Search Results for “debt-burnout/how-much-should-you-tip/subscribe-by-email/money-problems-day-1-setting-goals/brown-bagging-your-way-to-savings” — Page 3

Money-Saving Tip: Put Your Groceries Away

23 Hour Smoked Boston Butt — Image by bbum via Flickr

Last night, we went grocery shopping. I found a beautiful pork roast, just begging to come home with me. It could spend all day Sunday in the smoker. Rub some brown sugar and garlic on the outside, maybe use a mix of maple and cherry wood chips to turn my pork butt into breakfast food. Picture this: a beautiful chunk of slow-cooked pork butt, covered in a candied crust, falling apart at the lightest touch, and tasting faintly of maple syrup.

It was love.

This morning, I woke up, walked into the kitchen to make some breakfast, and saw that beautiful butt sitting on the counter. Room temperature meat, ruined by my negligence. $15 in the trash.

We got back late last night, and apparently set this wonderful piece of future-food down with the non-refrigerated items were were planning to put away later. We said good-bye to the sitter, chased the kids to bed, picked up the house a bit, and forgot about my new love.

I’m sad.

Here’s my advice: When you get home from grocery shopping, immediately put all of the groceries away. Let the kids juggle knives for a bit, if you have to, but get the food put away. If that’s not going to work, at least take it all out of the shopping bags so you can check your work.

There are starving kids in Iowa. Don’t let potential candied pork roast go to waste.

Making Extra Money Part 3: Product Selection

Finance

When you’re setting up a niche site, you need to monetize it. You need to have a way to make money, or it’s a waste of time.

There are two main ways to do that: AdSense or product promotion. To set up an AdSense site, you write a bunch of articles, post them on a website with some Google ads, and wait for the money to roll in.

I don’t do that.

I don’t own a single AdSense site and have never set one up. This article is not about setting up an Adsense site.

My niches site are all product-promotion sites. I pick a product–generally an e-book or video course–and set up a site dedicated to it.

Naturally, picking a good product is an important part of the equation.

The most important part of product selection is that the product has an affiliate program. Without that, there’s no money to be made. There are a lot of places to find affiliate programs. Here are a few:

Amazon. If you don’t live in one of the states that Amazon has dropped in retaliation for passing laws that attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling on collecting sales tax, you can sign up as an associate and collect a commission on every referral you send that turns into a purchase. That means you have a lot of product to choose from. Unfortunately, your commission is small, so you need to promote fairly expensive products to get a decent return. On the other hand, people trust Amazon, so that’s one less hurdle to making a sale.
Commission Junction. These are the people managing affiliate programs for a large number of credit cards and banks. If you’ve opened an account with INGDirect through one of my links, I got a commission for the referral. (Thank you!) They have a lot of other products, too.
e-Junkie. This one is a popular distribution system for bloggers. It’s likely that, if you’ve bought an ebook from a blogger, e-Junkie handled the fulfillment process. A lot of the products available there have an affiliate program, but that is up to the owner of the product.
ClickBank. My favorite. This is one of the largest affiliate networks specializing in electronic products, whether that’s membership sites, ebooks, or video courses. Commissions are good, often 50-75%. They also offer a 60 day guarantee of every product sold through their site, which helps soothe the wary customer. This is the site I’ll be using for this series.

The first thing you need to do is sign up for whichever program you intend to use.

If you’re not going with Clickbank, feel free to skip ahead to the section on keyword research.

Once you are signed up and logged in, click on the “Marketplace” link at the top of the screen.

From here, it’s just a matter of finding a good product to sell. Here are the niches we’re going to be looking for:

Back pain
Bankruptcy
Conflict resolution at work
Detox diets
Fat kids
Foreclosure avoidance
Job hunting
Weddings
Writing sales copy

I’m going to look for one or two good products in each niche. When that’s done we’ll narrow it down by consumer demand.

For now, go to advanced search.

