- RT @ScottATaylor: Get a Daily Summary of Your Friends’ Twitter Activity [FREE INVITES] http://bit.ly/4v9o7b #
- Woo! Class is over and the girls are making me cookies. Life is good. #
- RT @susantiner: RT @LenPenzo Tip of the Day: Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night. #
- RT @ScottATaylor: Some of the United States’ most surprising statistics http://ff.im/-cPzMD #
- RT @glassyeyes: 39DollarGlasses extends/EXPANDS disc. to $20/pair for the REST OF THE YEAR! http://is.gd/5lvmLThis is big news! Please RT! #
- @LenPenzo @SusanTiner I couldn’t help it. That kicked over the giggle box. in reply to LenPenzo #
- RT @copyblogger: You’ll never get there, because “there” keeps moving. Appreciate where you’re at, right now. #
- Why am I expected to answer the phone, strictly because it’s ringing? #
- RT: @WellHeeledBlog: Carnival of Personal Finance #235: Cinderella Edition http://bit.ly/7p4GNe #
- 10 Things to do on a Cheap Vacation. https://liverealnow.net/aOEW #
- RT this for chance to win $250 @WiseBread http://bit.ly/4t0sDu #
- [Read more…] about Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-19
5 Ways to Save Money by Going Green
This is a guest post by MoneySuperMarket.
Making changes in your daily life that minimize your impact on the environment is the right way to go green. While most people are happy just to know the environment is being protected, there are other benefits to going green. Pick a few of these five lifestyle changes and enjoy having a little extra cash in your pocket as well.
Eat More Meals At Home
Dining out is a fun family experience, but it takes its toll on your wallet and your neighborhood. Restaurants create millions of tons of trash each year. This tip is to the people who already avoid fast food for health reasons, but cooking with your friends and family is a great way to get closer.
Pick Up A Creative Hobby
Some hobbies require a lot more equipment or materials, therefore creating more waste and using more energy. Creative extracurricular activities use inexpensive or recycled goods instead, requiring fewer trips to the sports goods store. Woodcarving can be practiced with scraps from cabinetmakers, while yarn for knitting can come from old sweaters that are no longer worn.
Cool Off The Hot Water Heater
Each water heater features a small screw or dial that allows you to set the perfect temperature. Millions of people have their heaters set higher than necessary, wasting a lot of electricity each year. You can safely turn the heat down to about 125 degrees Fahrenheit, which could net you some hefty annual savings if it is at 140 or 150 degrees right now. Most people never use water for washing or showering that is higher than 130 when mixed in the tap.
Carpool With Co-workers
Driving back and forth to work puts a lot of wear and tear on your vehicle. Rising gas prices has made it even harder to afford a long daily commute by car. Sharing the responsibility among a group of co-workers or fellow parents at your child’s school can help to spread out the costs and the impact on the environment.
Try Your Hand At Gardening
You don’t have to have a green thumb to grow your favorite herbs in a windowsill pot. Start out easy and try a potted dwarf lime tree or a terracotta planter full of strawberries on the patio. The vegetables you harvest don’t have to contain pesticides. Compare your gardening costs against prices for high-end organic produce at the store. You could save thousands of dollars each year and reduce the damaging effects of large-scale agriculture.
How You’re Finding Me
Every once in a while, I like to dig through Google Analytics and see how people are finding this site. Some of the search terms are interesting.
“father of three” mid life crisis
Here’s a free piece of advice. As a father of three, you don’t get to have a mid-life crisis. It’s not allowed. Rather, it’s allowed, but you aren’t allowed to act on it. At a minimum, until your children are out of the house, you need to man up and provide all of the support you possibly can. No sports cars you can’t afford and no 22 year old hardbodies. Be there for your kids.
“payday loans” which accepts guest posts
Payday loan marketing. Just go away. You aren’t running a guest post here.
“slow carb” hungry all the time
You’re doing it wrong. If you are hungry, eat more bacon. Or beans. Beans fill you up longer.
$1000000 business idea
Ideas are the easy part. Execution makes you a millionaire.
articles on why appearance shouldn’t matter?
