Here’s her story: she had her wallet with her drivers license and debit card stolen in early November. Before she even realized it had happened, the fraudsters used the license and debit card to cash forged checks against her account. Note they didn’t forge checks drawn on her account, but they forged someone else’s checks and used her account to cash them against. She found out when she got an overdraft alert from her bank (Wells Fargo) and promptly contacted the bank to alert them to the scam and filed a police report. Wells Fargo ultimately opened them a new checking account  and closed the old account that had been compromised.

So that’s the end of the tale, right? Nope! Because the fraudsters are still running around with her ID and know she banks with Wells Fargo, they simply ran the scam again last week and cashed forged checks against the new account. Now she’s fighting with Wells Fargo again to get the mess straightened out and the funds returned. They are now talking about opening a third account with a teller alert attached to supposedly prevent this from happening yet again.

So what does this story illustrate? Two things:

1. When something like this happens, it is best just to move your primary account to another bank. In this instance changing the account number does no good because the fraudsters still have her picture ID and know she is a customer of the bank. Because it is typical for customers to not know their account number, it is common practice for bank tellers to use the picture ID to look up the account. That’s how this fraud was perpetrated a second time even though the old account was closed.
2. Any safeguard depending on the teller is of minimal effectiveness. I say this as a former bank teller. A teller alert or note on an account does little good if the teller never reads it. When the bank is busy and customers are lined up as far as the eye can see, most tellers will just press whatever button they need to clear the alert and complete the transaction. This is especially true of tellers working the drive-thru lanes. The limited visibility of the customer created by the way most drive-thru lanes are configured (especially when you are dealing with the farthest lanes and/or the passenger as the accountholder) and the desire to get customers in and out fast also limits the effectiveness of an ID check. If a bank manager tells you a teller alert will prevent fraudulent activity on your account, they are either lying or stupid because they should know better.

Although one of my resolutions is to eliminate unnecessary accounts, there is a lot of wisdom in having a secondary checking account that you can use in this type of situation and/or keeping most of your funds in an account other than your primary checking account. In any case if this happens to you, it is probably best to retreat to a different bank and hope the scammers don’t follow you there.

1. I don’t care about their investing advice, which is about a third of the magazines’ content. In any given personal finance magazine, typically the middle third of the magazine is dedicated to columns on mutual fund and stock picks. I don’t even bother reading these columns, mainly because I am a proponent of index funds as opposed to managed mutual funds. Also, in the digital age if you are getting your stock picks from a print magazine you are probably way too late to the game. Think about how many people know about the virtues of these great stocks by the time it makes it into a printed magazine, and if you are reading it in print how many people read it in an online edition before you and how many other people are reading the exact same article you are.
2. Most personal finance magazine articles are geared towards those with relatively low levels of financial literacy. This may sound very arrogant of me, but one of the things that drives me nuts with a lot of personal finance magazines is that it seems like most of the content is geared towards the Dave Ramsey struggling with the basics crowd with very little geared towards those of us that already have the basics of personal finance down and are looking for ways to reach that next level of financial savvy. This is where I think the personal finance blogosphere is filling a huge gap left by the traditional media. I can learn a lot more from browsing a day’s worth of postings on pfblogs.org than I can from an entire year’s worth of Money magazine in part because…
3. So much of personal finance magazine content is repetitive. How many times do I need to read that rewards credit cards don’t make sense if I have to carry a balance because of higher interest rates, or that energy efficient appliances can save me money in the long run? These are just a few of the topics that seem to get written about over and over in personal finance magazines. Can’t they at some point come up with some original insight?
4. So much of the content is available online for free. I started finding recently that by the time my print copy of the personal finance magazines would arrive in the mail and I got the chance to sit down and read them I had already seen most of the content elsewhere. This is because most of the articles in these magazines are posted online on their own websites, often before the print magazine actually hits newsstands or subscriber mailboxes.

Ultimately I think the better financial education can be found online on personal finance blogs and forum, so personal finance magazines only produce unnecessary expense and clutter.

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.

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:

• A well-placed and secure safe is the best place to hide valuables on your property. Safe deposit boxes at banks are also relatively inexpensive and offer even stronger security.
• Don’t hide stuff in items that someone may think should be replaced or donated. A well-intentioned friend or loved one may cost you nearly.
• Tell someone where you’ve hidden stuff should you be unable to remember, whether it be due to mental decline or death. Consider writing down your hiding places and leaving the list along with your will in the care of a trusted family member or friend.
• Make sure you hiding spot is reasonably well protected from the elements, excess moisture, and fire.

So do any of you stash your cash, or have you ever found something someone else stashed?

