This is a quick report back on my progress to get up to $150 free money from Citi.

As a background, in order to keep me in the Credit Protector program, Citi sent me 11 rebate coupons totaling $150 that can be redeemed over the course of six months. As you learned from my blog, I took the advantage: I started to redeem the coupons starting in early July, and will redeem the rest of the coupons every month until December. I sent out two $10 rebate coupons on July 5, and another two coupons worth $10 and $15 respectively on August 6. Today, I have received the first check of $10 in my mail. Hopefully, this is a good start for a stream of rebate checks every month.

On the other hand, in order to minimize my fee paid to the Credit Protector program (it charges 49 cents for each $100 balance at statement date), I regularly pay back the entire balance a couple of days before the statement date. In the recent two statement cycles, I only paid a dollar combined for the Credit Protector fee -- the small fee is a result of several pending charges not hitting my card until the statement date. This is truly a nice price to pay for the expected $150.

As a caveat, if you are on the same boat to work on these rebate check sets, you can actually track your rebate status at RebateStatus.com. Just put your last name, street number and zip code, and you can get the list of your rebates under processing. In my experience, it may take up to two weeks before your rebate status is posted.