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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-29

Misc

You’re not alone: Help with Bankruptcy & Debt

Finance

Debt managementFrequently regarded as an indication of personal failure, bankruptcy is still today widely considered a highly sensitive topic. Many will even feel uneasy speaking about their debt problems with close relatives and friends. If you, too, are facing serious debt issues and are in need of help, rest assured you are not the only one afraid of sliding into bankruptcy. In fact, thousands of households in the UK are threateningly close to insolvency and most are experiencing the exact same feelings of shame and despair. This perfectly understandable reaction has, meanwhile, unfortunately overshadowed the fact that there are hands-on practical steps especially designed to help you resolve your debt situation.

There is a good reason why addressing the issue of bankruptcy has an urgent ring to it. Recent statistics indicate a steady rise of individual company insolvencies in the UK, particularly since the 1990s. According to the British Insolvency Service, the rate of bankruptcy on an individual level has risen from a total of 24,441 in 1997 to staggering 106,645 in 2007 in England and Wales. Alarmingly, the peak doesn’t seem to have been reached yet. As  respected online-service ‘This is Money’ reports, ‘record numbers of people were declared insolvent in England and Wales’ in 2010, further noting that ‘an all-time high of 135,089 people were declared insolvent in 2010—0.7% up on the total for 2009.’ As you can gather from these numbers, you are certainly not alone with your debt problems: Around 140,000 adults are facing bankruptcy as a direct consequence of mishandling their debt issues, which translates to 385 new cases per day. It has already been pointed out that ‘the number of victims will be enough to fill both the London 2012 Olympic stadium and the Emirates Stadium.’

So, if you’re facing bankruptcy, there’s no need to feel ashamed. By taking an active stance and addressing your debt issues, you may even be able to avert insolvency altogether. With years of experience and several distinctions to our credit, the Debt Advisory Line have established themselves as leading experts in the field of debt management. We’ve already helped thousands of individuals and households who thought bankruptcy was their only option. Settling debt issues is our forte – and you shouldn’t settle with anything less.

This post brought to you by Debt Advisory Line.

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How to Prioritize Your Spending

Finance, Uncategorized

Jewel-Osco - monster shopping cart truck
Image via Wikipedia

Don’t buy that.

At least take a few moments to decide if it’s really worth buying.

Too often, people go on auto-pilot and buy whatever catches their attention for a few moments.  The end-caps at the store?  Oh, boy, that’s impossible to resist.  Everybody needs a 1000 pack of ShamWow’s, right?   Who could live without a extra pair of kevlar boxer shorts?

Before you put the new tchotke in your cart, ask yourself some questions to see if it’s worth getting.

1. Is it a need or a want? Is this something you could live without?   Some things are necessary.  Soap, shampoo, and food are essentials.  You have to buy those.  Other things, like movies, most of the clothes people buy, or electronic gadgets are almost always optional.   If you don’t need it, it may be a good idea to leave it in the store.

2. Does it serve a purpose?  I bought a vase once that I thought was pretty and could hold candy or something, but it’s done nothing but collect dust in the meantime.  It’s purpose is nothing more than hiding part of a flat surface.   Useless.

3. Will you actually use it? A few years ago, my wife an cleaned out her mother’s house.   She’s a hoarder.   We found at least 50 shopping bags full of clothes with the tags still attached.   I know, you’re thinking that you’d never do that, because you’re not a hoarder, but people do it all the time.  Have you ever bought a book that you haven’t gotten around to reading, or a movie that went on the shelf, still wrapped in plastic?   Do you own a treadmill that’s only being used to hang clothes, or a home liposuction machine that is not being used to make soap?

3. Is it a fad? Beanie babies, iPads, BetaMax, and bike helmets.  All garbage that takes the world by storm for a few years then fades, leaving the distributors rich and the customers embarrassed.

4. Is it something you’re considering just to keep up with the Joneses? If you’re only buying it to compete with your neighbors, don’t buy it.  You don’t need a Lexus, a Rolex, or that replacement kidney.  Just put it back on the shelf and go home with your money.  Chances are, your neighbors are only buying stuff so they can compete with you.  It’s a vicious cycle.  Break it.

5. Do you really, really want it? Sometimes, no matter how worthless something might be, whether it’s a fad, or a dust-collecting knick-knack, or an outfit you’ll never wear, you just want it more than you want your next breath of air.  That’s ok.  A bit disturbing, but ok.  If you are meeting all of your other needs, it’s fine to indulge yourself on occasion.

How do you prioritize spending if you’re thinking about buying something questionable?

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Beat the Check

Finance

Wheel of fortune. Shot wide open using 50mm/f1...
Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever played a game of “Beat the Check”?  Your rent is due tomorrow, but you don’t get paid until Friday, so you write the check today an, on payday, you run to the bank to get your paycheck deposited before it has a chance to clear.  To stretch out the time, you write yourself a check from another account to cover the deficit, knowing that will take a few more days to clear. This is called “floating” a check.

Sound familiar?

I think most people who write checks have tried to rush a deposit in before a check clears.

In 2004, the Check 21 act went into effect, which turned the game on its head. This law gave check recipients an option to make a digital copy of a check, slashing processing time. Instead of boxes of checks being transported around the country, the check began getting scanned and instantly transferred, along with all of the encoding necessary to keep the digital checks organized. This dramatically cut the amount of time it took to clear a check. What was once a week was reduced to as little as 48 hours.

Now, as technology improves and banks update their infrastructure to match, the “float” time has been reduced even further. Many banks are using image control systems to instantly convert all incoming checks to digital format. Within a couple of hours, these images can be transmitted to the Federal Reserve, to be transmitted nearly instantly to the issuing bank. If both the issuing and the receiving banks are using modern image control systems, it is impossible to float a check. “Beat the Check” is a thing of the past. It’s like betting on purple at the roulette wheel.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the funds are instantly available. That would eliminate the banks being able make use of the funds during that time. Don’t expect the banks to make a habit of allowing you the use of your money before the federal regulations demand it.