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Paypal Overcharge!
I just got this unbelievable news through the Consumerist that a man was over charged $81,400,836,908 by Paypal for $26 for gasoline! Juan Zamora was so shocked when he was informed his Paypal debit card has been maxed out when he knew he had $90 fund in his account! Who would have guessed this kind of fuck up, hiccup to happen?
Until now, Paypal has not explained the reason for the computer glitch… $86 BILLION ! Unbelievable!
How To Start Saving and Securing your Retirement
How is your anxiety level when it comes to your future and retirement? It is quiet understandable how the economic turmoil, job displacements and increasing price of basic commodities is causing alot of financial anxiety to families and even single people alike. Here is a list of 5 steps on how you can begin to ease that anxiety, today.
1. Beware of scams. This is so obvious. With the wake of recent financial scandals in the US causing major collapse in finance related companies, not ot mention the collapse of CAP and Legacy Group. Be aware of scams and stay away from to-good-to-be-true deals. There are 3 ways you can do to ensure you never fall and become a victim of fraudsters. First, if you have a financial advisor, never issue a check directly to him nor give custody to your assets to them. Second, never give your advisor a Special Power of Attorney over your bank accounts. Third, insist on getting monthly statements from the custodian (place where your trading accounts are held) rather from your advisor.
2. Do not dare predict the future. I do not think there is a sure fire way of predicting the future. No one can predict the future, do don’t try or you’ll just drive yourself nuts.
3. Invest 5-10 minutes a month and know exactly how much you have spent. Just track your total withdrawals from your accounts, chargings made into your credit cards with your income. Get everyone in the family involved. It would be easier this way. Not only that, you would be teaching and showing your children how to manage household finances.Getting their involvement will also make explanation easier in case you needed to do some cost cutting in order to make ends meet.
4. Do not withdraw too much from your investments. According to CFP Neal Frankle from Wealth Pilgrim, if you have a balanced portfolio, it’s generally safe to withdraw 4% to 5% annually. If your accounts have taken a hit over the last 12 months you have to re-evaluate your withdrawal rate. Just because you could safely take let’s say P15,000 a month out of your account 12 months ago doesn’t mean you can safely do this now. If your withdrawal rate is too high, you run the risk of running out of money faster. If your accounts have dropped 40%, your withdrawals may have to be reduced.
5. Take time to understand your investment time horizon. It’s easy to be very anxious about finances these days – but it may not be necessary. Let’s say if you are 60 years old, and you intead to retire next year, you may take away or withdraw 5% of your investment account just to make ends meet. If you are female, you can expect to live another 20 years! You have to consider and ask yourself if your money will last as long as you will. If you think about it, a person in this situation really have plenty of time to invest and work on your own portfolio. Just because you are retiring next year, doesn’t mean your investments should. Your money still has plenty of years to work for you. Make sure you don’t squander those years by allowing your money to lounge around in low-paying investments.
These are all easy and common sense steps. If you take the time to protect yourself, refuse to try to predict the future, track spending, make sure your withdrawals are appropriate and understand your investment time horizon, you’ll be far ahead of the game. More important, you can eliminate financial anxiety.
Dry Cleaning or Not!
How much do you spend for dry cleaning every month? If you are serious with taking care of your office clothes- expensive suits, silks and other delicate garment, here’s something else to consider.
How to wash and iron delicate garments
1. Handwash delicate garments like rayon and silk with little powdered soap and water.
2. Rinse liberally with water and never wring the material. Instead,
3. Hang it using a plastic hanger and air dry it. Do not leave your garments under direct sunlight. Instead, hang it somewhere shady and cool.
4. In case your garment is seriously wrinkled, instead of taking the risk ruining the garment, use a an aluminum foil to help straighten the garment out. According to this tip from Real Simple, “to get wrinkles out of silk, wool, and rayon clothes that can’t take direct heat, place a piece of foil on your ironing board, then lay the garment flat over it. With the steam button down, pass the iron three to four inches over the fabric several times. Wet heat radiating from the foil helps smooth out wrinkles.”
