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Nearly all of us fight the battle against clutter, and allowing clutter to reign can cost you financial in a number of ways. The most common one that comes to mind is paying bills late and being slapped with fees because the bill got buried underneath some pile on your desk.
Here is an unusual real-life example of clutter costing money. My wife’s great aunts, both in their eighties, share a house that had become an enormous mountain of clutter. Well unfortunately one of the great aunts fell and broke her hip, and to allow her to be able to move around at home with medical equipment and such the house needed to be decluttered. The Louisiana family spent over a week helping to get the house in condition, sorting through mounds of old clothing, mail, and other items.
They found a lot of interesting things in this decluttering exercise, perhaps the most frustrating of which was a $60 paper gift certificate to Maison Blanche department stores. It was piled amongst some books and other gifts that they had received many Christmas seasons ago, still in the gold gift envelope. Never heard of Maison Blanche? There is a good reason for that: it was bought out in the early 1990s by Dillards and has operated under the Dillards name ever since.
I have sent an email to Dillards customer service to see if they can in some way honor the certificate or exchange it for a Dillards gift card:
To whom it may concern:
As long as Dillard’s Department Stores have been in business and knowing the many other department stores that have been acquired and added into the Dillard’s family of stores, I am hopeful you can appreciate this story and assist with our request.
As you are probably aware, Dillard’s has purchased a number of department stores with locations in south Louisiana over the years, including Maison Blanche stores in the early 1990s. Considering how long it has been since that acquisition, imagine our surprise when we recently came across a gift
certificate to Maison Blanche!While helping to declutter our great aunt’s home after her recent hip surgery, we found an unused $60 gift certificate buried amongst books and other items she had received as Christmas gifts that year. Obviously there are no longer any Maison Blanche stores at which to redeem the certificate, and in the age of gift cards we would likely receive very odd looks trying to redeem a paper certificate in a Dillard’s store. However, as the certificate bears no expiration date we would like to be able to redeem the certificate or have a gift card issued in its place. Please advise as to how we can redeem this very old certificate.
Sincerely,
BillyOceansEleven
Unfortunately my email received only a standard “we will forward it to the proper executive for handling” response, and after two weeks we haven’t heard anything else so I am assuming the certificate is ultimately worthless (thanks for all the help there, Dillards!). So there is a real-life, albeit unusual, example of how clutter can cost you money.
In an effort to simplify my finances a bit, I decided to finally rollover my 401(k) from the job I was laid off from last year. I had put it off waiting for the old employer’s last annual match to hit this past February, and then put it off after my experience rolling over the last employer’s 401(k) in 2008. The last rollover required the old plan to send the check to me and for me to send in the check and other paperwork to Vanguard. Since I requested the rollover only a few days before Hurricane Ike came and knocked out power for nearly two weeks, this ended up being a very long process but one that ultimately saved me a loss of 9.1% since the power outage coincided with the beginning of the financial collapse.
Anyway, I finally called Vanguard to initiate the rollover today and was pleasantly surprised with how easy and quick the process was. Granted part of this was due to my old plan’s willingness to send the distribution directly to Vanguard, but the whole thing took less than 17 minutes. I simply called Vanguard and let them know I wanted to roll over balances in an old employer’s plan and provided them with the custodian name and phone number, and they conferenced in the old plan representative and provided them with the check payee name and forwarding instructions. This won’t even require any paperwork on my part. Super easy!
Like I’ve mentioned before, I am a fan of Vanguard’s funds because of their low expense ratios and the makeup of their life cycle fund I chose for my rollover IRA. As evidenced by my experience today, their customer service is excellent. I would highly recommend Vanguard.
Rollover IRAs are a great alternative to leaving balances in an old 401(k) and can result in more investment choices and potentially lower fees. Just make sure you request a direct rollover and not a cash distribution or the old plan will be required to withhold taxes from the amount.
