Paying for incidentals

#1
Is this the place to start a thread on prepaid credit cards and hotel reservations?

It is becoming increasingly difficult to reserve a room on line and check in while maintaining privacy.

Gift cards do not have a customer name. Hotels want a card with a name, expiry date, and sometimes, that the card name matches the reservation name.

Cards are not reloadable, and Uber do not accept such finite spending cards.

Reloadable can dis need online registration with SSN.

No reloadable cards need an ID check at Walgreens at time of purchasing and funding the card.

This was all easier three years ago.

What's the best way to manage to keep hobby ID an expenses separate from everyday civilian life ?
 
#2
Is this the place to start a thread on prepaid credit cards and hotel reservations?

It is becoming increasingly difficult to reserve a room on line and check in while maintaining privacy.

Gift cards do not have a customer name. Hotels want a card with a name, expiry date, and sometimes, that the card name matches the reservation name.

Cards are not reloadable, and Uber do not accept such finite spending cards.

Reloadable can dis need online registration with SSN.

No reloadable cards need an ID check at Walgreens at time of purchasing and funding the card.

This was all easier three years ago.

What's the best way to manage to keep hobby ID an expenses separate from everyday civilian life ?
Get a Visa or MC card in your name only but of same type you have with your SO, setup for paperless billing - if really paranoid you can pay off via money order but probably just with paperless check from your checking (you do pay all your other bills that way - right - if not you should). Not fool proof but unless your SO is a forensic accountant will be difficult to track.
 
#4
That's going to great lengths to indulge in this hobby. Cant u just pop in to a motel6 and pay w cash?
If you are single cash is no problem - you just take it out of your checking account.
For us with SOs, cash is getting harder to get as tax refunds, insurance dividends and other refunds are all in joint name or deposited electronically into joint checking account. Cash withdrawals that show up on a joint checking account are obvious and can raise the question of "where does all that cash go" whereas payment to a VISA card is just another credit card payment and causes much less suspicion by getting lost in all the other payments.

Cash is gotten by cashing reimbursement checks from work/consulting expenses, dividend checks from investments in my name only, rewards checks from Visa/MC for cards in my name.

I have enough money to hobby w/o affecting my standard of living; I just don't have it available to me as cash.


PS. recent WSJ article titled The Sinister Side of Cash and makes a lot of sense, starts off this way:

When I tell people that I have been doing research on why the government should drastically scale back the circulation of cash—paper currency—the most common initial reaction is bewilderment. Why should anyone care about such a mundane topic? But paper currency lies at the heart of some of today’s most intractable public-finance and monetary problems. Getting rid of most of it—that is, moving to a society where cash is used less frequently and mainly for small transactions—could be a big help.

For those of you who have access to digital WSJ here is the link: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sinister-side-of-cash-1472137692
Worth the read.
 
#5
If you are single cash is no problem - you just take it out of your checking account.
For us with SOs, cash is getting harder to get as tax refunds, insurance dividends and other refunds are all in joint name or deposited electronically into joint checking account. Cash withdrawals that show up on a joint checking account are obvious and can raise the question of "where does all that cash go" whereas payment to a VISA card is just another credit card payment and causes much less suspicion by getting lost in all the other payments.

Cash is gotten by cashing reimbursement checks from work/consulting expenses, dividend checks from investments in my name only, rewards checks from Visa/MC for cards in my name.

I have enough money to hobby w/o affecting my standard of living; I just don't have it available to me as cash.


PS. recent WSJ article titled The Sinister Side of Cash and makes a lot of sense, starts off this way:

When I tell people that I have been doing research on why the government should drastically scale back the circulation of cash—paper currency—the most common initial reaction is bewilderment. Why should anyone care about such a mundane topic? But paper currency lies at the heart of some of today’s most intractable public-finance and monetary problems. Getting rid of most of it—that is, moving to a society where cash is used less frequently and mainly for small transactions—could be a big help.

For those of you who have access to digital WSJ here is the link: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sinister-side-of-cash-1472137692
Worth the read.
It sucks that you have that to worry about that. I'm in a business where I'm sometimes paid in cash so no problems with the SO. Have you tried setting aside 40 or 60 every time you take 300 from the ATM or picking up a group dinner tab and having your friend give you the cash.
 
#6
The preloaded cards are easy to use if they are activated at the cashier when and where you buy the card. Walgreens checks ID, a lot of other places do not.

Seeking Arrangement did not accept my prepaid card to renew. No specific error message, but I learned that SA want a card that can handle international transactions, and my prepaid card cannot. Another roadblock.

For prepaid hobbyphone, if you buy a minutes card, you have to phone in, enter the card number, the phone number, and enter the activation code from the receipt, and navigate through a bunch of phone menues. Painful !

I top up minutes at small independent stores, much easier.
 
#7
What is the process for topping up mintues at indie stores? How does it differ from using a minutes card? Using a card seems very anonymous. You buy the card for cash and activate the card through your hobby phone. The only interaction is the card purchase. And if you do it for cash, there is no trace (other than the chance you are being recorded on video). With topping up at a store, I would think that there is an interaction with the store clerk that goes beyond just buying a card. Please elaborate. thnx
 
#8
What is the process for topping up mintues at indie stores? How does it differ from using a minutes card? Using a card seems very anonymous. You buy the card for cash and activate the card through your hobby phone. The only interaction is the card purchase. And if you do it for cash, there is no trace (other than the chance you are being recorded on video). With topping up at a store, I would think that there is an interaction with the store clerk that goes beyond just buying a card. Please elaborate. thnx

Just show up at the store, tell them you want to put $40 on your Boost phone, (or whatever other brand) unlock the phone, maybe hand the phone over. Or keep the phone in your pocket and just tell them your phone number. They type some numbers into their computer or cash register. Hand over the cash. Within two minutes, they tell you it is complete and hand you a printed receipt. You do not need the receipt.

