comcast deal for new subscribers

Last year I moved to a new house, and I needed to sign up for broadband internet. While at Best Buy one day, I talked to a sales representative who told me about an unadvertised promotion they had with Comcast. The details, which sounded too good to be true, were:

• Six months of broadband internet for $19.99/month
• Free cable modem after rebate (~$80)
• Free wireless router after rebate (~$60)
• Free “setup kit” after rebate (~$20)
• $100 Best Buy gift card

So, adding all that up, you pay about $160 upfront and $120 for six months of service. Total upfront & monthly cost: $280.

But, after rebates you get all $160 back as well as a $100 gift card to Best Buy. Essentially, you get broadband internet, a cable modem, a wireless router and a connection kit for $20. I found this hard to believe, but after grilling the sales representative I went ahead and signed up. Total cost after rebates: $20.

Rebate Timeline

To get the rebate, you have to wait for your first Comcast bill to come in the mail. After that you simply mail a copy of all the different receipts along with a copy of the cable bill for each rebate. Putting together everything needed for all of the rebates and mailing them out takes about one hour.

After mailing the rebates, I received my checks and $100 gift card about two months later. The upfront cost is a bit high, but the rebates and gift card, as well as the extremely discounted service (regular internet from comcast costs anywhere from $40-65/month depending on other services you may have with them), make it worth it.

Cancellation & Friends’ Successes

After the six months were up, I promptly cancelled the service with no problems. You do not have to sign up for a one year contract to get this deal, which is another great perk.

Since getting this deal for myself, I have helped my new roommate to get the deal as well as a friend who had already signed up with Comcast without any deals. She was able to call back and get the deal applied to her account that she had created a few days before.

More Comcast Deal Resources

Another great site with information on Comcast deals, as well as a wealth of personal finance/deal information is MyMoneyBlog. I highly recommend adding it to your RSS reader if you have one (if not, I’ll be writing about RSS readers in a future post, so stay tuned). See the links below for Comcast deal articles on MyMoneyBlog:

• MyMoneyBlog: New Customer Deals
• MyMoneyBlog: Existing customers - haggle down your bill

quicken to moneydance part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I gave my first impression of Moneydance. Part 2 is a more detailed look at various features of my new personal finance software of choice.

It’s important to note that all of the below I have done without reading any user guide or help website. I’m evaluating the software based on how intuitive it is. So far I’ve been relatively impressed. The features will be familiar to anyone who has experience with Quicken, and many of the features are simpler and better designed in my opinion.

Online access: So far I’ve been able to connect over OFX to Wachovia and Citi Credit Cards. I haven’t had the same luck with my Chase account.However, again this is still a big improvement over Quicken 2004 for Mac. To import my transactions, I would have to log in to the bank website and download the transactions file, then open it using Quicken.

User Interface: Moneydance is much more streamlined than Quicken. So far, using it has also been more intuitive. For example, the split transaction feature (which I use to track taxes paid on my paychecks) makes more sense to me. I would often get tripped up trying to enter a split in Quicken because Quicken would try to do auto-calculations on the fly (actually I’m not sure that is the best description, but something about splits in Quicken always confused me. No such confusion in Moneydance thus far).

Reporting: Moneydance does not have as much to offer as Quicken in reporting capabilities. I miss the Quicken magnifying glass that allowed me to drill down from a report into the register where the transaction exists. Some Moneydance reports have a feature like these, while others do not. That being said, I like adjusting column widths in Moneydance better than in Quicken.

Multi-platform: This is my favorite part of Moneydance. I can keep my account file on my thumb drive and interchangeably use it between my Mac and PC laptops. Quicken 2004, on the other hand, has two completely separate programs for Mac and Windows, with no easy interoperability that I know of. Also, the Mac version does not have the same features as the Windows version, which I found to be confusing and misleading.

Investments: I have struggled to figure out investment accounts in Moneydance. I imported my 401k and Roth IRA accounts with no problem, but I cannot figure out how to enter shares, purchase price, ticker and other fund information. To be fair, I did not do this in Quicken 2004, and I’m not sure if the Mac version even supported investment tracking. For now I am just tracking the principal for my investments in Moneydance. I will keep working on how to get the investments to update based on the current stock prices.

quicken to moneydance part 1

I went to reconcile my accounts in Quicken today, and I came to the annoying realization that Quicken had decided to sunset Quicken 2004 (Mac version). My bank no longer supported Quicken 2004. They actually removed the option to download account files for Quicken 2004. I tried the Quicken 2005 file (same file extension), but no luck there.

I can’t believe that this is Quicken’s business strategy to get me to upgrade. Break my software and then tell me that to fix it I have to shell out $70 to get Quicken 2007, which, from the reviews I’ve read, sucks. No thanks. How do big, successful companies like Intuit (makers of Quicken) stay in business with this kind of garbage?

Anyways, I happened to read on Lifehacker today that a new version of Moneydance was just released. Moneydance is cross-platform (Windows/Mac/Linux), and $30 for a license. They also have a free trial that seems to be fully functional. So far, I’m very impressed with Moneydance. I spent about two seconds importing all of my Quicken data (about 1.5 years of transactions) into Moneydance with zero hitches. Also, I’ve been able to connect directly with my bank and credit card company to download transactions - something that I could never get to work in Quicken 2004.

I will add more as I continue to work with Moneydance.

death by good ideas

…Even starting this blog is an example of the title. I am overwhelmed by ideas, dreams, musings to the point that I rarely act on any of them. This is a detrimental habit - I need to get a handle on it.

As I was thinking about the blog in the past couple of days, I’ve come up with a million post ideas, but I haven’t executed on any of them. At times like this, my lofty ambitions for some new project can be more helpful than hurtful.

How can I break out of this habit? How can I narrow in on an idea, flesh it out, and get something useful out about it? I hope this medium will be helpful to me. Let’s see…

welcoming myself to the blogosphere

This is an experiment. What am I trying to accomplish here?

• flesh out entrepreneural ideas
• share what i’ve learned in life, specifically: personal finance, life hacks, buying your first house, productivity

More ideas to come.