Search Results for “feed/573/budget4/subscribe-by-email/contact-me/money-problems-day-1-setting-goals/how-to-complain-the-squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease”

How to Complain – The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

: Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever been screwed by a company? Have they sent you the wrong item, or an empty box, or left your order backordered for so long that you can’t even dispute it with your credit card company any more?

What can you do?

I know you’ve heard the phrase, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” That means, he whines loudest, gets the most. The thing is, you have to whine effectively, or you’ll just get round-filed.

Targeting Subsystems On

Who you complain to matters more than what you complain about. The clerk at your local big-box retailer isn’t going to refund your online purchase. You need to complain to someone who can make a decision to help you. First, find the customer service email address. Next, if you are complaining about a recurring service, find the retention department’s email address. Finally, find the email address for absolutely everybody Vice-President or above for that company, including the board of directors. Go to their website, find the email for some PR drone and figure out the format. First.Last@Company.com or FirstInitial.LastName@Company.com or whatever. Look up the company in Google Finance and translate everyone’s name into the email format. You might not have the perfect list, but it should be close.

Target Locked On

Now that you know who you are about to blast, what are you going to say? A few things to include are:

Your contact information. If they can’t get back to you, they can’t make it up to you.
Details of the problem. Include the date of purchase, date of delivery, and a detailed description of what actually went wrong.
Scanned copies of receipts.
Any names of anybody you’ve had to deal with, either in the original transaction or when the problem occurred, if you have the names.

Engage!

What to say, what to say?

Don’t be abusive. It’s okay to be angry, and it’s okay to let them know your are angry, but swearing or threatening their lives will–at best–only get you ignored. Worst case, threats are illegal and they can pass your email along to the police.
Stay brief. It doesn’t matter that your daddy took you to Starbucks to use their free wi-fi when you were just three years old. Don’t talk about that time the aliens abducted you or how sad you are that they never call like they promised they would. Keep to the point. “This is who I am. This is what happened. This is what I want you to do about it.”

Send that sucker out. If you feeling particularly perturbed, send a CC to your state’s Attorney General and any possibly related regulatory agencies. I tend to save this step for round 2.

Money Problems – Day 1: Setting Goals

Finance

Today, I am starting a 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 going to run 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.

In this, the first installment, we’re going to talk about goals.

First, we’re going to ask 3 questions.

What is your financial goal?
Why?
How can you get there?

The first question is “What is your goal?” Of course, in this series, on this site, we’re only going to be addressing your financial goals. Losing 300 pounds, growing wings, and flying to the moon may be an admirable goal, but it’s considerably outside of the scope of this project.

So, what is your financial goal? Do you want to retire a millionaire, or become financially independent? Do you want to pay off your debt, or save enough money to see the world? Do you want to learn how to retire by 40?

Your goal does not matter…to anyone but you. To you, though, it is terribly important. Without a goal, how can you measure you progress and see what you have accomplished? It’s easy to get frustrated and give up when you can’t look back and see what successes you have actually accumulated.

Whatever your goal, you have to do two things:

Don’t let anyone tell you it is stupid or impossible. There is a quote that I can’t find attribution for, other than as an old Chinese proverb: “Those that say it can’t be done should get out of the way of those doing it.”
Write it down and hang it up. This lets you see your goal every day. It will be impossible to forget and difficult to ignore. I have Dave Ramsey‘s Baby Steps hanging on my refrigerator where I see it a dozen times per day.

The second major question to ask yourself is “Why?” Why is this goal important to you? Why do you care?

If you can’t answer that, it’s time to sit back and think about it for a while. Without a solid reason to succeed, you’ll lose motivation and fail. Are you getting out of debt to give yourself a secure retirement? Do you want to save to travel the world because you’ve been dreaming about it since you were in diapers? Do you simply want to provide a secure future for your family? Whatever your reason, it is–and should be–uniquely yours.

The third and final question is “How can you make it happen?” That question has an extremely simple answer: read the rest of the series.

Saturday Roundup

Life

I’ve spend the last 10 days at home with my two youngest kids. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s amazing watching them interact with each other and seeing how their imaginations works. It’s also been a helpful reminder that, if I don’t turn on the TV, they will happily find something else to do.

