Back in the day they were “selling” dollar coins through tv. It was legal tender so banks had to accept any deposit of it. The U.S. mint offered free shipping in the continental U.S.A.
Some smart folks started buying them with their credit card that offered air travel miles as a reward. Then they took all the coins and depositing them in their bank and paid off their CC. Rinse and repeat.
Yes they were out no money and had thousands of dollars worth airline miles.
One of the sub plots to Punch Drunk Love, and a true story.
don’t those coins cost more than their face value? you are talking commemorative coins yeah?
Commemorative coins do cost more that is correct. However this was not those. This was when the US mint was essentially attempting to phase out the dollar bill and replace it with a coin.
Keep in mind this was late 90s early 2000s.
My bank’s mutual fund let me buy and sell at yesterday’s price, so every time the stock market went up, I bought, and when it went down, I sold. I talked to a teller about it, wondering how much money the mutual fund rule designer had pumped money out of the bank by then. They quickly changed the rule into a non-insane form: today’s price.
I should have just shut up and kept pumping money out of the idiot bank, but I was young and stupid.
You can get a kindle with ads for cheaper than ask them to remove the ads.
Or install koreader?
Dude, you just made my evening. I have an ad-riddled Kindle that’s now going to get an upgrade today!
Aww, and you’ve made mine
and then never connect it to a network right?
then ask them to remove the ads
Sounds like they’ll just roll over if you complain, then you can connect it if you do desire
crazy how a single letter changes the whole meaning. Pretty cool loophole if it’s as simple as asking.
…or get a Kobo and never have to jump through the hoops
Exactly. The kobo is the king. The kindle is just spyware
Straight up.
Then just turn on airplane mode and download calibre. Also, talk to a lady named Anna about her archive.
Not sure if these are exactly loopholes, but whatever.
Learning to shave with a straight razor will save you a fuckton of money on shaving products. Shaving soap makes each shave cost a cent at most. The downsides are the initial cost of the razor, the upkeep, and the couple extra minutes necessary to shave.
Learning to roast coffee will cut your coffee costs by 50% if you enjoy high quality arabica beans. Some of the best coffee I’ve ever had I roasted and brewed myself. The extra time investment and clean up necessary is pretty intensive though.
I just stopped shaving and now trim my facial hair with my hair trimmer. Far easier on the skin and zero extra cost.
Same, I can also shape my beard exactly how I want
Not loopholes but excellent LPTs!
In general doing anything the old fashioned way takes more time and saves money. But it seems like most people are reluctant to spend the time even if they have it, and will rationalize this in some way.
These sound clever and make me regret being a tea-drinking bearded dude
You don’t have to go all the way to straight razor to get significant savings. Even just a safety razor basically cuts the cost per shave to nothing vs. modern cartridges. And it’s much easier to use.
eyup. just as easy as a disposable really an no real learning. just learn to keep it tight :)
Word. I bought enough safety razor blades for likely the rest of my life for about $75 (on sale)
Amex can get your money back on anything. Went to the vet they tried to gaslight me into doing an expensive procedure so I dispute the visit fee 75$
If you’re not abusing it, credit card companies are more than happy to do charge backs via disputes.
And, what, the shady company that scammed you is going to fight a multi billion dollar corporation?
I’ve used this a few times when I got fucked and the company doing the fucking didn’t respond or didn’t care.
The best loophole I’ve ever learned about is closed now.
Early in the Dubya administration they were pushing the dollar coins pretty hard. They went through a whole thing where any government coin-operated machine had to take dollar coins (veterans of the time mostly saw this as it mostly effected military bases but this is why the stamp vending machines at the post office suddenly became useless; they now took dollars instead of quarters).
One of the ways they “encouraged” the use of dollar coins was selling them directly on the Mint’s website. You could go on the US mint’s website and pay face value for them with a credit card, and they paid for shipping. Spend $500, and 500 $1 coins would be shipped to your door.
So people would order tens of thousands of dollars in coins on a credit card, as soon as they arrived they’d haul the coins to the bank and deposit them, immediately pay off the credit card bill with the deposited currency thus accruing no interest, and then they’d have all those rewards points to spend. The government was taking it up the ass shipping tons of coins to residential addresses, the goal of putting them into circulation utterly failed because they were being taken directly to banks, the credit card companies were taking it up the ass on rewards points that weren’t generating enough interest payments to feed the parasites. The policy got canned.
Imagine getting to fuck over a Republican administration and the parasite industry in one perfectly legal move. Too bad I was 14 at the time and wasn’t allowed to have a credit card.
Coinage in this country is one of my pet peeves. We should have a 3, 5, an .50 coins in regular circulation. Coins can work great. They can work fast too.
