Site Review – creditcardflyers.com
May 12th, 2008
You’ve been hearing stories about people taking advantage of credit card rewards and getting cash back or flying around the world for free and you want to join them. Chances are the moment you start looking around you’ll do exactly what I did: give up! There are so many different cards out there that trying to find one to fit your needs can be a challenge. An easy way to sift through all of this information is just what creditcardflyers.com helps you with.
I was approached to review this site and since I’m naturally hesitant to put my name behind a review unless I agree with it, I took a look at the site and I was impressed. This site is massive wealth of information about many of the rewards credit cards out there. Unfortunately to my chagrin they only seem to cover American based cards (too bad for the rest of us). The site broke down cards by reward types from Travel miles all the way to the World Series of Poker card. The best part is that every card has a review and detailed information about the offerings and an easy way to compare cards (not just one bank’s cards).
As I was browsing around the site not only did I find details about the credit cards and their rewards programs I also found a multitude of additional information. The credit card industry is littered with acronyms and terms that don’t make sense to a lot of people, creditcardflyers.com helps the consumer out by explaining some of these terms and really helps make sense of the jungle of cards out there. I was relieved to see this information because too often it’s put into the background and only available if you really search for it.
In conclusion I’m very glad I didn’t dismiss this request for a review, creditcardflyers.com has a lot of interesting and useful information on it. For me the only drawback is that I can’t use it to help me pick a rewards card because I’m a Canadian. If you are considering changing credit cards to take advantage of rewards this site might be a good starting point for your investigation.
Please note: this is a paid review but I was genuinely impressed with what was being offered.
Posted in Sites/Articles | No Comments
Happy Mothers Day!
May 11th, 2008
To all the mothers out there: we might not always say it but we appreciate everything that you have done for us and continue to do for us. My mother has been a great inspiration and a great sounding board for many of my crazy ideas (my wife gets many of those now). Thank you!
I am awestruck with the sheer selflessness and caring that mothers give as they go about taking care of their children. Every child should take this day and let their mother know how much they mean to them. Happy mothers day to every mother out there the world would be nothing without you.
Posted in News/Misc | No Comments
How to Save on your Gas Costs
May 9th, 2008
Since the price of crude oil and gasoline have been going up drastically the topic of saving on your gas costs has been common on many blogs. We love our cars and the bigger they come the better regardless of how much gas they guzzle. I wanted to jump into this general conversation with my tip to save on gas.
If the price of gas has gone up just don’t buy as much of it. Simply use less of it! I know the tip is very simplistic but I think it would be ideally exemplified with an analogy. We all wear clothes that get dirty which we wash with washing machines (well most of us do) and this activity requires a type of fuel of sorts (detergent). I think it’s is a perfect analogy for my saving tip.
We have grown accustomed to using our washing machines just like our cars and we’ve gotten to essentially need them. We need to have clean clothes. Just like with the car there are other alternatives to get our clothes clean that are far less expensive than owning a washer and dryer that we don’t use for the sake of convenience.
Now assume that all of the detergent makers decided to raise the price of detergent by 3 or 4 times what we pay now. So rather than paying say $7.50 for a pack of detergent the price was suddenly $30. We would instantly notice but we might still pay. For the sake of argument let’s say this went up 40 times (my logic is we drive and use our cars at least 10 times more than our washing machines). The price of that same pack of detergent would now be $300. How many of us would still continue to buy the premium brands? And just to make this analogy completely outrageous let’s just say that the washing machine was costing you $350 per month in financing costs and you were required to have insurance on your dryer of another $150 per month. Doing laundry would all of a sudden cost us $800 per month.
At this point how many of us out there would consider the alternatives? Probably all of us. We have alternatives when it comes to cars as well. We can drive less and not buy fuel or gas guzzling cars. We are in a situation where we are reliant on an incredibly expensive means of transportation when alternatives exist. I know this is a bit more of a challenge for some people and in some circumstances but walking, biking, transit and car pooling would probably be accessible to most people in some way.
The way to save on gas is to not buy it; we need to either improve the mode of transportation or find an alternative means. Cars have been around for about a 100 years and in that time we’ve come to rely on them so much that people are convinced they cannot live without them. I like most bloggers have a car that I drive to work for convenience, thankfully it’s pretty close and I’m saving time by driving which is my logic for continuing this. But if the price of gas were to go up another say 2 times I would start taking transit. I know there are alternatives and I would use them.
