I got super excited the other week when I saw my bank was pushing a special June offer for its low-interest Visa, with no fees for the life of the card. Anyone in NZ knows that it’s impossible to find a credit card with no annual fees here (though there is now Kiwibank’s Mastercard Zero – I’m not sure when that launched, because I never heard anything public about it and only learned of its existence through a random Quora thread).
Alas, you cannot earn rewards with that card. Even with account fees, and my bank’s irritating tinkering with the rewards scheme, I still come out ahead overall sticking with my current setup. (And come to think of it, what is the life of a card anyway – is that the life of the physical card, or the actual account? Because if it’s the former, then it would only be a couple years before it expired and I’d have to start paying fees on the new one.)
This week’s links
Ways to be kind to yourself, via Makeup and Mirtazapine
Alexis Grant lays out the cold hard truth: No one will pay you just to write
Kim from So Many Places tries to get her head around returning to the US – and all that entails
Cassie’s turning 30 and has a bunch of astute lessons to share
It’s a fine line … Exactly how confident are you allowed to be before it crosses the line? Via Yes and Yes
Sometimes things happen either all at once or not at all, as Lindsay observes
Athena shares her ‘why’ of personal finance
Here is a pretty awesome and free budget cookbook
A weirdly cool photography project spotlighting mixed race families (though I would consider some of them mixed nationality, not mixed race)
Finally, there are just so many amazing snippets in this piece about Britney in Vegas I have to share:
Single-named DJs pump their skinny arms as women in tight tube dresses and Lucite heels they bought online a year ago straddle mouth-breathing men on VIP couches like they just heard there was an asteroid headed toward earth or just took a handful of Ecstasy; platonic girlfriends decide to make out at no urging at all because we’re in Vegas bitchez! One does not have to go far to feel the erection of a stranger in the rear of one’s jeans. It is in these small, handsy hours of the night that Caesars’ hope for Britney was born…
The first thing you notice when you land in Vegas is all the breasts. Breasts are the shining, veiny centerpiece of the uniforms in Vegas; it’s a city built on the breasts and shoulders of women. The only thing women aren’t in this city are magicians, but they are the people being sawed and made to disappear nightly for the magician’s applause…
They refer to her not as Brit-Brit, which is her family’s nickname for her, but as an assortment of words to describe her made into portmanteaux with her name: When she’s practicing for her show, they call her Rehearsalney. When she’s caught learning choreography or participating in a new sequence, she’s Dancney. When she goes to Target, which is constantly, she’s Errandney. And when she inspires them or pulls something amazing off, which is practically always, if you ask them, she is Godney…
And yes, that does make two weeks of Britney links in a row. Not sorry.