Stealth Payment

[TheWolfe]

I'm not a producer but this is relevant to purchasing what producers produce so I thought I'd put it here.

If you have a shared credit/debit card and don't want your significant other to see your purchases, get a Visa or Mastercard gift card to pay for it. Pay cash for it to eliminate any paper trail. If you want a $25 card, you can set aside $5 from six ATM withdrawals over a period of time (you'll need about $30 because the gift card comes with a fee) or some other similar plan if you're concerned about having to explain a cash withdrawal from your joint account. In general the fee does not go up when buying larger gift cards so you will save money by buying one $100 gift card compared to buying four $25 cards.

Read the fine print on the gift card to make sure it can be used for online purchases. Some of them can't and I found out the hard way once. You will have to register your gift card on the gift card company's website before you can use it for online purchases. They will ask for a name, address and phone number but you don't have to give them correct information. All they're doing is matching what you enter when you make your purchase with the information the gift card company has on file. As long as you remember what false info you register your card with and use that same false info when you make your purchase, it will work fine and you won't have to worry about getting on some sort of mailing list that sends things to your house that you don't want. They'll also ask for an email address so, if you don't already have a second email address for secret activities, make a free one at gmail, Yahoo or similar.

The end result of this is that you're paying untraceable cash for your clips and paying a small fee to a gift card company to do so. I've done this several times and it works like a charm.