Even when I was at my personal finance low 2 years ago with over $14,000 in hard earned credit card debt, I never thought I would let my debt get to such levels.

The difference is that this $45,000 is now earning me about $180/month in pre-tax interest. After standing on the sidelines waiting for a good opportunity, Bank of America was very kind to me in July and sent me a 0% balance transfer offer. I quickly turned this offer into a $19,500 balance transfer.

That balance transfer wet my appetite for other convenient balance transfer offers. After reading a couple of other blogs I found a way for me to do this without applying for a large number of new credit cards:

• I first asked to have my credit limit increased on my other old BoA credit cards.
• I then had the credit limits from these two cards transfered over to the credit card with the 0% balance transfer offer.
• I then used this increased line of credit on my 0% BoA card and transfered this to my online savings account.

I now have just over $45,000 in credit card debt earing me cash for the next year. I think this is as far as I am willing to go unless another great offer falls in my lap. So far this has been a low effort, high reward way for me to earn a couple extra dollars each month.

For younger individuals such as myself, a little short term volatility will be averaged out over the next thirty years. Thus, the common financial advice is to keep yourself 80% or more in stocks to take advantage of those years of double digit gains in the equity markets.

This is good canned advice for the average person but it lacks the individuality that makes personal finance so personal. What if I am super risk adverse? What if I don’t ever want to see my portfolio or net worth go down? Do I ever have a chance of passing that magical $1,000,000 threshold in retirement?

I will say YES, you can still have a million dollar retirement without ever having to buy a single stock.

All you need is an upper middle class income, a savings account, and time.

If we were able to continue our family’s current average cash savings of $3000/month for the next 35 years and stuff this in a mattress we would have over $1,250,000 to sleep on at retirement.

That my friends is saving for retirement the hard way; the really hard way!

The biggest risk with this approach is the risk of inflation erroding the value of your savings

So, compared to the alternative, It looks like I will be sticking with stocks for my retirement. It’s a lot easier to save $3000/year invested in stocks than $3000/month invested in cash.

I have a couple of Citi card that I used to take advantage of their 0% balance transfers. I haven’t touched them in a while but it looks like they are trying to get credit card holders to also open up deposit accounts(checking and savings accounts).

Now normally I don’t usually spend the time and effort to take advantage of offers like this because in the end I normally end up losing money because I don’t follow through well enough. This one intrigued me thought because $100 is a fair amount of money. On my current budget that is my cash allowance for the month.

The number of hoops to jump through is quite extensive but again $100 is still $100. Here is the preliminary on what you will need to do.

The fine details are a bit more involved:

• open an e-Savings account which means you must have or need a checking account through them
• the e-Savings account must appear on the same statement as the checking account
• must be a first time deposit account customer(savings or checking)
• must make a single application for both accounts and open both by 03/31/07
• you must fund the account with a minimum deposit of $5,000

There does not appear to be any limit on the amount of time you must keep the $5000 in the account. They only say that the $100 will be credited to your account within 90 days of having met all their requirements.