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Here’s how the deal works: Buy coins from the US mint at face value online using your credit card. The mint is quite generous, and is offering free shipping on direct ship orders. Since these coins are actual currency, they can then be turned in at your bank. Pay off the credit card with the coins, and repeat. There are some credit cards offering 2% cash back on purchases, which on a $5,000 would net you $100 in credit card cash back (Charles Schwab, Fidelity Retirement Rewards cards). Rinse and repeat for a nice income stream.

All good things must come to an end. For those of you who made money on this deal, congratulations. However, be careful. Some credit card issuers are now classifying this as a “cash equivalent” transaction, in which cash advance fees and rates apply. The fees and lack of a grace period are likely a deal breaker. Don’t call the credit card company to find out how the purchase will be categorized. Test the waters with a small initial purchase, where any possible fees will be small. Then, look at your account ledger to see if the transaction posted as a purchase or cash advance.

Transunion is charging to place a credit freeze on your file. The charges to add, lift, or remove a credit freeze vary by state and can be found here. Some states even have differing charges based on your age. Here’s an idea. Make them free…But if they were free, it would hurt TransUnion’s business model.  We wouldn’t want to hurt a credit reporting agency’s business model in an effort to help consumers against fraud, would we?

A few days ago, when I was talking about bumping hard inquiries off your credit report, I mentioned choppage. Choppage is when soft inquiries are cut off of your credit report (usually in a large block). The soft inquiries are good, because they fill the spaces of your hard inquiries. So, you can see why choppage can harm your efforts to bump hard inquiries.

Choppage typically happens when there is a long line of identical pulls on your credit report. So, if you’ve been using national city, like mentioned in the bumpage post, and you have 60 days worth of pulls with nothing in between, your credit file may get chopped.

One potential way to avoid a chopped credit profile (and speed up the bumping process) is to pull from a few sources. CreditKarma pulls Trans Union, you can update daily, and best of all, its free. Truecredit.com allows daily pulls (all 3 bureaus), and is $15/month. Privacymatters123 allows daily pulls (all 3 bureaus), and is $30/year.

Probably the best way to avoid choppage is to take a break from pulling your credit report every once in a while.