As of tomorrow, about 75 percent of people who filed their last tax return specifying a direct deposit account should have received their stimulus rebate-a-ronis in their bank accounts. This is based on the schedule of payment on the IRS website. According to that schedule, tax filers with Social Security Numbers ending in the digits 00 through 20 would receive their directly-deposited stimulus rebates by May 2nd. Assuming a proportionate allocation of SSNs, that means 20 percent of direct deposit rebate recipients have their cash in hand right now. The majority of rebate-kateers—those with SSNs ending 21 through 75—will get their payments by tomorrow, May 9th. And an unfortunate few with SSNs ending 76 through 99 will have to wait until May 16th to get their rebates credited to their bank accounts. (As for people getting their rebates by paper check, some with unluckily high SSNs may not see their checks until mid-July.)

I wasn’t too upset about this payment schedule until I realized a few things:

1. My SSN falls between 76 and 99.
2. That means I won’t get my $1,200 rebate until May 16th.
3. Two weeks worth of 3% APY interest on $1,200 is almost $1.40.

Thus, the Federal government, by staggering the payment of these stimulus rebates, is cheating millions of people out of their $1.40. By my calculations, that’s about $140 trillion dollars people like me are being cheated out of, more than the entire economic stimulus package amount!

The reasons for the staggering payments have been cited before: the IRS and U.S. Treasury just can’t send out tens of millions of electronic and paper payments all at one time due to the fact that the entirety of the Federal government is still run on Apple IIe computers from the 1980s. So splitting the payment distribution into chunks by Social Security Numbers—which are more or less randomly assigned and evenly allocated by geography, financial status, ethnicity, etc.—seems to make some sort of sense.

Well guess what—it’s inherently biased against a really swell group of folks. That’s right, I’m talking about awesome people.

You see, just about everyone I know who is awesome has a Social Security Number ending somewhere between 76 and 99. For example, me. Here’s a list of just a few of the really awesome people whose SSNs fall in that pitiful 25% range of taxpayers who’ve been shunned by the IRS and the government:

• Most New York City firefighters
• That nun you see in the grocery store buying food for the homeless
• 90% of orphans
• Vietnam and Iraq War veterans
• Almost every Starbucks barista east of the Mississippi
• Santa Claus
• Spiderman
• All of the good living former U.S. Presidents

And if it isn’t bad enough that all of these amazing people are being punished just because they showed up too late (or too early) at the Social Security office, it turns out that a lot of terrible people were assigned SSNs with last digits between 00 and 20. Here’s just a sampling of the kinds of scum who are getting their rebate money before fine people like me:

• 67% of prostitutes
• 39% of convicted rapists
• The guys who canceled Star Trek
• Unwed teenage mothers
• Zombie Hitler
• The person you asked to the prom who turned you down because you were a nerd

Just how did so many losers end up with lower-ending SSNs while we monuments to humanity got the high ones? There are many theories, ranging from DNA profiling to covert behavioral analysis. But whichever school of thought you buy into, there’s little arguing that something is amiss with the way we’re being numbered.

By now you’re probably as outraged at this blatantly obvious conspiracy as I am. While the minions of evil are out there purchasing new cars and big-screen TVs with their rebates, people like you and me are stuck at home eating leftover lima beans and reading last month’s Reader’s Digest for the third time. And I bet you wish you could do something about it.

Well, there is. To be precise, there are three things you can do about it:

1. Write your local Congressman and let them know just how irate you are over the supposed “random” rebate payment schedule. Tell them that you’re just as awesome as, if not more awesome than, people with lower Social Security Numbers. Suggest that the next time there’s a stimulus rebate that payments be issued according to some more noble metric such as number of volunteer hours performed or number of homeless kittens adopted.
2. Write to the IRS and the U.S. Treasury demanding your $1.40 in interest. And if you’re getting a paper check in July, you should demand as much as $7.00. Be sure to let them know you’re a Punny Money reader so they understand right away just how awesome a person you are.
3. Refuse to stimulate the economy. The best way to say “screw you” to a government that has wronged you is to do the exact opposite of what they want you to do. For the stimulus rebates, that means not injecting that money into the economy. Put it in savings, stuff it under your mattress, burn it—just don’t spend it. That’ll teach those government number-crunchers to piss off the awesome people.

Finally, if the wait for your stimulus rebate is too painful to bear, feel free to print out the following simulated stimulus check and hold it in your hands for as long as you like.

