Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Looks like Amazon is trying to get more people on their Amazon Prime Program with a $10 promotion just to try out the service. The offer itself is a one month free trial plus a $10 gift certificate, offer expires July 28th.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s really simple. It lets you subscribe to everything that gets posted without actually having to visit. If you are familiar with feeds, the links are below. If you’re not, may I recommend getting a feed reader like Bloglines and getting your content that way. It’s a great way to get your daily fix.

If RSS isn’t your think and you’d prefer email, there’s a subscription form below. I won’t send you anything and Feedburner will send you one email a day with daily money hack that day. I will never send you anything else - the only exception is if we do a giveaway and I select an email subscriber, then I’ll email you to tell you that you won! That’s a good email right?

To subscribe to the RSS feed, simply click on the RSS icon below and Feedburner will walk you through it.

Blog Feed By Email

If you want to get the feed sent directly to your email, Feedburner also offers an email digest service as well. Simply enter your email in the box below and click submit.

Yahoo has a Yahoo User Research program where participants can earn up to $100 or more depending on the research.

Our goal is to make Yahoo! the best and the easiest-to-use place on the Web. We understand that talking to our users helps us better understand your needs, issues and concerns. And when we understand your needs better, we can continually make Yahoo! the best it can be.

We are looking for all types of people: Web novices and experts, Yahoo! users and non-users, people who use Yahoo! at home or at work, adults and teenagers … everyone! Feel free to ask others to sign up too, especially those who are not yet on the Web!

We conduct research in many ways, such as:

* Visiting you at your location in a field study
* Inviting you to come into a Yahoo! office to participate in a usability study
* Speaking with you in a telephone interview
* Participating in an online focus group study
* Connecting with you with an online survey

You may choose which of these you prefer when you sign up.

Please provide as much information as possible (name and telephone number are required), since it helps us ask you better questions. We will contact you by email or phone with more information about our next study. (Yahoo! User Research will not use the e-mail address you provide for any other purpose.) You may not hear from us right away, but don’t worry — you’ll be on our list!

Please note: Entry into the Participant Database does not guarantee participation in our research studies. When we plan for upcoming studies, we will query our database for potential participants. If you fit our criteria, we will give you a call or send an e-mail to schedule a time for you to come in to meet with us (or, for field studies, a time to come visit you).

Smart Money has a great monthly series called Ten Things [someone/thing/company] Won’t Tell You in which they outline, surprisingly, ten things that a particular company, profession, store, etc. won’t tell you about their product, service, or offering. Sometimes the articles are good because it tells you things you wouldn’t already know or be aware of, sometimes they are useful for trivia but not much else (knowing that reality TV may be staged doesn’t really affect my life).

Give the archives a look, you might learn something useful. Here are a few recent ones related to money that might be useful:

• 10 Things Your Tax Preparer Won’t Tell You
• 10 Things Your Airline Won’t Tell You
• 10 Things the DMV Won’t Tell You
• 10 Things Your Bartender Won’t Tell You
• 10 Things Your Wedding Planner Won’t Tell You

Enjoy!

Welcome to the 16th Carnival of Money Hacks (Money Hacks Carnival homepage). I wanted to do a clever theme for this week’s Carnival but I’ve been feeling a little under the weather this weekend. I think I ate something bad on Thursday and my body hasn’t been normal since, so I apologize. I did read through all the submissions (there were numerous multiple submissions, so I only chose one) and have select four Editor’s Choices that I feel were the cream of the crop.

Without further ado, here’s the Carnival:

Great Hacks/Editor’s Choice

• Peter presents Save money on your hospital bills just by asking posted at Bible Money Matters.
• PT presents Optimize Your Banking For International Travel posted at Prime Time Money.
• Silicon Valley Blogger presents How Money Challenges Prevent You From Building The Life You Love posted at The Digerati Life.
• Will presents Your Credit Card Is Better Than Your Debit Card! posted at Your Finish Rich Plan.

Saving Money

• Todd presents Grow Wealthly Through Conservation posted at HarvestingDollars.
• mbhunter presents Setting, forgetting, and getting with UPromise posted at Mighty Bargain Hunter.
• Faron Benoit presents Compulsive Spending is the Biggest Behavioral Block Against Fugal Living posted at Financial Learn.
• Sean presents Taking an Inventory of My Subscriptions (using Categories) posted at Financial Ramblings.
• Foxie presents A Budget Confession posted at Dreaming of Ferraris.
• Mike Leonard presents Impulse spending – it’ll be the debt of me posted at Until Debt Do Us Part.
• Mark Runta presents Building a Financially Smart Deck – A Check List! posted at Investing Lessons.
• Steve Faber presents One of the Best Reasons to Quit Smoking - You Could Save a Half a Million Dollars! posted at Get Debt Free.
• Brice Hogan presents Why Budget? posted at Financialzip.com.
• Sun presents Save Money on Gas by Changing Driving Habit? posted at The Sun’s Financial Diary.
• Madison presents Free FICO Scores & Credit Reports posted at My Dollar Plan.
• Mike presents Cheap, easy urban gardening posted at Living the Cheap Life.

Income

• Fitz Villafuerte presents How To Become A Tutor and Earn Extra Income posted at Ready To Be Rich.

