CK Blog

     On our way back from a 12 hour drive from Charleston, my sister-in-law and I got on the topic of the past. In particular, if you could go back in time somehow, would you try to change things about your life? Although our context was more on a general nature such as relationships, I thought it could just as easily apply to one’s financial life.

     Think about it for a moment, if you could go back and tap that 18-year-old self on the shoulder, would you tell them to avoid credit card debt or racking up student loans? Maybe you would tell them to be more frugal or work a few more hours to save up some cash. Would they have really listened? Looking back upon my own life I can think of plenty of decisions I have made about my finances that I know now were not always the best ideas. However, to be honest, I am not sure I would change a thing. Would it be nice if I had less (or none) credit card or student loan debt right now? Sure! Ultimately, I had to go through all that stuff to learn my lesson to get me to the point that I am in my life now.

     I have always had a good understanding of money and got the concept of debt is bad and saving is good, etc. Even when I was a lot younger, I could give people some solid advice and knowledge about money and personal finance, but did any of that stop me from doing many of the same things I could warn others about? Nope. I could rationalize why this is from so many different perspectives, have many good excuses and a few people that could share some of the blame but ultimately know its all on me. So did I make many mistakes along the way? Yes, but I also learned a lot from those mistakes and work at trying to avoid them again and maybe even help a few others avoid them. I still do some dumb things with money and I will have to pay for those as well, but I think I am doing better and will continue to do so.

     Check out some thoughts that Single Ma had along these lines.

     As a general thought about this topic, not just in the personal finance context, remember when you think about wanting to erase some crappy time in your life, think about what might have happened that turned out great for you. We never know how our decisions today will affect our lives later on. Maybe losing that job will open a door for you to get an even better one that you might have never tried for because you were comfortable (stuck in a rut?) in you old job? Maybe going through a bad relationship will cause a path for you to meet a great person for you later on that might have never crossed your path. I will admit that it works both ways and maybe your decisions could be altered so something even better or worse could have occurred, but playing what-ifs really just messes stuff up, so quit it already! =)

A long while back, I heard about DRIP programs as an investment method. The basic idea is that if you own at least one share of a stock in a certificate form, you can buy more stock directly from the company while avoiding paying the normal broker commision. A few companies even will give you a discount on the stock program. The main problem is getting that first share in certificate form since it is virtually always held by the broker. Why? Because its cheaper for the broker to keep the certificate themselves and hold onto it for you, than having mailed to you. Plus you have to worry about possibly losing it or mailing it when you want to sell or a merger occurs…etc. Also to get a stock certificate in your name ussually requires a nice fee to your broker in the neighborhood of $35 – $50 a pop. So while I was researching about it, I came across Oneshare.com that specializes in selling one share of stock in certificate form. While it can be used for the purposes of a DRIP program, there are other cheaper alternatives to use since Oneshare is more along the idea of giving the share of stock as a gift.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I cancelled my Netflix account. Overall, I can’t say I have any real complaints about the service and would recommend it to others. My main reason for canceling was purely a usage vs. cost consideration. Before I got Netflix, I only rented movies every so often from a local video store and the whole hassle of dealing with making an extra trip to return them and late fees.

I signed up with Netflix after seeing an offer from AAA that gave you $12 for joining and keeping it a month. My movie viewing did increase and I got caught up with several movies I had wanted to see. The post office that the movies are shipped back to is right near my work. So that meant if I timed my returns correctly, I had a 3-day turn-around. For instance, if I dropped it in the mail on Tuesday, they would receive it and mail my next movie on Wednesday, and I would receive it on Thursday. Of course, if you return it on Friday or the weekend, you are not getting it until Tuesday at the earliest. Every once in awhile, there would be a hiccup in returns. I would return two at once and one would be processed the next day and the other a day or few later. I cannot say for sure though if that is a Netflix issue or a USPS issue. I know someone who works at the post office that mentioned the Netflix envelopes are trouble for their machines so sometimes they get piled up until someone can manually work them.
Read the rest of this entry »

     Have you ever come across a really great offer? Let’s even say it is an opportunity for you that makes a few bucks with time being your main investment. What do you do that information? Do you share it with scores of others on the Internet? Clue in a few close friends or relatives? Keep things quiet to yourself?

     I have been pondering this whole thought for a little while now after I came across such an opportunity. I found out about it in a off-hand mention buried in a long theard on a message board. So right off the bat, I would have been out of luck if this person had not shared about it in their message. Granted in this case, the information is not secret per-say, but wasn’t hugely publicized either at that point. I did make a nice little amount of money when it was really active, not enough to get rid of my credit card debt or anything but still worth my time while it lasted.

     In the end, this particular deal followed the normal pattern and the gravy train ended as more people found out about it and the rewards got smaller and smaller till they mostly went away. For some dedicated souls, there is still money to be made, but the old happy days are probably gone for good.