Being a blog that focuses on personal finance, we talk a lot about money here. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that this blogger wants to make some money off of this blog. I’ve tried a few things before with very limited success (I’ve probably made enough to cover the costs of maintaining the site). Which leads to the obvious question: “Why?” Low traffic levels and poor ad placement probably have a bit to do with the limited success. The lack of selling of services and products as part of my content is probably another cause.
After thinking of what I’m doing wrong, I started thinking about the one thing that has been moderately successful: ING referral links. What makes this different? A few things:
That third point I think is the most important, and will shape my money-making efforts on this blog going forward. I maintain a small section on the right hand side of the page with rotating ads, and in that space I will only promote products and services that I use and would honestly recommend to others. To further emphasize that I use and believe in the product or service, I will post customer referral links to these services when available. Hopefully by doing this I can provide information on products that are more relevant to my users.
At this point I have two services I am promoting. The first is the aforementioned ING Direct Orange Savings and Electric Orange Checking accounts. I have been an ING customer for years and believe that they provide a great product in the Orange Savings account, although I would like to see their interest rate a little higher. The other service I am promoting is Coupons.com, which I use quite often to print coupons to sweeten the grocery and drugstore deals I c0me across. As expensive as Sunday newspapers are becoming and the hassle of keeping up with the inserts, this is becoming my primary source for coupons. I’ll probably add more in the future as I find referral or affiliate programs for services and products I use.
Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered about the promotional links I put on here or were curious how you can support the site, hopefully this post helps answer your questions. I don’t ever expect to make enough here to quit my day job, but I would be very appreciative of your support through checking out these services nonetheless.
I will note that unless this strategy becomes very successful, I will likely keep the Google Adsense bars on the site for the time being. This doesn’t bring in a lot of money (I finally receached the $100 payout level about a month ago after about 18 months of using the service), but every little bit helps.
I’m a big fan of bank account bonuses, and one of the easiest ones out there is the $25 bonus from ING Direct. Simply open an ING Direct account as a new customer with an opening deposit of $250 or more using one of the referral links below. You can earn a bonus for opening either the ING Direct Orange Savings account or the ING Direct Electric Orange Checking account (but not both).
The Orange Savings Account offers:
Referral links:
Electric Orange delivers the access and convenience of checking with the earning power of savings:
Referral links:
Please note that these links expire on 10/12/2009. If you see a message at the top of the ING signup page saying the link is invalid or expired, it means it has probably already been used. Just use one of the other links to complete the signup.
In addition to earning $25 for yourself, using these referral links helps support this blog with a $10 bonus for each successful referral. Thanks!
Rules of the game: Bonuses are only paid for accounts that are opened with an initial deposit of at least $250. Initial deposit does not include bonus. The $25 bonus is available only for new accounts with a new Customer as primary owner. Only one bonus will be provided per household. Bonus starts earning interest upon account opening, but is unavailable for withdrawal for 30 days.
Just an FYI…Due to a long overdue upgrade of the Wordpress software that runs this blog (ok, it was so overdue that it was a re-install), you may notice small changes on the site. Most notably, my blogroll is now empty and will be reconstructed. I will be going through the old blogroll to determine what sites should remain, however if you have a personal finance site and would like to be included please leave me a comment and I will review your request. Of course a little bit of reciprocal link love would be appreciated, but I may add you anyway if your site is really cool.
Also, comments made in the last few days will be manually added back to the new blog, but those aren’t visible now.
Thanks for visiting!
BillyOceansEleven
With everything going to hell around us, is putting your money in the bank just not safe enough anymore? Apparently a lot of people think so, as it is being reported that sales of home safes have increased significantly, but safes aren’t the only places people are stashing cash and other valuables. Mattresses, coat pockets, coffee cans, and other odd spots are also popular places to hide goodies.
