Tuesday, July 22, 2008

The good card

The picture above is of a card. It's not a credit card it's actually a prepaid card.
 
They started showing up in a restaurant chain a few months ago. Back then I thought it was wise to put money on a card that you would have to use only on certain restaurants.
 
However one day as I was buying fried chicken the cashier explained something to me. She said that for every 100 lempiras you prepay they load up the card with 120 lempiras. That's like getting 20 lempiras (about 1 dollar) "free". So right there I was going to pay 360 lempiras for chicken, I got the card and payed just 300 (the card itself is free to get). So it's like getting a 20% discount
 
The other good thing is that this card works in several different restaurants. You can look at the picture and see the logos and names of each. I will sum it up for you here: One burger chain, 3 chicken chains, 1 pizza chain, 1 donut chain, 1 ice cream chain, and another restaurant that I can't categorize since i haven't gone to it yet.
 
In any case it's nice since there are options to choose for everyone in the family.
 
Personally, I don't really load it up that much, just 100 or 200 every time (rounding off whatever I have to pay). Eventually some meals are "free" or "on the card" and I don't have to take out any money from my pocket.
 
We eat out on weekends so as you can imagine I usually "suggest" that we eat in any of these restaurant chains so that the meals can be cheaper for me. Plus they all usually have "value meals" that are smaller size. This is also good for our waistline :-)
 
Ok, enough good things, i'm ready to continue telling about my 2 other big debts. Will post about them soon.
 
 

6 comments:

Steve Smith said...

Hey, that sounds like a good deal. We frequent those places as little as possible but with kids and a sometimes busy schedule one of them usually sees us once a week. Where do you get those cards?

AJ said...

You can get them at any of the restaurants that show up in the card. They are free with the initial load of the card of 200 lps or so, which actually means they load up 240 lps on the card.

And yeah kids love that fast food huh?!
I take my family out on weekends to spend time with them and also because the maid is out on weekends.

La Gringa said...

AJ, if your wife doesn't work, why does she need a maid? How much does that cost? It's also giving you a 5th family member to feed, right?

You are probably going to start hating my comments but I'm trying to get you thinking in a different manner.

AJ said...

You are right in that we don't need a maid right now. We needed a maid two months ago when my wife had a job and we will need a maid as soon as my wife finds a job. She is actively looking for a job.

As you probably know, finding a good maid is a hard thing, so even with my wife out of work I think I need to keep the maid because as soon as my wife gets a job we will need someone to get my daughters from school, make meals, clean the house, wash, iron clothes etc.

My attitude right now is that my way has been wrong all these years. So even if I don't like what I read in the comments, it's probably a better idea than what I have done so far. So keep them comming. I can't promise I can execute all your advice but I will try to do as much as I can.

La Gringa said...

Hey AJ: Is one of the chicken chains KFC? Or is it Churches? We asked about the card KFC and they didn't know what we were talking about.

Oh, never mind. I looked closer at the card. Darn. We don't have some of those restaurants in Ceiba and we are more the Wendy's and KFC type than the BK and Churches.

Hmmm. But maybe we could get our money's worth at Dunkin Donuts. ;-D

AJ said...

The card is for:
Burger King
Churches Chicken
Pollo Campero
Popeyes
Little Caesars
Donkin Donuts
Baskin Robbins
Chili's

It's just my luck that my wife prefer's Wendy's chili than anything that those restaurants with the card sell. The most common thing I buy with the card is Pollo Campero.