Today’s question of the day is drawing good responses. Some people have also taken the time to warn about how credit cards can easily lead to overspending. This can certainly happen, especially with the plethora of reward cards and programs available these days.

So, I wanted to follow up with a post about UPromise. UPromise, in case anyone isn’t familiar with it already, is a program in which large companies (like Bed Bath & Beyond, Coke, Publix, Exxon, etc.) “help” families pay for college by allowing them to receive some money in an education fund in return for purchasing their items.

In the interest of full-disclosure, we signed up for UPromise in the past (the reward program, not the credit card) but personally didn’t find their service worthwhile, mainly because we seldom purchased products or from the companies that participated in the program, and when we did, we thought the savings were pretty paltry. However, many of our co-workers and friends, especially those with kids, use the service and are very happy with it.

When UPromise first came out, I remember reading an article that I thought was very eye-opening, because it discussed UPromise from a business standpoint rather than from the consumers’. I think its content is worth discussing again here.

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Here’s my contribution to JLP’s Question of the Day Marathon:

How many credit cards do you have, and what’s their combined credit limit?

We have three: two Citibank Dividend MCs and a Visa from our credit union. We use the first two, serially, to get up to $600 cash back each year (since there’s a $300 reward cap on each one), and the third for when we’re outside the US, because it “only” charges Visa’s 1% foreign transaction fee for purchases made outside the country. (The Citibank cards charge 3%.) Total credit line for the three cards is over $34K, which I find pretty ridiculous since that represents an unhealthy chunk of our post-tax income. Apparently, though, having a low credit utilization positively impacts your credit score, something I didn’t know ’til I did a bit of research for this post.

Now it’s your turn. And thanks in advance for sharing and reading!

Update: Interesting how many responders don’t use/own credit cards. MyFico has some average credit statistics and lists the average number of credit cards at 9!

Most of my free time’s occupied right now with trying to learn about some new investing vehicles and re-evaluating some of my current holdings. I’ll be sure to post any learnings, tools, or discoveries as they arise. In the meantime:

1. For value investors out there, George at Fat Pitch Financials has been generous enough to post a preliminary excel spreadsheet he’s been using to evaluate the intrinsic value of companies for his own investment decision purposes. You can download it for free, but it requires a plugin to work (available after automatically joining a group via Yahoo! groups, also for free). He’s using linear regression to forecast future free cash flows and looking for feedback.
2. This week’s Carnival of Investing is up at My 1st Million at 33. I submitted a post on what to do with employee stock options, and there are many more that run the gamut from real estate to technical analysis.

Pardon the light posting. More content forthcoming soon.

Ramit over at I Will Teach You To Be Rich has started a unique personal finance “ad campaign” targeted at younger people.

The idea’s pretty simple: create a bunch of arresting images (like the one to the left) that get people to pause and consider the importance of starting to manage their money at an early age, and then direct these same people to his website.

I don’t benefit from putting this ad here, but I admire the initiative he took, think the message is important, and believe that what Ramit has to offer is worthwhile enough to suggest you head over there and visit his site, especially if you’re a recent college grad. What he’s accomplished so far is impressive, and I think his communication style is pretty effective for the audience he’s targeting.

If you’re a personal finance blogger and think it’s a worthwhile message to spread, he’s got an entire series of images planned. (One other, entitled “Retirement accounts? But I’m 23” is also available.)

In July, Experiglot’s NPV grew to $89.93. Traffic has continued to grow, albeit a bit slower, in large part due to my guest writing stint over at All Things Financial and having my post on ETFs picked up by TheStreet.com.

Revenue sources have finally diversified a bit: I got my first ad request from Linkworth (see left sidebar) and decided to sign up for Emigrant Direct’s affiliate program. We’ll see if it’s worth keeping or not.

You might have noticed that the graph on the upper left sidebar is now based on quarters rather than months. It just got too hard to read, so I decided to simplify it a bit now that I’m into my 3rd quarter of this experiment and aggregate data can actually be used.