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Don’t Screw Future-You

Finance, Life

A conversation between me and my temporally displaced self.
Future Me: Excuse me, Jason?
Me: Yes?
FMe: <Slap!>
Me: May I ask what that was for?
FMe: Of course.
Me: What was that for, jerk?
FMe: That was payback for all of the hell you have put me through.
Me: What?!?  I’ve never even met you, before.
FMe: Of course you have.  I am future-you, and I’m sick of getting screwed by past-me, that is, you.
Me: Huh?
FMe: Listen close.  You’re not  the sharpest brick in the box and I don’t want to explain this twice.
Me: ???
FMe: A long time ago, when you first met our wife, you were dumb.
Me: I don’t appreciate….
FMe: Shut up.  I was dumb then, too.  Remember?  You…err…we bought a new truck, built an addition on our…err…your…err…whomever’s house, got married in the same year.  On top of many other expensive decisions.  Do your recall?
Me: Yes, I do.  So what?
FMe: If that wasn’t enough, you and your smoking-hot bride are still shopping like you’re rich. You drive a new car.  Your kids wear new clothes.  You’ve got a house full of new furniture.  How did you pay for all of that?
Me: Naturally, I charged it.  Zero payments, zero interest for a year!  Pretty smart, huh?
FMe: What happens in a year?
Me: I don’t know.  I’ve got a full year to figure that out.
FMe: <Slap!>  I’ll tell you what happens!  Future-you, that’s me, gets screwed!   Your raise didn’t come through.  You had a baby. The truck broke down.  Your wife took maternity leave.  A roommate moved out.  You took a loss in the stock market.  You didn’t plan!  You had no savings to cover any of those problems because you were too busy servicing debt to pay for your current life.
Me: How was I to know?
FMe: <Slap!>  Life happens!  You never know what is coming next.  You need to plan and save for what might happen.  Otherwise, you’ll just accumulate more debt to be serviced by yours-truly.  That is not acceptable.
Me:  So?  What are you going to do about it?
FMe: <Slap!>
Me: Really?  Again?
FMe: <Slap!>  I’m struggling to pay your debt. Your son starts college next year, but you’ve left me completely unable to help.  Your daughter wants to get married in a couple of years, but the Father-of-the-Bride can’t afford a tux.  My wife, your beatiful bride, wants a vacation that I can’t afford.   You’ve screwed me, dude.
Me: I’m sorry.  What can I do to fix it?
FMe: Buy me dinner, first.
Me: Huh?!?!?
FMe: Stop the excess spending. Spend less than you make, for a change.  No credit.
Me: None?
FMe: None.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.  Only spend what you can afford. Budget.  Pay off those nasty bills.  Don’t leave me hanging.
Me: So, what you’re saying is that, if I don’t have the money, I shouldn’t buy it?
FMe: Exactly.  That’s the path to wealth, freedom, and financial independence.  Live in the real world.
Me: Gee, thanks, Future-Me!  Now I know.
FMe: And knowing is half the battle.

What would your future-you have to say to you?

 

Horseback Riding Lessons

Finance, Parenting

For the past couple of years, my daughters have been riding in horse shows with a local saddle club.  We’ve been lucky in that my wife’s cousin has let us borrow her horse for the shows, so costs have been minimal.Bought a Pony

Unfortunately, that horse isn’t available this year.  We knew that a few months ago, so the plan was to take a year off from the shows and focus on lessons, to get the girls some real skills.  We found a great instructor at a stable about 30 miles from our house.  Since we live less than two miles from the border of the biggest city in the state, that’s a comparatively short drive.

We pay her $200 per month for 1 lesson per week for both girls.   They each get 30-45 minutes on the horse during each lesson.

Now that show season has started, the plan seems to have changed.   The girls will be riding a different borrowed pony tomorrow.  The shows cost about $50 for registration, lunch, and gas.  Our club has 1 show per month, but my wife has assured me they’ll only be hitting three shows this season and limiting the number of events to keep the cost down.

