learned through the years here in this blog from time to time. They really add up.
Deals. I’ll occasionally share really good deals on necessities. I’ll avoid sharing deals on travel, fast food, entertainment etc. I won’t bother you with the tiny deals which will only save you a few bucks here and there — they have to be substantial deals worth the time it takes to execute them.
Recipes. From time to time I’ll share affordable recipes I am fond of. I am diabetic and eat a low carb diet. This results in there being plenty meat along with veggies in my diet — very little grains and sugar. If anyone reading this blog is vegetarian or Vegan, I beg your pardon and perhaps you can just skip over them. I’ll also share food preservation tips as well along with where I buy all my groceries to get the best prices I can — I keep a Price Book / Shopping Checklist in an Google spreadsheet, which I’ll share later. I like cooking at home because it tastes better than restaurant food and can be affordable, often as little as $1 per plate. (I might talk about meal kit deals from time to time, but mostly I avoid them since they are higher in carbohydrate.)
Transparency. I will never push for anyone to use a referral link of mine knowing one can get a better deal with a direct link — incognito or not — or a referral link better than mine. I will do all that I can, to the best of my knowledge, to share the very best ways to get my readers the most money possible. I would expect the same and this is really one reason I love Profitable Content so much — RJ’s transparency and wanting his readers/viewers to get the best deals possible.
Ads. I don’t like the spammy Google ads, etc. and they’ll never be here on my blog.
Cryptocurrency. I’ll never post anything about cryptocurrency here.