Enter your keyword, pick the category and set the advanced search stats. Gravity is the number of affiliates who have made sales in the last month. I don’t like super-high numbers, but I also want to make sure that the item is sellable. Over 10 and under 50 or so seems to be a good balance.

The average sale just ensures that I’ll make a decent amount of money when someone buys the product. I usually aim for $25 or more in commissions per sale. Also, further down, check the affiliate tools box. That means the seller will have some resources for you to use.

This combination will give us 36 products to check out for back pain, unfortunately, none of the results are for back pain products. After unchecking the affiliate tools and setting the gravity to greater than 1, I’ve got 211 results. Sorting by keyword relevance, I see three products, two of which look like something I’d be interested in promoting. One has a 45% commission, the other is 55%. The X-Pain Method has an initial commission of $34 and claims a 5% refund rate. Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief pays $16, which will make it a potentially easier sale. I’ll add both to the list for further research.

I’m not going to detail the search for the rest of the niches. That would be repetitive. You can see my selections here:

Back pain – X-Pain Method; Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief
Bankruptcy – I’m dropping this one from the list. It’s too complicated and deserves an attorney. I don’t know enough about the topic to make sure it is up to date.
Conflict resolution at work – Management Training: By the Book; Anger Management for the 21st Century
Detox diets – Master Cleanse Secrets: 10 Day Diet; Master Cleanse Insider; Eating for Energy: Raw Food Diet for Weight Loss
Fat kids – I’m dropping this one, too. A kid’s health is too important. I don’t want to sell a dangerous or unethical product.
Foreclosure avoidance – How to Stop Foreclosure in 7 Days Flat; Foreclosure Defense Secrets
Job hunting – Guerrilla Resumes; Amazing Cover Letters
Weddings – All Types of Wedding Speeches; The Master Wedding Planning Guide; Amazing Wedding Planning
Writing sales copy – Instant Swipe File; Ad Copy Creator Pro; How to Write Killer Copy

Now we’re going to go through a few steps for each of these products.

The Sales Page

We need to make sure the sales page doesn’t suck. If the site doesn’t work, is hard to read or navigate, has a hard-to-find order button, or just doesn’t look professional, it’s getting cut.

Raw Foods is eliminated. The sales video is horrible and the order link is at the bottom of several screens worth of nothing. It’s a crap site.
The 7 day foreclosure-avoidance product is out. Site’s down today. I want reliability.
Management Training By The Book is out. I don’t like typos on the sales page, especially in the page title.

The Email List

If it has an email subscription form, we’ll need to subscribe, then double-check to make sure our affiliate information isn’t getting dropped in the emails. If it is, the seller is effectively stealing commissions. In the interest of time and laziness, I’m going to eliminate anyone pushing for an email subscription. It’s harder–and time-consuming–to monitor that. On of my niche site had a seller completely drop their product. Instead, they pushed for email subscriptions so they could promote other products as an affiliate. Absolutely unethical.

Wedding speeches is eliminated for throwing a mandatory email entry into the order process. There’s no guarantee they are up to anything shady, but I’m taking the simple route.

Checkout and Credit

Finally, we’re going to visit the checkout page. You need to do this from every links in the newsletter and the links on the sales page, just to make sure you’ll get your money.

The way to tell who’s being credited is to look at the bottom of the order page, under the payment information. It should say [affiliate = xxx] where xxxis your ClickBank ID. Anything else, and the product gets cut from the list.

When you are checking these, don’t click on every possible link at once. That confuses the cookies. Do one at a time. I tried to do it in one batch for this post and lost half of the cookies. If it weren’t for the fact that I already own one of the products and bought it through my own link and got credited, I would have been talking undeserved trash about thieving companies.

Other Factors

Sometimes, when you’re examining a product, it just doesn’t feel right. When that happens, drop it. There are millions of other products you can promote. In this case, I’m dropping the anger management program because, in my experience, angry people don’t think they are the problem. Here’s a life tip: If everyone else is a jerk, the problem probably isn’t everyone else.