The direct costs aren’t too bad, but there’s a problem with keeping-up-with-the-Joneses accessorizing.  Vests and boots and helmets and belts and shirts, oh my.

I’d guess our costs for the summer will be $300 per month.

One thing we’ve been considering is buying a pony.  We can get an older pony for around $500-1000.  Older is good because they are calmer and slower.  Boarding the thing will cost another $200 per month.   We’ve been slowly accumulating the stuff to own a horse, so I’m guessing the “OMG, he let me buy a horse, now I need X” shopping bill will come to around $1500, but I’ll figure $2000 to be safe.   We already have a trailer, a saddle, blankets, buddy-straps, combs, brushes, buckets, rakes, shovels, and I-bought-this-but-I-will-just-put-it-in-the-pile-of-horse-stuff-so-Jason-will-never-notice stuff.  We’re certainly close to being ready to buy.

(FYI: If you’re starting from scratch, don’t think you’re going to get into horse ownership for less than $10,000 the first year, and that’s being a very efficient price-shopper.)

So we’re looking at $5400 for a horse, gear, and boarding the first year.  If we cancel the lessons, by spring we’d have $2000 of that saved and most of the rest can be bought over time.

On the other hand, if we go that route, we’ll never save enough to buy the hobby farm we’re looking for.

Decisions, decisions.  I should just buy a new motorcycle.   Within a year, I win financially.

 

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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.

Clickbank

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.

CBSearch

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:

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.

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?

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A Moment of Clarity

Finance

Money money money!
Image by Matt Stratton via Flickr

Ten years ago, I buried myself in debt. There was no catastrophic emergency or long-term unemployment, just a series of bad decisions over the course of years.

We bought a (short) series of new cars, a house full of furniture, electronics, hundreds of books and movies, and so much more.   We threw a wedding on credit and financed an addition on our house.   We didn’t gamble or drink it away, we just spent indiscriminately.  We have a ton of stuff to show for it and a peeling credit card to prove it.

What changed?

In October 2007, we found out brat #3 was on the way.    Don’t misunderstand, this was entirely intentional, but our…efficiency caught us by surprise.   It took several years to get #2.   We weren’t expecting #3 to happen in just a couple of weeks.   #2 wasn’t even a year old when we found out she was going to be a big sister.  That’s two kids in diapers and three in daycare at the same time.

The technical term for this is “Oh crap”.

I spent weeks poring over our expenses, trying to find a way to make our ends meet, or at least show up in the same zip code occasionally.

I finally made my first responsible financial decision…ever.   I quit smoking. At that point, I had been smoking a pack a day or more for almost 15 years.   With the latest round of we’re-going-to-raise-the-vice-tax-to-convince-people-to-drop-their-vices-then-panic-when-people-actually-drop-their-because-we-made-them-too-expensive taxes, I was spending at least $60 per week, at least.

Interesting side story: A few years ago, Wisconsin noticed how many Minnesotans were crossing the border for cheap smokes and decided to cash in by raising their cigarette taxes.   The out-of-state market immediately dried up.  Econ 101.

So I quit, saving $250 per month.

Our expenses grew to consume that money, which we were expecting.  (Remember, we were expecting a baby!)   Unfortunately, our habits didn’t change.   We still bought too much, charged too much on our credit cards, and used our overdraft protection account every month.  At 21% interest!

Nothing else changed for another year and a half.  My wife would buy stuff I didn’t like and we’d fight about it.  I’d buy stuff she didn’t like and we’d fight about it.   When we weren’t arguing about it, we’d just silently spend it all as fast as we could.

Bankruptcy was looming. We had $30,000 on our credit cards and our overdraft protection account was almost maxed out.  Have you ever thought you’d have to sell your house quickly?

One day, while I was researching bankruptcy attorneys, I ran across Dave Ramsey.   When I got to daycare that evening to pick up the kids, I noticed they had The Total Money Makeover on the bookshelf, so I asked to borrow it.

