If there’s even a hint of impending layoffs at your workplace, get a copy of your credit report. That’s the advice of Gail Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit National Foundation for Credit Counseling.
Why? Because potential employers may want a look at it. If there are any errors or delinquencies on your report, the time to deal with them is before you need to make a good impression.
Textbook sellers want to gouge you. Banks keep finding ways to gouge you. Some states are investigating potential gouges, i.e., taxes on everything from shoe repair to golf to bowling. (Wonder where they stand on the repair of bowling shoes?)
Read on for a chance to learn, among other things, how to put your children on a budget. No more free rides, kiddies.
In most of the country — not here — summer means sandals and flip-flops. We’ve still got a month or more of naked toes. That’s why you need this week’s giveaway.
My monthly health insurance payment has risen by $40, starting now. The increase was anticipated, or at least announced. I’d managed to block the amount, though, so I was still surprised.
My bimonthly electric bill was $22 higher than the previous one, thanks to a Seattle City Light rate increase. An extra $11 per month won’t kill me. But it got my attention.
Here’s today’s word, and it’s a funny one: gofobo. (Try saying it five times, fast.) This movie-mad site offers access to free screenings, contests and events.
I’d been planning to write about free movies but my daughter beat me to it. Well, at least she got me off my dime. Which, of course, means saving you some dimes. Lots of them. I’ve paid as much as $10.25 for a matinee ticket in Seattle.
As Abby notes in the blog post linked above, gofobo is chronically last-minute; you might have 24 hours or less to respond.
“Still, what’s the worst that happens? You get an offer on a movie you can’t go to,” she writes. “I’d say that’s one of the smaller tragedies in life.”
About that $10.25 ticket: It was a business expense. Otherwise I would have used a freebie. Here are some other ways to get them.
Maybe you read the article about the doctor with $555,000 of student loan debt. In addition to that horrific sum (which started out as $250k in 2003) were a few other scary numbers:
Gargantuan loans taken out with no clear idea of how they’ll be repaid. Sound familiar?
Actually, there’s a crucial difference between subprime mortgages and student loans: You can’t return your diploma to the school and walk away from college debt. In fact, such debt can’t even be discharged in a bankruptcy. With few exceptions, student loans stay with you until you pay them back.
I know that I’m getting older because I have begun to find value in bromides. That’s why I’ve decided to highlight one every so often, starting today. After all, Ben Franklin made a decent living at it – not that my site is comparable to Poor Richard’s Almanack, for a number of reasons:
Let me emphasize that an axiom is no substitute for independent thought. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, pious aphorisms are a way to appear profound when what you’re actually expressing is “Because I said so.”
Wish I had a piece of the hosiery industry in Anchorage, where you remove your footwear after you enter someone’s house. Knowing you’ll be unshod regularly means making sure your feet are decently covered.
Once when I was an Anchorage Daily News reporter I took off my shoes at an interviewee’s home and discovered a rent in one sock. It’s hard to look professional when your big toe has its eye to the peephole.
Obviously Alaska is not the only place where indoor shoe-wearing is frowned upon. People in other cultures live this way too – and so, increasingly, do U.S. residents, as a quick Internet search indicates. Sometimes it’s because they want the carpet to last longer. Sometimes it’s because they don’t want spike-heel scratches on the hardwood.
And sometimes it’s to keep you from tracking in poisons.
Christina at the Northern Cheapskate blog recently wrote about needing a new toaster cover. The old one doesn’t owe her a thing because it’s more than a decade old, a “well-intentioned gift” from her mother that initially left Christina embarrassed. It was an old person’s item. Women in their early 20s didn’t use toaster covers.
Eventually she appreciated the gift. Still, the idea of “needing” a new one made her laugh: “The toaster won’t feel ashamed if it sits on the counter in its natural state.”
It’s more than just a toaster cover, of course.
You don’t have to throw baseballs at weighted milk bottles to win this rather pensive ursus maritimus.