Ebates 14% Promotional Cash back Rate Today

For St. Valentienes day today Ebates has 14% cashback promotion for many stores.

There are 175 merchants on the list with the 14% cashback rate today.

Some notables : 

Sears

Kohl's 

Petco

J. Crew

Dick's Sporting Goods

JCPenney

Rite Aid

Standard Ebates blurb: To get cash back from Ebates you need to be signed up with Ebates.  Then simply go to Ebates to get the referral to the store before you do your shopping.  I also get a referral bonus if you use my links to sign up with Ebates.   

--This article does contain referral links which will hopefully pay this site a big commission for purchases made at the sites.

Bank CD Interest Rates vs Inflation

Around eight or so years ago I distinctly remember getting paid 4% interest on our simple savings account with Washington Mutual bank.   That was a promotional deal of some sort if I recall right but I didn't have to do anything special to get it.    Now it seems like that kind of interest rate on savings is something of the distant past.     I think we're getting 0.000001% from our bank right now.   Or more or less close to it.   1 cent a month.    With the interest rates we've got right now your savings are not keeping up with inflation.    But is this the norm?     I remember that 4% interest rate not long ago and that should have been able to keep up with inflation.

I couldn't find good history of interest rates for CDs or savings specifically.   But I did find Federal Reserve H.15 tables for interest rates on 3 month commercial paper.  
I got the inflation figures off the BLS site.

For both I'm representing the annual averages of the interest rate and the inflation rate.

Here's a chart showing the interest rate versus inflation for 1997 to 2016:

(click for full size)

You can see there that the rates paid by banks were quite a bit higher in the not too distant past.

For about the past 10 years we've had interest rates that are pretty low and don't keep up for inflation.   But if you look back to the previous 10 years from 1997 to 2006 the opposite was true for many of those years.  

Overall for the 20 year period the annual interest rate averaged 2.4% and the inflation rate averaged 2.2%.

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FREE - 8 Pack Brawny For New TopCashBack members

TopCashBack has a deal right now where you can get a 8 pack of Brawny paper towels at Walmart for $9.97 and then get that $9.97 refunded in cash back.   That nets you a free 8 pack of paper towels.

The deal is only for NEW TopCashBack members.

Follow this link to sign up*

The deal ends tonight.

If you use my link I get a referral, thanks.

--This article contains referral links which pay this site a commission for purchases made at the sites.

New Versus Used Automobile Sales 1990-2010

I've never bought a new car myself.   I feel like I'm in a minority in that regard but maybe not.   I was curious what % of car sales are new versus used so I did some research.  I found data in Table 1-17 on the National Transportation Statistics page.   They haven't updated the numbers on that table for a few years so it only goes up to 2010.   But its good enough for my purposes and you can see the general trend is fairly consistent over a couple decades.

Most car sales are used cars.   The total number of used cars sold is two or three times the number of new cars sold.      In 2010 there were 36.8 million used cars sold and 14.5 new cars sold or leased.

The value of used cars and new cars sold is roughly the same.  In 2010 we spent $324B on used cars and $311B on new cars.  

New cars average sales price is around triple the average price of a used car sold.    In 2010 the average new car was $26,850 and the average used car was $8,786.

Here's the info in graphics over the period from 1990 to 2010 :

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