Another important factor is the sales page itself. If it doesn’t make you want to buy the product, why would anyone else?
Amazing Cover Letters is eliminated because it’s too easy to overlook the buy link. If I have to hunt for it, it’s losing customers.
Amazing Wedding Planning is getting eliminated because I don’t like the sales page. The buy link is easy to overlook, and it doesn’t compel me to buy.

Now we’re down to 10 products in 6 niches. At this point, we’re comfortable with the sales pages and we know that they are crediting commissions. As it stands right now, all of the products are worth promoting.

Back pain – X-Pain Method; Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief
Detox diets – Master Cleanse Secrets: 10 Day Diet; Master Cleanse Insider
Foreclosure avoidance – Foreclosure Defense Secrets
Job hunting – Guerrilla Resumes
Weddings – The Master Wedding Planning Guide;
Writing sales copy – Instant Swipe File; Ad Copy Creator Pro; How to Write Killer Copy

We’ll make the final determination after doing some heavy keyword research in the next installment. That’s where we’ll find out how hard it is to compete.

Any questions?

Money Problems: Day 9 – Health Insurance

Finance

Today, I am continuing the series, Money Problems: 30 Days to Perfect Finances. The series will consist of 30 things you can do in one setting to perfect your finances. It’s not a system to magically make your debt disappear. Instead, it is a path to understanding where you are, where you want to be, and–most importantly–how to bridge the gap.

I’m not running the series in 30 consecutive days. That’s not my schedule. Also, I think that talking about the same thing for 30 days straight will bore both of us. Instead, it will run roughly once a week. To make sure you don’t miss a post, please take a moment to subscribe, either by email or rss.

On this, Day 9, we’re going to talk about health insurance.

The first thing to understand is that there is a difference between health care and health insurance. Health care is what the doctors do. Health insurance is when the insurance companies pay for it. Or don’t. They are not the same thing. I won’t be addressing who should get care or who should be paying for insurance. That’s political and I try to avoid that here.

I won’t spend much time discussing health care as a “right”. It’s not. If a right requires somebody to actively do something for you, it’s not a right. It can’t be. The logical conclusion of requiring somebody to provide you care gets to be a intellectual exercise to be completed elsewhere. That, too, is political.

What I will discuss are the components of a health insurance plan is the U.S. and what to watch out for when planning your insurance coverage.

Premium

This is the amount you pay for your health insurance. For people with employer-sponsored insurance, this is usually paid out of each paycheck, deducted pre-tax. For those with an individual plan, it’s almost always a monthly payment. There generally isn’t much you can do to lower this much. Most employers offer, at most, 2-3 options, ranging from a good plan for a high premium to “we’ll mail you leeches if we think you’re dying” for a much smaller price.

Copay

This is a flat fee paid out of pocket when you get medical care. Depending on your plan and the type of visit, this could be $10-50 or higher. For example, with a plan I participated in recently, the copay was $15 for an office visit, $25 for urgent care, and $100 for an emergency room visit. The office visit and urgent care visit were billed the same amount to the insurance company, so the price difference was entirely arbitrary. Currently, all health insurance plans are required to pay preventative care visits at 100%, meaning there is no copay.

Coinsurance

This is the payment split between the insurance company and the insured. 80/20 is a common split for plans with coinsurance. That means the insurance company will pay just 80% of the bill, until the insured has paid the entire out-of-pocket maximum. After that, the coverage is 100%.

Deductible

This is the amount that an insurance company won’t pay. It has to be covered by the insured before the insurance company does anything. For example, if you have an insurance plan with a $25 copay, 80/20 coinsurance and a $100 deductible, and paying for an office visit costing $600 would look something like this: $25 for the copay, followed by $75 to max out the copay, leaving $500 to be split 80/20 or $400 paid by the insurance company and $100 paid by the insured. That office visit would cost $200 out-of-pocket. The next identical visit would be cheaper because the deductible is annual and doesn’t get paid per incident. That one would cost $115 out of pocket.

