StopBuyingCrap.com

Stop Buying Crap #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 | #7 | #8 | #9 | #10 | #11 | #12

With the help of my friend Peter, I’m going to list some crap we can all stop buying.

Books that you won’t read. My friend Peter is a real book worm (and he loves to play with frogs). He got me into a series of silly fantasy books. (yup, we’re geeks) “Hey Cap! Let’s read them together and discuss about them later okay??” And Peter never read them. He’s too busy with school or some other crap. Wasted money? $34+

Movies that you won’t watch. My friend Peter is also a real DVD addict. He loves to buy movies. This is good for me, because I get to borrow them for free. Sometimes, he buys so many movies that he doesn’t even have time to watch them all. Again, he’s too busy with that silly school thing. He wants to become a doctor. *pff* Well Pete my boy, a doctor doesn’t have time to watch DVDs! Stop buying them! Wasted money? $200+

DVD-R/CD-R that you don’t use. Now my friend James thinks he’s smarter. He doesn’t buy DVDs or CDs. He gets his fix from DVD-R/CD-R. The thing about this is that he ends up with a bigger collection than Peter, which he doesn’t even have time to watch, play, listen to, or use. It should also be note that although CD-R Medias are dirt cheap now, the same can’t be said for DVD-R Medias. Here are some questions you should ask yourself. Do you honestly need a DVD collection of 500 movies? You save money by buying them in bundles, but do you really need to burn/copy all those things? Do you find yourself just looking for things to download so you can burn them? So yeah. Wasted money? $50+

Fast Food that’s bad for you. Okay, I’ve ate my share of $0.99 two tacos at Jack in the Box. Or $0.99 double cheeseburger at McDonalds. In fact, sometimes my dinner would be 6 tacos from Jack in the Box. My freshmen year in college consist of 70% fast food, 20% cereals, and 10% junk food. Besides being bad for your health, they really do add up in prices, even if you eat the value meal. Refer to my “Eating out and Thin Wallets” piece. Wasted money? $365+ (assuming $0.99 Two Tacos per day at Jack in the Box)

That’s all for this edition of Stop Buying Crap. Got some crap in mind that all of us should avoid buying, or at least buy in limited amount? Let me know!

I think a lot of us has heard of this. Basically there are market research companies that pays you for participating in their research and survey. They generally take about 2 to 3 hours, and pay you $100 for your time. Occasionally they also feed you too. Fairly good stuff, I heard.  Long ago, while browsing a car message board, I notice a market research offer of $100 for 2 hours of my time. My car make and model was included in the people they’re searching for. I thought about it long and hard, but the drive up to LA (I live in Orange County, CA) during rush hour was NOT worth it for me. (The total trip would have taken around 5 hours)

I received a letter in the mail a few days ago, with the same type of market research offer, from a company named Synovate, they seem reputable enough. *shrug*

The “Automotive Evaluation Study” required 2.5 hour of my time, and at first I thought the location would be in LA too, since the mail came from Encino, CA (part of LA County) One bonus of this is, they have a few dates and appointment hours to choose from, so I figured this may be a better offer. Plus, back in the days I wasn’t as into “free” money as I am today.

To my delight, after calling for an appointment and answering a series of questions to make sure I am qualified to participate, I found out that the location is at Long Beach Convention. (Only 24 minutes away, according to Mapquest) So it’ll take about 3.5 hours total for $100 bucks. About $28.57 an hour, not too bad for this type of “work.”

They told me over the phone that light refreshment will be available, I guess I shouldn’t expect free lunch too.

My appointment will be on May 1st, 2005 at around 12 PM. From the series of questions and the pre-survey that I have to fill out, it looks like I’ll be looking at some future SUV/light truck makes and models. Not really my cup of tea, but it should be “fun” in some sense. I’ll definitely share my experience with this after I come back, should be interesting to see what type of questions they ask, and what people are looking for these days in terms of automobile owners. Plus, I’ll find out if the $100 is worth my time or not.

Well I finally wrote my preview on Emigrant Direct.

Click here to read the brief review on Emigrant Direct.

A lot of the information are from a super long discussion thread at Fatwallet, which can be read here. It’s over 2,600 post long, and contains over 150 pages as of this moment.

I have been following Emigrant Direct closely, ever since it was such a pain for me to get my account setup with them. I also got a good gist of how they work, via a good post from Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog.com

At the end though, I’ll advise some cautions in getting an account with Emigrant Direct. By all means you should try it out and see how well they work for you, but please deposit a smaller initial deposit and see how it goes first before you transfer over a larger sum of amount.

If there’s any errors or misinformation in my review, please let me know. Also, if you have any experiences of your own with Emigrant Direct, feel free to leave some comments!

Update: I eventually got an account at Emigrant Direct, about 5 months later. You can see the updates here. A full review is coming soon, but so far it’s not really a favorable review.

I honestly couldn’t think of an original title. So there you go.

Finally finished the first two parts of the article on Credit Cards. Basically, this will hopefully be a good introduction on how credit card works, and things related to credit cards that all of us should know about.

Part One talks a bit about credit report/history, FICO scores, and some terms that are used when we talk about credit cards.

Part Two goes into detail over the two main different types of credit cards there are out there, secured and unsecured credit cards.

The upcoming parts of this article will go into more details in the world of credit cards. Eventually, depending on how well I can organize these subjects and topics, I’ll may add in 102, 103, and so on. Since there are more complicated subjects about credit cards, and a lot of nasty hidden surprises too.

As always, if you have any suggestions, comments, or if there’s an error, please let me know!

Woops, its been quite awhile (busy lately). I’m still working on that article on credit cards… I think I’ll split it into parts and post up part 1 first.

It’ll cover a bit on what credit is… a little bit on FICO scores… and a little bit on the actual subject of credit cards. On another note, I pulled my FICO score just today, its not too bad at all.

For more information on what FICO score is and how it relates to you, check out this review.

Its a bit funny but, appearantly online searches for anything related to filing your tax has gone up recently, according to Yahoo.

Search words for “tax forms” went up 77%, “e-file information” went up 45%, while anything on “IRS” went up 41%

The part that made me laugh is that searching for “extension” is up 1,589%

Guess not everyone’s not done with filing their taxes.

The 1040s wont fill themselves up, people.

Something funny I got from a friend in the email.

The 9 weirdest tax write-offs from MSN Money

Here’s an interesting one:

Then there was the client who approached Manhattan CPA Marc Albaum about a very personal tax matter. “He had made some money being a sperm donor and wanted to know if he could take a depletion allowance,” Albaum recalls. “I told him he really needed to be an oil well or something like that.”