Best posts made by honkinggoose

Thank you @Ma Barker . I’ve logged into Discover bank and see 5 of my 6 accounts. The remaining one is still waiting to confirm my identity. Full funding will hit 3 of the last 4 by Tuesday, and the other will fund shortly after they give me an account number. Easy 1200 bucks. That will cover some upcoming taxes that I always hate to pay. “:)”

I opened 3 accounts in my name and 3 in my wife’s name. I presume most people do this. Has anyone tried to open a joint account as another route to a bonus? That would mean 7 accounts per couple. I did not have an additional 20k available within the next two weeks, so could not try. It would tie up 140k, but I doubt if these things happen simultaneously on a regular basis, and it’s only for a couple of months.

Of course, I doubt if Discover will do one of these again (3 bonuses ending on the same day). When I called, it sounded as loud as a boiler room with poor acoustics.

Sorry for pointing you in the wrong direction, @hbg1. A couple of your issues were exactly like mine.

@FrugalFreak
Wow! I guess I’m not as weird as everyone says … or you … never mind.

@dangeRuss
As for why I block a lot of things, my reasons are similar to FrugalFreak’s.

Tracking cookies - I don’t block all of these, but they are deleted when I close my browser (every couple of hours). That said, I believe that with the tracking and fingerprinting methods used by companies today, non or n-PII “non-personally identifiable information” is only technically true. If you haven’t yet, take a look at https://panopticlick.eff.org.
I don’t do things online that I’d be embarrassed about, but think my activities should remain semi-private. Although not a perfect analogy, this is the best one that comes to me at the moment - I would be pretty ticked off if the library, without notification, was selling the list of books that I checked out. I would be even madder if they told me that it was non-PII, when it was trivial for anyone to make it PII without my knowledge or consent.

Javascript - This is at least as much for safety as privacy. With today"s, ransomware, malware, scriptmorons and the like, I look at NoScript as a sometimes painful, extra step of protection. Although I’ve only mistyped my way into a couple of bad sites, there have been several reports of legitimate websites being scammed to serve up malware. Recently, the most famous to do this was Equifax. As well, would you feel comfortable if you logged into your bank and NoScript popped up asking if you want to allow javascript from a .ru, .cn, or .kp domain to run on your machine? It happened to me for several weeks / months at Chase.

OTOH, I may be deluding myself, and Google not only knows my SSN, shoe size, and favorite food, but also my date and time of death. “:-)”

Regarding your test with Firefox, that tells me that I need to update all my settings backups, gather last night’s data backup and restore my machine from an image. I normally do this every year around Christmas, so it’s about due, but finding the downtime will be my biggest issue. Your test also tells me that this has caused you undue work, for which I apologize. Thank you very much for going above and beyond. I don’t know how you find time in the day, or you’ve got a secret workshop of elves …

Thanks again and enjoy the remainder of your weekend.

@zapjb

Those prices were for Dec 2 - 9, 2017 in zip 14221. Those prices naturally change by the date and the location. Usually airport affiliated locations are more expensive. I just checked and Dec 2, 17 - Jan 2,18 will cost 838, all in, for a full size at the same location. You can check the prices yourself, sorry for not providing the link earlier - www.costcotravel.com. You can check prices without membership, but will need your member number to book.

Or “There’s a needle exchange van that comes by once a week”. Jeez, why did that pop into my head - too many drug movies.

@Ma Barker said:
“This is understandable so the bank will not be out of $$ if the check bounces fwr. For bounced checks, they assess a fee for it and Chase is one of those banks that aren’t forgiving especially to those who have opted out of overdraft protection.”

@richard, make absolutely sure that the check is not going to bounce. Not only will you be hit with the mentioned fees, but rest assured that the exchange rate for the “bounced” part of the transaction will be much better than the lousy exchange rate for the “deposit” part. Thus, not only do you have hunt down a check bouncer in a foreign country, but you get a bounce fee from Chase, and one additional gut punch of losing 3 - 5 percent on the deposit-bounce transaction. Yuck!

That you can’t pay back.

Congrats on what can be an amazing experience if you’ve never been to Europe. You are going when the exchange rate is very good. You may want to confirm that May is still the shoulder season. If not, April lodging rates will be much lower. Once you decide what you want to see / do, you can then determine if there is a tour that covers those things.

My wife and I went a dozen years ago, but we won’t be tour people until at least our 70’s, if then. For us a significant percentage of the fun was deciding what to see and where to go. We both spent a few nights researching (cost, location, time required) and ranking the sites that we each wanted to see. We then spent a little time each night discussing and narrowing down the sites. It was a packed two weeks that we will never forget. We actually hit everything that we planned to do, but weren’t allowed into two of the castles due to the queen being in residence, or about to be in residence. We used Priceline and Betterbidding to pick a great rate on a great hotel next to the tube in London, took a train to Bath for a half-day, rented a car and drove to the Cotswolds, Nottingham, York, Inverness, Edinburgh, and lots of smaller places along the way. We met tons of wonderful people, saw historical sites with a whole new perspective, and thoroughly enjoyed the entire trip, including our 1.5 “rain days”. The people of England, including London, were much warmer and friendlier than we expected.

I can be kind of thrifty :-), but we did not pinch pennies on this trip (nor did we spend like a drunken sailor). This was going to be, in all likelihood, our only trip to England, and I did not want to constantly be calculating the exchange into dollars. I don’t recall exact numbers, but our two weeks were way under $3000, including airfare. We stayed at one B&B for 2 nights, one 3 star hotel for 3 nights, one 4 star for 4 nights, and a five star for 1 night. The remainder were with family. To get a very rough idea of costs, just figure out how much the trip would cost you in comparable areas in the U.S. and then multiply it by the exchange rate.

Finally, although we saw tons of sights, the two that stand tall above the rest are the British Library and the Cambridge American Cemetery.
Whether you do a tour, or do everything on your own, have fun.

@frett If you’re planning skills are good here, they’ll be good there. At least they speak English. As @my4mainecoons mentions, guidebooks are great place to start. We used one of Rick Steves’ guidebooks to pick the places that we wanted to see.

As for car info, yes, they all have steering wheels on the right. It took quite an effort on the first day to adjust, especially the right hand turns. After that it was only a problem when there was no traffic (nothing to remind you to stay to the left). I went through a few empty traffic circles the wrong way. “:-)” Almost all rentals have manual trannies, but with so many changes to vehicles in the last decade, I don’t know if they still have clutches.
One oddity that I had to learn on my on was their traffic signals go from red to yellow to green. The yellow is kind of like a green light ( but not an arrow ) in a turn lane - you’re free to go if it’s clear. There are speeding cameras on a lot of the M series highways, where the fast lane is to the right, and it’s illegal to pass on the left. Despite my first day jitters, and catching a few curbs on right hand turns, driving was one of my fond memories of that trip. People in England seem to take driving a lot more seriously than Americans. On the not-very-crowded M1 driving at 60 - 70 mph, I felt quite confident that if anything happened, I knew exactly what the vehicles near me would do. To me, that was an incredibly freeing experience, and made driving very enjoyable.

Okay, so now I am long-windedgoose. “:-)”. One last thing that talking about the driving reminded me of - everywhere that you are a pedestrian, remember to always look to the right as you come to a curb. We are so programmed to look to the left that we often have a foot half-way off the curb as we look to the right. In Great Britain, it is exactly the opposite.