HSA

Health Savings Account. For people with a high-deductible plan–that is, a plan with a deductible of at least $1200 in 2011–they are eligible to open an HSA. This is a savings account dedicated to paying medical expenses, excluding OTC medication. It can be used for vision, dental, or medical care. Payroll contributions are taken pre-tax, which makes it a more affordable way to afford major medical expenses. Unfortunately, there are annual contribution limits. Currently $3050 for an individual account and $6150 for a family account. HSAs do not expire, so you can contribute now, and save the money for medical expenses after retirement.

FSA

Flexible Spending Account. This is similar to an HSA, but the contributed funds evaporate at the end of the year. It’s “use it or you’re screwed” plan.

Individual Plans

If you’re not getting health insurance through your employer or another group, you are on an individual plan. These cost more because they A) don’t benefit from the economy of scale presented by getting 50 or 100 or 1000 people on the same plan, and B) you don’t have an employer subsidizing your premium.

Employer-Sponsored Plans

If your employer provides health insurance, you have an employer-sponsored plan. Possibly the fastest way to correct problems with the health insurance industry would be to make individual plan premiums tax-deductible, while eliminating that deduction for employers and letting insurance companies work across state lines. That would eliminate the mutated pseudo-market we have right now, and force the insurance companies to compete for your business. Honest competition is the most sure way to increase efficiency and service while reducing costs. It beats “one payer” or “socialized” care which add overhead to the process and hide the premiums in increased taxes.

Open Enrollment

Most employer-sponsored plans only allow you to make changes at a specific time of the year, unless you have a “life changing event”, like marriage, divorce, death, or children.

Explanation of Benefits

After you use your health insurance, the company will send an EOB, showing you what was billed, what they paid, and what you’ll be responsible for. It’s fascinating to see the difference between what gets billed by the doctor and what the insurance company is willing to pay, by contract. You should read this, to at least understand what you are consuming and how much is getting paid for you.

Maximum Dollar Limit

If your insured care cost more than your maximum dollar limit, or maximum annual limit, the insurance company stops paying. this was supposed to be going away under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care ~~Fraud~~ Act. Unfortunately, if an insurance company offers a crap plan, they have been allowed to apply for waivers based on the fact that they offer a crap plan. The deciding factor in whether the waiver is granted seems to be the amount of the political contributions the insurance company has made to the correct political entities, but maybe I’m just bitter.

Out-Of-Pocket Maximum

This is the most you will have to pay directly with coinsurance. After you pay this amount, the insurance company will cover 100% of expenses, subject to the maximum limit.

COBRA

The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 is, in short, an opportunity to continue your employer-sponsored health plan–minus the subsidy–after you have left the employer. It’s expensive, but it keeps you covered, and will eliminate issue with pre-existing conditions when you get a new plan.

Catastrophic Health Insurance

This is an extremely-high-deductible plan, typically $10,000 or more. For the people who can’t afford coverage, this is insurance-treated-as-insurance. It’s coverage when you absolutely need it, not when you feel a bit ill. $10,000 isn’t a bankruptcy-level bill, while $100,000 usually is. This plan prevent medical bankruptcy for a small monthly fee. For the people who got screwed by a PPAACFA waiver, it bridges the gap between a plan that’s useful for minor things and protection when something goes really wrong.

Things to Watch Out For When Applying For Health Insurance

Now that we’ve looked at the terms you need to understand, we’re going to talk about some things to check before deciding what coverage is right for you.

Individual, Individual + 1, Individual + Family

Do you need coverage for yourself, or yourself and your family? If you and your spouse are both working, make sure to run the math for every possible combination that will cover everyone. Is it cheaper to have one of you cover yourself and the kids, while the other just gets an individual plan?

Maximum annual coverage

It’s really easy to blow through a $3000 annual maximum. If you’ve got a low annual max, look into a supplemental catastrophic plan.

Primary and Secondary Coverage

For years, my wife paid for insurance that covered herself and the kids, while I covered myself. When we were expecting brat #3, I added her to my insurance plan, without having her cancel hers. When the bill came, my insurance plan covered the coinsurance and deductible, which saved us thousands of dollars when the baby was born.

Pre-Existing Conditions

If you’ve got a pre-existing condition, it can be difficult to get insurance if you don’t already have coverage. This makes sense. It prevents someone from corrupting the idea of insurance by waiting until something goes really wrong before getting a plan. Without this, all of the insurance companies would be bankrupt in a year. This is one of the biggest benefits of COBRA. It’s a short-term bridge plan that eliminates the idea of a pre-exisiting condition deadbeat. If you’ve got insurance, you can transfer to a different plan. If you don’t, you can’t.

Homework

Your homework today is to get a copy of the details of your health insurance and look up all of the above terms and situations. How well are you covered? Did anything surprise you?

Money Problems – Day 5: Boosting Your Income

Finance

Pizza Delivery Bike — Image by Kevin H. via Flickr

Today we’re going to look at ways to boost your income.

People spend a lot of time talking about ways to reduce your expenses, but there is a better way to make ends meet. If you make more money, you will—naturally—have more money to work with, which will make it easier to balance your expenses. I’ve found it to be far less painful to make more money than to cut expenses I enjoy.

I can hear what you’re thinking. It’s easy to tell people to make more money, but what about telling them how? Guess what? I’m going to tell you how to make money because I rock.

By far, the simplest way to make more money is to convince whoever is paying you to pay you more for what you are already doing. In other words, get a raise. I know that’s easy to say. Money’s tight for a lot of companies and layoffs are common. None of that matters. Your company knows that hiring someone new will involve a lot of downtime during training. If you’ve been visibly doing your job, and the company isn’t on the brink of failure, it should be possible to get a bit of the budget tossed your way.

The first thing you need to do is get visible. If you habitually come in 15 minutes late, make it 15 minutes early. If you are working an alternative schedule, consider switching to the standard schedule, so everyone who matters can see you are at work. Start sending status updates to your boss, including copying him on emails to other people you work with, if those emails signify important milestones in a project.
Next, log your work. Keep track o what you do, what you’ve accomplished, and—most important—how much money you have made or saved for the company.
Third, do your research. Hit the salary survey sites to find out what other people in your field are making. Don’t worry if you are on the high side. There is always someone making more than you. If you are the exception to that rule, try using a similar variation of your job description and title. What’s the concrete difference between a software engineer I and and a software engineer II? About $15000.
Finally, schedule a meeting with your boss and ask. Lay out the things you’ve done, the amount you make for the company and what other companies are paying. Chances are, your boss will have a hard time refusing your request.

Another simple idea is to get a second job. Personally, I hate this idea, but it works wonders for some people. Gas stations and pizza stores offer flexible schedules and they are always hiring. If they aren’t willing to work with your schedule, or it doesn’t work out, you can always quit. This isn’t your main income, after all.

My favorite option is to create a new income stream. What can you do?

Take a piece of paper and a close friend and brainstorm how you can make some money. Write down every type of activity you have ever done or ever wanted to do. Then write down everything you can think of that other people who do those activities need or want. Remember, during a brainstorming session, there are no stupid ideas. Take those two lists and see if there is any product or service you can provide.

You can start a blog—although don’t expect to generate much money early—or try writing for some revenue-sharing article web sites, like hubpages or squidoo. Other options include affiliate marketing, garage sale arbitrage(buying “junk” at garage sales, fixing it up and selling it), or even doing yard work for other people.

One interesting business I’ve seen lately is a traveling poop-scooper. These people travel around and scoop poop out of ddog-owners’ yards. Business booms in the spring when the snow melts, but it can be an ongoing income, since dogs don’t stop pooping.

Raising your income can make it easier to pay your bills, pay off your debt, or even taking nice vacations. How have you made some extra cash?