I spent a good five years or so of my youth and unknown sums of my parents’ money collecting cards. Whenever I would go with my mother to Sams Club I would buy a wax box of packs of cards and spend the rest of the evening opening up the packs to see what treasures I could find. Often when I would visit with my dad on alternate weekends he’d take me to a baseball card show. And of course my old friend Ron and I loved it when my mother would drive us to Houston for the huge card show at the AstroArena followed by a baseball game in the AstroDome.

I was really into baseball cards, even to the point my friend Ron and I tried to sell our wares at card shows in Baton Rouge on a couple of occasions. It was a great hobby, and taught me lots of great lessons about money:

1. Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay you for it. I remember opening up packs of baseball cards as a kid and finding the hot rookie card at the time and being giddy at how much the card was worth. “That Craig Biggio rookie card is worth $0.50, and Beckett says all these commons are worth a nickel each,” I would think to myself. What I didn’t realize at the time is that no one would really be willing to give me a nickel for those commons, mainly because they could go and buy the same pack of cards I did and get those commons for a lot less than a nickel each.
2. Today’s hot item is not necessarily a good long-term investment. Think of this as a small baseball card version of the dot-com bust. I remember from my youth that everyone would go nuts over cards for certain first round draft picks, certain they would be a hall of famer before ever stepping on a big league field. Two fun examples: the Phillies’ first round pick of Jeff Jackson, who would never play a major league game but was touted highly enough to be pictured on the box for Score’s 1990 factory set, and #1 overall pick Ben McDonald (LSU alum, and even went to my high school) who played several seasons for the Orioles but for the most part had a very lackluster professional career over 8 seasons. Both players’ cards went for several bucks each back in 1990, and now can probably be had for less than a quarter each.
3. Just because something is cheap doesn’t mean it is a good buy. I thought of this one last night as I found a wax box of 1990 Pro Set football cards. When we were getting ready for our first card show, we saw a vendor selling these wax boxes for about $9 each, so we ordered a couple of boxes thinking we could get $0.50 a pack for them (each box has 36 packs if I remember correctly). Well, there was a reason we could buy them for so cheap: it was because no one else wanted them. I think we only sold a few packs in two shows and opened up the rest of the packs in that one incomplete box. The other box is sitting in my house right now, complete with the handwritten “Good Buy!” sales pitch and the $0.50 price crossed out for a lowered $0.45 price.  
4. Trust your instincts. By 1993 I had pretty much stopped actively collecting cards. Why? Because in the short time I had been a collector I saw where almost all cards went for $0.50 a pack to where the cheapest cards were at least $1 a pack and many of the popular issues were anywhere from $3-5 a pack. Lots of cards weren’t even sold in packs but in fancy packaged sets with price tags well beyond the budget of the average kid. I decided I couldn’t afford card collecting anymore and that there was no way new cards would be worth as much as they were selling for and just stopped buying. Of course not too long after that the sports card market went into the toilet and I could now go buy most of those formally hot sets on eBay for a fraction of what they sold for then. Unfortunately most of the cards I already had also plummetted in value, which brings me to my last point:
5. Hobbies are for your enjoyment, not necessarily for making money. Yes, you can make money with a hobby (writing and photography are two hobbies that come to mind), but the primary motivation should be to do something you enjoy, not to do something that will make you money.

So what is to become of my baseball card collection? For now it will sit in my new office until I have time to sort through it. Eventually I would like to organize and catalog my collection, trading to complete sets of cards with only a few holes and get rid of cards from issues I only have a few off. I might eventually complete my Ryne Sandberg card collection, since the last I checked I can get the rookie cards from Donruss and Fleer I am missing for about $12 each (they were about $40 at their peek). I may eventually put my completed sets in binders for easier viewing with my boys when they get older, but that is a long ways off.

1. If you have pets, make your bed. Doesn’t really apply to us, but I can see where pet hair and the like would be unwelcome bedmates. 
2. Know where you’re going. This includes nothing your route and the traffic conditions that might warrant a detour. While traffic is a fact of life, a lot of traffic jams and wandering around looking for something because you’re lost can be avoided, saving time and money.
3. Plan your perfect day. I’m an accountant, so there are no perfect days. However, I do find making a list of what I need to do the next day helps to focus my energy when I get into the office in the morning.
4. Clean out your desk’s inbox. Some sorting and weeding of easy items is good, but it seems like trying at absolutely clean out the inbox is a recipe for either getting stuck at work late or leaving a bunch of stuff unorganized and unfinished for your arrival the next day.
5. Set your desk for tomorrow. This should include cleaning up your desktop. I’m not the best at doing it, but I like to at minimum sort through the papers that accumulate on my desk during the day (in my job I do a lot of analysis, so I can end up with multiple schedules scattered on my desk by the end of the day). This goes well with #3 and #4 above.
6. Sort, open, and act on your mail. I’m trying to get better at this as well. We moved my office downstairs in our house, so the shredder is now easily accessible as I sort the mail. The credit card offers and such go directly into the shredder and the other junk mail goes into the trash. Bills go into my work bag to pay while I’m taking my lunch at work the next day. The weak link for me is statements and such which end up in a pile on my desk until I get tired of looking at them and bring them to work to scan. I just need to bring them with me to work with the bills and scan as I receive them.
7. Load (and, if necessary, run) the dishwasher or hand-wash the dishes. We’re pretty OCD about this. We never leave dirty dishes out overnight. Larger stuff gets hand-washed and everything else goes in the dishwasher. The only disagreement between me and the wife is she insists on running it nightly, even if it isn’t full.
8. Get ready for bed an hour before you plan to go to sleep. I don’t use a full hour, but I’ve gotten into the habit of making sure my clothes are laid out and my lunch is packed before I go to bed. It is a waste of time and money for me to go out to lunch just because I was too lazy to pack the lunch the night before and I was too rushed to do it that morning. I also make sure that those bills and anything else that needs to come with me to work is packed up and ready to go.