Hiding valuables may give you a sense of greater security over your stuff, but it certainly isn’t without risk. Take the recent case of an elderly Israeli woman who had stuffed her life savings of over $1 million in her mattress, only to have her daughter unknowingly throw out the mattress because it was lumpy. $1 million was literally thrown out to the trash.
This article on MSN illustrates some of the dangers of hiding valuables pretty well. Among the tales in the article were clothes given aways with cash lining the pockets, donated books randomly stuffed with $20 bills, and $20,000 hidden under a sink that was so moldy the Treasury Department had to examine it to figure out what was left.
According to the article, the practice is more common than you might think. They quoted an estate auctioneer in Virginia as estimating that one in ten estates they handle involve “stuffers”. In many cases, surviving family members will have no idea there are valuables stashed amongst seemingly insignificant items.
So what are some lessons to be learned from this? Perhaps the following would be a good start:
So do any of you stash your cash, or have you ever found something someone else stashed?
The actions and proposals of the leftist loonies in Washington has many of us scared for the future, and one of the results of this fear is the rise of survivalism. While I don’t think we are headed for a complete anarchy situation along the lines of “Mad Max”, I do think some common sense preparations for possible trouble ahead would be appropriate. I even discussed this idea last year when oil prices went through the roof. That post can give you some thoughts on reasonable preparations to make, the types of things that are grandparents did - not because they were scared of some threat but because they knew it made sense to prepare for a rainy day. The Survival Podcast and the forums on that site are also a great resource for a more self-sufficient lifestyle.
That said, I heard an advertisement on the radio this morning that I think is going off the deep end. During the Glenn Beck radio show this morning, there was an ad for a product called “The Survival Seed Bank“, which claims to offer enough non-hybrid seeds to plant a full acre crisis garden. But hold on to your tin foil hats, because according to the ad the “global elite” are cryogenically storing non-hybrid seeds in the Arctic. Additionally, seeds are being touted as having the potential to be better investments than gold and silver, and it is claimed that seeds have outperformed gold and silver in this country in the past. The ad ends with a reminder that in a true crisis situation seeds would be “the ultimate barter item.”
The argument for having some seed to be able to plant a garden is a good one, however I wonder if people who buy this product are buying this for any other reason than fear and if they really know what to do with the seeds they are purchasing. A few things to think about:
I’m not saying don’t buy this, but know what you are buying and think any preparations you make through. Don’t just buy this and put it in a closet so you can sleep better at night under the dilussion this will make you ready for the end of the world.
I won’t go into a long rant on this, just because this story out of the UK speaks for itself. A premie strong enough to breathe on its own for two hours outside of the womb is deemed to still be a fetus and denied care and dies in his mother’s arms.
Premature baby ‘left to die’ by doctors after mother gives birth just two days before 22-week care limit
Is this what you really want for the American health care system? Somehow I doubt it if it meant you or your child would be left to die because of some cold governmental rules that dictated you weren’t worthy of care.
Ever run into the grocery store for milk and bread and come out with a two-foot long receipt for your two items? So have a lot of other folks, including our friends at the Wall Street Journal who did a story on the phenomenon. It seems that retailers have found this to be the perfect spot to add promotional messages, coupons, store policies, and seemingly every other useless piece of information they want to get in front of customers. What are my favorite receipt paper wasters?
As alluded to in the WSJ article, Walmart is testing out receipts that print on both sides, which I recently encountered at a Sams Club here in Houston. It seems pretty odd at first, but my receipt for eight items had the header and my purchases listed on one side and the payment info and a survey invite on the other. The entire length of the receipt was only about four inches long. Very cool.
The WSJ article does single out CVS receipts as being long, but at least a lot of the extra length on those is coupons which can represent some value to the consumer. However, I would prefer that they cut the coupon so it is easily detached from the end of the receipt, like Target does with gift receipts.
Of course all of this creates tons of paper clutter for those of us that save receipts to track expenses. I’ve been working to clear out a lot of my clutter recently, which will be the subject of another post.
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