Passive Income with Agloco

Agloco is a company trying to pinch a few bucks out of the internet advertising money. The idea is to gain ground by sharing the revenue with their subjects, and that means with you and me. The idea is not new, and quite similar to the infamous AllAdvantage. I knew of people making thousands dollars with AllAdvantage back in the dot-com days. These were all cheaters, creating countless accounts and referring these to themselves, and running bots to click links day and night :) AllAdvantage was wasting money on these dudes, and went all belly up.

What's new with Agloco is that they seem to be quite aware of this problem. Times have changed, and there are no wild investor money to throw around. On the other hand, internet advertising has matured. There's a lot more services to be advertised, and advertising technology has been perfected by Google and the likes.

You can earn passive income by signing up and installing Agloco's viewbar. It is a narrow strip similar to the window's taskbar, spanning the length of the screen. Did you notice it in the screenshot? It shows some information and the dreaded advertising. The good news is, your income does not matter on whether you click anything or not. In fact, it does not even matter if you have the taskbar on all the time.

The entire profit is divided equally. That means the best strategy is not to cheat, as that maximizes your profit-to-effort ratio! One can earn at most five browsing hours per month. So if there's ever a moment you feel you are wasting your time online, well you might as well launch the program and earn your credit.

Once you have the credits, you automatically get a share of the entire revenue produced by all members, and even company shares. There's also a referral bonus, just like in affiliate programs. This is perhaps why the word is spreading fast through the blogs. I had signed up by a referral myself.

The company is young, and the viewbar was launched just two weeks ago. So if there's ever a good time to jump on this, then that's now. Even if the thing is not going to fly, you'll get something before they bust. It is commonly observed that pioneer companies will often disappear just to clear the way for successful projects built on their experience. Yahoo did not invent email, Google did not invent the web search, and Windows was by far not the first operating system. It may well turn out that this project will live, and you'll have extra money every month without having to sacrifice a part of your life for it.

Stoozing Update: Money Transfer

The check from the credit card has cleared, and the funds were available today, just one day after the deposit. Since I had transfer scheduled with Emigrant Direct, which is my favorite online savings account, the money are already in New York. Emigrant Direct blocks funds for a while, obviously as a security measure. They are earning money already, but I cannot yet buy into a CD. Yeah, and I kept fifty bucks in my checking to pay the first minimum payment. This should be one percent, and that's $35. I will be paying a bit over the minimum and will later look how did that show up on my credit history.

$toozing

Stoozing is turning a buck by loading zero-APR-low-transfer-fee credit cards and tucking the money into a good savings account. So you get free credit, use it to earn some interest and then pay the card when introductory period is about to expire. I am about to try this out.

The idea has been around for a while, and a couple years ago you could get really good deals with hefty credit limits and no transfer fees at all. I was then still in debt and nobody wanted to give me good limits anyways. Now I got out, and have this card that actually makes it possible.

Is stoozing cheating? Well, in finance lingo this is called arbitrage, and financial institutions do this day in and day out to each other, whenever they can. Arbitrage implies that certain actions can be taken to make profit without risk at all, and signifies an imbalance in the economy. When such conditions arise, scavenging on them restores the balance, and so this is essentially a healthy process.

Cheap credit card balance transfers from the days when the federal interest rate was non-existent and higher savings interest rates reflecting on new conditions in the economy are precisely in this sort of profit-promising imbalance. People are abusing these transfers en masse, and I actually have a friend who earned over half a grand on this last year alone. The result is that the cards are now coming with a much higher transfer fees.

It used to be that the transfer fee is something like 3% of the balance, capped at hundred dollars of so. These caps are now going up quite quickly, and often there's none at all. Sometimes the percentage for the fee is as high as 5%. But if you get an offer with the transfer fee capped at a good level, you can still play the game!

That's exactly what I got, an HSBC MasterCard with 3% of transfer fee, but no more then $100. Minimum payments are just 1% of the balance. The person at the activation really wanted me to transfer some stuff to them, even if to my checking account. So there, they got it.

I have a low limit - $3600, and I am taking nearly all of it to my Emigrant Direct account, making about 5% a year. This means at my best I will net $75 or so, but hey, I got to start with something!

Debt Free, For A Week

I am just about to write a check for fifteen hundred and eight dollars, add 95 cents. This is what remains of my credit card debt. I had it under control for more then a year now, in zero percent accounts, opening new cards when the old ones were about to expire from the intro period. I paid big if I could, otherwise just dollar a day, in a kind of a calendar ritual. My credit ranking grew quite a bit, but I almost got burned again this winter when I went abroad and got stuck for two month. You know the drill.

It wasn't always this easy on me. I never had too huge a debt, perhaps because I missed my first payments even before I had a chance to get big credit lines. It was about three and a half grands at its peak, and stayed there for long time while I struggled to catch up with payments and all sort of fees, periodically forgetting to send a check, causing another avalanche of penalties. I dived on my checking account and got three hundred of them, on small purchases totaling less then a hundred. I didn't even open the letters, waiting for the next paycheck to come. Well the bank didn't wait and closed my checking account. I was maxed on my cards, nobody would issue me another, and the rent was due. I borrowed from my roommate and had about six hundred outstanding on my closed bank account. Add the bills and my split-the-bill balance with my roommate and the total would be about five grands.

It is now about five years since I first didn't pay the full balance on a credit card, and I never got out of it. Living with an out-control debt is quite different then normal, and living happily is quite impossible. I plan to write about this, but at this point I'll just write down the check and go mail it before it's midnight. These are the tax money I am sending. Wish me good luck.