30 Day Project Update

This month, I am trying to establish the Slow Carb Diet as a habit. At the end of the month, I’ll see what the results were and decide if it’s worth continuing. For those who don’t know, the Slow Carb Diet involves cutting out potatoes, rice, flour, sugar, and dairy in all their forms. My meals consist of 40% proteins, 30% vegetables, and 30% legumes(beans or lentils). There is no calorie counting, just some specific rules, accompanied by a timed supplement regimen and some timed exercises to manipulate my metabolism. The supplements are NOT effedrin-based diet pills, or, in fact, uppers of any kind. There is also a weekly cheat day, to cut the impulse to cheat and to avoid letting my body go into famine mode.

I’m measuring two metrics, my weight and the total inches of my belly, waist, biceps, and thighs. Between the two, I should have an accurate assessment of my progress.

Weight: I have lost 11 pounds since January 2nd. This is crazy. At least part of this has to be due to the natural swing of up to 5 pounds from day to day, and part of it is due to the fact that I was wearing jeans when I weighed in the first time and cotton pajamas this morning. From now on, this is going to be the first thing I do on Saturday mornings, so everything is as consistent as possible. Another factor is that I’ve cut most of the crap out of my diet for a week. My body has been flushing garbage. But dang! 11 pounds in a week. I’m a bit excited.

Total Inches: I have lost 5.5 inches in the same time frame. This is proof that it’s not just water that I lost, which is where first, dramatic losses usually originate in a diet.

The loss seems a little bit nuts. Here’s hoping it stays consistent.

Best Posts

Your retirement account shouldn’t be an optional investment. Do you know how to maximize retirement savings?

I’m a big fan of making extra money. Money Crashers lists 6 sites to help you rake in the cash, without needing any special skills.

Unclutterer is giving away three Fujitsu Scansnaps. I want one of these is a way that isn’t quite right.

I’ve been moving to LED lights instead of CFLs for a few years. CFLs make lousy security lights in Minnesota in the winter. They take 5 minutes to get to full brightness when it’s cold. LEDs last forever.

LRN Timewarp

This is where I review the posts I wrote one year ago.

I posted about the difference between bribes and rewards and the problems inherent in trying to buy good behavior.

Lesson 2 of my budget series went live, detailing my monthly bills.

We made some changes to our budget plans that haven’t worked very well. Over the course of the last year, every one of these ideas has either been partially or totally abandoned, but it’s working for us.

Carnivals I’ve Rocked

How to Complain – The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

3 Things You Need to Know About Homeowner’s Insurance was included in the Festival of Frugality.

Thank you! If I missed anyone, please let me know.

Get More Out of Live Real, Now

There are so many ways you can read and interact with this site.

You can subscribe by RSS and get the posts in your favorite news reader. I prefer Google Reader.

You can subscribe by email and get, not only the posts delivered to your inbox, but occasional giveaways and tidbits not available elsewhere.

You can ‘Like’ LRN on Facebook. Facebook gets more use than Google. It can’t hurt to see what you want where you want.

You can follow LRN on Twitter. This comes with some nearly-instant interaction.

You can send me an email, telling me what you liked, what you didn’t like, or what you’d like to see more(or less) of. I promise to reply to any email that isn’t purely spam.

That’s all for today. Have a great weekend!

Make Extra Money, Part 6: Setting Up a Site

Business, Finance

In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to show you how to set up a WordPress site. I’m going to show you exactly what settings, plugins, and themes I use. I’m not going to get into writing posts today. That will be next time.

I use WordPress because it makes it easy to develop good-looking sites quickly. You don’t have to know html or any programming. I will be walking through the exact process using Hostgator, but most hosting plans use CPanel, so the instructions will be close. If not, just follow WordPress’s 5 minute installation guide.

Installing WordPress

Assuming you can follow along with me, log in to your hosting account and find the section of your control panel labeled “Software/Service”. Click “Fantastico De Luxe”.

On the Fantastico screen, click WordPress, then “New Installation”.

On the next screen, select your domain name, then enter all of the details: admin username, password, site name, and site description. If you’ll remember, I bought the domain http://www.masterweddingplanning.net. I chose the site name of “Master Wedding Planning” and a description of “Everything You Need to Know to Plan Your Wedding”.

Click “install”, then “finish installation”. The final screen will contain a link to the admin page, in this case, masterweddingplanning.net/wp-admin. Go there and log in.