Budgeting Using Google Tools
Just found out from WSJ Blog that Google Docs has beefed up their resources for personal finance spreadsheets, allowing users to edit them from their cellphones and other mobile devices.
The Web-based tools can help users keep track of variety of expenses, ranging from household and personal budgets to shared costs between co-workers and roommates to weddings. Other worksheets can help users figure out how long it will take to pay off their mortgage or credit-card bills. The templates are Excel-like spreadsheets that users can customize and access from any computer. Now, users can also edit those spreadsheets, sort by column, and filter by terms on from a variety of mobile devices. Users can also share their spreadsheets with anyone, so multiple people can work on a budget together. For example, parents with college-age kids can work on a shared budget at the same time from different locations; others may want to share their spreadsheets with their financial planners or accountants. Users can decide to keep their budgets private or invite others to view them.
Ofcourse, you will have to manually enter your data, which is saved automatically. According to Andrew Chang of Google Docs, the spreadsheets are lightweight and appropriate for do-it-yourselfers who don’t want to connect with other services and prefer to run quick calculations of their finances.
Here are direct links to those templates:
- Family Budget Planner
- Personal Budget Tracker
- Monthly Budget Planner
- Annual Personal Budget Spreadsheet
- Savings Calculator
- Bank Account Ledger
- Credit Card Payment Calculator
- Statement of Net Worth
- Auto Expense Report
- Road Trip
- Mortgage Payment Calculator
- Wedding Budget Manager
- Wedding Vendor Payment List
Staying Fit on a Budget
If you have removed gym membership from your budget with the goal of saving more this year, here are a few tips on how to stay fit–on a budget.
- Walk more. If you are one of those people who drives to work or commutes to work, you might want to ditch the car for awhile and walk or sprint from the parking lot to your office. While sprinting might race your heart rate like brosk walking, you might want to change or wear appropriate shoes and be wary of potholes lest you injure yourself.
- Instead of riding the elevators or escalators, use the stairs instead.
- Eat healthy. Increase your vegetable intake and lower your carbohydrates from your diet.
- Keep tabs with your health by having an annual check-up.
- Instead of snacking during break times, eat a fruit or two instead.
- Ditch the softdrinks, coffee and alcohol. Opt for more healthier beverages like some fresh fruit drink or better yet, increase your water intake!
- Stop smoking. Not only are you helping yourself, you are also helping to protect your immediate family who could suffer from passive smoking.
Do you have other smart tips in staying fit on a budget? Make your comments below or email them to me at frugal.pinoy@gmail.com. Interesting tips will get free cellphone loads from me.
How to Protect Yourself from Identity Theft
Bill Shrink Guy just gave out this apt reminder on how vulnerable anyone can be when it comes to identity theft. My identity was never stolen, thank goodness, but I have heard of so much stories that I have come to take faithful steps in protecting myself and avoiding the possibility of my identity to be stolen by taking these measures:
1. Ditch any unnecessary personal information or passwords in wallet or purse
I used to walk around in a wallet with my original bank slip with my password on it. I even have in one time wrote my internet banking password in the slip lest I forget. Dumb…
Rid your wallet of all papers with any passwords or any personal information that are precious to thieves lurking around. The same advise goes to those who leaves their bank online passwords into their cellphone…
2. Be safe with your mail
How often have we heard of missing important mail? I do not want to bark at the wrong tree here, but there are certainly instances and reports of those nosy Postal Office employees. Just to be on the safe side, manage your mail and divert important mail such as bank statements or credit card statements which contains your personal details which may be used against you or used to cause harm on others.
3. Use online facility to access your accounts
Like me, I opt out on paper statement of accounts from my bank. I use the online facility to check my transactions, and to download my current statements into my Quicken for quick consolidation. Not only it is convenient, if in the event you spot an erroneous and suspicious transaction from using the online facility, you can quickly notify your bank for the immediate cancellation of your card and the bank can immediately check the said transaction. Not only are you protecting yourself, and your identity, you are saving your bank paper and saving the environment.
