I bought a $100 American Airlines gift card. I suppose AA could go BK, but i’d rather have the gift card that I might possibly be able to use or re-sell down the line than just waste the credit…
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Sure, since that’s “use it or lose it” situation. Is there any other airline’s GC that is treated as travel expenses, such as Southwest?
I don’t know off the top of my head.
Found a couple of links which may be useful. I have NOT read them yet.
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I’ve just paid my property and income taxes for the second year and have paid tuition charges with it. If the surcharge is 2.5% or less, and it is in my case with the state (and state University), you actually pay less tax by charging than you do if you use an “e-check” (ACH). I even used it when the surcharge was greater than the rebate once (2.75%) because the increase (0.13%) was worth it to me to delay paying over $3k for almost two months.
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I had a special assessment and apparently my HOA gets categorized as travel by BofA/Visa, so the rewards were actually higher than the fee.
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My understanding is that there are no trading fees and you can hold your fee-free low cost Vanguard index funds or a money market mutual fund if that’s your thing. These days there’s no difference between the major brokerages in terms of cost for self-directed internet trades.
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How exactly do they make money off your $100k? I moved over $100k of a Vanguard mutual fund. And they paid me $500 to do that, too.
It looks like the standard Merrill Edge bonus is $600 for $200K in assets. There was a 50% bonus promotion ($900 for $200K) which expired on 7/15.
I’d like to learn more about this too if Argyll would be so kind. While the thread is not about good IRA custodians, if MerrillEdge is a bad one, I’d like to move my money elsewhere.
There are internal mutual fund fees that all the brokerages share with each other, even with no-load funds with no CDSC which have largely gone away. The thing is you will likely pay them at any firm, and those fees, unlike the CDSC, come out of the rate of return on the investment(s), so as long as the investment is doing well, and there is no CDSC, and you will pay these fees at any firm, and ML does not charge more for any account or advisory/wrap fees, why not have the credit card rebate(s) on top of it?
And any transfer bonus, which I am not up on, would be on top of this. That’s how I look at it, anyway. Unless I am overlooking something, of course.
I get the restaurant category for these liquid lunches by mail, inspired by the movie.
Also: regarding B of A rewards, there are three tiers. Although you need $100k in ME or WM to get a 75% CC rewards boost, $20k gets you a 25% boost, and $50k gets you a 50% increase in the CC rewards, which are not too shabby either.
In addition, you can try the B of A Cash Rewards card – 3% in a category of your choice, 2% at grocery stores and 1% elsewhere. The bonus applies to this card also, and if you select restaurants as your top category you would get 3% x (1.75, 1.5 or 1.25) depending on your level of B of A rewards on this card as well, with no annual fee.
I would likely agree that the Alliant premier cash reward card is better unless you have $100k at ML.
Hope this is useful.
Thank you. Let’s try an example. Can you tell us what these fees are for this ticker: SPY and for this ticker: VT?
None of us are talking about deposits.
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Deposits? Of course they make money off the cash you deposit. This is about investment holdings. And mutual funds at that, not even individual shares of stock that they can lend to short sellers.
So you’re saying the mutual fund itself pays a fee to wherever the fund shares are being held?
Account transfer bonuses are pure customer acquisition costs.
First a disclaimer – I am a layman, not an investment professional. That being said, this is how I see it:
You have two classes of fees (as I see it): internal (within the investment) and external (outside).
Outside = account fees, wrap/investment advisory fees, transaction fees, etc. that are external to the return on the investment, but may impact when you buy/sell the investment.
Inside = 12b1 (marketing) and other internal expenses that reduce the return of the investment.
It is the inside investment fees that I believe you are talking about. For the first example you gave, SPY, it appears to be an ETF, not a mutual fund, and tries to replicate the S&P 500 Index, a low-cost, passively managed Index fund tracking the S&P 500. It appears to have internal fees which detract from the return, these are laid out on page 1 of the prospectus and equal 0.0945% of the Trust average net assets.
I focus less on these kind of internal fees, as you can compare relative investments by their rates of return, which take internal fees that detract from the return into account. Whether it is a portion of this, or some other fees buried within the ETF documentation, money has to be paid to the holder of the fund if it is not being held by the creator of the fund. Otherwise, you would pay external fees, such as a transaction fee for buying or selling, to cover your broker’s expenses. there needs to be an agreement in place between the creator of the investment and the place that it is held, and it stands to reason that remuneration would be a part of that agreement.
In addition, some investments have different classes that pay slightly different rates of return – things like institutional classes of shares, that self-directed accounts can’t buy but investment advisors can. So even if you pay a wrap fee, you may be able to obtain an investment that pays a little bit better than a standard class of the same underlying investment from within a managed account that is not reachable from a self-directed account unless you have tens of millions of dollars to invest in a single fund. This may be structured differently for ETFs, but I would bet that the basic principle would still be there (investor / managed accounts) get a slightly better return that regular investors, because the underlying principle is the same.
An example of this is here for Vanguard mutual funds. So a wrap fee gets more than just a broker / team managing the investment, it may also invest you in a better class of shares that mitigates in part the wrap fee charged, in addition to not paying buy/sell transaction fees as they are included also.
I hope this is helpful. Got wordy.
So you’re saying the mutual fund itself pays a fee to wherever the fund shares are being held?`
There has to be an agreement for, say, ML to hold a Vanguard (no-load) fund. Payment of the “load” (Class A or B shares) used to be the reason, or a portion of the higher expenses of a Class C share of a mutual fund. Whatever the agreement between them is, I think it is reasonable that a fee payment is part of it, yes.` Otherwise you would only be able to hold no-load funds at that fund company (vanguard at vanguard, for example) or would have to pay a transaction fee at buy and/or sell time, which is still true for some funds I believe.
Hope this helps.
So is this your educated guess, or based on something tangible? Because we’ve seen mutual fund companies make their funds available to be held by third party custodians. But I dont know if there’s any indication the fund is paying that custodian. I’ve always assumed it was just a perk the custodian is providing to their clients, to entice them to keep their assets in-house. But it is possible that a marketing fee is being paid as well.