Archive results for “March 2009f 2009”

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Has Your Credit Card Offered You an Incentive?

I read this article on Yahoo finance and it really surprised me:

“With defaults on the rise, credit-card issuers are employing all sorts of tactics to persuade consumers to reduce their balances and, ideally, close their accounts.

[Via Yahoo Finance]

Some are giving out gift cards or cash back. One bank (Chase) unfortunately is adding a $10 monthly fee for accounts with large balances. It doesn’t appear to be happening with all accounts – just a select few.

I don’t like what I’ve heard about the way Chase is handling things. One customer in the article says, “They’re trying to renege on the deal [he had].” Citibank and American Express are using the gift cards or the cash back. I think those are a great idea although someone is paying for these incentives down the line.

Have any of you been offered an incentive like that?

Posted by Tricia on March 2, 2009 at 7:48 AM in Credit Cards | 16 Comments »
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A Helpful Book to Us – The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris

Boy, that title sure sounds like one of those, “Too good to be true” type books, doesn’t it? The tag line doesn’t help either, “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.” That’s what I thought at first too. Then I read a review from a blogger who tends to have the same philosophies as myself and I started to think that maybe there was something to this book that could be interesting to us.

I received a gift certificate to Amazon.com so I decided to purchase it (this was a while ago). I’m glad I did.

I was going to do a book review, but I agreed with the review that originally led me to purchase the book. So I am going to provide a link to that review for everyone to read and then just discuss how the book has affected us.

The 4-Hour Workweek Book Review at Get Rich Slowly

Like JD, there were parts of the book that I wasn’t interested in, but there were many parts that I was interested in. It gave me a lot of food for thought when thinking about certain aspects of our business.

Ferris talks about becoming an expert in a certain area. I don’t agree with the suggestions on how to become an expert. Joining some organizations and reading a few books and then promoting yourself as an expert doesn’t sit well with me. It makes me question every “expert” out there. I think to be an expert you have to really immerse yourself in a subject.

Even before I read this book, my husband was doing that. He hasn’t always been paid for all of the work he has done, but he is becoming respected among peers (including a person who works for someone my husband would love to work for). Others are coming to him for answers so he is very close to becoming an expert. That is thanks to all of the studying he has done the past three years. We knew his expertise would help the business, but reading about it in Ferris’ book gave us more ideas on how to utilize it in other ways.

Ferris also talks about outsourcing your life. Our business was geared towards outsourcing some tasks to keep our time commitment low. But after reading this book I realized that we could outsource even more so we shifted our business model a little bit. As it works now, we create products and then some of the products are produced & shipped by a third party. After reading the book, we realized that we could outsource more. You do pay for that outsourcing in terms of a lower profit margin, but you have more time to work on the more important parts of the business. I also got some ideas on how to automate some of the administrative parts of the business as well.

So our business is not traditional. There is no physical store front. Is a path like ours right for everyone? No – just like I believe that this book is not right for everyone. I chuckle because I know someone who would call the book rubbish. I think it depends on what you where you are in your life and what you want. For us, we read the book at the right time. If I had this book in my hands fresh out of college I probably would have called the book rubbish too.

Posted by Tricia on March 2, 2009 at 1:18 AM in Making Money | 1 Comment »
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Changes in Our Income

Not too long ago, we did an income switch-up. I went to part-time at my job. My husband got a part-time job that ended up being more like full-time. How did that affect our job income?

It only affected it a little bit.

Since my husband works a minimum wage job and I earn about twice as much at my job – there wasn’t much of a change. It fluctuated some since some weeks I worked more hours and some weeks he worked less. The big thing is that we were pulling in about the same amount of income working more total hours. That is the part that bothers me since it is not an efficient use of time.

On the flip side, since my husband has a fairly recession-proof job, there is a some sense of security. But it still bothers me. Not only because of the more total hours, but because the effect it is having on our family.

We no longer have regular dinners together everyday like we used to. We haven’t been able to go out snowshoeing together at all this winter or even take a trip to the lake. Our family unity is suffering. Not sure how else to put it except to say that it stinks. I don’t like to sound like I am whining about it, but I have to say what I really feel about this arrangement. We’ll deal with it – we used to work opposite shifts way back when, which was even worse. I guess once you have a taste of being able to have time together, you don’t want to go back to not having it.

As for the business, it is still making a profit and it is growing. When I talked about income above, I was not including the business in there. All net income from our jobs and the some of the profit from the business goes to our expenses and towards our debt (I haven’t added to our savings account in a while). Some of the funds from the business have already been used to pay off start-up debt in full and to contribute to the business savings. We are being conservative right now with the money we pay ourselves.

There have been questions about our business and I’ve decided to talk a little bit more about it. I’ll start tomorrow with reviewing a book that was very inspirational.

Posted by Tricia on March 1, 2009 at 1:17 AM in Making Money | 8 Comments »
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