I can’t believe people shit all over the coin (Sacagawea dollar piece) like they did. They should have made it bigger though, too similar to a quarter to easily distinguish by feeling.
A lot of the mistake was made decades earlier with the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which was the same color and basically the same size as a quarter and thus often mistaken for one. The solution? Mint it in “”“”“”“gold”“”“”“”. It’s actually brass, mainly copper and zinc with some manganese and nickel. Brand new it’s too yellowy and then it tarnishes. It pretends to be gold way worse than the copper-nickel mix in quarters, dimes and, well, nickels pretend to be silver.
It’s still the same dimensions as an Anthony dollar so it still has the problem that it’s very close in size and shape to a quarter, most coin op machines either outright won’t take them or will accept them as quarters, and we’re used to “cents are coins, dollars are paper” that most people didn’t care. The republicans hated them because there was a brown chick on it, everyone hated them because they tried to immediately cram them into everyday life, and then the Mint hated them because they took it up the ass shipping tons of them to residential addresses only for them to end up in banks in original mint packaging anyway.
If it were me, what I would do is scrap the idea that there are 100 cents in a dollar because the dollar has gotten too worthless to worry about a hundredth of one. Stop minting pennies, nickels and quarters, let the existing stock circulate for a couple decades without minting more, and then when everyone is naturally standardized on the dime, ditch the cent entirely and make it 10 dimes to a dollar. I am also a raging misanthrope who would bring back burning at the stake, so probably don’t vote for me.
The great recoinage/auto-da-fé of 2025!
auto-da-fé, what’s an auto-da-fé?
It’s what you oughtn’t a do but you do anyway.
On my old commute, there was this one really long red light with a u-turn and merging road to the right you could take. Since the merging road was there, a right turn was allowed.
On busy traffic days, you could take the u-turn if the light was turning red and just go and skip it with a right turn. Pretty sure it pissed people off, but it was legal as far as I could tell.
I’m not sure if I’m picturing it correctly, but this just sounds like a Michigan left, which is how a lot of intersections here are designed (left turn is forbidden, you have to go past, u-turn, and turn right).
I’m not sure if that’s what they’re talking about or not. The use of u-turn here is weird. The ‘pissing people off part’ makes me think it’s what I usually see people do.
They come up to a red light, they turn right, make a u-turn, and turn right again. Which is basically the same as having driven straight through the original red light to begin with.
Same thing when there’s a really long light with a right-turn lane to a much less busy side street. If you get there shortly after the light turns red just turn right, go partway down the street and make a u-turn, then make another right back onto the main street.
I enjoyed paying $1.50/mo for YouTube premium by signing up with a VPN to Turkey 🇹🇷 but that’s not a thing anymore 😢
Why pay the bastards, just block their ads? Plus you can get sponsor block and bring back youtube dislike
VPN via Turkey used to work on other subs too. Often something like 1:10 discounts. Most of these loopholes are closed though.
It’s still very possible for iOS in app purchases if you use gift cards and a Turkey iTunes account. Some regional pricing has been adjusted but many have not
What do you use it for? Adblock? Use uBlock Origin
Video download? Use yt-dlp, or one of its many GUIs, such as Tubular (Linux) or Seal (Android)
It was nice for iPhone
Fair enough, if you use Apple, you’ve bought into capitalism; you can’t be saved.
Lol, lmao
You can’t cancel your reservation within 24 hours. You can rebook it. Okay, rebook it for one week out. Call back a day later, cancel.
Why wait the extra day, Just do it in the same call. They don’t get paid enough to give a shit. And if they do, you technically haven’t broken any rules.
Yeah, I’m Canadian. Thus, non-confrontational by nature. Now, If I was answering a call and someone did that, I’d let them get away with it, 100%.
Managers audit those calls. Source: I’ve worked in three call centers.
And why should the customer care?
If you want to cancel a subscription for whatever reason, worst comes to worst (dark pattern nonsense like trying to cancel an Adobe subscription) you can call your bank and request for a replacement card
I work for a UK bank, and we automatically provide your replacement card details to all subscriptions, for example Netflix, Spotify, adobe, amazon prime, gym and many many others etc. The reason for that is that if you lost your card or it expired, you would otherwise have to spend ages updating the card numbers with all your providers. We call the subscriptions ‘recurring visa’ and if you ask your bank to place a recurring visa block, it’s quick and easy and we won’t let your named merchant take further funds. No need for a new card. However, if you are in a contract and you deny the company access to your bank card, they may demand that you pay for the rest of the contract still. They won’t be able to get the money from the bank tho.
I did this, a gym membership could “only be cancelled by the manager” I just went online and changed the credit card number on file. Moved away never looked back
The trick with Adobe is to use PayPal… you can then cancel the recurring payment yourself.