Here are a couple of bonus tips of my own for you:

1. Use your lunch break to take care of personal business. One of the luxuries of bringing your lunch to work and eating at your desk is that you normally won’t need the whole hour. Keep a list of personal items you need to work on (bills to pay, rebates to submit, etc.) and use those to fill the remainder of your lunch break. It helps allow you to relax once you get home from work and avoid booting up the computer to clear your personal tasks list. Haven’t you already spent enough time in front of the computer by the time you get home?
2. Keep a to-do list with you at all times. We’ve all done this: think about something that you need to do and then completely forget about it. A lot of times these types of things will come back to bite us in the butt (i.e., when you forget to send in the credit card payment), other times it will just mean wasted time and effort (i.e., when you go to the store and remember something you were supposed to get after you’re already home). A great way around this is to keep a “to-do” list with you so you can jot things like this down and review it regularly. A pad and pen will work, although I find using the Fliq Tasks app on my iPhone to work really well. It helps keep me on track when I ask myself the question “what was it I needed to do.”

All you have to do is work your money-saving magic through the Retentions Department. They won’t send you there if you just ask for it by name, so you have to threaten to cancel to get there and get the best deals. I called Dish Network retentions today, and my call went something like this:

BillyOceansEleven: Hi, I would like to cancel my service.

DishNetwork: I’m sorry to hear that and I see you’ve been with us for two years. May I ask why you want to cancel?

BOE: Well, money is tight so I am shopping around my service and I can get a programming package similar to my current one over at DirecTV for $29.99 a month, which is considerable less than the $44.99 before tax I’m paying you guys now.

DN: Give me a second to review your account…Okay, I can offer you a $15.00 bill credit for each of the next 12 months, which will bring your price before tax to $29.99.

BOE: Well, that would put me at the same cost as DirecTV, so let’s do that.

DN: Okay, give me a few minutes to update your account.

DN: Okay, I have added the discount to your account and you should see the first credit on your next statement. Thank you for choosing Dish Network. Goodbye.

Total time spent including navigating the phone tree to get to retentions was 3 minutes 48 seconds and total savings is $180 over the course of a year. Not too shabby!

A few pointers:

• Be absolute in your comments. Don’t say “I’m thinking about canceling.” Say “I would like to cancel.” This lets them know you mean business.
• Comparison shop and be prepared to present them will the best deal out there. Give them a reason to adjust the bill. “I think my bill is too high” is less effective than “I can switch to DirecTV and get this service for $29.99″.
• Give them some idea of what it would take to make you happy. If you simply want to lower your bill, focus on a competitor offer for the same service for less. If you really want more channels at the same price, present them with a competitor’s service offering around your current price.
• Remember that you have the most leverage when you are no longer contract. If you are under contract you probably won’t get much since they know you’ll have to pay the early termination fee if you really do cancel.

As we have begun the process of decluttering our house, I had a revelation while working in my office over the weekend: I don’t need to keep all of these receipts. I asked myself why I was keeping all of these receipts, and I realized that I would never track every dime in Quicken and even if I started to do so there would be no benefit to tracking spending from 2003 (yes, I had receipts that old and older). The revelation led to a new method for saving receipts and tracking purchases:

1. Receipts for large purchases and items that could still be returned or are still covered by a warranty should be scanned and saved in a special file.
2. Receipts for tax deductible items like charitable contributions should be saved in their own file with the support for that year’s income tax return.
3. Current receipts should be reviewed so I can classify the purchases properly in Mint.com (one of the coolest sites ever, btw) and filed in envelopes by month.
4. Once the tax return is filed for the prior year, all receipts not supporting a tax deductible item or a large purchase (see #1 above) should be shredded.

