Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

You can get one credit report from every credit reporting agency free per year from annualcreditreport.com, however they still charge you if you want to see your FICO credit score.

Providian offers your credit score free every month if you have any Providian Credit Card, at their website. Also offered are alerts if your score changes too much in a month and a graph that traks your score over a period of time. So far Providian is the only bank that offers this.

At one time I had about 15 or so different credit cards from major banks offering all kinds of rewards including points, cashback, miles etc. Personally I have a lot of miles, and I’m not interested in getting miles from credit cards. Also most credit cards that offer miles are not great unless they have some kind of annual fee (Note: I have not used the much advertised Capital One card so I cannot comment on that).

So today I will feature the best reward programs that have nothing to do with miles. The first card is Citibank Dividend Platinum Select, which offers full 5% cash back on groceries, gas and pharmacy purchases and 1% on everything else (annual limit 300$).

The Chase Cash Plus Rewards card also offers the same benefits as Citibank Dividend Platinum Select.

The next is HSBC Cash Back Platinum. This card offers 1% cash back on everything you spend in a year upto 2500$, 2% cash back on your purchases from 2500$-5000$ and 5% on all purchases beyond that. I haven’t found this card mentioned on the HSBC Credit Cards website however.

Here I will blog about several topics, starting with finance. I am often found lurking in financial newsgroups such as misc.invest.mutual-fund and misc.invest.financial plan. Looking at the posts every week asking for advice and the same old replies and arguments every week, I figured I can blog about these discussions because there seems to be a general lack of understanding amongst people about managing their finances and credit. I don’t claim to be any sort of expert but I do know many of the options available, especially to new investors like me.

I have a page on Investing in India on my website, which is reasonably trafficked and I hope to achieve that with this blog too.