Just don’t try to cash it at the bank or you might end up in Federal prison where the only stimulation you’ll receive will be of the surprise-from-behind variety, probably from someone with a low Social Security Number.

You search for it, you get it here at Punny Money with our not-too-frequent feature Search and Ye Shall Receive. Today we look at three search engine queries that brought some people seeking financial enlightenment to this humble quadrant of the internet.

Since the IRS Gave Me a Refund, Will They Not Come After Me For Deducting My Hair Extensions?

If you get your tax refund, will you not be audited? (via Google)

Oh if only it were that easy. No, my friend, when you get that delicious little refund check in your hands, your IRS worries are only just beginning. Uncle Sam has three years from the day your tax return is filed (or the April 15th deadline, whichever is later) to audit your return. If it establishes that you owe money, it has up to ten years to come after you for it. And if it determines that you filed a fraudulent return (i.e. you claimed your weekly visits to the local brothel as a “medical expense”), there’s absolutely no statute of limitations.

So always live in a state of paranoia because you will get audited and chipmunks are waiting to steal your car keys when you go to work tomorrow.

What Benefit Is There to Not Having My Account Information Sent By Pieces of Paper Anyone Can Steal?

What are the benefits of paperless statements? (via Google)

Well, I kinda gave away one of the answers to this question in the snarky headline; getting your bank and credit card account statements sent to you online is about 83 thousand times safer than having them molested by half the U.S. Postal Service before being deposited in a mailbox that’s about as easy to break into as a papier-mache ATM machine. But there are other benefits than just security to keeping stacks and stacks of statements from hitting your home:

• It takes up less room in your trash can.
• It saves you time spent weeding out junk mail from important account information.
• It’s easier to store electronic statements for years than shoe boxes full of papers.

I Can Has College?

Can I go to college? (via Yahoo!)

Without knowing anything else about your situation, and basing my answer solely off your question, I would say no.

Oddly enough, someone else searched for the phrase “I can go to college” shortly after this query was received. To this person, I say congratulations and I look forward to having my Big Macs served by you in the future.

I haven’t been chasing savings account rates as much as I used to lately, mostly because the bulk of our savings is sitting in a nice 9%+ APY 7-month CD that still has a few months left on it. We have since picked up a few more liquid bucks that have been bouncing back and forth between savings accounts averaging only 4.5% to 5% APY, waiting for the next wild deal to appear.

It looks like Wachovia, my banking arch-nemesis, has decided to issue that deal.

I used to have all of my accounts at Wachovia—checking, savings, CDs, safe deposit boxes. Then I realized they were shafting me with sub-1% interest rates and horrendous customer service, so I jumped ship and took all of my loot with me. Now it seems they’re offering a crazy savings account promotion that may even be too much for this hardcore Wachovia-hater to pass up.

More details are available on this FatWallet discussion and this Bank Deals post, but I will summarize:

1. Open a Wachovia checking account and the new Way-2-Save savings account. You need both. Existing checking accounts are fine (including their Free Checking option).
2. The base yield on the Way-2-Save savings account is 5.00% APY.
3. You get an end-of-year bonus of 5% of your balance, up to $300. (Second- and third-year bonuses are 2%.)
4. You can’t just deposit money at will into the Way-2-Save savings account. In order to get money into it, you can: (1) deposit up to $100 a month directly, (2) automatically have $1 moved from your attached checking account into the Way-2-Save account for each debit card purchase, online billpay transaction, or other debit deductions.

So say you have 100 qualifying purchases or billpays or other debits on your checking account each year, and you put $100 into the savings each month. That would be $100 x 12 plus $1 x 100, or $1300. The 5% bonus on that would be just $65, but that’s still a very nice bonus. Even if you don’t do any debit transactions or billpays, you’d still get a $60 bonus just doing the maximum $100 monthly transfers. And don’t forget the 5% APY that $100 a month earns, though that rate could change at any time, in theory.

Just how good is this deal? Well, on a scale of 1 to 50 million, I’d give it a 39,194,942, which is pretty good! I deducted 10 points off the top just because it’s Wachovia, but the rest of my deductions are because of Wachovia’s attempt to get you to use your debit card more. As everyone knows, debit cards are evil and should not be used, even for what works out to be a 5-cent bonus on each transaction.

Wachovia does give you one extra option that could allow you to make up to $300 a year just doing the $100-a-month transfers: you can have up to 5 Way-2-Save savings accounts at once, each hooked up to a separate Wachovia checking account. I don’t know what kind of weirdo has five Wachovia checking accounts, but I’m told it’s possible.

