CK Blog

Okay so I am not from the government, but I am here to help you! Check out the link below with some helpful consumer info from the Federal Citizen Information Center of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

The new Consumer Action Handbook – This guide from the Federal Citizen Information Center can help with your consumer problems and questions. Find help on such topics as buying and leasing cars, shopping from home and protecting your privacy and yourself from fraud.

To help out my monthly cash flow for the moment, I changed my payment plans to Sallie Mae. I had went with the default standard payment plan originally, but have switched to a graduated plan. Under this plan, my payment is lower for the first couple of years compared to what I had been paying and will be a bit higher later on. I hope one of these days I will be able to get more aggressive on repaying them even though it does have a really nice interest rate.

As part of the whole process of moving, I took a look at the various books that I had on my bookshelves and stacked in various boxes and thinned out to a shelf of books that I really enjoy and want to keep. That means I have about 8 boxes worth of books that I am not so in love with. Some I would probably never read, so I enjoyed the first time but once was enough and some I can part with if I don’t dwell on it (the bandage effect).

I have been going through the boxes and inputting the ISBN numbers into an spreadsheet as an inventory method. I then have been searching places like Amazon and Half.com to get idea of the prices and what I find is depressing from a seller’s prespective. So many of them are going for $0.75 or less, lot of times a penny. The sheer amount of volume only would have to sell to make a decent rate when you consider postage and envelope costs along with commissions. As a buyer, it of course is nice to get a bargain like that. Of course whenever I am looking for a book though, it seems like noone is selling it for a penny.

Of course money is money and if you watch your costs, you’ll come out with a little extra from selling assuming someone buys your book eventually, but running some quick calcuations it looks like a lot of effort for very little return.

As I have mentioned, I recently moved into a new place and as part of that got a new phone line. Personally I do not have much of a need for a landline, I use my cell phone for the majority of my calls and I think my parents are about the only people who have my actual landline number, everyone else has my cell number. I got the phone for the DSL connection, I know I could have gotten naked DSL, but I got the landline for the 911 coverage.

I picked the metered option which is $6.50 base plus another $5.50 in extra charges and profit fees. I also got charged $47 for connection charges, which makes me mad because I found out afterwards that I could have gotten that waived if I would have ordered it online instead of over the phone. I know it costs a little more to pay the operator to take my order, but not $47 worth. The nice thing though is they did split the charge over 3 months so it is $15 a month instead of one big chunk.

The big sticker shock part came from the DSL side. I got the charge for the modem which was $49.99, I could have brought it off eBay and saved a little chunk. Then they charged me $12.95 for the shipping and handling of the modem but thats not a biggie. I was impressed with how fast they got the modem to me, it was waiting for me when I got home from the work the day after I initally ordered the phone line, but the DSL was not even scheduled to be activated for another week and a half, so they could have sent it parcel post for all I care instead of charging the extra money. Plus I am sure it did not cost them nearly that much to ship the package given what I know about how much it costs my company to ship out packages. Now my company is a really big Fortune 500 type, but our volume probably is a drop compared to a fulfillment place like this one that will drive the price down.

I guess it was just the overall sticker shock of getting the bill for so much more than I was expecting caused me to just react so negatively. Once I really sat down and looked at it, I understood the various causes of it even if I still was not thrilled with it.

I am stuck smack in the middle of a money rut. I am starting to get really tired of thinking about my money or personal finance in general. I used to be diligent about keeping track of stuff in Quicken, but I have not updated my file in probably close to a month. I keep an overview by glancing at Yodlee or my online banking. I pay my bills and do some little things here or there but big picture stuff is escaping me.

I think it is a little bit of several factors. Part of it is I have just moved so I had many extra expenses related to that have set me back and money overall on both on a bankroll sense and a monthly outgoing basis is tighter. Another factor is I help my parents who are both older handle their bills and day-to-day financial stuff so I get an extra helping of dealing with the money stuff. It also probably does not help that as a topic I read a lot about personal finance and investing because it can be interesting to me and I probably need to take a little break from some of that reading. Maybe read a novel or do a puzzle, something different!