Sure, but then you need a PayPal account, and fuck PayPal.
Use a privacy.com virtual credit card. Gives you full control over each card. I use one for each subscription, especially those I don’t plan to renew.
I learned this because I used to get drunk and lose my credit card.
However sometimes they allow cards that are being used for recurring subscriptions to keep going even if you’ve had the card replaced. I know from experience Chase does this
Specifically ask the bank to revoke authorization codes.
It’s supposedly for convenience. More for the people charging me than me, but convenient nonetheless.
My American Express card was compromised a few weeks ago and while they sent me a new card I was still able to use the old one at stores, use mobile payments, and recurring payments could process. The only thing I couldn’t do was use it online. Even after I received the new card, recurring transactions were able to occur.
Tell them it was lost/stolen. Don’t dispute any existing charges, but for security reasons they should still block any new charges made against the old card.
Not drinking isn’t one of the 12 steps
Eye, but not drinking feels like a loophole insofar that I’ve abstained for over 5 years and went from no money to having a down payment for a house saved up, all while improving my health by leaps and bounds. Can’t get a beer gut if you don’t drink 👌
I’m probably 5 years sober … and yes you can :(
Do they still call it a beer gut when you don’t drink? Shouldn’t they call it a pizza and fries gut or something?
I’d say it’s mostly energy drinks,
but I found a really good zero alc beer that is also putting in work so technically still a beer gut.
12 steps of what?
Addiction recovery if I had to guess, in this case alcoholism.
The 12 steps of drinking. Not drinking’s not one of them.
Yep!
But commiting yourself to the idea of surrendering to some kind of God is.
So you can fail AA as a sober atheist, but pass it as a religious, functional alcoholic.
Great system.
Working as intended
Go to a climbing gym. “I think I left my drink bottle here last week. It was clear, about this size”. Worker pulls out a box of lost and found drink bottles. “Oh, that is it there”. Take a dusty one (so you know it’s been there a while, and nobody’s coming back for it). Now you have a new drink bottle! Give it a clean and go!
Don’t be a dick to service workers. Your entire life will be better.
This isn’t a loophole–just how any decent human being should behave.
I think working retail should be a mandatory thing like how military service is mandatory in some countries.
Everyone should have to serve their time doing retail so that they can have a bit of empathy
Not really “loophole”, more like common sense
But a service worker knows lots of loopholes, and they can help you take advantage of them or choose not to bring it up if you’re treating them badly.
Or basic manners. Although, if you want to consider basic manners a loophole, I’m okay with that. It doesn’t matter how you get there.
If your bank can only deposit a certain amount of a check the same day and you need it all just cash it and deposit the cash
Great tip, if you live in the 1980s
WTF
It’s still valid today.
Payroll fucked up and I didn’t get a deposit a few weeks back. They gave me the choice of waiting 2 weeks and having the deposit added to my next paycheck, which is totally undoable, or they would cut me a paper check that day.
I took the paper check.
I decided it would be easiest if I could use my Bank apps Mobile deposit but it only allowed me to access $500 of it that day, the rest had to wait until the next business day which was Monday.
If I would have thought about it I would have done it this way so I could have had access to the whole check before the weekend.Sorry, can’t imagine having a banking system that’s a decade behind fuckin Eritrea or Kazakhstan and thinking it’s the norm 😂
Why be such a jerk to OP?
It’s not OPs fault they live in an underdeveloped nation, they’re just trying to get by.
If you get married the tradition is for one partner to change their last name to match so both have the same last name.
We didn’t do that, so we have different last names.
So when you sign up for services that offer (x) months free or discounted cost per unique household, you use one name, cancel, and sign up under the other name. They don’t know you’re married, don’t know if it’s a rental, or don’t know if it’s a roommate thing. So when we were poor AF we could save a lot of $ on services at least for a few months or so. Usually cable tv that offered a 6-month discount.
has not worked for me. most places its by address.
Eh, this was years ago we played this game. We tried to keep it on the DL by not changing immediately after the discount, usually several months later. We also had separate checking accounts and cards, so that probably helped. The policy may have updated since then, but I don’t see how they’d know if one person canceled the policy and another with an entirely different name and payment account opened a new one.
yeah and actually if its a single family home I have gamed the system by putting apt 1a, 1b, etc but I have not tried it when I actually have an apt/unit/whatnot
Where I live you can freely use your maiden name or your spouse’s name and switch between them whenever you want.
We didn’t like either of our last names so before getting married I legally changed mine so my Spouse could adopt it after the wedding, instead of both of us legally changing it after the wedding.
Even with the same last name they don’t know you’re married. We share a last name and have done this a few times before.
Well played, then.
