Would you agree to pay 90% interest on a loan? Poor Toni apparently did, posing a scary question to Bankrate.com’s Steve Bucci. Apparently, Miss Tony borrowed $1200 and the lender is demanding $90/mo. in interest – or 90% annual simple interest (i.e. not compounding). The answer that Bucci gives is funny because he gives two of them after a few words of advice about borrowing money in general.
What a load of crap. Looks like a lot of rich people got together with their rich lawyers to defraud the government (and us all) and now they’ll be able to settle up and pay only up to 50% of the regular penalty (depends on the shady transaction). Over four thousand people are going to get the benefit of the doubt and the schemes “range from complicated, risk-free offsetting currency transactions to products sold to small businesses involving health insurance plans. The transactions were marketed to wealthy individuals, large corporations and small business taxpayers.”
Back in February I wrote a post titled “How Much Is Your Time Worth?” where I introduced a little MSN web app that calculated your take-home-pay per hour. What this handy number was supposed to do was give you an idea of how much your time was worth given a lot of assumptions, such as the alternative to doing a task was to actually work and be paid for it (not something that’s always possible, especially if you’re trying to get out of doing laundry at 10PM when you’re not self-employed). It appears that Yahoo! Finance columnist Laura Rowley has something to say on the same subject.
To get a trial offer to Amazon Prime, put a bunch of items into your Amazon.com shopping cart, select one or two day shipping, and on the final checkout screen you should see the following text:
[Your name], you have been selected to receive a FREE four-month trial of Amazon Prime. If you sign up then you can get unlimited One-Day Shipping for $3.99 per item on over a million items sold by Amazon.com while your trial lasts.
» Learn more & sign up (link added)
Click the link and a javascript-esq pop-up will appear with a HUGE “Sign me up — it’s FREE” button to sign up.
The free Amazon.com Prime trial lasts four months after which they will charge you usual $79 annual fee. They even promise to send you two reminder emails! For my thoughts on Amazon Prime, if you pay for it, read this post.
No Purchase Is Necessary!
Update: You can get the free offer by clicking this link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/subs/primeclub/signup/main.htmlAnd to prevent it from automatically upgrading you from the trial (free) to the actual ($79/yr), go to Your Account, scroll down and click Manage My Subscriptions, and then click the “Do Not Upgrade” button. I’d still double check after four months to make sure you aren’t charged.
One of the side benefits of taking employer-reimbursed graduate courses (other than a free education) is that my $24k or so in student loans are deferred until I complete school, even when the net cost of the courses will be negligible. I didn’t even need to do anything to get them put into deferment; ACS found out by themselves and actually caught me off guard. They put the loans in deferment until my scheduled graduation date in 2012 (hopefully it won’t take me seven years but that’s the limit at Johns Hopkins).
While in deferment, the government will cover the interest payments but I can continue to pay off the principal without penalty and without surrendering the deferment status. It’s a double bonus – not only do I get a “free” education but I also get to avoid interest on the loans. You don’t need another reason to go back to school!
ING recently added in a very annoying third step to their login procedures that “encrypts” your PIN before they send it across an already encrypted SSL (secure socket layer) connection. I’m a fan of Step 2 (a revolving set of questions that changes each time) as a security measure because it’s actually a security measure. Encrypting a pin twice doesn’t seem to be that much added security and logging into my account takes that much longer ebcasue I need to click on these stupid buttons or type in the corresponding letters. The transmission encryption they use is High-grade SSL Encryption (RC4 128-bit) and it’s so much more powerful than this silly little keypad.
As I went to pay for a recent Amazon.com purchase, I saw that they now accept payment via a bank account (ACH). All you need to do is provide the typical bank account information (Bank Routing Number, Account Number, Your Name) and some atypical information (your driver’s license number and state). Is this a good way to be paying for your purchase? No because if you make a mistake you could be dinged with fees.
I poked around the Terms and Conditions and here are four points of note:
1. If you make a purchase and your account has insufficient funds, you’ll be dinged for $25 (3). This isn’t all that surprising though and it’s less than some bounced check fees.
2. You give Amazon authorization to request “a credit report and performing other credit checks or verifying the information you provide against third party databases” (2c) in the event of a dispute.
3. You’re forced to use their Error Resolution Policy (6) which means you have to provide them with all sorts of information regarding the transaction.
4. Fraud protection (such as unauthorized transfers) is provided by Amazon and only for 90 days.
(Click to continue reading…)
I’ll have the distinct opportunity to host the lucky Seventh Carnival of Debt Reduction and am accepting your submissions until Sunday 10pm. Please use this contact form to send me your article include the title, a link to the article, a brief description, the trackback, and whatever other pertinent information you want.
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