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Money Magazine joins the 21st century

Monday, August 6th, 2007

Money magazine has an article about online banking: Break the bank: Go online.

The yields are way higher
The convenience is finally there
The service is comparable, if not better
You’re in control

I’m wondering what cave they’ve been living in. I’ve had an online bank since about 1999. I’ve always had an ATM card for that account, and they provide free business-reply envelopes for mailing in deposits. Since I use direct deposit, most of my money shows up instantly, I just have to wait for the occasional refund check or personal check to get there by mail. There are several ATMs in my town that I can use for free — one is affiliated with my bank’s network in some way, and the others are in credit unions.

The only huge inconvinience is change. If I’m not vigilent about spending the coins I get, I end up with a huge jar of change and no easy way to get it into the bank. When I lived in a city with Commerce Bank, they’d change it for free in their machine. Now I just stick it into Coinstar and get an Amazon certificate (they don’t take the 8-9% commission on Amazon certificates).

Posted in articles, saving | No Comments »

NYTimes small business section

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

The NYTimes Small Business section has some interesting articles this week.

Don’t Go West, Young Man. Buy Yourself a Franchise Instead

“I pretty much knew I didn’t want to go and apply for jobs and fight against the rest of the working class and try to stand out above it,” Mr. McGee, 24, said. “So I started shopping for a franchise because I figured it would be a good opportunity for someone to hold my hand through the whole thing.”

Costco Offers Health Insurance to Business Owners

Costco is now offering small-business health insurance plans for customers in five states on the West Coast — Nevada, Oregon, Hawaii, Washington and California. The program is available to Costco executive members — the premium level of membership offered at $100 a year — and was designed to cater to small-business owners and employees who cannot afford coverage.

Posted in articles, small biz | 7 Comments »

CNN Money Article: Most ruthless foreclosure states

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

CNN Money has an article listing both the most ruthless foreclosure states and the slowest.

In Alabama, late-paying homeowners can lose their properties to foreclosure at breathtaking speed – as little as 30 days after a delinquency notice is published.

In New York State, the process can drag on for well more than a year.

With foreclosures spiking around the nation, homeowners should learn the foreclosure laws in their states – what you don’t know can hurt you.

30 days seems fast, but usually the borrower is already 30 or more days late before the delinquency notice, so its really more like 60+ days. And it makes me wonder why banks lend in NY at all.

The article is mostly fluff, but this part was interesting:

One more wrinkle for home owners to note is that simply because they’ve lost their properties to foreclosure, it does not always mean they’re completely off the hook for their debts. If the auction sale brings less than the amount owed to the lender, it may still go after the borrower for the balance.

That’s called a “deficiency judgment,” and it’s a right that lenders do not enjoy in every state. As a practical matter, deficiency judgments rarely occur, but Jacobson knew of at least one case where it was invoked.

A couple owned a home that was totally destroyed in an earthquake. Its value to the lender fell to near zero and the owners had no insurance. The lender asked for a deficiency judgment – and won.

I suspect that the couple had a clause in their mortgage requiring them to keep insurance with the mortgage hold as one of the beneficiaries. Every mortgage I’ve ever seen requires this, because how else can the bank get their money back if the house burns (or falls down in an earthquake)? In this case the couple had probably broken the terms of the agreement and deserved the judgement against them.

Posted in articles, housing, real estate | 9 Comments »

Your TV is robbing you blind

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Free Money Finance posts about an article on how to earn $1 million by not watching TV.

So what does this all add up to? Say you’re 25 years old and you initially spend $2,000 for your TV, DVD player, entertainment cabinet and gaming system after getting your first job. Add in monthly costs of $100 for cable, $10 for electricity use, $20 for renting movies, $25 for buying games and $20 for an occasional pay-per-view event, and you’re looking at $175 a month. Add in another $525 a month extra you spend due to the influence of commercials if you are the average person, and you are costing yourself $700 a month watching TV.

If you instead invested this money and received a return of 8% compounded annually over 45 years until you’re 70 years old, you would have more than $3.7 million in your account.

The numbers may be correct for an average person, but I suspect that there are a bunch of people who don’t spend that much. At the moment I don’t have a TV, and I certainly don’t have 700 extra dollars laying around each and every month.

When I had a TV, I don’t think I spent $700 (not including rent) most months, so if I was only spending $500 total on utilities, food, and everything else minus rent, $700 of it couldn’t be due to the TV. And I had a very nice 27″ TV for free because an always-need-the-latest-gadget friend moved in with another similar person who already had a nicer TV. So I got the “old” TV on permanent loan.

Sure I subscribed to cable, and occasionally bought food that I saw advertised on TV, but if I wasn’t watching the TV I’d be on the computer (similar electricity usage). So the TV probably accounted for $100-200 a month (cable plus excess purchaes). Still nothing to sneeze at, but not $700 either.

I got rid of it because I was wasting so much time watching junk when I could be doing other things. I’ve replaced a lot of that time with random websurfing, but even with that I still get more things accomplished. I was never one who could do much other than watch openmouthed when the TV was on, so it was a big imposition.

Posted in articles, saving | 9 Comments »

The Prioritizer

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Through Trent at the Simple Dollar I found The Prioritizer: A New Way of Looking at Your Money and Your Life. It’s pretty simple. List some things in your life and plug them into the tool. Answer some simple questions after thinking deeply about them, and get a prioritized list.