Investing

• nickel presents The Best Online Discount Brokers posted at fivecentnickel.com.
• jim presents a full review of TradeKing posted at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.
• retirehappy presents Short Term and Long Term Capital Gains Tax posted at My Retirement Blog.
• Ryan presents How to Invest for the First Time posted at Millionaire Money Habits.
• Dorian Wales presents The Perfect Home is a Financial Nightmare - Don’t Get Caught Up In the Costly Race posted at The Personal Financier.
• Alvaro Fernandez presents Your Brain On Trading 101 posted at Cognitive Fitness blog.
• FMF presents Don’t Borrow from Retirement Accounts posted at Free Money Finance.
• Sagar Satapathy presents 10 Surprising Implications of the Global Rise in Food Prices posted at Currency Trading.net.
• The Financial Blogger presents Managing Your Portfolio Like A Pro: Validea Capital Management Approach posted at The Financial Blogger.
• Emmitt Khamo presents Passive Income Ideas - Dividend Investing posted at Passive Income.
• Marcus presents Investing In The Stock Market posted at Stock Market Investing For Beginners.
• praveen presents Renting vs. Owning in Retirement posted at My Simple Trading System.
• Bill D presents 11 Ways to Become a More Successful Stock Trader posted at The Wealth Hunter.

Other

• Aryn presents How to Pay Bills While on Vacation posted at Sound Money Matters.
• GBlogger presents To Get Rich, Be Happy—But Not Too Happy posted at Can I Get Rich on a Salary.
• Steve Faber presents What is The Highest Gas Mileage Car? - The Top 10 Real Cars for $4.00 a Gallon Gas posted at Get Debt Free.
• Jamy presents The Yin and Yan of wealth equation. posted at Wealth=Wise(Investments+Strategies).
• Dereck presents Want to be rich? Then shut up and listen posted at I Will Not Die.
• Kaye presents 10 Awesome Father’s Day Ideas - Part 1 of 5 posted at Mrs Nespy’s World.
• Master Your Card presents Justifying 3-6 Months of Expenses in Savings posted at Master Your Card.
• NtJS presents Don’t Throw Away Your BPA! posted at not the jet set.
• FFB presents Your Personal Finance Tipping Point And A Contest posted at Free From Broke.

Next week the Money Hacks Carnival heads on over to Mrs. Nespy’s Frugal World.

In recognition of Memorial Day, we will not be listing a money hack today. Please enjoy the beautiful weather and give thanks to the brave men and women who have protected our liberties and given us the opportunity to enjoy the freedoms we’ve come to cherish.

Please have a safe remainder of the weekend.

When you decide to work with a financial planner of any certification, it’s important to know how they are paid. When you understand how they are paid, you better understand their motivations for recommending particular products. The three most common payment structures are: fee-only, fee-based, and commission-based.

Fee-Only planners don’t get a commission, they are paid based on the advice they give and not the products they get you to buy.

Fee-based planners will receive commission on some of the financial products they sell but mostly they are paid out of the fee you pay for their advice.

Commission-based planners are paid entirely based on the products they get you to buy.

Obviously, the closer to the fee-only side of the spectrum you can get, the better. That’s not to say all commission-based planners are bad, but you can see how they may be biased.

Stamps.com has a promotional offer where you can get $25 in free postage, a free scale worth $50 (it’s a good scale, I still use it every day), $5 in supplies like labels and stickers, and a four week trial period. I’ve used Stamps.com in the past and they’ve always done a great job for me, never had an issue. In fact, one thing I learned was that if you print Priority Mail postage through Stamps.com or the online USPS interface, you had delivery confirmation absolutely free! I found the Stamps.com interface to be much easier to use than the USPS website for printing out postage.

Ultimately though, I found that I didn’t print enough postage for it to warrant the monthly fee of $15.99 so I canceled it; keeping the postage and scale. Now you must stay at least one month paid to keep the scale, but the postage is yours regardless. It’s an easy way to save $25 quickly.

Stamps.com is an approved licensed vendor of PC Postage for the USPS and has been around for many many years.

If the $25 offer isn’t what you’re looking for, or you don’t want the hassle of the scale, you can always take advantage of their free $5 in postage offer. It lets you try out everything about the service but without any of the headache.

Do you have a skill or service you can offer to people? If so, consider bartering rather than buying. Bartering is where you trade skills or services with someone else such that you “pay” for what you get with the skill or service you bring to the table. In our age of credit cards and cash and heavy consumerism, we’ve gotten used to the idea that we have to actually pay for everything, rather than thinking whether or not we can use the bartering system to our advantage.

This won’t work everywhere, obviously. You can trade web design work for a shirt at Banana Republic or a skirt at Ann Taylor, but you could offer up web design work for accounting services or a new roof on your house (web design for a roofing company?).

What are some of the benefits of bartering? Well, you aren’t taxed, for one. So you can get “paid” for your work without having to pay taxes and the other party can get “paid” for their work without having to pay taxes. So in effect, Uncle Sam is upset but neither of you are! With taxes as high as 50% (after you factor in federal, state, and FICA taxes), that’s a significant amount of savings there!

How long should you keep certain records? That depends on who you ask! If you may have potentially made a mistake on your tax return, you will want to keep the records for 6 years. If you file a fraudulent tax return, you’ll want to keep the records indefinitely. Banks recommend you keep records for six years, credit cards recommend a few months, ultimately the bottom line is that all these records need to be saved and need to be saved for a period longer than one month.

So rather than keeping them in paper form, where they can be lost, damaged, or destroyed, why not keep an encrypted electronic copy on your computer? Electronic records take up no space and are easily reproducible (you can make multiple copies and keep them in different places). Secondly, you can always encrypt and lock your files so that they can’t be accessed by third parties without your permission. It’s much harder to lock up paper documents and much more expensive.

So consider scanning in your paperwork so that you don’t have to keep pesky paper versions around!