- Time to steal my son’s Wii. RT @fcn: Dang, watch Hulu on your Wii… http://bit.ly/9c0U8F #
- RT @FrugalDad: 29 Semi-Productive Things I Do Online When I’m Trying to Avoid Real Work: http://bit.ly/a4mcEI via @marcandangel #
- With marriage, if winning is your goal you will always lose. via @ChristianPF http://su.pr/2luvrz #
- RT @hughdeburgh: “There is no worse death than a life spent in fear of pursuing what you love.” ~ from http://FamiliesWithoutLimits.com #
- @chrisguillebeau The continental US can be done in 6 days on a motorcycle, but it’s not much of a visit. in reply to chrisguillebeau #
- Ugh. Google’s a twitter competitor now. #
- Took this morning off. Just did 45 pushups in 1 set/135 total. #30DatProject #
- RT @Moneymonk: To solve the traffic problems of this country is to pass a law that only paid-4 cars be allowed to use the highways. W Rogers #
- RT @SimpleMarriage Valentine’s Week of Giveaways: A Private Affair http://ow.ly/1oolpT #
- Your baseless fears do not trump my inalienable rights. — Roberta X http://su.pr/2qBR3P #
- RT @WellHeeledBlog: Couple married for 86 years(!!) will give love advice via Twitter on Valentine’s day: http://tinyurl.com/ybuqqtu #bp Wow #
- 193 pushups today, including1 set of 60. Well on my way to a set of 100. #30DayProject #
- @prosperousfool Linksys makes wireless repeater to extend the range of a router. in reply to prosperousfool #
- RT @MyLifeROI: Is anyone else unimpressed with Google Buzz? #
How to Cut Costs on Legal Fees
Occasionally, life goes truly pear-shaped and you’re forced to enter the legal system.
Even if you’re not embroiled in a tawdry, tabloid-fodder divorce, there are still legal issues that everyone needs to address, without exception.
The problem? Or rather, one of many, if you’re having legal problems?
Lawyers are expensive.
Before I go any further:
- If you are having criminal court issues, get a lawyer. Get the best possible lawyer. Really. The cost does not compare to a lifetime in jail, or even 10 years. If you’re facing jail, get the best dang attorney you can find.
- I am not only not an attorney, but I’ve never even played one on TV. I have driven past a law school a couple of times, but never stopped in. I do know several attorney, carry the business cards of a couple and have a couple on my speed dial, just in case. If any of them thought I was giving legal advice, I’d be in trouble. To reiterate: I am not an attorney. This is not legal advice.
- Don’t do a prenuptual agreement at home. A prenup will almost always be found unenforceable if both parties don’t have an attorney.
Where was I? Ah, yes. Lawyers are expensive, but there are ways to mitigate that.
There a couple of things you can handle yourself.
Small claims court, also known as conciliation court. Typical cases in conciliation court include cases involving sums under $7500(varies by state) that involve unpaid debts or wages, claims by tenants to get a security deposit, claims by landlords for property damage, or claims about possession or ownership of property. Fees and procedures vary by state, but generally cost less than $100 to file. The procedures for your state can be found by googling “small claims court” and the name of your state.
Small worker’s compensation cases can be handled yourself, if they don’t involve a demotion or termination related to the injury.
Apartment and car leases are usually simple and straightforward. Read them carefully, but you probably won’t need a lawyer.
You can probably handle your own estate planning and will writing with some decent software. I love Quicken Willmaker. It walked me through a detailed will that takes care of my kids, and gave me advice on financing their futures in the horrible event that I am tragically killed before my wonderousness can fully permeate the world. It also contains forms for promissory notes, bills of sale, health care directives and more. If you have extensive property, I’d still seek an attorney’s advice, but I’d bring the Willmaker will with me to save some time and money.
Purchase agreements. A few years ago, I sold a truck to a friend and accepted payments. I made a promissory note and payment schedule. When he quit paying or calling me, that paperwork was enough to get the state to accept the repossession when I took the truck back.
A simple no-fault divorce is actually pretty painless, on the scale of divorce pain. Again, the procedures vary heavily by state.
Other resources for finding legal information free or cheap include www.legalzoom.com and www.nolo.com.
Have you had to do any of your own legal work? How did it work out?
5 Things Guaranteed To Annoy Your Wife
One from the vaults….
