Wireless routers are proliferating homes nation wide as technology improves and prices decrease from market competition. Many people have home WiFi wireless routers so that they can use the web on their laptop throughout their home. The signal from these routers can often extend a few hundred feet outside the walls of one’s home, so some people choose to leave their wireless access point open as a common courtesy so that other people can jump on the internet if they’re in the neighborhood if they need to. Now congressional Democrats want businesses and individuals who offer WiFi to the public to track and report child pornography for face a $300,000 fine.

The Securing Adolescents from Exploitation Online (SAFE) Act requires anyone who provides a “remote computing service” or an “electronic communications service” to the public who learns about the storage or transmission of an offending image or an illegal activity must register their name, mailing address, phone number, and fax line with the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The person finding the violation must also make a report to the CyberTipline that includes all of the information they know about the person as well as the illegal images themselves. This law would require individuals to collect, store, and submit any child pornography that an individual recognized to the government.

The bill was rushed through congress in a very hurried fashion that was only designed for non-controversial bills or emergency pieces of legislation. This means that there were no committee hearings and time for public comment. The vote passed the house on an extremely lop-sided vote of 409 to 2. Only Rep. Ron Paul and Rep. Paul Broun voted against the legislation. The bill will now move onto the Senate and then to the President’s desk for a signature.

The authors of the legislation claim that they are not trying to target individuals who have open WiFi routers, but rather internet service providers. Unfortunately the language in the bill is so broad that anyone enforcing the law could easily interpret the legislation to apply to individuals. There have been many instances in the past where the letter of the law has trumped the intent of the law. The Senate version of the legislation would be well served to clarify this section of the legislation so that individuals wouldn’t be forced to monitor, collect, store and report offensive imagery.

Share This

If you’re traveling out of your locality and you want to drive, a rental car is just about the only way to go and the car rental companies know this. You’re standing at their front desk and the only way to get to your destination is to rent a car from them. They can get away with charging you as many junk fees on top of the price they quote as they want. These companies know that if you don’t rent a car from them, you’re up a creek without a paddle. Car rental companies, hotels, and local governments are using this to their advantage and are charging all sorts of money-grab fees and taxes that will substantially increase the price of your rental car.

Local governments see out-of-town travelers, especially those who are there for business, as major targets for taxation. These people who are traveling have no say in what taxes they have to pay and they won’t be around long enough to do anything about it, so they’re just stuck paying the high taxes. Cities and counties frequently charge taxes on a per-room basis for hotels, taxes on car rentals, and taxes on other services that are frequently used by travelers. Local governments know that voters are much less likely to revolt on a tax for people who do not live in their locality, so they gouge travelers whenever they pass through.

Hotels are another frequent offender of charging extra fees on top of what the room supposedly “costs” to stay in. Before you book your room, make sure to check and see if there are any daily facility fees that you have to pay. When shopping for a hotel room, do as much comparison to see what the actual cost will be as possible. Expedia’s hotel room search service does a good job at including the miscellaneous fees that hotels tend to add on.

Airlines will frequently charge you a passenger facility charge or PFC that’s a big cost. Terminals will sometimes charge you for passing through their halls, and Congress approved it. There are also charges for federal security service, charges per flight segments, and the list goes on. The pricing that you see for a ticket will be very disingenuous, so when you think you are getting the best deal, you might be getting ripped-off.

Share This

If you have kids or are hoping to have kids someday in the future, planning for their college education seems overwhelming, but it’s not something you want to overlook.  It is never too early to start planning, either.  The costs just continue to increase every year, and it seems the costs are increasing much faster than our earnings. 

What if you  have no plans for offspring?  You can still let your every day spending benefit your own college education if you used loans to finance some or all of your higher ed costs.

It can be really difficult to be disciplined enough to stretch your dollars into savings accounts for yourself and/or your children.  Most families don’t feel there is enough money to go around- so this is a good way of letting the things you are already buying benefit your long term savings goals- things like groceries, holiday presents, and restaurant meals.

Upromise is a program that gives people a way to connect the debit and credit cards they are already using, as well as grocery store discount cards, to their Upromise accounts.  Each time you use the card at participating retailers or to purchase certain products, a small percentage of the purchase will be credited to your Upromise account.   

