Question About Weekly Stipend

I am a Basic user and have a question about the weekly stipend that you get with the Premium account: Are there any restrictions on what you do with the L$400 weekly allowance that you get?

I'm specifically wondering if you could save up your weekly stipends and then trade them in for US$, effectively defraying the costs of your Premium payments to Second Life.

Even the US$72/year option is too much for me, but maybe selling some Linden$ would make it not as bad.

Thanks.

You can do that, yes

It seems at the moment you get the $500 a week if you opt to be a premium member at the time you sign up, however if you wait until later you only get $400

I was told people who premium'ed their account before July 20th 2006 get L$500 per week, after that you only get L$400 per week as they dropped the amount for new users.

You can hoard stipend if you like.
Actually, when i signed up, you could make a small profit doing that. LL seems to have decided to basically just reimburse your membership fee via stipend now, by cutting it to 400L a week.
By going for a shorter payment period, you will lose a small amount of money when the two things are balanced out.

This gives me an idea-I could loan noobies money to go for the full payment plan and we can split any savings from the reduced cost of the full plan at the end of the year. (No crap about exploitation please, I'm trying to help the guy out for a completely negligible amount of money).

Nah, wouldn't work... I'll be signing up for a year once I have the land I want (land is sucking up all my monies xD)

He's talking about using the stipends to pay off a yearly plan IE hoard stipends for a year then trade em in. It'd work but he wouldnt get 100% since obviously the trade value is going to be a bit lower. So he'll have to spend a few bucks but no real harm.

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Maybe I will sign up for a premium account, but I'll wait a little while to be sure I still play SL after some time goes by.

Well, if you are just concerned about playing for free, you can offset your monthly losses by buying your First Land plot and reselling it for a tidy profit....that should help bring you even closer to the break-even point for a yearly subscription.