I think the biggest factor though is that I am not making the progress towards my financial goals like I want to. My net worth direction is going in the opposite direction that I want it going in. I am not living some high life full of HDTVs and Playstations, overall I am a pretty frugal guy, but past mistakes and family boundary issues have me stuck between that proverbial rock and a hard place that I need to keep working to break out of. I could write a whole slew on how I could blame others particularly on the boundaries issues, but in the end, I am the one who made the decision to say yes when I should not have.

I will figure my way out of this rut with time, right now I just feel like I’m sitting in the middle of a large financial hole with my little shovel trying to make a little headway and getting nowhere. So I will just have to take a breath, give it some thought and prayer and take another day at a time.

While looking around Amazon.com, I noticed a suggested title from them called The Personality Code by Dr. Travis Bradberry. It seemed interesting and covered topics that I studied as an undergraduate in college so I looked more into it and the book itself was interesting enough but there’s more to this story though.

On the Amazon page for the blog entry by the author promoting a game hosted on his website. It was a Press-Your-Luck game based on the story of Michael Larson, the guy behind the game show scandal which is mentioned in the book. You could win prizes such as a blinkie, autographed copy of the book, a IPod Shuffle or an Nintendo Wii based on how well you scored in the game. I got lucky and got enough points to win a Wii. The game asked me to fill out a form with my information and said the prize would be shipped out within a week. Weeks go by and nothing shows up, I try following up and got nowhere.

Now I see the blog entry mentioning the contest is gone and the game on the website has been changed to a play game. Maybe they meant the contest to be over a long time ago and just dropped the ball by not changing their website or their entry on amazon before someone won a prize, but it seems a little shady to not award the prize and then just erase any mention of the contest like it never existed. There were no posted rules saying the game was over by a certain date or anything like that, I played the game in good faith and guess I really lost in the end. They could have at least sent an email or called and said “Hey, we screwed up, sorry.” At this point, I would not be surprised if the blog entry over at Amazon just got totally erased to get rid of my comment and although I don’t expect anything to come of this, I have to say I’m really disappointed at the outcome from the author of a book I find interesting.

Many moons ago, I had came across Roboform, a program that saves passwords and fills out forms for you on the net. It seemed nifty, but it didn’t excite me enough to want to buy it at the time over utilizing exisiting features within my browser, so I stopped using it. While messing around with Cashduck and the whole GPT scene, I decided to give Roboform another shot though. The more I used it, it seemed handy enough so I plucked down a few bucks and got the full desktop verision, but did not opt for the Pass2go (Roboform for flash drives) verision or additional license for another computer since I didn’t think I would need them.

Some time passes and I picked up an Ativia flash drive on sale at Office Depot. Its one of the new U3 variety and includes a trial of the Pass2go. I sync my data from my main Roboform database and start messing around with it. It does seem handy to have, espically since my main computer has been having problems with its graphics card so I have been using another computer more often or doing stuff at work. I decide to check out purchasing a license for the Pass2go and it turns out the company offers discounts if you have already purchased a license from them. But I cannot from my order id number anywhere. I checked all my emails and I either did not get one with this number or long since deleted it. The software itself nor does their website offer an easy way to get another copy of this number. How hard would it be to make a little form that lets you put in your email address or something like this and have them email you the info or else accept an alternative method of proving your egilibity for the discounts on the extra licenses.

I would gladly pay the few bucks to get the new license if only they would let me!

Edit: On a hunch, I checked my paypal history and started inputting numbers from the order history there from when I brought Roboform orginally. One of the numbers worked so problem solved!

If you have listened to Dave Ramsey’s radio show or read one of his books, you have probably come across his discussion of living off your nest egg, particularly for this in retirement. He suggests putting money in a good mutual funds that should average a 12% annual return and then take 8% out of that to live off or supplement your income and then the remaining 4% is essentially a cost of living increase to keep up with inflation. Now barring any unexpected lottery wins or similar windfalls, I am far away from retirement; I got curious how this would work out numbers wise. This particularly came to mind after reading a comment on http://allfinancialmatters.com/ discussing some related ideas of Dave Ramsey where someone asked what happens in the years that the stock market does not return 12% since that figure is an average over the long term, particulary if the return for the year was negative.

To make matters simple, I looked at the S&P 500 index for period of 1988 to 2006, which could equate to a nice long retirement for someone. Over that period, the overall index returned 13.44%, not adjusted for dividends. Here is a chart with what would have happened: