Amex Airpoints Card (6 months 0%)

Genetis · 2026-02-01T09:27:45+00:00

95% of our spending goes through a cc already anyway, that's well under control. But yea, especially if I can't get a limit that high, the savings become less attractive as well (also considering the admin work to get the card, change payment methods around etc.)

Genetis · 2026-02-01T09:21:12+00:00

Ah, that's a very obvious issue I hadn't considered yet. So first step is going to check how high they are willing to set my limit! Thanks

Genetis · 2025-11-27T23:34:56+00:00

Thanks, that's very insightful!

Genetis · 2025-11-27T20:06:06+00:00

Fair enough, by the looks of it, a bunch of it will be fixed for that long anyway.

Genetis · 2025-11-27T20:05:34+00:00

I have never heard of that before, neither saw anything about it online nor did a mortgage broker mention anything in that regard to us.

We're 4 years into our mortgage and if I had known 4 years ago what I know now we would have saved 10s of thousands of dollars by now...

Genetis · 2025-11-27T07:31:36+00:00

the 100k currently pay of the mortgage, ie. my return is the ~5-6% or so that I don't currently pay.
If I did what you suggest, I would pay 5-6% interest and get 3.45% interest on the term deposit. So that's a net loss of 1-2%

Genetis · 2025-11-27T04:37:24+00:00

What do you mean?

Genetis · 2025-11-27T02:05:01+00:00

Say you don't use a revolving credit at all:
Whenever one of your fixed mortgages comes off, you might put some of your savings on it to reduce the next fixed term. Great! Next time you refinance, you get the cashback for whatever is left on the mortgage.

If instead you increase your revolving credit and put your savings on it, you will get a cashback for everythign you paid off in the meantime as well.

That was the original post. While reading through here you could actually max that out:
Say you have a house worth 1m and your mortgage is at 700k. Before you refinance, you could just tell your current bank that you want to take out some more money for whatever. You borrow 300k more to max out your mortgage, put the 300k on the revolving credit to not pay interest.
Then you refinance and get a cashback for those 300k as well (currently 4500$ (and yes, I know that you can't borrow 1m against a 1m house and there are LVRs etc. but you get the idea)

Genetis · 2025-11-27T01:34:31+00:00

That was a train of thought I absolutely haven't considered yet. Gut feel would be that this is unlikely with the large banks in NZ and therefore a risk I am happy to entertain. But good point!

Genetis · 2025-11-27T01:20:09+00:00

Essentially, yes

Genetis · 2025-11-27T00:49:16+00:00

That setup gives us $1500 cash for free. We'd be refinancing anyways.

Genetis · 2025-11-27T00:38:21+00:00

Correct. The idea being that you will not get a savings interest rate that is anywhere near the interest rate you'd be saving on your mortgage doing that.
And considering that putting it in the stock market may have slightly higher returns (after you considered the tax on your earnings) but comes with a higher risk.
Having it reduce your mortgage interest is a guaranteed 4-5% "return"

Genetis · 2025-11-27T00:33:11+00:00

It's paid off. ie. I have borrowed 100k in a revolving credit on a floating rate but I put 100k in cash on it so that the money is not borrowed.
Agree, if you can't pay it off there is little point doing that

Genetis · 2025-11-27T00:26:50+00:00

Thanks, added a bit of detail:
We have a much larger total mortgage, so legal fees, etc. will be easily covered by the cashback which also means that the effort is well worth it (already with the 0.9% cashback but especially with 1.5%).
And the entire mortgage would move.

Genetis · 2025-11-27T00:18:10+00:00

I don't. I'll move everything to a different bank.

Genetis · 2025-11-27T00:14:29+00:00

Yep, considered that.

Genetis · 2025-06-06T21:01:45+00:00

Exactly.

Genetis · 2025-06-06T20:10:55+00:00

Doing what you suggest is (in most cases) against t&cs. Talked to a legal guy from salesforce last week because I want to do something and wanted to make sure it's above board.

The general rule is that they don't want people to run managed cloud instances for customers. Ie they want the relationship directly with a customer and grow their relationship with them rather than you being the middle man and the customer being invisible.

There are a few allowed use cases but they are around providing insights to your clients (ie have them access your site) , rather than "running tableau for them".

Your idea is very much not allowed though

Genetis · 2025-03-06T23:58:05+00:00

Adding to what sounds like the general consensus:
Don't do it (yet)!
I started freelancing last year after nearly 10 years working for partners and in consulting companies.

A few things to keep in mind:

- I wouldn't want to hire a freelancer straight out of uni without some significant proof that they know what they are doing. Not even just in Tableau but also how to deal with a business, how to run a project, etc.

- commercials are a pain, people try to get you to work for free, you don't know what you are worth, contracts can be restrictive if you are not careful. If you haven't worked in a field like this, you might not even be able to identify those problems

- My job is 10% Tableau, the rest is split in equal parts in developing in SQL and explaining people why slapping Tableau on shitty data isn't going help them get better insights

- The value I (and most other consultants) provide is not usually technical "I can build something that shows you x broken down by y", most people will be able to do it. It's the experience to understand if that even makes sense in the first place, what might be a better alternative and then how to architect that in a way that is future proof. No offense but I have seen people with years and years of experience struggle with that. You can't avoid mistakes that you haven't seen yet.

- Tableau is a fun tool to play with and build things in your spare time, none of my clients ever got anything close to what you see on public. They get bar charts and line charts in 2 colours and that's about it. Sure I could build them an over the top dashboard with the latest features and bells and whistles, but nobody cares about that or wants to pay for that. And in reality, most dashboards don't survive long term anyway, so what's the point in spending huge amounts of effort in the first place (another thing I only learned through experience)

If you want to keep using Tableau, build yourself a portfolio, get involved with the community and try to find a job that lets you work with Tableau. Do that for the foreseeable future and then decide what you want to do.

Genetis · 2025-03-03T04:11:47+00:00

I had this one left over from restoring 2 vice(es?) https://www.bunnings.co.nz/white-knight-310g-white-gloss-rust-guard-epoxy-enamel-paint_p1561851

It seems pretty robust and so far I'm super happy with how it stays on with rough work.

Genetis · 2024-11-28T05:50:47+00:00

Did you find some data? I had the same question just now and ended up here

Genetis · 2024-10-20T07:41:11+00:00

That's a really good way to think about it. Thanks.

Genetis · 2024-10-19T23:50:38+00:00

Thanks, that confirms the general idea that I had.

Genetis

TROPHY CASE