Everybody Loves Your Money

This is an article that I read a couple years ago.  What’s interesting is that the numbers they point out are actually worse now.  I noticed that they had the savings rate at about 2% in 2004.  Now it’s a negative number.  I believe that people’s debt load might have increased too.  Anyway, check out the article.  It’s great!!

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0816/p14s01-wmgn.html

Here’s a paragraph from the article:

“Those who get by just paying the minimum monthly charge may not have noticed that the typical minimum has been lowered in recent years from 5 percent to just 2 or 3 percent, according to De-mos, a research and advocacy group in New York. With an interest rate of 15 percent, it calculates that it would take 32 years to pay off $5,000 by making only 2 percent minimum payments. It also warns about bigger late fees: Revenue to credit-card companies from late fees jumped from $1.7 billion in 1996 to $7.3 billion in 2001.”

32 YEARS to pay off $5k.  I bet none of the people making these minimum payments realize how long they’ll be paying that off.  Imagine how much more money they’d have if they had just paid cash for the things they bought.

I left a comment over at Jonathon’s MyMoneyBlog and decided it was really worthy of a post on my blog.

Since I work in IT, I’m pretty familiar with server loads and things of that nature.  Most IT architectures I’ve seen, usually count on a percentage of Users accessing the server at any one time.  In the case of web servers, that means you expect a certain number of visitors per day and you build up your infrastructure to support that.  It would be far too expensive to build your architecture to accomodate every single potential user at one time.  You can do a lot of cool things to help mitigate the risk of too much traffic.  “On demand” computing is one method.  In this case, you simply have systems standing by to help accomodate the load when it happens.  In some cases, your server hardware company might even put their equipment on your site and only charge you if you use the processing power.  That’s just one example.  There are plenty of other ways to address the risk of too much traffic too.

So, why am I blabbing about this?  I just tried to go to Emigrantdirect.com.  I, like every other Emigrant customer, received emails and a snail mail directing me to their site with a special access code to get set up on their new site.  I have to wonder if the left hand knew what the right was doing though because the site isn’t available and I’ve been reading other people’s posts saying they’ve been having trouble accessing the site too.  Apparently they have way more traffic than they can handle.  Not very comforting considering they have some of my money.

Did their marketing department tell their IT department what they were planning?  I can’t imagine that the IT department would have thought it was such a good idea to direct every single one of their customers to their website on the same day.  If my experience is any indication of how flooded they are with traffic, I’d say they probably should have sent out timed mailings that drove a certain amount of users to their new site at a time so that they could manage their traffic better.

I guess this is my way of venting in a particularly geeky way.  Come on Emigrant!  Let me see my money!!!!!

Update:  I was finally able to get on today and log in.  I like the new site much better than the old one.  I’m not a huge fan of the challenge question along with the password, but I suppose I’ll get used to it.

It wasn’t long ago that I was sitting in amazement at the price of housing in my neighborhood and I’ll admit I was a bit giddy.  Sure, I knew the party could end and kind of expected it would due to interest rates rising and other economic factors.  Well, the party appears to be over.

For the last couple years, I’ve had some saved housing searches on my browser which lets me quickly and easily see what’s for sale around my area.  Up until about 3-4 months ago, I’d most often see a “subject to inspection” statement on each listing.  That just meant that someone had put an offer on the house.  I was amazed at how quickly the houses would sell.  In many cases, it was measured in hours and not days.

Fast forward a few months to today.  I have seen the same houses sitting on the market for a couple months now.  In one case, they started the house at $419k, then dropped it to $399k and now it’s down to $379k where it’s been for weeks.  Granted, the house is smaller than mine, but only a few months ago, a house sold across the street for $440k.

I guess the party is over.  Since I’ve been so vigilant to calculate the value of my house as the prices went up, I’m also going to apply the same strict process as the houses lower or flatten out.

I must admit I was thoroughly entertained by this blog posting that is complete with audio files of the voicemails this guy left when trying to get his date to cover her share of the restaurant bill after he realized she wasn’t interested in him.

Oh, and did I mention he is supposedly the CEO of a company? Yeah.

You have got to read through this and listen to the wave files. I am SOOOOOO glad I’m done with the dating scene. I’d hate to run in to a woman that was like this:

How not to act on a date

Amazingly I was able to call my cable company and get them to drop the price of my broadband again.  I have done this twice before.  What I normally do is call them, ask them for a lower speed connection that costs less and then tell them about how my phone company is offering a 1.5mbps service for half as much.  They usually offer to lower my price for 6 months and that keeps me happy.

The last time I did this, the lady mentioned that they wouldn’t be able to give me a discount again because they had given me an entire year of service at $29.99 for 6mbps service.  That stayed in the back of my head so that when my price popped back up to $45.95 a couple months ago, I didn’t bother to call them back.