I then check my balance by SMS, something like

*BAL# [Talk]
And receive a text showing my expiry has been extended and other 30 days. Then I leave the store.

Imagine you bought a phone card but had a butler to type all the numbers for you. It's like that. Except they generate the numbers from the computer.

At some AT&T stores they have an ATM like device where you type in your phone number and deposit cash. For a while they had some tax dodge where you could pretend to 'pay your bill' rather than 'buy minutes' and thereby escape an NYC / NY sales tax.

I had a couple of bad experiences buying cards , leaving the store without using the card, and then not being able to use the card.


One was a scratch off plastic card, which I scratched off the silver paint and the ink below, by scratching with a steel house key. Then I could not read the number I needed to type in.

Another card I bought had a code number that was not recognized and I needed to call customer service. Turned out I got an old stock card with fewer digits that the current supply. Spent 45 minutes on hold on my hobby flip phone to get manually credited by N operator. After that I do not leave the store before I get SMS confirmation of my new balance.



Buying a hobby smart phone and getting set up with no ID is no problem at independent stores. A reconditioned iPhone5 or Samsung equivalent is cheap, and makes texting multiple people much easier than on my old flip phone burner.
 
#10
Does that procedure work with Tracfone? I like the small outlay for the longer term. $20 for 3 months/60 minutes x3.
I've had my Tracfone for 3 years - bought a cheapo flip phone there for $15 that also had 2X minutes bonus (the double the minutes every time you add minutes) Yes, texting is a pain but the phone looks like an old flip phone I had and I keep it in my car's tool box (for 911 emergencies- inactivated phones all still will work on 911 - that's my story if anyone should come across it and ask.) I buy the minutes at Target when they have a sale (couple bucks off the card). Scape the wax coating covering off the card with a coin (never had a problem with this) and there is an $ app on the phone the brings up the "enter code" box, you enter code and you are done. 2X bonus is remembered as it belongs to the phone and minutes are automatically doubled.

PS Target is best place to buy condoms and related supplies. Just got a 24 box of Skyns (I've tried them all and these are the best IMHO - they are thin, somehow fit the, ahem, bigger sized appendages w/o feeling like you are wearing a tire inner tube as with the Trojan Magnums ) there for under $10 and another 5% off using my Target card. You can use the self-serve checkout where the checkouts are separate scanning stations (no moving belt where the stuff is sitting out there for all to see) where you can discreetly scan your stuff and drop it into the bag without having anyone in line behind you or using a cashier.
 
#11
Yeah, that's why I got a Tracfone also. And now you can even get 3X minutes. But I wanted to know from Jaxny if the top up @ the convenience store works with that.
 
#16
LOL. No, I meant for preloaded cards, not the phones themselves.
BTW, be careful using their ATMs. Awhile back, some of their stores had skimmers attached to the ATMs. (King Kullen just got hit at five of their stores, too.)
 
#17
LOL. No, I meant for preloaded cards, not the phones themselves.
BTW, be careful using their ATMs. Awhile back, some of their stores had skimmers attached to the ATMs. (King Kullen just got hit at five of their stores, too.)
My technical background says that the skimming is from the magnetic strip on the card and is much more difficult with the " chip" cards. I've been out of this field for a while (and I really don't care as that's the bank's problem) but my gut feeling is the skimmers go after the low hanging fruit, i.e. the magnetic stripe cards.

Any comment from technical guys here would be appreciated.
 
#18
A search on the topic of skimming with chip cards yielded these contrasting comments from different articles:
•Because the card’s information changes after every transaction, data skimmed from it would be useless to a criminal.
•Fraudsters have started dropping devices into ATMs that can steal data off chip-enabled credit or debit cards.
 
#19
A search on the topic of skimming with chip cards yielded these contrasting comments from different articles:
•Because the card’s information changes after every transaction, data skimmed from it would be useless to a criminal.
•Fraudsters have started dropping devices into ATMs that can steal data off chip-enabled credit or debit cards.
Simplifying the process with a chip card is that there is 2 sides to the transfer of ID info - 1 that is encoded in the chip and a 2nd at the decoding center that has info on the chip card that is only known to the agency that made that particular chip card. Copying data coming out of the chip card during a particular transaction (say during an atm transaction where a skimmer has read all the data back and forth from the chip card does no good at the next transaction) is only unique to that particular transaction.

Imagine a combination lock where the combination to open the lock is dynamic - it changes each time you try and open the lock based on the person who made the lock knows for that particular lock the method by which the combination is to be changed. This is simply not the same as copying the data on a magnetic strip on a card and in effect having an exact copy of everything needed to be the original card. So someone who watches you open your combination lock and records your combination is nt able to use that combination the next time the lock is to be opened as the combination has changed.
 
#20
If the explanation I've given is not clear please accept my apologies as my thinking is affected by the several bourbons I've have just prior to login to UG. I do love my Bulleit Bourbon - used to be a Scotch drinker but have found that a good Bourbon is better than a good Scotch and I am not exporting my $'s.
 
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