Do you know of friends or anyone who had experienced identity theft?
Ways to Save on Travel
With the summer break coming up, I surmise it wouldn’t hurt to start planning for the summer break. How do you usually begin planning for a trip? I usually begin mine with my budget. If I have more money to spend, then I begin my search for trips possibly to prestigious resorts in the country (read: Panglao Island Nature Resort, Balesin) or somewhere off the beaten track (read: Bolinao, Rizal Beach: Gubat, Sorsogon, or Pagudpod)
Here are Ways to Save on Travel
The Installment Trap
One of the many obvious and effective marketing and selling scheme continuously used by department stores, electronic shops and appliance centers is baiting customers into buying their wares through installment payments. Credit card companies’ logos and supposed “easy installment plans” usually lures customers into buying things that they simply couldn’t afford.
Yes, if you cannot afford to pay for anything in cash and in full, and you have to make monthly payments for some items, it simply mean you cannot afford it right now.
How to File Credit Card Disputes
I know alot of people who one way or the other had have horrifying experiences with credit card companies. Years ago, when I was still carrying a Citibank Credit Card, I have had experience when I was charged 6 times for a magazine subscription– Oprah magazine in fact. After receiving the credit card bill, I quickly noticed the numerous times I was charged, I quickly called their hotline number and the CSR told me to file a dispute claim by downloading a dispute form from the website of Citibank and fax the form along with the statement of account. Needless to say, Citibank quickly remedied the problem and they credited the other transactions and I was only charged once for the annual subscription of Oprah Magazine.
While it’s not always possible to avoid credit card disputes, here are some more tips for dealing with them:
•Get promises in writing. Save receipts for big charges. Also ask for written confirmation of when the item will be delivered and what services are provided as part of the purchase.
•Know the rules. The Fair Credit Billing Act gives consumers the right to dispute a credit card purchase or withhold payment for a card purchase – but only under certain conditions.
Disputes must generally be filed in writing within 30 days after the bill is sent. While disputing a charge, the card holder will not have to pay the contested amount and won’t incur interest on it. If the dispute is lost, the card company is allowed to charge interest back to the date you filed the dispute, after a standard grace period.
•File the dispute carefully. Banks classify card holders’ disputes into nearly two dozen categories, such as “merchandise not received” or “canceled recurring transaction” (just like what happened to my Oprah Magazine subscription), but generally, if filed as an “unauthorized transaction” – as long as it is unauthorized – you’ll have more protection.
•Be prepared to arbitrate. Most disputes are settled between the merchant and the consumer. But your credit card issuer could also try to resolve it with the merchant’s bank. If that doesn’t work, the final step often is arbitration, where the issue is decided by Visa or MasterCard.
It’s rare for cases to go to arbitration: At Visa, only one-tenth of 1% of disputes are decided in arbitration, spokeswoman Randa Ghnaim says.
Credit card disputes can last up to 270 days, including the arbitration process, although 99% of card disputes are settled much sooner, says Monteiro of MasterCard.
•File a complaint elsewhere. If you feel that your dispute hasn’t been fairly decided, file a complaint with the Department of Trade and Industry. You can check the SOP in filing a complaint, here. Filing a lawsuit is also an option.
Ofcourse, nobody wants to be bothered with credit card irregularities and there are alot of ways in avoiding this kind of problems. But here are things you should be aware of:
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Be careful of divulging your credit card information. Do not give out your information over the phone or the internet.
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Be aware of phising scams in the internet.
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If possible, be present while the cashier is swiping your card into their machines. Ensure that your card is only swiped once. You do not want double or triple charges into your account.
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Keep all receipts of every transactions until your statement arrives and you have double checked each transaction.
If this article bothered you so much, heck, you can always get rid of those cards and switch to debit cards! Here is my take on the advantages of credit cards.