The deal officially starts on January 15, 2008, but some people have reported success opening the Way-2-Save account already by calling their local branch and getting transfered to a call center operator who helped them open the account. I might give this a try with one or two checking accounts to put some miscellaneous funds to good use. I’m just hoping I don’t get the customer service runaround from Wachovia as they were so fond of doing to me.

Ah Monday. The return to a wonderful job after a long weekend. The joy of sharing the highway with thousands of other happy individuals. The return of the mail carrier after a heart-breaking two-day absence.

Normally Monday means a slightly heavier load of mail since it hasn’t been delivered since Saturday, but yesterday I was greeted with an obscene number of envelopes bearing those familiar logos of the likes of Capital One, Bank of America, Citibank, and various other financial institutions who want my money, my blood, and what little space remains in my recycling bin.

But yesterday was different from the usual deluge of 0% balance transfer offers and $50 for opening a checking account advertisements. There were no ads or offers in yesterday’s mail. What was there? Confirmations. Confirmations of my online internet activity. Credit line increases. Balance transfer executions. E-mail address changes. I counted 12 separate confirmation letters in all. All on paper, all in separate mailings.

I’d received similar paper mailings before, but never more than one on any given day. I have been fooling around with my various credit card and savings accounts lately, requesting larger credit lines and taking advantage of account opening bonuses and interest-free credit card loans. I guess all of that fancy online accounting converged into a single day of mailing.

But this huge batch of confirmation letters irked me in a way that no single confirmation letter has ever irked me before. I counted three separate causes for my irkyness:

• Paper letters for online activity. Thanks to the power of the internet, I can do pretty much anything imaginable with my credit and bank accounts from the comfort of my couch. All it takes is a few mouse clicks, a couple of keystrokes, a swig of gin, and all my finances are in order. So then why must I get all these paper confirmation letters when I do something online??? I know you sometimes need 5-7 days to qualify me for that massive credit line increase, but have you ever heard of e-mail?
• Every letter had my full account number. “Your credit line increase for account number XXXX YYYY ZZZZ WWWW has been approved.” You won’t even show my full credit card account number on your website when I’m logged in from my laptop—something nobody’s going to get their hands on in the next 10 minutes without breaking down the front door and brandishing a shotgun. But you’ll gladly plaster it all over your paper confirmation letters. Mailboxes are so easy to rob that I just robbed my neighbor’s right now while typing this sentence. Maybe if credit card issuers wouldn’t send out umpteen mailings with full customer account numbers for anyone to see and steal, there wouldn’t be so much rampant theft and fraud and pain. Just a thought. (Morons.)
• Two separate letters for one request. Twice. This was the straw that broke my electronic camel’s back. For one credit line increase request, I got two letters: one saying “You’ve been approved for an increase to $10,000,” another saying I’ve been rejected for an increase to $20,000. I had requested the increase to $20,000; but much like a first-grader who can’t combine two thoughts into a compound sentence, Bank of Name Omitted to Protect the Stupid Bank couldn’t combine the good news and the bad news into a single letter. Similarly, another bank decided that it took two letters to confirm my e-mail address change—only the content of both letters was identical. Yay, double the chances for a mailbox thief to steal my account number!

Banks and credit card issuers be warned: If you send me another paper confirmation and I happen to paper cut myself on it, I’m going to sue you soooo much for assault with a deadly weapon. And if you don’t believe me, just check your mailbox for a confirmation letter written in myyyy blooooood.

You know, from the paper cut.

With internet banks dropping their high yield savings account rates, I’ve been looking for a better place to deposit our savings. I thoroughly considered my own buried treasure method until I realized I don’t have a shovel.

So I started to look around at other internet banks for a better rate. Fortune smiled upon me and threw up a fantastic deal all over me on a 7-month CD with an effective APY of 9.36%. Since first seeing the deal last Thursday, it’s been a crazy ride full of suspense and anxiety to get this CD opened. I thought you might enjoy looking at a timeline of my adventures in rate chasing.

Thursday

1:30pm. During lunch, first saw the thread on FatWallet about a 9.36% 7-month CD at SECU, a small Maryland credit union, starting Saturday and running until whenever.

4:45pm. Finished lunch. Remembered I lived in Maryland!

5:10pm. Filled out an online application for SECU membership. Started second lunch.

Friday

8:30am. Finished second lunch. Received confirmation e-mail that SECU membership application has been received; a form requiring my signature before account opening would be mailed to me.