I read the book twice, had a very frank discussion with my wife about the possibility of bankruptcy, and we set out on the path to financial freedom together.

What made you decide to handle your finances responsibly?  Or, perhaps more importantly, what’s holding you back?

Cutting Healthcare Costs

Finance

It’s not a secret that health care can be expensive.  Many people pay two and three digit bills for their prescriptions.   A visit to the doctor’s office can hurt the budget.  Glasses cost hundreds of dollars?  How can you cut this cost?

Drugs

If possible, go generic*.  There is no difference between Trazorel and trazadone, aside from the cost.   Wal-mart, Target, and many other stores offer common generic prescriptions for $4-5.   When you are talking to your doctor, ask if there is an drug option that has an available generic.  When you are talking to your pharmacist, ask if there is a generic alternative available.

Get the price match.   The Cub Foods pharmacy near me matches the Target generic drug price, giving us $4 generics for the asking.   This is often an unpublicized deal, so make sure you ask. If your pharmacy will not match nearby prices, consider going elsewhere.

See if there is a 90 day plan.  Many insurance companies sponsor a 90 day prescription plan that gives you a 90 supply of drugs for the 60 costs as long as you are willing to accept the drugs by mail.   For expensive prescriptions, this 33% discount can be a substantial savings.

Physician

Does your clinic offer online consultations with your doctor or nurses?   Some clinics offer a chat or email option to talk to your doctor without requiring a visit that will add fees and copays to your expense sheet.   Most clinics and hospitals have a free nurse line for basic questions, like “When is my baby‘s fever dangerous?”  It’s a great chance to save some money.  I know, from personal experience, that they won’t be shy if they feel you need to come in, but they generally won’t try to convince you to come in if aspirin will fix the problem.

Stay in-network.   Check with your insurance company to make sure the doctor you want to see if in your network and therefore, available at the cheapest out-of-pocket price.  If not, and you really want that doctor, ask your insurance company if they accept nominations for the network and ask your doctor if he’d be interested in being nominated.

Stay home for your cold.  Don’t go to the doctor for every minor problem. The best remedy a doctor can give your for your cold will reduce it to a seven day malady.  On the other hand, if you do nothing, it will go away in about a week.  Why waste the money?   This counts double for the emergency room and urgent care.  Strep throat is not an emergency.  Wait until morning and go to the clinic, paying the lower fees instead of the large ER costs.   Make an appointment for a doctor visit, if possible.  Urgent care is billed the same as a regular visit, but most insurance plans double or triple the copay for urgent care visits.

Cash Flow

A Health Savings Account(HSA) is a pre-tax account to save for qualifying medical expenses similar to a Flexible Savings Account(FSA).  The main differences are that HSAs are only available for people with high-deductible insurance plans and do not have to be spent on medical expenses.  Non-qualifying expenses move from pre-tax to post-tax, meaning you will be charged federal income tax for non-qualifying withdrawals.  FSAs are “use it or lose it” plans.  If you don’t use it, it will go away, usually at the end of the year.  That makes December a great time to stock up on over-the-counter medicines and possibly replace your eyeglasses, as both of those are qualifying expenses.    Find out if you have either option available.   If you use either one, set aside a place to store every imaginable medical receipt, so you can be reimbursed.  Make sure you understand the FSA-eligible expenses.

An Ounce of Prevention

Get routine checkups.  The earlier you find a problem, the more options you have. This goes for everything from cancer screenings to blood tests.  Get a physical every year and know what is happening with your body.  We may be living in the future, but replacement parts are still hard to come by.

Maintain Your Health

It’s cheaper to be healthy.  Eat right, exercise, quit smoking.

I enjoy a good meal.  It’s one of my favorite things.  I won’t cut rich foods out of my diet, so we reduced portions.  Beyond the first few bites, the flavor isn’t nearly as enjoyable or even noticeable.  There’s no more enjoyment for huge servings than small ones.