This system saves the important stuff and ultimately disposes of 95% of those receipts. The only reason for even saving the current year receipts until you file your taxes is to allow for mid-year tax code changes resulting in new deductions. A perfect example is the reintroduction of the sales tax deduction a few years ago. The tax code was changed to allow you to deduct sales tax paid in leiu of state and local income tax, with the deduct amount being a predetermined amount based on your income and number of dependents or on actual receipts. Additionally, if you used the predetermined amount there were certain large purchases you could add. This was great, but since they enacted the change mid-year you could have very easily thrown out deductible receipts because they weren’t deductible at the time.

So far I have shredded two large bags full of receipts, and it has been an interesting experience. The oldest receipt I found was for a computer I bought in 1998 that I gave away several years ago. I also found tons of receipts so old that the thermal printing had faded away. As I went through all of these receipts, I’d look at some of this stuff and wonder why I spent the money on that. Other receipts would bring back fun memories, like the great CVS raids of 2004 when CVS was just entering the Houston market. We lived in an apartment complex at the time and CVS sent a mailer with several coupons for free items in various categories. Most of our neighbors just pitched them in the garbage next to the mailboxes, so I went and dug out as many as I could and the wife and I raided CVS for free stuff for several weeks. And to make it better, they sent another round of coupons about a month later and we did it all over again! I still have lotion, shampoo, and conditioner from that deal! Oh the memories!

Anyway, I hope this helps some of you other OCD people out there to tame the paper monster.

Especially in this economic environment when consumers are looking to cut discretionary spending (yes, in this day and age a home phone is discretionary), service providers want to keep you as a customer and are willing to show a little love to do it. Here are a few tips:

• Try your best to pay on time. If you do the late fee isn’t an issue in the first place. Also, you are less likely to have success in these requests if you are frequently late.
• Be nice. Phone reps have some discretion, meaning it is up to them in a lot of cases whether to grant your request. They won’t want to help you if you are a total jerk to them.
• If at first you don’t succeed, ask for the supervisor. It very well could be the case that the rep doesn’t have the power to waive fees, but their supervisor probably does.

This can work for many different types of bills, and it never hurts to try. This is usually very easy, so no need to stress about it. Quick and easy money back in your pocket.

The initial decision I made was to try to hussle Sprint for various freebies to help bring the cost down to a level comparable with what we’d be paying if I switched to AT&T. I had read on SlickDeals and on Hustler $$$ Blog that many people had been able to successfully get Sprint to throw in free phones, free data plans, and other goodies to get them to renew a contract. Sadly my call to Sprint retentions didn’t go as well. They would offer me no freebies, and the best they could do on a new phone was a Motorola Q for $199.99 after rebate, which is $100.00 more than I could get it for on their website. So I politely declined and mulled it over during the Christmas break.

Well, in comes my brother-in-law JoeMoney to make the decision for me. He found some deal where he could get iPhones without a contract for about $150. He bought several to resell, and generously offered to sell me one at his cost. This sealed the deal for me – I decided to switch to AT&T, and here’s why:

1. I was actually offended that Sprint wouldn’t do more to keep me as a customer. No freebies, no phone, nothing. If your service sucks as badly as Sprint’s does, you need to show at least a little bit of love at renewal time.  Since I couldn’t get any concessions from Sprint, my cost with separate accounts for me and my wife would have been about $20 more per month than an AT&T family share.
2. The iPhone is just a really cool device, and I’ve been wanting to replace my iPod shuffle (it’s one of the old 512MB ones that looks like a USB thumb drive). This will be a far cry from my Treo 700p, which has to be one of the crappiest phones ever made.
3. Because I’m getting the phone without a contract, there is no requirement to sign up for the AT&T data plan to use the phone. My brother-in-law is unlocking the phone for me so I can just use WiFi and save the $20 or so a month.
4. Since I’m not buying the phone under contract, I can purchase another phone at a discount from AT&T. I bought an LG Shine for free after rebate, which appears to be going for around $150-$175 on eBay. That along with selling my old Treo should come close to covering my cost for the iPhone.
5. I realized almost everyone else in my family and my wife’s family is on AT&T, so a lot of the minutes I was burning calling them will now be free mobile to mobile minutes. That makes the shared pool of minutes go a lot farther.
6. I decided I don’t really want to port my Houston number. From my days as a consultant a lot of people had my number, and since I’m now working in a corporate accounting department I don’t really need or want those people to be able to contact me. My cell phone is now purely for my convenience and no one else’s, especially since I’m no longer reimbursed for any of the bill. Plus my new number will be a Baton Rouge number, which will be great since a lot of the people who call me are calling from Baton Rouge anyway. They can call me from a landline without long distance charges.

So there you have it. As soon as I receive the package with the new phone and SIM card, I will no longer be a Sprint customer. A better phone, better service, and a lower cost. Oh happy day!