Additionally, if you do online shopping (and who doesn’t this time of year?) logging into your Upromise account first, and then clicking on the various store shopping links from within their site will result in higher rewards to your Upromise account.  It’s a simple step that if you remembered to do it each time, could result in a few extra dollars credited to your account every time you did your online shopping.

In fact, participating Upromise companies fall under the following categories:

• consumer packaged goods
• Grocery stores
• online stores
• Local retailers
• Restaurants

Earnings in your account can be saved for a beneficiary that you designate; can be applied to your existing school loan payments; or can be transferred into a NY 529 account  (which is a tax-advantaged college savings program- I am sure other states have equivalent plans that can be connected!) In my personal Upromise account, I actually have both of my children set up as beneficiaries, with the older child receiving 45% of the earnings, the younger child receiving 35% of the earnings, and the remainder going towards my own college loan payments.

Additionally, you can grow your earnings faster by inviting your family and friends to connect their grocery store cards and debit cards to your Upromise account also.  You don’t see their card numbers within your account; but whenever your connected friends and family shop with their cards, their earnings are then credited to your own account.  I actually earn three times as much from purchases my mom and aunt make as I do my own!

Share This

What would you think of a major bank opened up a credit card company opened an account in your name even though you never applied for the car? What if I told you that this practice was completely legal? It turns out that Citibank did exactly that and opened 3.5 million credit card accounts for “customers” who never even applied for their cards.

The way Citibank was able to pull this off legally is that they bought Macy’s credit card portfolio. If you open a credit card with a bank or retailer, they have the legal right to transform your card with them to another type of card if their program changes. A common example of this might be when a bank switches from issuing Visa Credit Cards to MasterCard Credit Cards. Citibank used this loophole to purchase 3.5 million inactive Macy’s credit accounts and then opened up Macy’s branded Citibank credit cards for the customers.

Citibank made a statement to the Boston Globe about this business practice. Their public relations people had the audacity to claim that they had received “positive feedback” from customers about these new cars and that there were no privacy or security issues to be concerned about.

The truth is that Citibank is opening up a second credit line for people without them ever asking. If you receive a new Citibank Macy’s branded credit card in the mail, your credit score will actually go down! Customers who receive one of these will likely perform a hard-credit pull and have the age of their card reduced significantly. These two factors could easily lower your credit score by 25 points or more.

If you receive one of these cards in the mail, don’t make use of it. It might even be a good idea to move your credit cards from Citibank over to another financial institution. Citibank needs to hear from consumers that they are not happy and will not stand for this practice.

Share This

There is so much competition among credit card companies that in order to get people to sign up for their credit cards, many have created various rewards programs.  The rewards programs offer bonuses meant to encourage a consumer to choose that credit card over the other seven in the consumer’s wallet!

If you have rewards credit cards but don’t feel like you’ve been rewarded, you probably don’t know the “trick”; or if you know it- you’ve been ignoring it!  For almost all rewards credit cards, you have to do this one, minor detail if you expect to earn a thing from the advertised rewards!  If you don’t have  rewards credit cards and want one, you can compare a bunch of the different offers and find one that offers something you actually want- whether it’s airline miles, points that can be used for retail shopping, cash back, or gasoline rebates.

So what’s the one, minor detail that you must do if you expect to earn any rewards with your rewards credit card?  The only real way to benefit from using this type of credit card is if you do not carry a balance from one month to the next.

That’s it.  That’s the trick to getting rewarded with rewards credit cards!

With rewards credit cards, you really need to pay your balance in full every month, otherwise, you will almost always pay more in interest and finance fees than your rewards are worth.  If the credit card you use has an annual fee, then you have to earn that much in rewards each year before you actually “earn” anything.

Think about it.  If you make $300 in purchases in January and earn 1% cash back, you’ve earned $3.  If you don’t pay off your entire balance and just make the minimum payment, you’re probably going to be charged interest ranging from 8% to 18% on that $280 balance (or whatever you have remaining after you make your monthly payment).  If you make your payment late, add on another $29 to $39 in late fees.