Configuring WordPress

After you log in, if there is a message at the top of the screen telling you to update, do so. Keeping your site updated is the best way to avoid getting hacked. Click “Please update now” then “Update automatically”. Don’t worry about backing up, yet. We haven’t done anything worth saving.

Next, click “Settings” on the left. Under General Settings, put the www in the WordPress and site URLs. Click save, then log back in.

Click Posts, then Categories. Under “Add New Category”, create one called “Misc” and click save.

Click Appearance. This brings you to the themes page. Click “Install Themes” and search for one you like. I normally use Headway, but before I bought that, I used SimpleX almost exclusively. Your goal is to have a simple theme that’s easy to maintain and easy to read. Bells and whistles are a distraction.

Click “Install”, “Install now”, and “Activate”. You now have a very basic WordPress site.

Plugins

A plugin is an independent piece of software to make independent bits of WordPress magic happen. To install the perfect set of plugins, click Plugins on the left. Delete “Hello Dolly”, then click “Add new”.

In the search box, enter “plugin central” and click “Search plugins”. Plugin Central should be the first plugin in the list, so click “install”, then “ok”, then “activate plugin”. Congratulations, you’ve just installed your first plugin.

Now, on the left, you’ll see “Plugin Central” under Plugins. Click it. In the Easy Plugin Installation box, copy and paste the following:

 All in One SEO Pack
 Contact Form 7
 WordPress Database Backup
 SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2
 WP Super Cache
 Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress
 date exclusion seo
 WP Policies
 Pretty Link Lite
 google xml sitemaps
 Jetpack by WordPress.com

Click “install”.

On the left, click “Installed Plugins”. On the next screen, click the box next to “Plugins”, then select “Activate” from the dropdown and click apply.

Still under Plugins, click “Akismet Configuration”. Enter your API key and hit “update options”. You probably don’t have one, so click “get your key”.

Tools

The only tool I worry about is the backup. It’s super-easy to set up. Click “Tools”, then “Backup”.

Scroll down to “Schedule Backups”, select weekly, make sure it’s set to a good email address and click “Schedule Backup”. I only save weekly because we won’t be adding daily content. Weekly is safe enough, without filling up your email inbox.

Settings

There are a lot of settings we’re going to set. This is going to make the site more usable and help the search engines find your site. We’re going to go right down the list. If you see a section that I don’t mention, it’s because the defaults are good enough.

Writing

Set the Default Post Category to “Misc”.

Visit this page and copy the entire list into “Update Service” box. This will make the site ping a few dozen services every time you publish a post. It’s a fast way to get each post indexed by Google.

Click “Save Changes”.

Discussion

Uncheck everything under “Email me whenever…” and hit save. This lets people submit comments, without actually posting the comments or emailing me when they do so. Every once in a while, I go manually approve the comments, but I don’t make it a priority.

Permalinks

Select “Custom structure” and enter this: /%postname%/

Click save.

All in One SEO

Set the status to “Enabled”, then fill out the site title and description. Keep the description to about 160 characters. This is what builds the blurb that shows up by the link when you site shows up in Google’s results.

Check the boxes for “Use categories for META keywords” and “Use noindex for tag archives”.

Click “Update Options”.

Date Exlusion SEO

Check the boxes to remove each of the dates and set the alt text to “purpose” or something. This will suppress the date so your posts won’t look obsolete.

SEO Search Terms 2

This plugin reinforces the searches that bring people to your site. It’s kind of neat. Skip the registration, accept the defaults and hit save.

WP Policies

Scroll to the bottom and click import. We’ll come back to this.

WP Super Cache

Select “Caching On” and hit save.

JetPack

Across the top of the screen should be a giant banner telling you to connect to WordPress.com and set up Jetpack. You’ll need an account on WordPress.com, so go there and set one up. After authorizing the site, you’ll be brought back to the Jetpack configuration screen. Click “Configure” under “WordPress.com Stats”. Take the defaults and hit save.

Contact

On the contact configuration page, copy the code in the top section. You’ll need this in a moment.

Pages

Now, we going to create a couple of static pages. On the left, click “Pages”, then “Add new”.

Name the first page “Contact” and put the contact form code in the body of the page. Hit publish.

Menus

Under Appearance, click “Menu”. Enter a menu name and hit save.