Get more exercise, even if it’s just a 2o minute walks twice a week parking on the far side of the parking lot, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator.

Vision

Go online.  This one is worth a write-up all by itself.  I have 6 pairs of prescription glasses–all varieties of frames and coatings–that have cost a grand total of about $150.  There is no noticeable difference between my cheapies and the designer alternatives.   While I work on the write-up, the best site to introduce you to the concept of online glasses is GlassyEyes.  Reviews, coupons, and discount likes.  They have step-by-step instructions on turning an intimidating idea into a simple and cheap solution to an expensive problem.

How do you save money on health care?

* There are no generics available on new drugs until the initial patent expires.   This gives the pharmaceutical companies a change to recoup their research and development costs.  Without this patent period, new private drug research would evaporate.   Don’t hate the brand names, but don’t show undue loyalty.

 

I’d Tap That: Making Life Difficult for Government Spying

Life

4th Amendment

 

Skip to the bottom if you’re familiar with PRISM and don’t want to hear any political talk and rampant violations of our Constitutional rights, but still want to protect your privacy.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the PRISM program is an NSA program to monitor electronic activity.

Lots of electronic activity.

The companies identified to be working with the NSA in this grand overreach include AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk, Skype, Yahoo! and YouTube.  For most people, that is the definition of “the internet”.  If you’re doing it online, the NSA is–or could be, at their leisure–watching.

This isn’t a crazy conspiracy theory.  This is happening, and the government has admitted it.  In fact, when this broke, the executive branch’s response was along the lines of, “Don’t worry, we’ll find the guy who leaked this information.”

On top of that, the government has been demanding phone records from at least Verizon on a daily basis.

In addition, the Justice Department was just busted wiretapping Associated Press phones.

Seriously, if you put this in fiction, nobody would buy it, because it’s ridiculous in the land of the free.

As far as the people who say I’ve got nothing to worry about if I’m not doing anything wrong: shut up.  You can speak again when you give me your email passwords, bank records, and let me install a toilet cam in your house.  What are you trying to hide?

Seriously, there is such a mess of non-legislative administrative regulations that are considered felonies that the best estimate is that most people commit three felonies a day, without realizing it.

  • Catch your kid with a joint and neglect to call the cops?  Welcome to the federal penitentiary.
  • Use one of those pill planner things to sort prescription meds for your half-senile grandmother?  In some states, that’s a felony.

When we live in a system with so many rules that have never been voted on and our legal system refuses to consider legitimate ignorance of the law to be a defense and we have a collection of secret laws that are a felony to disclose or violate, government spying gets far more dangerous.

  • Many TSA guidelines are secret.
  • The Banking Secrecy Act of 1970 has a number of secret provisions.
  • FISA.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978(FISA) is the law the NSA is using to justify all of these data requests.  The law, that we all must obey, is being overseen by a small subcommittee in Congress, and the FISA courts are just a small subset of the judges.   The judges are signing warrants allowing the wiretaps and massive surveillance, but that is clearly unconstitutional and, hence, illegal.

The text of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the supreme law of the United States is: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Any warrant that cannot name a place to be searched is illegal.

Any warrant that cannot describe the person to be monitored is illegal.

Any warrant that is not backed by probable cause is illegal.

Tell me how “I want to watch what everyone is saying on Facebook and seize all of the data” meets any of those criteria.

Bueller?

Wiretapping the AP is a serious violation of the First Amendment, too.  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Monitoring the press in case somebody breaks a story the government doesn’t want broken is crap.

How can we petition the government for redress of grievances that they call a felony if the company discloses the violation to us?  It’s self-serving circular crap.

When you throw the IRS harassing charities working for the “wrong” politics, you start to pine for the good old days of Nixon-level fair play and integrity.

To be fair, FISA got nasty with the Patriot Act, which was an abomination enacted by a different political party.  Hey, Washington, next time try to remember that your laws will someday be administered by your political enemies, k?  (NSA: I trust you’ll pass the message for me?)