Does that $3 still sound rewarding?  No! You absolutely must plan to pay your balance off in full every month in order to benefit from a rewards credit card program- regardless if it is cash back, airline miles, gasoline rebates, auto rewards, free merchandise or some other benefit- they all work the same way.

Share This

For many industries the fourth quarter is considered to be one of the most profitable times of the year. For the cell phone industry, this is no exception. For whatever reason, the Christmas season is when a lot of people are ending their 2 year cell phone contracts and are looking to switch carriers. Because AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile all want to steal customers away from each other, they will likely be adding all sorts of deals to potential buyers. T-Mobile capitalized on this fact and is thus far the first of the major carriers to offer some very significant discounts on their cell phone plans.
T-Mobile isn’t the biggest carrier around, but it is generally considered to be one of the cheapest. A recent Consumer Reports study found that customer service was slightly better at Verizon, but you pay a significant premium for that service. It’s a bit of a compromise; you get a great price for your service and reasonable customer service.

The company is currently offering 1,500 peak minutes for just $39.00 a month. A year and a half ago I entered a contract with Alltel that was $39.00 a month for just 500 minutes a month! For an additional $10.00 a month, T-Mobile will provide you with 1,500 peak minutes and unlimited calling after 9:00 PM and on weekends. This deal likely won’t be around for long, so if you’re thinking about getting a new cell-phone plan, the Christmas season is definitely the time to do it.

If you want to have your free nights and weekends calling start earlier in the evening, there’s a little trick you can use to get your free hours to start as much as three hours earlier. If you live on the Pacific or Mountain time-zones and know someone on the eastern seaboard, you can register or a cell-phone plan, have the phone sent to the person who lives on the east coast. You’ll get a number for whatever locality that person is in, but your nights and weekends will be based off Eastern Standard Time. So if you live in California and your phone is an east coast phone, your nights and weekends minutes will start at 6:00 PM! The one caveat with this is that you need to make sure that you aren’t in a plan that will charge you a bundle if you’re outside your specified plan. Get a nation-wide calling plan with your cell-phone to prevent this from happening.

Share This

Up until the last few years, international calling was a very expensive proposition. You could be paying several dollars per minute even when you had the best deal on international service there was to get. In order to skirt around the system and get free calling, a number of intrepid technologist invented a device called the Blue Box, including a young Steve Wozniak. The device would generate special tones that interfaced with AT&T’s management system and allowed them to make free calls. Wozniak reportedly once used the device to call Pope John II. Fortunately you no longer have to hack the phone system to get inexpensive international calling anymore. There are now many options to get international calls for free.

We have been able to get free long distance service with our cell phones and through VoIP for some time now, but international calling has remained relatively expensive. A new company called Talkser.com is hoping to change that service. It’s a completely free ad-supported phone service which will allow you to make international calls. There’s absolutely no registration necessary, so they won’t be harvesting your personal information and selling it to advertisers.
The Talkster service is also very useful to setup conference calls. It’s completely free to do this, but the parties involved will have to listen to advertisements before the conference call begins. If the people you’re talking to don’t mind it, go ahead and take the free service if you don’t have one available through your phone system.

If the parties you are interested in talking to overseas have an internet connection, you have a lot more options to communicate with them. A new service called Oovoo is offering a tool which will allow you to have a video-phone conversation with anyone in the world. Other services like this have come out before, but Ooovoo is very intuitive to use and lets you conference with several different people at once.

About a decade ago we moved to a system a domestic where long distance calling is practically free. Instead of paying for expensive long distance plans, we just got it with our cell phones or bundled services for free. In the next decade or two, we will likely see this extend to international calling as well with the proliferation of new technologies and increased market competition.

Share This

Most mainstream economists, including those who published the Social Security Trustees Report, who have done calculations as to how long the Social Security trust fund can last believe that we’re moving in a very negative direction, and that the trust fund which holds excess Social Security dollars that is currently paying many of our current retirees will be completely gone by the year 2042. If you plan on retiring any time after 2030, chances are you won’t be seeing your full Social Security benefit during your retirement. You just can’t trust the government to take care of you when you retire, it’s time for us to take responsibility for our retirement plans and not depend on Social Security.