Then, under “Pages”, click the box next to “Contact”, “Disclaimer”, and any other policies you’d like to display. Hit save.

Widgets

Also under Appearance, click “Widgets”. This is where you’ll select what will display in the sidebar. All you have to do is drag the boxes you want from the middle of the page to the widget bar on the right. I recommend Text, Search, Recent Posts, Popular Search Terms and Tag Cloud. In the text box, just put some placeholder text in it, like “Product will go here”. We’ll address this next time.

Posts

We’re not going to worry about getting posts in place, yet. That will be the next installment. However, the steps in the next installment could take 2 weeks to implement, and we want Google to start paying attention now. To make that happen, we need to get a little bit of content in place. This won’t be permanent content. It’s only there so Google has something to see when it comes crawling.

To get this temporary, yet legal content, I use eZineArticles. Just go search for something in your niche that doesn’t look too spammy.

Then, click “Posts”, then delete the “Hello World” post. Click “Add new”. Copy the eZine article, being sure to include the author box at the bottom, and hit publish.

To see your changes, you may have to go to Settings, then WP Cache and delete the cache so your site will refresh.

Congratulations! You now have a niche blog with content. It’s not ready to make you any money, yet, but it is ready for Google to start paying attention. In the next installment, I’ll show you how I get real unique content and set it up so Google keeps coming back to show me the love.

How to Have a Perfect Life

Life

A few years ago, my wife and I were discussing life improvement, the options in front of us, and our future goals. She said she felt trapped by the scope of our goals and didn’t know where to start. That led to a discussion on

achieving our goals, which led to this.

Examine your life. Take stock of every aspect of your life. What pleases you? What upsets you? What do you do that adds no value to your life? Or worse, removes value? What do you do that adds the most value? What would you like to change? Eliminate? Improve? Count the small things. Nothing is insignificant. Write it all down and be specific.

Analyze your list. Are there any obvious patterns? Is there a single thread that is making you miserable or affecting multiple other items? Would eliminating 1 factor improve 90% of the rest? Is there a bad job or a toxic relationship ruining your happiness? Be honest and be critical.

What are your dreams? Where would you like to be in six months? A year? 5? 10? How would you like to retire? When? Write it all down. This is now your life plan.

Set goals. Set concrete, definable goals. Set goals that have an obvious success point. When you reach your goal, you want to be able to point it out. “Lose weight” is not a goal. “Lose 50 pounds in the next year” is a measurable, definable, concrete goal. Set incremental goals to reach your larger goals and, more importantly, your dreams.

Here’s an example:

Dream: Retire at 50.

Incremental Goal: Get a 10% raise within 6 months
Incremental Goal: Eliminate debt within 3 years
Incremental Goal: Max out 401k contribution
Incremental goal: Save 150,000 within 10 years
Incremental Goal: Save 45k each year after that.
Retire

When you are setting up your goal plan, make sure to include the analyzed items mentioned earlier. These are the things that will make today happier for you.

Now, you have examined your life. You have analyzed the results. You’ve gathered your dreams and compiled a goal plan based on your hopes, dreams, goals and desires. What’s next?

We’re going to take a page from David Allen. It’s time to Get Things Done. What do you have to do next to reach your goals? What is the next step? Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by the scope of the entire list. Select one single item from your plan and look for the one single next step to make on the path to that goal.

Going back to the retirement goal plan, the next step towards a 10% raise could be researching salaries for your job description in your area to give you ammunition in the meeting with your boss. It could be updating your resume to hunt for a better paying job, or even just studying up on some resume tips.

If you want to run a marathon next year, the next step is to start walking every day to train your body.

If you want to improve communication with your spouse, the next step is probably to let her know.

If you want to eliminate debt, the next step may be setting up a budget or canceling unnecessary services like cable.

Every goal has a path leading to it. If that’s not true, you haven’t defined a concrete measurable goal.

Examine your life. Analyze your situation. Know WHAT you want. Know what you want to change. Set goals to get there, one step at a time. Take a single step towards your goals.

Then take another.

What are you doing to reach your goals and improve your life?

2011 Goals

Life

It’s that time of the year when people make public promises to themselves that last almost as long as the hangover most of them are going to earn tonight, otherwise known as New Year’s Resolutions.

Not a fan.