The question I’ll leave you with is at what point would you stop buying gas? What would the price need to hit before you couldn’t justify the cost?
Posted in Saving Ideas, Commentary | 1 Comment
Don’t Be Afraid of your Financial Situation
May 8th, 2008
One of the most common reactions to something we don’t understand is fear. It drives us into many of the stupid decisions we make and thoughtless things we say. I know I don’t speak for every person but too often when we don’t understand something and rather than trying to find information we simply react with fear. What does this have to do with personal finance? Everything! As a society we are uneducated in the ways of personal finance, even at the most basic level, and we react spastically when something comes up.
Don’t be afraid of your financial situation. Understand it.
Before you do any more damage that might take years to fix, stop and take a look around you. If your financial situation is healthy and you’re living well below your means then congratulations, you’re in the minority. But if you’re in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, and wondering how you’re going to pay your bills then take a good look. Are you simply reacting to what’s happening around you or do you really know what’s going on?
You’ll probably have to ask yourself a few questions to get a better understanding of where you stand such as:
- Am I spending too much money? Why?
- Do I know where my money goes?
- Do I buy things because I don’t want to admit I can’t afford it?
- Do I understand how my credit cards and debt work?
- And the list goes on and on.
When I first left university and started working I was making good money which I in turn was spending at an alarming rate. When I ran out of money I simply turned to my credit cards to cover the difference. At first this wasn’t a problem because the credit cards had low limits. But that changed very quickly and before I knew it I was heavily in debt. I was living from paycheck to paycheck and afraid of my finances and how I spend my money.
If at that time I had stopped and understood more I would be in a far better situation today. Not understanding and being afraid of your financial situation can mean that you’ll continue to spend money when you shouldn’t (or don’t have it) to keep appearances up because you don’t want to admit being in debt.
Educate yourself! Understand the consequences of your actions and take some responsibility for them. That doesn’t mean you need to stop all of the fun things in your life that cost you money but you might want to consciously cut back to get a grip of your financial situation rather than reacting because you’re afraid of your financial situation.
Posted in Financial Situation | 4 Comments
Online Financial Tools
May 7th, 2008
The thought of calculating the amortization on a mortgage is enough to give me a headache and prevent me from even attempting it. I know that there are sites and tools out there that can help by doing a lot of these financial calculations and I have used them in the past. Yesterday I ran across a post over at Money Ning about a great online Mortgage and Loan Calculator; the online calculator itself is very well thought out and is a handy visually appealing tool.
When I first looked online for financial tools many years ago they were hard to use and clunky but things have come a long way since then. The tools still come in complex and difficult to use versions but there are more and more well built easy to use tools. The best part is that most of the tools are free (like Mint.com). We no longer have the excuse that we don’t know what our financial situation is or whether we can afford a loan or a mortgage
Have any of you had success with any online tools? Definitely pass them along; I’m thinking of creating a section of this site to list all of these types of tools.
Posted in Sites/Articles | 3 Comments
We Sold our Condo
May 6th, 2008
Over the past couple weeks things on my end have been very crazy and hectic; not only was there a great deal of work that I had to do but I’m also slowly plugging away on a couple projects that I wanted to complete. The projects are still moving forward but everything unessential was effectively placed on hold while we bought a new house and sold our condo.
The great news is we sold our condo last night! All of the cleaning and preparation to ensure that the unit was in prime selling condition paid off. We didn’t get quite our asking price but what we got was better: we got an offer without any conditions! Now its up to the lawyers and banks to get all of the details in place. But all of the major hurdles have been completed.
This has been a very new experience for me in that I have never purchased or sold a house successfully. It was a stressful event since we were buying and selling what will be our home. This wasn’t an investment or a recreational property. We needed to take everything into account including all of the repairs and upgrades that will be going into our new home.
I’m glad that this process is effectively over and we can move onto the packing and preparing for the move. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done but we don’t need to do this on a crunched time line. Our lives can go back to a more normal pace and we can go back to some of our regular routines. This also means that I’ll have more time to put into this blog and a couple other projects that I have going!
Posted in Real-Estate | 2 Comments
