Earn 5x Aeroplan Miles on all IHG stays this fall + MORE Sep 3rd

One of the most important aspects of your financial life is your credit score. As a savvy consumer, you need to know how to get your credit report and how to calculate your credit score. Once you understand where you stand, you can take steps to improve your situation.
It’s vital that you take steps to improve your credit score. The difference between fair credit and good credit can mean thousands of dollars in interest saved over the course of a loan. If you can improve your credit rating so that it is considered excellent, you can get the best terms on many of your financial products and services, from mortgage loans to insurance policies.
Tips for Improving your Credit Score
If you want to improve your credit score, it’s a good idea to approach your efforts systematically. Here are some tips that can help you improve your credit score:

Pay your bills on time. Payment history is the most important aspect of your credit score. Late payments are one of the biggest hits to your credit score…

Standard & Poor’s says the U.S. government sued the rating agency as “retaliation” for its downgrade of the country’s credit rating.
The Department of Justice filed civil charges against the rating agency in February, claiming that S&P refused to warn investors that the housing market was collapsing because it would be bad for business. It also says S&P knowingly inflated ratings of risky mortgage investments that helped trigger an economic crisis. And that S&P gave high marks to the investments because it wanted to earn more business from the banks that issued them.
The government is seeking $5 billion in penalties.
S&P, a unit of McGraw Hill Cos., has repeatedly denied the claims.
The rating agency said in a court filing Tuesday that its opinions were independent and based on a good-faith assessment of the performance of residential mortgages during a tumultuous time in the market.
It also said that, like nearly everyone else at the time, S&P did not anticipate the scope or impact of the collapse of the housing market on the economy as a whole…

If you are an Aeroplan mile collector you would have known that Summer 2013 presented tons of opportunities for earn bonus miles for hotel stays and it looks like that trend continues for the fall. Earlier today we had a separate post on the Aeroplan Starwood offer (which is the best of the bunch), the Aeroplan Best Western offer got mentioned in our daily update and now here is an IHG offer for the fall.  Here is the offer as it will appear on RC’s Aeroplan page tomorrow:Earn 5x Aeroplan Miles (2,500 miles per stays) on every qualifying stay at InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, InterContinental Alliance Resorts,  Crowne Plaza® Hotels & Resorts, Hotel Indigo®, Holiday Inn®, Holiday Inn Express®, Holiday Inn Resort®, Holiday Inn Club Vacations® hotels, Staybridge Suites® or Candlewood Suites® hotels Worldwide.  Full details, online registration and booking Sep 1 – Nov 30, 13 

Just shy of two years ago—in October 2011—I wrote a post that laid out the year-to-date returns for the Complete Couch Potato portfolio. If you can remember that far back, the third quarter of 2011 was truly ugly. The European debt crisis was all over the news, the US government’s credit rating was downgraded, and the global economic outlook was bleak. If you held a diversified portfolio, your equities were in the toilet, but you were saved by a solid performance from REITs and outstanding returns from bonds, especially real-return bonds. Overall, the portfolio experienced a small loss over the first nine months of the year:

January–September 2011
Ticker
%
Return

iShares S&P/TSX Composite
XIC
20%
-12.02%

Vanguard Total Stock Market
VTI
15%
-5.26%

Vanguard Total Int’l Stock Market
VXUS
15%
-13.82%

BMO Equal Weight REITs
ZRE
10%
5.77%

iShares DEX Real-Return Bond
XRB
10%
9.53%

iShares DEX Universe Bond
XBB
30%
7.20%

Total

-1.6%

Now let’s look at how the Couch Potato has performed so far in 2013…

Very to similar to last Fall’s Aeroplan Starwood promo (see here and here) comes another promotion to earn extra Aeroplan miles on your Fall 2013 Starwood stays. The beauty of this promotion is that you do not have to set Aeroplan as your earning preference with Starwood Preferred Guest which means you can earn your regular Starpoints for your stays and any possible bonuses from promotions such as the current SPG Take Two promotion.  If you have multiple nights/stays planned with Starwood this fall this promotion is a no brainer as it simply gives you an extra bonus for those stays. Here is the promo as it will appear on RC’s Aeroplan page later today:Earn up to 9,000 Bonus Aeroplan for stays at any Starwood Hotel & Resort Worldwide. Earn 5,000 Bonus Miles after you complete 5 nights, 2,000 more miles after you complete 7 nights and 2,000 miles when you complete 9 nights for a total of 9,000 Bonus Aeroplan miles. Full Details, online registration and booking (Registration is required) Sep 1 – Dec 15, 13