I am, however a fan of planning out some concrete goals and doing my best to meet them. I do this through a series of 30 day projects. I set a goal that can be reached in 30 days, and push for it. I tend to make my goals fairly aggressive, and I tend to meet them.

Here were my goals and results for 2010:

January: Wake up at 5am AND read to my kids every night before bed. These were easy goals to meet. A year later, I am still getting up much earlier than I ever have, even if it’s not 5AM. I write better late at night than I do early in the morning, anyway. I’m not still reading to my kids every night, but we are making progress on teaching my four-year-old to read.
February: Do 100 push-ups at one time by the end of the month. I accomplished this in 22 days. I also had a secret project that involved doing something sweet for my wife every day. By the end of the month, she was convinced I had done something horrible that I was trying to make up for.
March: Do 100 sit-ups at one time by the end of the month. It took me a week, but I found out how bad sit-ups are for your back. Pure failure.
April: Spring Cleaning. I will declutter every room in my house this month. We missed one room and one closet, but made a lot of charities happy.
May: Have a sit-down dinner with my family, at the dining room table at least 3 times per week. We managed this one and enjoyed it, but we haven’t managed to keep it up. I’ll have to try this again.
June: No computer use, while anyone else in the family is awake, except for household necessities, such as bills. This one worked well and improved the quality of our interaction. I’m not quite this strict about it, but my computer use has gone down dramatically while my family is awake.
July: Write fiction every day. I don’t think I wrote more than a few pages of fiction, but I did write every day.
August: Buy nothing new this month. We came very close to doing this one perfectly. It wasn’t easy.
September: Attempt to learn a new language. Total bomb. I never even got started.
October: No yelling at the kids. Have you ever thought about trying this with a a two-year-old and a four-year-old? We never got started.
November: No complaining. Not at home, not at work. I didn’t make this an actual month, but I’ve been trying to complain much less. I think it’s been working.
December: I will have done 14 projects this year. December is a month off. As planned, I took December off.

So I missed 4 months of projects. This year, I’m going to modify my overall plan and only do 6 projects, every other month. That will give me a month off to either relax or incorporate the goal into my ongoing habits without any stress.

Here are my goals:

January: I’m going to do Tim Ferriss’s Slow-Carb diet. Yes, it’s a fad diet, but it beats the constant stream of garbage I eat now. The basic plan is to avoid anything white; no bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, or sugar. That’s accompanied by a targeted supplement regimen and a timed exercise plan to manipulate my metabolism. I’m not adding any aerobic exercise to my day, because I want this to be as controlled an experiment as possible. If it’s working at the end of the month, I will keep it going. It’s time to not be fat anymore.
March: In February, I managed to get myself able to do 100 pushups in a single set. In March, I hurt my back trying to do the same with sit-ups and that killed my workout habit. This March, I’m going to do the 100 pushups challenge again, but this time, I’m going for perfect pushups. Last year, they got sloppy after about 80. This year, that won’t be good enough.
May: I’m going to do at least 30 days of the Couch to 5k running program. It’s a 9 week program. As a 30 day project, it’s designed to establish the habit. When I tried picking up running last year, my knees were causing problems. Hopefully, my January project will mitigate that this year.
July: I’m going to pick up a new language. This is the failed plan from September 2010. I’ve narrowed it down to either Spanish, Swedish, or Italian. One is useful, one is a part of my heritage, and one is for fun. At the moment, I’m undecided.
September: Undecided. I am leaning towards a “nice” month. 30 days of doing something nice, for someone, somewhere. If I go this route, I’ve got 9 months to plan, because that’s a lot of things to do.
November: Absolutely undecided. Any suggestions?

That’s my plan for the new year. Six specific goals, each lasting 30 days. I could definitely use some help for September and November. Please give me some suggestions in the comments.

Search Results for: feed/573/budget4/subscribe-by-email/contact-me/money-problems-day-1-setting-goals/how-to-complain-the-squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease

Targeting Subsystems On

Target Locked On

Engage!

30 Day Project Update

Best Posts

LRN Timewarp

Carnivals I’ve Rocked

Get More Out of Live Real, Now

Installing WordPress

Configuring WordPress

Plugins

Tools

Settings

Writing

Discussion

Permalinks

All in One SEO

Date Exlusion SEO

SEO Search Terms 2

WP Policies

WP Super Cache

JetPack

Contact

Pages

Menus

Widgets

Posts