9:20am. Contemplated transferring savings from current internet bank of choice (we’ll call it Bank of Crap to protect the names of the innocent, crappy bank). Decided against it because Bank of Crap still had a high APY until Saturday.

Saturday

2:50pm. Woke up. Checked the mail. No SECU signature form.

2:55pm. Went back to bed.

Sunday

12:30pm. Sent usual weekly e-mail to Bank of Crap letting them know how much I hate their crappy bank and would leave it if their savings account rate weren’t so high.

4:45pm. Reply from Bank of Crap: “You’ll never leave us, you rate-chasing loser. Har har har.”

6:10pm. Read various responses on the FatWallet SECU CD thread. Lots of happy people with CDs. Some started posting pictures of themselves with their deposit slips. One person named his 7-month 9.36% CD “Franklin.”

7:30pm. Saw the CD listed on SECU’s website. It looked so beautiful.

11:15pm. Cried myself to sleep with no CD to comfort me.

Monday

10:45am. Memories of CD that could have been almost gone. Resigned to let my money sit in Bank of Crap at their new, lower crap savings rate.

4:50pm. Home from work. In the mail: Victoria’s Secret catalog (filed for later), credit card offers (ew, AMEX), and… the signature form from SECU.

5:00pm. Checked online to see if the CD was still available. Saw that CD was pulled from SECU website. Some FatWallet forum members say deal is dead; others: “deal ends Tuesday.”

5:10pm. Called SECU’s 800 number. Operator says I can bring my signature form to a SECU branch location Tuesday to open the CD.

5:20pm. Initiated a wire transfer for full balance from Bank of Crap savings account to my local checking bank. Wire fee supposedly $15. (An ACH three-day transfer would have cost me $23 in lost interest; irrelevant since time was of the essence.)

5:30pm. Read that Bank of Crap’s cut-off for same day wires is 5pm. Crapped my pants.

6:00pm. New pants. Meticulously scoured deal forums for more information on SECU CD. Found a PDF of the CD application; printed, signed, caressed.

7:15pm. A call from Bank of Crap. “This wire transfer… it’s a joke, right?” “No joke,” I responded. From Bank of Crap: “You’ll pay for this, Captain Planet.” Realized entire bank was on drugs the whole time. Worried I’ll never see my money again.

11:45pm. Bedtime. Set the alarm for 7:50am so I could get to SECU when it opened.

Tuesday

7:55am. Breakfast: wife still asleep, so I ate a jar of basil.

8:00am. Checked Bank of Crap. No sign that wire has been initiated. Decided to take my chances and go to SECU.

8:45am. Arrived at SECU branch a few minutes before opening. One person ahead of me; crazy woman mumbling something about “must withdraw, dig hole, bury money, Punny says so.”

9:05am. Met with SECU bank girl. Membership activated. I wrote a check from my local checking account, not sure if they’d verify the funds are in place.

9:15am. SECU girl tried to talk me into opening a checking account. Replied: “Thanks, I don’t even have any money in the ones I have!” Got a funny look back. Crapped my pants in fear.

9:25am. Left SECU, CD opened. Funds weren’t verified. Terrified that Bank of Crap will screw up something and the check will bounce any minute.

10:30am. Still no sign of wire transfer. Called Bank of Crap. Confirmed wire transfer in progress. Could have sworn operator concluded call with “thank you, have a crappy day.”

12:05pm. Local checking account shows wire transfer received. Crapped my pants in relief.

12:30pm. Deal forum members indicated that SECU closed the 7-month CD deal at noon. Rubbed my CD opening receipt all over myself.

Epilogue

A few additional funny moments in this SECU CD comedy:

• Some people on various deal forums were weighing the cost of a round-trip ticket to Maryland just to open the CD versus the interest to be earned.
• Several people out-of-state signed up for Maryland community college classes in order to claim credit union eligibility. Cheapest class found was $12: “TIS THE SEASON TO BE SINGING,” a zero-credit music course. I suspect the entire class will drop before it starts.
• At least one person paid upwards of $70 to FedEx their CD applications overnight. Many of us (myself included) took wire transfer fee hits in the $5-$20 range. Before the $12 community college class was discovered, lots of folks paid $55 to become an honorary University of Maryland alumnus. (They never did anything to confirm my eligibility, but I am a genuine graduate of a Maryland public university.)
• One person considered marrying a UMD alum to get in on the deal. Now that’s creative!

Lesson learned: rate chasing is not for those faint of heart… or those short on pants.