Well, on a whim, I decided to try it again.  I used exactly the same technique as I’ve used in the past and the lady offered to lower my price to $35.99 to keep me as a customer.  Amazingly all I had to do was say, “Hmmm.  That helps a little but I’m still really impressed by my phone companies price of $25.99.”  After I said that, she said, “How about I take it all the way down to $29.99.”  I said, “That sounds great.  I really appreciate it.  It’s still a couple bucks more expensive than DSL, but I’ve been a customer for a long time and think that sounds reasonable.”

After a little bit of small talk while she edited my account, I was done.  Yet again, I’m reminded of something my dad told me many years ago.  “If you don’t ask for it, the answer is definitely NO”.

Check out this blog.  As if there weren’t already over a million reasons not to cheat on your wife, here’s just one more.  This lady started a blog awhile back and recently found out her husband is cheating on her with her best friend.  It’s actually pretty interesting to read the blog from the beginning (Goes back to June).

Check out the sign she posted on the side of a building near her husbands work.  I think my favorite line is the last one.  “I paid for this billboard from our joint checking account”.

http://thatgirlemily.blogspot.com/2006/07/this-photo-is-what-ive-been-talking.html

Okay.  I’m leaning towards thinking this is fake and part of some sort of viral campaign.  You can see a link to someone’s theory on http://www.fark.com

I received my new access code for EmigrantDirect’s new site that will be launching later this month.  I noticed that they said they would be raising their rate to 5.15% as of July 28th.

I have got to get more money moved in to this account.  I locked up a bunch in a 3 month CD and the CD calculator says that it’s not worth removing it from the CD and putting it in to Emigrant yet.  As soon as my CD matures, I’m moving the money over though!

A lot of the standard tips, but there were a few that you don’t always see:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SomeTipsForSavingMoney.aspx

Scott is a techy but blogs about non-technical stuff once in awhile.  I’m a fan of his product reviews more than anything.  When he starts blogging about developer code, my eyes tend to strain……

So, I’m not sure this is the greatest policy in the world. Why would you publicly come out and state that you won’t prosecute anyone for stealing things under $25? It seems like a huge invitation for questionable people to come in to your store and go to town.

Another thing they said was that they wouldn’t prosecute anyone under 18 years old. WTF? So if you aren’t an adult, should you feel free to steal? Now obviously most people are honest and wouldn’t do anything with this information, but what about the percentage of people that are dishonest? It sure seems like they are opening a can of worms.

Yet another interesting tidbit in the article was that they are doing this so that they can focus on the professional thiefs and their employees. Wow. That’s a nice thought. It’s no secret that employers lose a percentage of their product due to shrinkage, but I’m sure it’s even more significant at Walmart:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/13/news/companies/walmart_shoplifters

So, please do not steal from Walmart, or any other company for that matter! It’s not nice!

I’ve always been interested in home improvement projects that add value to my home.  Upgrading kitchens and  bathrooms are high on the list of projects that can really help increase your home’s value.  We haven’t done any of these major projects in our current house, mostly because the house is pretty new and the kitchen and bathrooms are pretty current.  We have done painting and a few things like that, mostly to just make the house the way we’d like it.  When choosing colors, we tend not to go radical.  I like to use more neutral colors that are easy on the eyes and wouldn’t cause someone to stop and say, “Holy moly.   That’s a nice bright color”.  Of course, painting is easy enough to change so it’s not really a big deal to go with something more bold that you like because you can always change it later.

The latest project that we have just completed is a new patio in our backyard.  We chose to go with an exposed aggregate patio instead of building a deck for a couple reasons.  First of all, I wanted a low maintenance solution that would last a LONG time.  Wood decks tend to need sanding, pressure washing and staining every year or two, while concrete just needs a good pressure washing each year.  Secondly, the area that we poured the patio is at a great level to step right out on.  If we’d built a deck, I think it would have been a step UP.  Now that all the work is done, we are very happy with it.  We did all the ground preparations (we had to cut down an 8 foot tree and dig out the stump and then remove about 30 wheelbarrows full of dirt.  Not all that fun).  We paid to have the patio poured though.  This crew came in and set up forms, did a little more ground prep, and then wheelbarrowed the concrete from the front of the house to the back and finished it.  It took 3 people to do the work and they spent the better part of a day here.  Total cost: $1800.

It’s probably worth noting that I got multiple bids for this job.  I wanted to know that the people I chose to do the job were both competitive and had done a lot of other work.  I got a total of 3 bids and picked the middle price.  I didn’t choose the cheapest price because the guy seemed a bit shady and took weeks to call me back.  The most expensive company gave me a bid of over $2300.  He made the comment that he doesn’t do a job for any less than that, so I told him that I don’t hire a job for that much.  He talked about all his overhead etc.  I’m not sure if I was supposed to feel sorry for him and hire him simply because he hasn’t been able to keep his price competitive, or just send him on his way.  I chose to just send him on his way.

Anyway, it’s all done.  Here’s a pic!