If you’re married, or anything close to being married, you’ve irritated your wife. Even if you think you are perfect and the epitome of unannoyingness, I promise, there has been a day when she strongly wished you traveled for a living.
It’s long been known that the two things most likely to break up a marriage are money and sex. The former because there is too much, too little, or just the right amount going to the wrong places, and the latter because there is too much, too little, it’s not with each other, or it is with each other, but you’d really prefer otherwise. If your problem is the latter, I can’t help you.
If your problem is the former, I can help you understand some things you may be doing that are driving her batty. Kill-you-in-your-sleep-and-pretend-it-was-the-dog type of batty.
1. Nagging her about her shopping, but buying whatever you want. Gentlemen, this is known as a double standard. Don’t do it. In my house, my wife’s on an allowance. It was her idea. A few months later, I realized that I needed to be on one, too. Naturally, her allowance is bigger than mine. I don’t mind the disparity, because she still smokes. If her allowance didn’t give her room to smoke and shop, her allowance would be nothing more than a polite fiction. Whatever you do, find something that works for both of you and meets both of your needs, fairly. Anything else will only build a resentment that will burn for a long time.
2. Nagging her about her shopping, yet demanding she do all of the shopping. My wife has a weakness: clearance tags. If something is on sale, there’s a good chance it’s going to come to our house. I have an aversion to shopping. I hate it. Our budget dies a little bit each time my wife shops alone. We’ve come to an agreement. Now, I do most of the shopping, so she doesn’t feel tempted. I’m learning to embrace my inner material girl so we don’t have to have “discussions” every time she steps out for milk and comes home with $100 worth of clothes for the younger brats.
3. Nagging her about her shopping. Nobody likes being nagged. If you’re having a problem that keeps repeating itself, talking about it more won’t help. Neither will talking about it louder. You need to find a way to communicate that she will hear and understand. Different people communicate in different ways. Find the way that works for both of you.
4. Nagging her. A wise man once said, if everyone around you is a jerkface, maybe the problem isn’t everyone around you. Have you ever considered the idea that the problem might be you? If nagging is the only way you have to deal with people, you need to work on that. Don’t blame her. Maybe you’re ticked off about something that isn’t irritating. If that’s the case, she certainly has the right to be annoyed that you are nagging her.
5. Going on and on about how much you’d like to be me. Yes, I live the rockstar life, driving the station wagon with 6 disc changer and all. Yes, I am the neatest thing since sliced bread, and even that was a close contest, but really, confidence is important. You don’t have to be me to be cool. You’re swell, too. You’re right, this one isn’t about money, but it’s probably still irritating.
There you have it, my perfect solution to a happy marriage: don’t nag and quit trying to be me. There are other important bits, like love, respect, and communication, but this is a good start.
What do you do that annoys your spouse?
Cheap Conference Calls
Sometimes, a conference call can make you thousands of dollars. Whether you’re pitching a product, or planning a new service to offer, sometimes you need to be able to talk with a team.
Business owners rely on many technological tools to conduct business day to day. Online business conferencing is one of the more popular services that owners have come to rely on. There are lots of online websites that provide free conference calling services that will save the small business owner some cash. Some of these sites offer permanent free calling for life and others offer free calling for a limited time only.
Free Conference Calls
There are a number of free conference call services out there. For most, you can use the site and get unlimited free conference calling 24 hours a day and seven days a week. This is a permanent full time offer and no credit card is needed with the best of the service. You can often conference with up to 96 different users at the same time and spend at least six hours on each call. That is more than enough time for the average business owner to conduct all of their all business with fellow participants.
Skype
Skype is another company that has a free business conferencing service for all Skype users. There is no fee for conference calls as long as all of the users have downloaded Skype. Anyone that wishes to use their mobile phone to join in can be added by purchasing Skype Credit. Payments can be made online or through payment processing services like PayPal. This is a cheap way for a small business owner to connect with team members via conference call.
Go To Meeting
GoTomeeting.com is the most well known of the companies providing conference calling services. The company offers its GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToTraining that provide unlimited usage for business owners. Basic plans start at $15 a month which is a bargain for owners that have frequent conference calls with employees and customers. At the high end of their offering is GoToTraining at $150 per month. GoToMeeting has a lot of features including the recording and playback of all meetings. This is a useful option for any attendee that misses a meeting and needs to catch up.