Political talk is over.  How do we stop the government snooping?

There are four main pieces to discuss, based on the scandalous Constitutional violations reported recently.

1.  Social media monitoring.   There’s nothing to this.  If you post things on Facebook, the government sees it and knows it’s you.  Don’t post anything you don’t want broadcast to the police, your grandmother, and your priest.

2.  Internet browsing.  There is very little that is secure on the internet.   The government can subpoena your ISP and get any records they keep.  Unless you go anonymous and encrypted.  Welcome to TOR.  The Onion Router is a system that encrypts your internet traffic and bounces it all over the world.   Once you enter TOR, nothing you do can be tracked, until your internet request leave the TOR system.   The system is not centrally owned or controlled, so nobody in the system can track what you are doing.

For example, if I use the TOR browser to search Wikipedia, a snoopy NSA goon could tell I’m using it, and they could tell there was a request from the TOR system to Wikipedia, but they can’t tie one request to the other.  If I’m dumb and log into Facebook, I lose that anonymous shield.

That’s solid protection from anyone watching your internet traffic.

How do you use it?

Easy.  Just install the Tor Bundle.  When you want the NSA to stop snooping over your shoulder because you want to do a search on erectile dysfunction, you launch TOR and the TOR browser and search without having to share your embarrassing secrets.

3.  Email.  Email is easily the least secure means you can communicate.  When you send an email, that message is in plain text, and it bounces from server to server until it reaches the recipient.  Any of the involved servers can keep a log of the traffic and read your email.

Never, ever, ever, ever put anything incriminating or important in an email.  Don’t send credit card numbers, your social security number, or the address of your meth lab.

But what if you want to have a dirty conversation with your spouse without letting the sick voyeurs at the NSA listen to you ask your wife what she’s wearing and how would she like it torn off?

Use PGP.  OpenPGP is a free software encryption program that is basically impossible to decrypt.   It’s known as public-key encryption, which means that anybody can encrypt a message to you that only you can read.

It’s like magic.

To use PGP, the easy way(for Windows users) is to get Gpg4win.  Install that, then open Kleopatra.  This will let you generate your encryption key.  You do that by:

  • Clicking File, then New Certificate
  • Click Create  Personal OpenPGP key pair
  • Enter your name and email, then click next, then “Create Key”.  Enter your passphrase when asked.

You now have a set of PGP keys.  To get your public key that others can use to send you messages, right-click your certificate and select “Export certificates”.  Pick a path to save the certificate, then do so.  You can open this file with notepad to get your public key, or you can email the file out.  There is no need to worry about security with this file.

You will end up with something that looks like my public key here:

—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (MingW32)
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=fHba
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–

To get your private key, that you can use with any number of plugins for your email client, right-click on your certificate and select “Export secret keys.”

You can either use PGP as a plugin for your email client, or you can use Kleopatra’s feature “Sign/encrypt files”.  To do that, write your message in a file, then select the feature inside Kleopatra.  You’ll end up with an encrypted file you can attach to your email that snoopy government man can’t read.

4.  Phone calls.  This would appear to be harder, since your phone is largely out of your control.   There’s nothing practical you do about a landline, except to avoid saying anything sensitive.  On your cell phone, you have options, assuming you use a smartphone.

For Android users, it’s free an easy.  Install Redphone.  If you place a call with Redphone, it checks to see if the caller also uses Redphone.  If he does, it places an encrypted call over your data plan to the other phone.   Nobody can listen in to an encrypted call.   The same company also makes a program for texting.

For iPhone users, you’re stuck with Silent Circle for $10/month,  which may be a better option, since there is support for more devices, including Android.   It was designed by the guy who designed PGP and handles texting and email, too.

That’s it.

There you are, the whats, whys, and hows of modern, hassle-light, private communications.   Doing what we can to foil bad government programs is our patriotic duty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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