Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

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!

The promotion has ended.

Do you like money? Sure, we all do! Well RevolutionMoneyExchange is running a promotion until May 15th where you can get $25 for opening an account through a referral. Through the service, which is a lot like PayPal, you can send, receive, and request money from other account holders. It seems like a pretty easy and quick way to make $25 and you can get your money out via an ACH for free.

Signup takes about five minutes.

Upromise, a college savings program that is linked to your credit cards, store loyalty cards, and other spending methods; has a new promotion where you can get $10 for creating a new account. The service is entirely free and it’s a great way to get started with a $10 promotion, usually the promotions are only a few dollars so this one is certainly noteworthy.

I currently link Upromise to my grocery store loyalty card and several credit cards, allowing me to earn money similar to cashback into a Upromise account. The idea is that you can then get the funds later for educational expenses but, unlikes say an IRA, you can withdraw it penalty free if you want to request a check.

If you have a PO Box, you have a corporate office address if you are willing to try this hack out. First, you will need the physical address of the post office in which you have a post office box. You can find that address here by using the post office locater and putting in your zip code. Each zip code usually only has one post office.

Then, simply put your PO Box number as your suite and you have a virtual office!

For example, if your PO Box zip code is 15236, then you would get the following post office:
Post Office - Pleasant Hills
500 Regis Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15236-9998

Now, strip off the Post Office and the +4 of the zip code and enter in your PO Box as the Suite:
Daily Money Hack Corporate Offices
500 Regis Ave.
Suite 100
Pittsburgh, PA 15236

There you have it, your own corporate offices. Locals may recognize the address but most people won’t notice, this may also get you around those pesky forms that say “No PO Boxes!”

Do not use this technique to get FedEx or UPS deliveries because it won’t work and will just result in headaches for you and them, they can’t delivery to your box even if the address is different.

Do you own your home and have some equity in it? If so, you might want to open a home equity line of credit with a lender just in case. This is a line of credit, not a loan, so it should cost you absolutely nothing to open (if your bank does, go elsewhere) and can give you a bit of peace of mind when it comes to the future. If your bank tries to sell you a loan, walk away because that’s not what you want.

Why? Banks have a habit of giving you money when you don’t need it because people who need money often have a great probability of having trouble paying it back. Right now, you probably don’t need the HELOC so the bank will most likely extend you the line against your home equity. It makes sense to apply now, rather than after something bad has happened and you’re under the dual stress of the bad event and figuring out how to come up with the month.

Why now? Also, HELOCs aren’t opened in a day and they take some time to be approved so doing it now, when you’re not under the gun, will be much better for your heart.

The HELOC should not replace your emergency fund as a means of handling short term, high dollar emergencies like a car breakdown.

If you watch this episode of boing boing TV, you’ll probably be pretty scared for your information if you have any RFID-enabled cards in your wallet. The easiest way to defend against rogue RFID readers, without disabling the chip, is to surround your cards with materials that dampening magnetic fields. In the video, you see a stainless steel wallet, but any conductive material will work. So, you can simply line your wallet with tin foil or wrap your cards with tin foil and have a reasonable defense against rogue RFID readers.

For more drastic measures, you could always microwave your cards (dangerous!) or bang them with a hammer. That will render the RFID chip inoperable.

Snowflaking is an idea, I believe, pioneered by Paid Twice and picked up by a lot of folks as a great term for an idea that’s long been practice with great success. It’s a play on words off Dave Ramsey’s Snowball theory of paying off the smallest debts first and then taking that payment and applying it to larger debts. Snowflaking is a little different.

The idea behind snowflaking is that you find random sources of revenue and then apply that towards your debt. Small payments of even a few dollars here and there can have a tremendous impact on your debt. It’s called snowflaking because each of those small payments is a “snowflake” that will build itself up into a nice little snowball to help tackle your debt. The key is in taking all this found money, such as coins you find in the couch cushions, and applying it directly towards debt. Did you get a big tip or a bonus? Apply it towards debt. That’s snowflaking!

The EECB is a concept created by the Consumerist and one that has some devastating positive results by those who have utilized it’s incredible potential. See, if you have a complaint with a company, talking to the CSRs and the foot soldiers at the ground floor can only get you so far. Many companies don’t empower the very people that talk to customers each and every day. They think that the power should be concentrated at the very top.

So, if you want results and the lowest rungs (or their managers) aren’t working? Go to where the power is, go to the executives and initiate an EECB. Curious as to how you should do it? The Consumerist has an step by step instructions on an EECB and, if you do a little searching, posts detailing the results of successful EECBs.

So, the next time you have a problem with a CSR located 10,000 miles away, fire up the old email app and launch an EECB.