My 24 year old daughter needs an operation on her knee. She injured it while running. She runs a lot. She is a part time police officer, and running is part of her job. Because she is part time, she gets no benefits. That means no health insurance. This is not the type of injury that hits you immediately, it is something that creeps up on you over time. So we can’t prove that it was work-related and go with worker’s compensation.
She can’t work now because she can’t run. The operation is going to cost about $8500, which she can’t afford (and neither can we) because she isn’t working and has no health insurance. She can’t get a job now because of her injury, and she can’t get it fixed because she doesn’t have the money because she doesn’t have a job. Does this sound like a vicious cycle to you? Very frustrating. She’s looking for another job right now, but as I’m sure you well know the job market is pretty tough out there!
As I’m sure you can imagine, I sure would like to have a better system out there to help people like this!
Have you ever had to ship gifts across the country for a birthday or Christmas? The shipping expenses are often more than the cost of the gift itself! That’s why I’ve decided to give everyone that I have to ship gifts to a gift card instead of buying something that costs a lot to ship. I figured that way I can afford to give them the $30 to spend any way that they want instead of spending $10 on a gift and $20 on the shipping!
Maybe even cut out a picture from a magazine and include it with the card to tell them what to buy with the gift card, so they know that I had something specific picked out. And even customize the card with my smiling face on it so that they won’t just re-gift it to someone else!
I’ve noticed that there seems to be some confusion among consumers about different types of credit services. There are many different types of services related to managing debt. There are debt management, credit repair, and debt consolidation to name a few. Many people don’t understand the differences between them. To be honest, sometimes I get confused too between them all too.
So if you are contacted by a company that offers you credit repair services and tell you that they can help you with bad credit repair, please be careful and make sure you understand exactly what services you will be getting for your money. Are they simply advising you to contact the credit agencies (or offering to contact the credit agencies on your behalf) to see if their reports are accurate and to tell them to remove any incorrect information? You can do that for free by yourself!
Are they offering to consolidate your debt by putting all of your debt and payments in one account? Sounds good – they offer to lower your monthly payments that way, but the credit experts are warning us that actually hurts your credit. And debt management – well I think that is where they try to get the credit card companies to accept less money than you owe them. The problem with that is you can’t use the credit cards anymore! And you have to come up with a large lump sum to pay off your lower debt balance, which many of us can’t do!
So, folks, be careful and make sure that you fully understand what it is you are getting into!
A few years ago a friend of mine (Ed) decided to become a stock broker. I tried to be supportive and do my Stock Trading though him and the brokerage firm that he was working with. The only problem that I had with him was when I called him and told him that I wanted to buy stocks in certain companies he always tried to talk me out of what I wanted to buy and steer me towards what he thought was a better investment.
I got pushy and demanded that he buy the stocks that I wanted (and he did) and they made money. The stocks he recommended lost money (I kept track.) I came to the conclusion that I was better off with an Online Broker because that was not going to ruin my friendship Ed. Well, maybe it would if he found out! So I’ll just keep my Online Trading a secret from him as long as I can!
Yesterday I decided to stop by a store that I’ve been wanting to go to for a long time. I don’t know why I never stopped there before; just never seemed to find the time. But yesterday I was driving past and I knew I had a few minutes to spare so I decided to pull in. There was an elderly woman sitting at a picnic bench right outside the front door, folding T-shirts. I decided to just sit down beside her and chat. I don’t know why, I just did!
So we sat there chatting, her folding her T-shirts, me just enjoying the nice weather and the conversation. The talk turned to family, and the passings of loved ones. Seems she lost her hubby about three years ago to cancer. He had been sick for months and ran up huge hospital bills. She’s convinced that if they had been able to afford health insurance to help with his fight against cancer, he would still be alive today. That is such a very sad story. Certainly one that makes me wish that this country took better care of the health needs of its citizens.
Jerry sent me the link to a blog called Online Siesta that he suggested that I read. I found it interesting because it is a blog about how to make money with blogs! It is full of great tips on how to make money with your blog. As I’m reading the blog I see that it is written by the Vice President of Infolinks.com, which sells in-text link advertising. Apparently the way bloggers make money with this is similar to other programs where the blogger puts in hypertext links that generate revenue when the reader clicks on the link.
That seems like it is a good way to make money, assuming that the reader actually clicks on the link. As for me, when I’m reading someone else’s blog I really can’t say that I click very often on the links. I wonder how many other people actually click on them? I really enjoyed reading the post about the 10 top reasons to NOT use in text advertising – it obviously is sprinkled with sardonic humor that I get a kick out of!
Will tells me that he has finally decided to go to an outplacement melbourne consultant to see if they can help him to find his next job. He’s been looking for a job for over a year now, every since his company laid off a hundred employees. It sure seems that the economy troubles are not being confined to the United States! I blame corporate greed and corruption for those troubles. There really should be a better system “out there” that enables everyone to make a decent living and not simply support the “rich get richer and the poor get poorer” spiral that we seem to be stuck in.
But I digress. Will said that his sister Becky used a career outplacement sydney service to help her to re-evaluate her job skills and find a new career, so he is hopeful that they will be able to help him to land a new job too. It has been very difficult to survive this past year and he is sinking deep into debt. I certainly can empathize with that! I hope it works out for him.
When we first moved into this house I went up into the attic and saw that we had an attic fan. I couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to work; everything that I tried to make it run didn’t seem to have any effect. Well, finally I got around to having a handyman service come out to the house and take a look at it. I hated to admit defeat, but my wife was reminding me frequently that we really should be running it to help keep the costs of cooling the house low. Well, it turns out that the motor was burnt out. No wonder it wouldn’t run! We determined that it was cheaper to replace the motor than to replace the entire fan, which was surprising, but good news. So we replaced the motor and now it runs just fine. I hope we will see a difference on our electric bill next month!
I was reading that the Golivemobile is expanding their overseas operations in the upcoming months. I’m sure that those countries will be thrilled to have Golivemobile over there. For the most part, it is a technology company, which doesn’t usually have a large negative impact on the environment. So for those countries that is a good thing because so many other American companies do a lot of polluting. And I’m sure that the jobs that will be going over there will be high paying jobs by their country’s standards. Low by American standards, but that is the whole point of sending jobs overseas, isn’t it?
In this day and age of belt-tightening, my wife was telling me that she has found several ways to stretch our dollars and make ends meet. First of all, she told me that she has been using Angel Food Ministries, which is a non-profit organization that allows the consumer to purchase good food at a really great price. They don’t require any information about income at all; they don’t care if you are rich or poor. You can order the food online at their website angelfoodministries.com and pay for it online too.
Another budget stretcher is using the Yahoo Freecycle websites. There are usually local yahoo freecycle groups that helps match up people looking to get or give away free stuff. And on that note, Craigslist does the same thing. We’ve received really great things from all three of these places -check them out when you get the chance!
The banking industry is certainly growing! And it appears to be growing at our expense. I went to open a savings account the other day and the bank told me that I had to maintain a certain minimum balance on my savings or they would charge me a monthly maintenance fee! On my SAVINGS? I don’t think so! A few days ago a good friend of mine told me that he had received a check from a customer of his and he deposited it and wrote checks against it. Well, you guessed it! That check bounced, so his checks bounced and he is being slapped with NSF fees all over the place! I can remember once depositing a check in my account from a relative and it bounced, and I got charged a return check fee myself! I think that should be illegal, for the banks to charge the innocent customer a fee for that!
More and more I’ve been thinking that prepaid debit cards just might be the direction to go. They are becoming easier to get, easier to use, and if you arrange for direct deposit from your pension or paycheck, many times you can get the cards without any monthly fees. And now some of them can even be set up with online billpay! That is a great convenience to have – online billpay makes keeping track of finances a lot easier!
I seem to be running across a lot of people lately who are aggravating me to no end. These people are unemployed simply because they want to be able to smoke their marijuana and do their other recreational drugs, and so many employers are now requiring drug tests. These people are collecting food stamps, unemployment/welfare benefits and are finding ways to make ends meet through black market means. I think that people should be required to take drug tests before being given any kind of government assistance. I deeply resent having to pay taxes to support people who would rather do drugs than work and pay their fair share of taxes.
My sister has been complaining to me about how she has been trying to refinance the mortgage on her house. She has been talking with several financing companies, and she thought that she had one lined up to get her the loan that she wanted. She had sent them all of the information they had requested, and they said that they would call her back the next day to make an appointment for an appraiser, and to get her credit card information to charge the appraisal fee. They never called back! That was two weeks ago, and now she is worried that they were some kind of scam artist trying to get her personal information. I think she may be right! She’s been sending them emails asking them what’s going on and they don’t bother to respond. Very unsettling, and very rude!
Over the years my wife and I have been using credit cards to help us to get the things we need and want, with the intention of paying the balance off in full when the bill comes in. Unfortunately, the difficult economy we are in right now is making us rethink how we will be using our credit cards in the future. With kids in college, it is likely that there will be times when we might not be able to pay the balance off in full! Of course we would prefer to not be in that position, but there really is only so much one can do!
So we have been looking at the comparecards.com website to help us figure out if there are better credit card plans than the ones we have, hoping that we can find a better deal. I’m hoping that we can compare credit cards and find a way to save money. Maybe even apply for (and get) a no interest credit card! That would be great!
My wife was telling me that she read an article recently about how women are not only treated unfairly in the workplace, but also in the markeplace. Research has shown that when negotiation for a new car, white men are the most likely to get the best prices, followed by african-american men, followed by white women, followed by african-american women. Lesson? If you want to buy a new car, women should bring along a white man to do the negotiating for them so they will get the better deal! That’s certainly a sad state of affairs!
I’ve been hearing a lot of advice recently from financial experts on how to best manage our money in these economic hard times. In the past, the advice has been to pay off credit cards as quickly as possible. This has been good advice because credit card debt has always been considered “bad debt” because interest rates have been high. However, in recent months the credit card companies have been cancelling accounts left and right. They are afraid that they are going to be stuck with a lot of unpaid credit card debt. Quite possibly because there has been a lot of publicity recently about how people can get out of paying most of their credit card debt! The companies are using the excuse that the cards have not been used recently, so they are cancelling them due to non-use. I think they are just afraid of losing money!
So more recently people have been advised to stop paying off their credit cards, and to keep low balances on them so that the credit card companies won’t close the accounts. And I think that people who have poor credit and are struggling to get credit cards approved would be well advised to get some prepaid credit cards so that they can start rebuilding their credit rating.
I love movies. I’ve spent a lot of money buying DVDs. My wife has started to give me a lot of “flack” about how much money I spend buying DVDs. She argues that I’m spending a lot of money (about $20) per DVD and only watching it once or twice; it would make so much more sense (to her) to rent the movie for a couple of dollars and then return it. Well, in theory that is a good idea, but it is a hassle going to the movie rental store all the time. So my son recently bought me a year’s subscription to Netflix. I was annoyed at first because I felt it was an insult directed at me regarding my spending habits. But I have to say that I’m really enjoying the convenience of having the movies mailed to me!
I have been astonished to find out how many scams are “out there” nowadays. So many advertisements for “working at home and making a million dollars” are tempting the people who are having a difficult life to send in their hard earned dollars to sign up for a “pie in the sky” scheme. I feel so badly for the thousands of desperate people who are scammed by these piranhas of society!
My best friend’s son Ben has recently got a job with a travel agency. Naturally, he wants us to “throw business” his way and book an Alaska Travel vacation through him. Well, I’ve always like the kid, and I’ve always wanted to Travel Alaska and see Denali Park on a nice vacation, but I’m not sure that this is a good time to go anywhere, with the economy as tight as it is.
So I’m going to have to look over our finances with the wife and see if we can afford anything like that and ask Ben for some figures on going out there. I’m sure we’d have a great time, I’m just not sure we can swing it right now. Maybe we’ll get in touch with some of my brothers and see if we can arrange a larger family vacation out there, and make it a kind of a family reunion and vacation all in one. That would be a lot of fun to combine the two!
My neighbor tells me that he has been making some extra money by taking online surveys. I was really surprised and skeptical about that because in past years I tried that and all I ever got was lame attempts by the companies to get me to buy their products. They would offer me gift cards if I participated in a very long survey AND took some of their “special offers” which always led to me spending more money than the gift card was going to be worth!
But my neighbor assures me that there is an opinon site called MyOpinionNow that really does pay money for surveys. He says it is free to join, and there are no catches. I’ve been looking through the site and it does look promising. I think I’ll give it a try!
Business and work, General life, Health, Money and finances, Relationships | Dean | 
July 31, 2009 2:52 pm | 
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