Appearances do matter, and always will. Your appearance is what makes the initial impression when you meet someone new. You don’t have to be a model, but basic grooming and fashion sense is necessary. Take this with a grain of salt. I’ve got a week’s growth of a beard and I wear a different plaid, button-down shirt every day.
are push ups supposed to be hard
Only the first 50. After that, I kind of go on blissed-out autopilot. If you can do 100 pushups, you can probably do 200.
acceptable place to put tattoo
If you wear clothes there, you can put a tattoo there. Visible tattoos are called “job stoppers” for a reason. If you put a tattoo on your face, the only job you qualify for is “drug dealer’s girlfriend”. Or possibly prison janitor.
burning bridges with toxic people
If you must burn bridges, filling them with toxic people first isn’t a bad idea.
candied pork butt
Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it. Interesting side story: while double-checking the rule number, I stumbled across My Little Ponies doing things they never advertise on the box.
cut my wife’s hair
I did this once. Pro tip: In the back, at the bottom, cut small chunks and leave them longer than you think they should be. You can always cut more, but uncutting hair is really hard.
f***** on the roadside by your mechanic
He probably deserves a tip for that.
girls fart for money and girls live farts
See the bit about the pork butt, remove the funny, and…ewww.
how to be a successful debtor
I recommend starting by paying your bills. When the debts are gone, you win. Success!
i ate bacon on slow carb diet
So did everyone else, sweetie. It’s the biggest draw to the slow carb diet.
in memory of pets tattoos
When I get a pet, I get it with the understanding that I’m going to outlive it. The day I bring it home, some small part of me is preparing for the day when I have to dig a hole in my backyard. Tattooing that day? Not gonna happen.
thickening felt behind testicle
Why are you on google? Go to the doctor. Please?
Interesting. Between girls farting and my post about being well-trained, there is a significant amount of fetish traffic coming through here. Maybe I need to explore a new advertising strategy.
4 Ways to Change Your Finances for the Better
Finance is made out to be difficult, but it’s really not. All financial advice really boils down to 2 sentences: “Spend less than you earn. Save or invest the rest.” Everything else is an unnecessary complication, unless you need to be told that commemorative plates aren’t actually an investment. Unfortunately, we’re all people. (Except for you in the back. I see you, and you are not people.) People make mistakes. People sometimes need things spelled out, or at least explained in a way that makes it seem less intimidating to get started.
With that in mind, here are four steps that will get you out of debt and, over a long enough timeline, make you rich:
1. Lower your interest rates. If you’ve got debt, particularly credit card debt, you’re paying too much interest. It doesn’t matter what the interest rate is, it could be better. It’s time to pick up the phone and politely ask your credit card company to lower your interest rate. If they refuse, mention that their competitor is offering you 3% interest on a balance transfer with no transfer fee. Mention a competitor by name, but don’t worry about a specific offer. There are always offers being tossed about.
If they won’t lower your rate, find a company who will. 5% on a 10,000 balance is $500 per year. That’s 3 months of payments for free.
2. Lower your monthly payments. Do you have a cable bill? A phone bill? Any other bills? Put them in a stack and call them. Every. Single. One. Ask if there is any way you can lower your bill. Can you get put on a new customer promotion? My electric company offers a saver switch for my air conditioner that will lower my bill by 15% just for giving them the ability to toggle my AC on and off. When we had that installed, I never noticed it in use.
3. Save $1000. When you’ve got no money, every unexpected expense is an emergency. When you’ve got a little bit socked away, you can ride out the problems without much worry. $1000 may not be enough to ride out an extended bout of unemployment, but it does a pretty good job of taking the sting out of car repairs. Do whatever you have to do, but get some money in an emergency fund. Then, don’t touch it!
4. Categorize wants and needs. I want a vacation. My kid needs braces. I want a big screen TV. My gas bill needs to get paid. I want a new car. My family needs food. Are you sensing a theme? Pay attention to what you spend. Ask yourself if it’s something you need, or just something you really, really want. Just the act of categorizing it can make it easier to avoid buying whatever it is.
5. Use the savings from 1-4 to pay off whatever you owe. Don’t blow your new-found savings on spinner rims or soap made from rich-people tallow. Use it to finally get ahead of the game.
Fixing Your Credit Report
Sometimes, negative things appear on your credit report. Usually, they do a good job of maintaining
Credit card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)accuracy, but mistakes do happen. The creditor or the reporting agency may screw up, or you may have your identity stolen. If either of these situations are true, you’ll want to correct your credit report, making yourself eligible for lower rates on future credit and, occasionally, lowering the cost of things like auto insurance.
If you throw “credit repair” into Google, you get 18 million hits. Most of those are either outright scams or hopelessly optimistic about what they can accomplish. As I said once before:
Credit Repair is almost always a scam. There are ways to get correct bad information removed from your credit report. If the information is correct, those methods are illegal. There are two legal methods to repair your credit. First, stop generating bad credit. Make your payments on time and eventually, the bad items will fall off. Second, write letters disputing the actual incorrect items on your credit report. There are no quick fixes, and anybody telling you different is flirting with a jail sentence, possibly yours.
There are ways to avoid the scammers.
- Avoid advance-fee credit repair. If they are any good, you will pay for results, not intentions. If they charge beforehand, they are already breaking the law.
- If they insist they can erase the accurate, but negative information, run away.
- If they tell you to dispute everything negative, even the accurate information, run away.
- If they tell you to create a new credit identity, don’t just run, report them. It’s a felony.
Legally, you cannot get valid information removed from your credit report. Anyone who tells you differently is advocating a crime. However, according to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), you are entitled dispute incorrect records.
To verify the accuracy of your credit report, you need to see it. You can get a free report if your credit is used to deny you for something. This is known as an “adverse action” . You have 60 days from the denial to request the report. You can also get one free report from each of the major credit bureaus each year. I space out these requests so I see my credit report every 4 months.
If there is inaccurate information on your report, dispute it in writing. Send a letter to the credit bureau that is reporting the error. Explain the problem and politely demand an investigation. They will contact the creditor, who usually has 30 days to respond. In the meantime, send a dispute letter to the creditor, along with proof of the inaccuracy. If the investigation does not go your way, the creditor will have to report the dispute status to the credit bureaus in the future.
If the negative items are accurate, there is only one way to get it off of your report legally: Wait. Most negative information can only be reported for 7 years, while a bankruptcy will be reported for 10.
Another way to build your credit in the face of negative credit is to start building good credit to overshadow the bad. Get a credit card. Your first credit card from the bottom of the debt-barrel will probably be a gas card or a store-branded credit card. That’s fine. The main consideration is are low or nonexistent fees. Don’t accept application fees, activation fees, fees for carrying a balance or fees for not carrying a balance. Annual fees are becoming a fact of life, so look for low fees. The interest rate does not matter. You will be paying this card off immediately, meaning no less often that every two weeks. Make sure every penny is paid during the grace period, and make sure your card comes with a grace period. Some don’t. Those are bad cards to get.
There are no quick fixes for bad credit, just good new habits and time.
Happy Father’s Day: The Benefits of Being a Parent Can’t Be Measured
It’s true that the benefits of a parent cannot be measured or quantified in any meaningful way. It’s hard to put a price on the emotional commitment and special experience of raising a child as a parent, some of which may not even be realized by the parents themselves until afterwards. But it is undeniable that the experience of parenthood is a rewarding and special time in someone’s life.
For one thing, being a parent can you relive your childhood through your child. There are very few experiences in the world that are as intimate and vicarious as a parent who is raising their newborn child into an adult. Your child’s experiences become your experiences, their safety and learning becomes your priorities, and their success, ultimately, become your own success as a parent. You can rediscover the parts of your childhood that you may even have forgot as your child experiences them for the first time.
As a parent, you are also the center of the world for your child. This can be a tremendous source of self-confidence as well as incentive for self-improvement, to know that another human being sees you as their ultimate role model and will grow up in your footsteps. Just imagine the sense of wonder and awe with which you regarded your own parents when you were a child, and apply them to your child. That is the way they will see the world for a long time, with a constant sense of amazement and curiosity. The mundane becomes extraordinary and fantastic to a child, and a parent is part of the magic and the child’s discovery of the world.
In addition, parenting is a rewarding experience because you involved in the creation of a life and the raising of your child with your partner. There is a great amount of pressure, but also a sense of pride as your child’s characteristics and worldview will, in a large part, be derived from your interaction and education of them. All the things that you wish you had done in your childhood, or wish you had experienced or learned about earlier. These are all things that you can teach your child. As a parent, you are your child’s most important friend, teacher and role model. That is a tremendous source of empowerment and responsibility. But the reward you can get out of being a great parent is a new life in the world that you shaped with your words and actions. What you teach them becomes their most important life lessons, and your actions as a role model becomes the standard by which they live the rest of their lives.
So yes, the benefits of being a parent cannot be measured in conventional terms. But these benefits can definitely outweigh any worldly possession or unit of valuation. Parenthood is an emotional, spiritual, intellectual and educational experience that very few other experiences in the world can replace or even come close to imitating.
