Category: Money

This offer is too good not to share. If you use the link from the IRS website, you can file your taxes for free through H&R Block. If you’re not an H&R Block fan, don’t worry, the same link leads to about a dozen other places you can file for free.

One of the things I least enjoy doing is keeping up with the file cabinet. We save bills, check stubs, warranty documentation, school papers, loan info and pretty much everything else that could come back to haunt us if someone makes an accounting error. The problem we have (like I imagine most everyone has) is that the papers add up quickly and we run out of space in the filing cabinet. Our garage ends up cluttered with boxes of old bills that in all likelihood we’ll never see again, but are a pain to move around.

To remedy this problem, I’m devising a plan where we scan everything that we possibly can–that is anything that doesn’t require us to retain the original document. That way we can hang on the everything for a year then throw it away and still having a copy backed up on the hard drive and on CD.

This will add a little time scanning, but it will make documents easier to find, archived for longer periods of time and take up a lot less space in the garage. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m looking forward to doing it (in a strange way) and plan on documenting the process here. I bet you just can’t wait.

Today, five days after placing an order on Buy.com, I got this email:

Hello Marcus,

Thank you for shopping at Buy.com.

At Buy.com we strive to provide the widest assortment of high-quality products at the lowest prices on earth. However, sometimes circumstances beyond our control affect our selection.

We were recently informed that the item listed below from order #55555 is no longer available from that supplier. Please accept our sincere apologies for this inconvenience.

Your order for this product has been automatically cancelled and you will not be charged.

….

Sincerely,
Customer Support Team

I can see getting an email a day after I placed the order, or maybe even two, but a week later? Sorry, I’ll go elsewhere to avoid waiting a week for something then, about the time it’s supposed to arrive at my house, find out it’s been cancelled.

Maybe I’m a little late to jump on this ship but I’ve never had ads on any of my sites. Finally (with server expenses being what they are) I decided to try Google ads. I put them on Silverfish Longboarding, a site I created a few years back that now gets about half a million page views a month.

As much as I’d like to make a little cash off it, I’m also curious as to how people react to them and how much the bother me after they’ve been there for awhile. I’m also really curious to see if anyone actually clicks them. Personally in my entire Internet career I’ve probably clicked fewer than 20 ads. Updates to come.

Saturday I heard a talk show host, rather unsuccessfully, trying to defend his position that a society where there was no cash, only credit cards would be used. I find the idea that this could happen interesting, but I really doubt it would ever happen for the following reasons:

1. Peer transactions. Yesterday I bought a couple bikes off some friends. Unless they had a credit card reader in their house, this transaction would have been much more difficult in a cashless society. How would kids pay for things? Can you imagine a 10 year old with a credit card?

2. Anonymity. People are skeptical of how much the government (or any organization) knows about them. There will always be a legal way to purchase things anonymously– at least there should always be a legal way.

3. Responsibility. Too many people dissociate real money with plastic. Cash is the only way many people actually realize they’re spending their money. Without cash, the amount of consumer debt would probably skyrocket (if that’s possible from how high it is already).

4. Tradition. All other reasons aside, I don’t ever see the day when people outgrow the natural desire to have cold hard cash. It makes you feel like what you worked for is real. It’s what people have done since the end of bartering and old habits die hard.

While technology has taken an obvious foothold in many areas of life and lots things are changing, don’t count on the day that cash will disappear for good.

Before we bought this home, one of the home insurance reps we talked to on the phone mentioned the movie “Money Pit” and said “why did you buy an old house?” Well… there are a lot of reasons we bought an old house, the charm, the neighborhood that actually has TREES in it (imagine that), not every house on the block is the same as ours, we could afford more buying old–there are dozens of reasons. I’ve also discovered right away (and I knew this to an extent in the beginning) that we will definitely be putting money into the home.

At this point, I’m still excited to learn about home improvement and I feel that any amount of money that goes into this house will likely come out–it’s an investment. If the housing market continues on its current trend around here, it should be a very good investment. In any case, I feel the home is a great investment, and being a homeowner feels great.