Money Problems – Day 8: Insurance

Finance

On this, Day 8, we’re going to talk about insurance.

What is insurance? Insurance is, quite simply a bet with your insurance company. You give them money on the assumption that something bad is going to happen to whatever you are insuring. After all, if you pay $10,000 for a life insurance policy and fail to die, the insurance company wins.

A more traditional definition would be something along the line of giving money to your insurance company so they will pay for any bad things that happen to your stuff. How do they make money paying to fix or replace anything that breaks, dies, or spontaneously combusts? Actuary tables. Huh? The insurance company sets a price for to insure—for example—your car. That price is based on the statistical likelihood of you mucking it up, based on your age, your gender, your driving history, and even the type of car you are insuring. What happens if a meteor falls on your car? That would shoot the actuary table to bits, but it doesn’t matter. They spread the risk across all of their customers and—statistically—the price is right.

What kinds of insurance should you get?

Homeowner’s Insurance

For most people, their home is, by far, the largest single purchase they will ever make. If your home is destroyed, by fire, tornado, or angry leprechauns, it’s gone, unless you have it insured. Without insurance, that $100, or 200, or 500 thousand dollars will be lost, and that’s not even counting the contents of your home.

Homeowner’s insurance can be expensive. One way to keep the cost down is to raise your deductible. If you’ve got a $1500 emergency fund, you can afford to have a $1000 deductible. That’s the part of your claim that the insurance company won’t cover. It also means that if you have less than $1000 worth of damage, the insurance company won’t pay anything.

You can get optional riders on your homeowner’s insurance, if you have special circumstances. You can get additional coverage for jewelry, firearms, computer equipment, furs, among other things. You base policy will cover some of this, but if you have a lot of any of that, you should look into the extra coverage.

Auto Insurance

Car insurance is required in most states. That’s because the kind caretakers in our governments, don’t want anyone able to hit you car without being able to pay for the damage they caused. To my mind, I think it would be more effective to just make whacking someone’s car without paying for it a felony. If someone is a careful driver or has the money to self-insure, more power to them.

Auto insurance comes with options like separate glass coverage, collision, total coverage (comprehensive), or just liability. Liability insurance is what you put on cheap, crappy cars. It will only pay for the damage you do to someone else.

Rental

I’ve never had rental insurance. The last time I rented, I could fit everything I owned in the back of a pickup truck with a small trailer, and it could all be replaced for $100. Heck, I had the couch I was conceived on. Err. Ignore that bit.

Almost everything you can get homeowner’s insurance to cover will also cover renter’s insurance, except for the building. It’s not your building, so it’s not your job to replace it.

Life Insurance

If you care about your family, you need life insurance. This is the money that will be used to replace your income if you die. I am insured to about 5 times my annual salary. If that money gets used to pay off the last of the debt, it will be enough to supplement my wife’s income and support my family almost until the kids are in college. You should be sure to have enough to cover any family debt, and bridge the gap between your surviving family’s income and their expenses. At a minimum. Better, you’ll have enough to pay for college and a comfortable living.

Life insurance comes in two varieties: whole and term. Whole life…sucks. It’s expensive and overrated. The sales-weasels pushing it will tell you that it builds value over time, but it’s usually only about 2%. It’s a lousy investment. You’re far better off to get a term life policy and sock the price difference in a mutual fund that’s earning a 5-6% return.

Term life is insurance that is only good for 5, 10, or 20 years, then the policy evaporates. If you live, the money was wasted at the end of the term. The fact that it’s a bad bet makes it far more affordable than whole life. It doesn’t pretend to be an investment; it’s just insurance. Pure and simple

Personal Liability Umbrella

An umbrella policy is lawsuit insurance. If someone trips and hurts themselves in your yard, and decides to sue, this will pay your legal bills. If you get sued for almost anything that was not deliberate(by you!) or business related, this policy can be used to cover the bill.

If you call your insurance company to get an umbrella policy, they will force you to raise the limits on your homeowner’s and auto insurance. Generally, those limits will be raised to $500,000, and the umbrella coverage will be there to pick up any costs beyond the new limit.

A little-known secret about umbrella policies: They set the practical limit of a lawsuit against you. Most ambulance chasers know better than to sue you for 10 million dollars if you only have a policy to cover 1 million. They will never see the other 9 million, so why bother? They’ll go for what they know they can get.

The flipside to that is that you should not talk about your umbrella policy. Having a million dollars in insurance is a sign of “deep pockets”. It’s a sign that it’s worthwhile to sue you. You don’t want to look extra sue-able, so keep it quiet.

Insurance is a great way to protect yourself if something bad happens. Today, you should take a look at your policies and see where you may have gaps in coverage, or where you may be paying too much.

How Much Should You Tip?

Finance

: Image by cemre via Flickr

This post from CNN Money has been making the rounds. I’m getting into the game today.

With the holiday season upon us, tipping the people you work with is a tradition in some cases and actually expected in others. Here’s what CNN came up with and my take:

Housekeeper. We don’t have one. I’d think $75-100 would make a nice tip/Christmas bonus. I seem to be more generous than average with my imaginary maid. Maybe that’s because of the outfits she wears.
Gardener. Once again, we don’t have one. Even if we did, I live in Minnesota and have close to a foot of snow over the patch of weeds I call my garden. If I did have a gardener, I wouldn’t have seen him for a few months by now, anyway. $0!
Mail carrier. I’ve only met my mail man a dozen times and I’ve never considered giving him a Christmas present. Do people really do that?
Barber. I don’t have one any more. My wife has started doing my hair for me. When I did, I tipped about 25%, but again, I wouldn’t think about a Christmas present. I only saw him quarterly. I don’t think my wife has a regular stylist either. She’s just got a shop she goes to and gets whoever is available. Is there holiday tipping protocol for that?
Garbage collector. No way. Really? I don’t know that I’ve seen the same guy twice. Am I supposed to give a present to the anonymous, interchangeable union guy that drives past my house every Friday?
Newspaper carrier. One night, twelve years ago, while my wife was still working graveyard shifts, she had a hard time sleeping on her nights off. That’s natural for 3rd shift workers. At about 4AM, she was watching TV and saw someone run past the window. Scared, she came to wake me up. I handed her the phone to call the police, while I grabbed the only thing I had for self-defense and went to investigate. I ran out on the front step–in my boxers, carrying a sword–and saw someone lurking in the neighbor’s yard across the street. I yelled, “Y0u don’t belong here!” only to hear “I’m delivering the paper!” That’s when I start tipping the newspaper carrier. I stopped when we canceled our subscription a few years later. Who needs a dead tree in the morning, when there are a million news sites on the internet?

If the majority of people are giving Christmas bonuses to that many people, and are as generous as the article suggests, then I fall far to the loutish end of the bell curve. I am planning to give my virtual assistant 1/12 of the pay he’s earned this year, so that should make up for some of it, but that is an ongoing business relationship.

How do you compare when it comes to holiday tipping?

Search Results for: debt-burnout/how-much-should-you-tip/subscribe-by-email/money-problems-day-1-setting-goals/brown-bagging-your-way-to-savings

The Sales Page

The Email List

Checkout and Credit

Other Factors

Premium

Copay

Coinsurance

Deductible

HSA

FSA

Individual Plans

Employer-Sponsored Plans

Open Enrollment

Explanation of Benefits

Maximum Dollar Limit

Out-Of-Pocket Maximum

COBRA

Catastrophic Health Insurance

Things to Watch Out For When Applying For Health Insurance

Individual, Individual + 1, Individual + Family

Maximum annual coverage

Primary and Secondary Coverage

Pre-Existing Conditions

Homework

Homeowner’s Insurance

Auto Insurance

Rental

Life Insurance

Personal Liability Umbrella