These are just a few of the options available to the business owner who is on a budget and looking for a way to stay connected with his employees.
Funerals Cost Too Much
When my mother-in-law died, we weren’t prepared to pay for her funeral. We were three years into our debt repayment and were throwing every available cent at our last credit card. We had a couple of thousand dollars in savings, but that was earmarked for property taxes, braces, and a few other things that make money go away.
Then we found out we had a $1500 bill just to get her released and moved to the funeral home.
And catering for the funeral.
And programs.
And the grave, marker, and urn.
Scratch the last one. My mother-in-law prepaid for her grave site and had a funeral insurance policy to cover the marker, cremation, vault, and urn. She paid $800 and saved us nearly $1900 last spring.
By the end, we spent about $2500 for everything, including a reception at the funeral home.
I can’t describe how helpful that was. We couldn’t have covered it without debt, and the money we inherited was months away.
A little pre-planning on her part smoothed out the hardest time in our lives.
In 2009, the average cost for a funeral was $7,755. That’s a lot of cake for something that often catches you by surprise. In 2012, the average savings balance in the U.S. was $5,923.
Unexpected funeral expenses are a “wipe me out” expense. In a flash–a heart attack, a car accident–your life savings can get sucked into death expenses, leaving your family with nothing.
That reminds me, it’s time to buy a pair of grave plots.
The Happy Butt
Do you find the cloud in every silver lining? Is the glass not only half empty, but evaporating? Do you start every day thinking
about how the effects of entropy on the universe make everything you do ultimately pointless?
You may be a pessimist.
Pessimism gets a bad rap. Without pessimists, we wouldn’t have insurance plans, missile defense systems, or Eeyore, and what would the world be without those things?
The thing you have to ask yourself is “Does the negativity make you happy?”
The next thing you have to ask yourself is whether or not you were lying with your previous answer.
If you have a negative outlook on everything, I have good news for you: it’s possible to defeat it. No matter how long you’ve been looking at the world through coffin-colored glasses, no matter how ingrained your negative slant is, it’s possible to change it.
You have to want to change it, because, as the saying goes, old habits die hard. Yippee kai yay.
You need a happy butt.
Little known fact: language shapes the way you think. If your language has no words for a concept, you will have a difficult time thinking about that concept, or even understanding it. Statistically, Asians are better at math than their western-world counterparts. Why? It’s not genetic. When a family moves to the US, the edge is lost within 2 generations. It’s not the amount of school they get. Even in backwaters with limited school access demonstrate the same abilities.
It’s the language. Euro-based languages are horrible. They are a clumsy mish-mash of crap from around the world, and the numbering system makes no sense. 11, 12, 13, huh? Spoken, that’s not a progression, it’s something we have to learn by rote. Why is 13 pronounce “thirteen”, with the ones place first, but 23 is pronounced with the tens place first, the way it is written? Where did the word “twenty” even come from? It’s obviously a horrible bastardization of “two” and “ten”, but is it self-evident? Does the progression through the decades follow some kind of rule? Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. Nope.
The Asian languages (most of them) differ. The numeric progression is spoken in a rules-based progression that makes sense. 23 is literally “two tens three”, making learning math less about rote memorization and more about masters some simple rules.
In the western world, we are handicapped by our language, at least when it comes to math.
The rest of our thoughts are formed by language, too. Learn a language with different roots than the one your were born with and see how your perceptions change.
One of the signs of negative thinking is qualifying everything you say negatively. For example, one person might say “It’s a beautiful day, today” while Mr. Negativebritches would say “It’s a beautiful day, but it’s probably going to rain.” That’s a sad butt, err, but. Every time you qualify a sentence with a sad butt, you are reinforcing your negative view of the world.
The solution? Drop your drawers and paint on a smiley face. You need a happy but(t). You can rephrase the sentence into a happy thought without changing the sentiment or meaning in any way. Try this: “It’s probably going to rain, but it’s a beautiful day, now.” That’s a happy butt, and it reinforces the positive in your mind.
It sounds stupid, but it works. Your language shapes your life. Put a positive spin on what you say, and you will eventually start to think about life in a positive way.
Give it a shot. For the next week, every time you say something negative, qualify it with a happy butt. At the end of the week, come back here and tell me how it’s working and if you can sense a change in your mindset.