Since Social Security’s future is rather shaky and we simply cannot depend on receiving our full benefit, we have to supplement that money by saving for retirement on our own. Fortunately because of the power of compound interest, we can put a small amount of money away each month and over time that money will grow and snowball to be a significant chunk of change by retirement.

For example, if you were 25 and invested $100 a month into a decent mutual fund, you would have a pile of $500,000 by the time you retired. That would be plenty of money to supplement your Social Security income and allow you to avoid an impoverished retirement. If you save any more than that, you could even improve your lifestyle when you retire.

When you are doing your retirement planning, you should put your money inside of your company’s 401K plan if they offer any sort of match or into a Roth IRA. Either of these vehicles will allow for growth without having to pay taxes on your earnings every single year. If you’re not terribly familiar with the issue of finance, it’s definitely worthwhile to sit down with a fee-only financial advisor and have them look at the options you have for retirement. They will be able to help you come up with a plan that will allow you to retire quite comfortably by doing some simple planning ahead.

Share This

In the “old days”, people would set aside some money each week and it would be enough to retire on.  The chances of that being enough these days are slim to none!

1.  It’s never to late too start, but start as early as possible!
If you start early in your life, your money will have more time to grow.  Each year your interest gains will be based on the previous year- which is what we call “compounding”.

2.  Use your company 401K plan if you have one.
Contributing money to 401K plans gives you a tax deduction, not to mention tax-deferred growth on the money you put there.  Many employers offer some kind of matching- whether they match 100% of your contributions or a smaller percentage- that’s free money.

3.  Be realistic with goals.
How do you want to live when you are retired?  How much will that lifestyle cost you?  With that in mind, determine how much money you’ll need to supplement your social security, 401k and other sources of retirement income and then put that amount into your budget for saving.

4.  Consider IRA’s
An IRA offers tax advantages.  Traditional IRA’s give contributors tax deferred growth (you only pay tax on the money when you actually withdraw it) while a Roth IRA offers tax free growth but doesn’t allow for any deductible contributions.

5.  Invest in Stocks over the long term.
Over a long period of time, stocks are among your best opportunities for achieving high returns.

6.  Have a diversified portfolio
The best investors are those who “diversify”.  Have a good mix of stocks, bonds, savings accounts, cd’s and other investment vehicles to ensure you are getting the best gains possible while minimizing your risk.
7.  make smaller withdrawals upon retirement to stretch out your money.
When you retire, don’t pull out all of your saved money all at once.  Instead, take out money from your taxable accounts first and allow the tax-advantage accounts that you have to continue to compound and grow for as long as possible. 
8. Consider a part time job.
You’ve probably seen many retired aged individuals working part time in places like Walmart as greeters. Not only does working help you reduce the amount of money you need in your savings for retirement, but it gives you socializing opportunities you may not otherwise have.
9.  Stretch it out!
When you retire, you can stretch out your assets by moving to an area with a lower cost of living, or making modifications to your lifestyle.

Share This

Texas Hold’em poker is one of the in things to do for young people right now. Thousands of college students play home games with their friends for relatively low amounts of money and even more gamble their savings away on the internet, despite it’s illegality in the United States. Fortunately, there’s now a way to win money by playing poker online in the United States without having to skirt the law.

The relatively new service, called the National League of Poker, has moved from 30,000 users just over a year ago to 150,000 users today. The service is completely advertiser supported so you never have to put down a dime to win money. Even if the payouts are lower than what you’d find on some of the sites which are illegal in the United States, it’s a lot better deal than handing over your credit card number to some shady company in Gibraltar.

The way the service works is that you’ll be given a certain amount of points to play in each day. These points can be used to pay for tournament buy-ins. Players who place high in each tournament will be awarded more playing points, and the top 1000 players will qualify for the champion’s tournament each week in which they can win some money. There are also a number of tournaments that anyone can get into that will pay real money throughout the week.

If you’re not terribly concerned about the gambling aspect of having poker and just want to have some fun and maybe win some money here and there, the National League of Poker is a great way to play online. You’ll get a lot better play out of your opponents because they are actually working for some sort of prize as opposed to those who play on the free services such as Yahoo in which player’s actions are often extremely erratic and not a true poker-playing experience.

Share This