     Back to my original question though, what do you do with your deals, potentially if they are of a more fragile nature? I tend to find that most times, even with the best of deals most people won’t take advantage of the opportunity anyway. I remember back when ING Direct had a really nice referral offer where a new customer only had to put like a dollar in your account and both you and the new depositor got a little bonus. I mentioned it to a few friends, not only because I would have liked to recieve the bonus, but because it was a good deal just from the interest rate alone compared to what they were recieving. Did any of them jump at the chance? Nope. I was just dumbfounded that people would walk away from free money that barely required any work and no risk. Compared to other deals that have come across my way that required a lot more risk and potential capital, this one was a piece of pie.

     Then again, I shake my head in disblief when I hear my coworkers talk about how they don’t take advantage of the company’s 401k and thus walking away from free money ever paycheck in the form of the company match. Then there is those who do participate in the 401k, but keep their money in super conservative investments that no where match their age or retirement needs. I won’t even go into the coworker who constantly keeps two 401k loans out and keeps their 401k mostly in money market funds.

     I’ll grant you that paying off debt could be a mathmatically reason for not taking advantage of a 401k, but of course most people aren’t exactly using that approach either.

     In the end, I am no closer to having an answer to this ponderable for myself, and probably will continue to try to spread the knowledge among my peeps when it seems appropriate, but know it’ll probably a losing battle.

My younger brother really likes to download music. But now days with the legal entanglements of the practice, a search was on for a good source of music that was also reasonable in price. A friend of mine uses the ITunes music shop and really likes it. Every so often, he will connect his IPod and pick out a few new songs to download. Sometimes it will only be a song or two, other times the session will mean twenty songs. Overall, given the $0.99 price, that is not a bad deal since its only a bit more than you would spend if you had a retail CD every week or two habit.

Given his economic status currently, my brother was hoping to find a lower price alternative. What is the first name that comes to mind when you think about music online (besides ITunes)? Napster of course. In particular, I have seen plenty of ads where they proclaim how you can download lots of music that would cost you $10,000 to fill up your IPOD with ITunes for only $15 a month with Napster.

Sounds good right? So we get online and download the software. As far as I can recall, there were no real problems to install it. Once it was setup, the first thing I noticed was it had real ITunes type of interface feel to it. Anyway, we registered and selected the 7-day trial they offer to see what it was like. He downloaded a couple of songs and planned to try later to really search and try it out. In the mean time, I decided to do some more research about it.
Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that in the process of updating the theme in the blog (WordPress) software, somehow the formatting on the posts went all kinds of wacky. It does not seem to want to let me indent or add lines easily for whatever reason. I’ll play around and see I can figure out what the deal is, but I didn’t want someone to come along and look down upon my lack of formatting.

The grace period on my student loans is ending, so Sallie Mae has processed my consolidation loan and sent me the terms of my repayment. I know there were potentially better deals for consolidating the loans that I have read about on Fatwallet’s Finance forums, but I was out of luck due to the single lender rule. The gist of that rule apparently is that if you only have one lender (ie: your school uses Sallie Mae to process your loans), you have to consolidate with them. Although you can also run into problems due to the selling of loans, even though you may have probably from Bank A, when it comes time to consolidate, there is no guarantee that they have not sold your loan along the way. It is common for banks to take the loans they have made, bundle them up together and sell them to others as an investment so the bank has more money available to make loans.

FinAid has some advice for getting around this rule. Of course, when I was in school getting loans, I had no idea about this rule or the potential benefits to me when it came to consolidating time, otherwise I might have tried to do something about it. That is not to say I would not have consolidated with Sallie Mae, who knows…but I would have had more options without as much hassle and work if I wanted to try to bypass the rule.

Read the rest of this entry »

You are ‘French’. In the nineteenth century, it
was the international language of diplomacy.
It is a ‘beautiful’ language, meaning that it
is really just a low-fidelity copy of Latin.

You know the importance of communicating
‘diplomatically’, which for you means both
being polite and friendly when necessary and
using sophisticated, vicious sarcasm when
appropriate. Your life is guided by either
existentialism or nihilism, depending on the
weather. You have a certain appreciation for
the finer things in life, which is a diplomatic
way of saying that you are a disgusting
hedonist. Your problem is that French has been
obsolete for a long time.

What obsolete skill are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been on a decluttering / spring cleaning kick over this weekend. Well really its a long time in the making, I just never have been able to keep a substained effort in really knocking it out. But this time I feel like I’ve made some progress, I gotten rid of some stuff and found other things I’ve been looking for. Mostly it is amazing how little of the stuff around that I really utlize because the rest of the stuff is stuffed or stacked away and forgotten because they are not easily accessible.
Read the rest of this entry »

Awhile back, my sister-in-law was writing a report about Emmis Communications (EMMS), which owns radio and television stations as well as some magazines around the county. Being familiar with it and having being sparked by her questions and report; I decided to invest a little in it. I logged onto my Sharebuilder account and picked up a few shares.

A few days ago, I got a notice from Sharebuilder announcing a special shareholder meeting and included the proxy to vote my shares. I have never attended a public company’s shareholder meeting; I have usually just sent in my proxy if I remembered about it. Since I was in town and had some free time I decided to attend in person and see what the fuss was about. Maybe I might even learn something in the process? Naah.
Read the rest of this entry »