It’s simple, but forces you to look at just two choices at a time. That helps clarify. For example if your choices are Retire Early, Eat Out Four Times a Week, and Travel on Vacation Every Year, you’d have a set of questions like this:

Pick the one choice you like better from each pair
Retire Early	Eat Out
Eat Out	Travel
Travel	Retire Early

This being personal finance, you should probably pick things that cost money like bad spending habits, houses, retiring early, etc.

When you finish, you might find out that you’d rather go out to eat and travel a lot than retire early. Or that you want to retire early so you should give up some more expensive habits.

Mine was not particularly surprising, but Trent suggested using 5 long term goals, 5 short term and 5 things you splurged on recently. I did discover that something I was thinking about splurging on made the top 5 on that list of 15 and that I should do it and not worry about it since it obviously mattered a bunch (and also was under $200…still being frugal).

Posted in articles, frugality, saving | 7 Comments »

Wisebread: Can you afford not to follow your dreams?

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Can you afford to follow your dreams? Can you afford NOT to?

Saw an interesting post worth reading on Wisebread the other day:

Lest you think I’m just a sentimental idealist, we also realized (how practical of us!) that the relative value of the financial security we were pursuing wasn’t very high. Even if we paid off all of our debt more rapidly than we could possibly imagine, we wouldn’t be satisfied. We would be more secure, but not happy. The money that we could then accumulate (when we were not longer using it to pay off debt) could not buy us our dreams, nor the years spent not pursuing them. For us, that price was simply not worth paying.

Posted in articles, small biz | 8 Comments »

Article: A Battle Between the Bottle and the Faucet

Monday, July 16th, 2007

A Battle Between the Bottle and the Faucet

THOSE eight daily glasses of water you’re supposed to drink for good health? They will cost you $0.00135 — about 49 cents a year — if you take it from a New York City tap.

Or, city officials suggest, you could spend 2,900 times as much, roughly $1,400 yearly, by drinking bottled water. For the extra money, they say, you get the added responsibility for piling on to the nation’s waste heap and encouraging more of the industrial emissions that are heating up the planet.

Yes, switching to tap is a good way to spend less. The markup is worse in a restaurant (especially in NYC). But there are downsides:

“The tap water quality is fine in most of the United States,” said John D. Sicher Jr., editor and publisher at Beverage Digest, a trade publication. “The issue is convenience and shifting consumer preference. It’s not so easy, walking down Third Avenue on a hot day, to get a glass of tap water.”

But you can buy a bottle a month or so and keep rinsing it out and reusing it. I admit to buying bottled water when traveling (in the airport…) and when my current reused bottle is starting to look bad.

Posted in articles, frugality | 8 Comments »

NYTimes: Can’t Sell Your Home? Maybe It’s Priced Too Low

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Can’t Sell Your Home? Maybe It’s Priced Too Low

“The homes that are having a hard time selling are the average-priced homes,” said Vanessa Justice, a real estate agent with Pacific Union GMAC in the Bay Area, where the median house price is about $750,000. For upper-end homes, she said, “it’s actually pretty crazy right now.”

The title is a little misleading, since it’s not the price of the house so much as the size/type of house. Our area is about the opposite. The lower end (bottom 30 or 40% in terms of price) seem to be moving quite well, and then the high end (the top 10 or 15%, but maybe not the top 2%) are also selling fast. The mid-range houses are sitting on the market 6 months or more with several reductions.

Luckily the house I bought to fix and resell is nicely in that bottom 30%. Small house but fits in with the neighborhood, had a lot of cosmetic stuff that needs doing but nothing that requires a major contractor/engineer. Now I just need to finish it and get it on the market.

Posted in articles, real estate | 7 Comments »

Article: In Small Packages, Fewer Calories and More Profit

Monday, July 9th, 2007

I think I want to start a series of posts entitled “things I wish I invented”. Convincing consumers to pay more for less stuff is brilliant. The NYTimes has an article on the “100 calorie” packs. I think I first noticed them in stores a year ago. I chose to buy the regular snack packs of crackers (140 calories) which were less expensive. Yes, I could pay less and get 40% more! I guess for easy counting 100 is a good round number. I do buy the snack packs over the large container if I’m traveling or trying to watch my consumption of something. There is a psychological barrier to opening three or four packages.

In Small Packages, Fewer Calories and More Profit

Posted in articles, things i wish i invented | 9 Comments »

Boston Globe: Colleges fear debt puts damper on donations

Monday, July 9th, 2007

Colleges fear debt puts damper on donations

“I got a great deal with my financial aid, but I’m still paying tens of thousands of dollars,” said the Orlando, Fla., native. “And now they want more money? I think it’s just ludicrous.”

University fund-raisers are increasingly worried over young graduates like Minsky. They fear that with student debt ballooning today, campus coffers may be suffering tomorrow.

Um, yeah. Hard to sqeeze out extra money when your student loans are eating you alive. My school called all the scholarship recipients right after graduation. I hate to tell you, but an 8k scholarship to a 32k school is not really as much help as you might think. It reduces the loans by a bit, and elimates all those nice Pell grants, but not much else.

Posted in articles, saving | 166 Comments »

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