Crap or Not? American Automobile Association Membership

Got the renewal bill in the mail a few days ago.

Hmm.

Is AAA membership all fluff, or is it the greatest thing since slice bread?

Of the four years of membership, their service was utilized a few times. Once to jump start a car (couldn’t find the jumper cables), twice for towing buddies rides, another time to find a trustworthy auto repair shop, and a few times for those ‘free’ travel maps.

Then there’s those famous AAA discounts. Hotels, theme parks, restaurants, and retail stores. These were taken advantage of whenever possible. In fact, if you’re a frequent traveler, AAA discount will easily pay for itself within days.

AAA Membership price seems to vary by region. To the top right, you’ll see that for a Southern California basic membership, the price is $47 and an additional $24 for another adult membership. $71 for two people. Not too bad.

Still, in recent years their service have been utilized less and less—while their membership price has been slowly increasing. $71 per year isn’t a big deal, but ten years of that and it’ll be $710. That’s a lot of hot Cheetos.

Crap or not? You can vote on the top left of the blog.

Poll Result:

Related Post:

• Crap or Not #7 – Digital Cameras
• Crap or Not #6 – First & Business Class
• Crap or Not #5 – Gym Membership
• Crap or Not #4 – TMX Elmo
• Crap or Not #3 – Tempur-Pedic Mattresses
• Crap or Not #1 – Ionic Breeze Air Purifiers
• Is AAA Worth It? from Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

Who says 0% balance transfer doesn’t pay?

The above picture shows the interest earned through the past year on the ING Direct account, 98% of which are accumulated via 0% credit card balance transfers—and that’s not including other interest earned from Emigrant Direct and HSBC Direct.

Not too shabby.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to take advantage of these offers, check out the links below. There are also obvious risk involve when taking advantage of these offers, so make sure you figure out all the details before diving in.

Related Links

• Things to watch for in 0% Balance Transfers
• FICO Score Tracking During 0% Balance Transfers
• Free Money! …aka Best of 0% Balance Transfer Offers
• Making Money With 0% Balance Transfers

Check out the 57th Carnival of Personal Finance at Just Another Money Blog.

The Carnival of Marketing is also up at Kicking Over My Traces.

What a flippin’ hot day.

Personal Finance is not exactly an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and says “Boy, I’m going to talk about Individual Retirement Accounts today!”

Except for maybe Jeffrey of Personal Finance Advice. And uh, many others in the personal finance blogging community. But they’re exceptions (aka freaks). So you shouldn’t take them into consideration.

Keeping a budget, being smart with your spending, saving a good percentage of your income—to name a few, are all necessary components to a healthy personal finance—but they are hardly exciting conversation topics. You see, personal finance can be rather stale at times.

BUT, just because it’s boring doesn’t mean it’s not important. It’s so important that you should devote as much time to it as you would with sleeping, eating, or going to the bathroom. It’s so important that if you neglect it, you wouldn’t have a place to sleep, eat, or poo—which is a fate terribly worse than boredom.

Don’t let personal finance’s somewhat boring nature stop you from caring.

A recent online conversation:

Pete the Jerk: i need an external hd
Cap: again?
Pete the Jerk: for my cuz
Pete the Jerk: i really hate mail in rebates
Cap: yeah
Cap: they’re lies
Pete the Jerk: do i want an ugly one
Pete the Jerk: or a cool looking one
Pete the Jerk: 15 dollar diff
Cap: ugly one

It’s really simple. If the employees at your company aren’t also your customers, then you’re doing something wrong.

Here’s an often heard story: Your friend gets a job flipping burgers at a nation-wide fast food chain. Upon actually working behind the scene at said establishment, your friend proclaims that he’ll never, ever, eat at said fast food chain again.

Replace fast food chain (McDonalds) with consumer electronics retailer (Best Buy), and you’ll get the same story.

“I’ll never eat at McDonalds!”

“I’ll never get my computer serviced at Best Buy!”

When that happens, you sir, have a problem.

Yes, in some cases it would be inappropriate for your employees to be your customers.

Fine.

But let’s say they can be your customers. In fact, they are your customers. Everything’s peachy.

What happens though, if you take away the employee discounts? Will your Bank of America tellers really bank with you? Will your installers actually buy that GM vehicle? Will your service representative actually fly on American Airline? Will your AOL retention consultants actually have an AOL account?

If, even with all those benefits and discounts, your employees still don’t use your service or products—still aren’t your customers, then you really, really have a problem.

Maybe they see the actual workmanship that goes into the products. Maybe they know what type of service they’ll really get. Maybe they don’t believe in the product. Maybe they know for a fact, that it’s inferior to a competitor’s. Shrug, maybe they’re just fickle.

Probably not.

Alright, if you’re high enough up on the chain, you probably don’t have a friend that flips burgers, so you probably never hear the complaints. Still, there’s a problem and you need to address it. Your employees aren’t your customers and the solution is quite simple.

You ask them why.

“Why aren’t you our client?”

If they ask why in return, tell them it’s because you want to know. Once you get the reasons, it will probably be a good idea to do something about them.

The lower you go down in the chain with your questioning, the more important the answers are. Seriously.

P.S. Let the response be anonymous, it’ll work better.

It’s the ultimate personal finance question: paper statements or electronic statements?

I’ve been debating the question since last year, and like Jonathan of MyMoneyBlog, I’ve also been trying to gradually go from paper statements to electronic statements. But, in the end, I’ve decided to stick with paper statements. It’s just too easy to ignore emails, and it’s just too much of a hassle (for me) to manually backup these data myself.

There are always incentives and offers from companies to get you to switch to online statements, usually in the form of a credit to the account. Chase’s current incentive is a pretty good one:

In this method, Chase will be the one storing the electronic statements on their server. Sure, it’s not difficult to download and backup your statements yourself (to Gmail, CDs, etc.), but having easy access to 6 years of past statement is even better.

If everyone jumps on the 6 years of statement stored online bandwagon, I would be awfully tempted to try and go paperless again.

Related Post and Links

• Ditch the Monthly Paper Statements?
• Sticking to Paper Bills from MyMoneyBlog
• Don’t Get Electronic Credit Card Statements from Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

Or so I thought.

Two months ago I placed a 50% deposit on new wheels for the car: big, shinny, spinning wheels. Hah, just kidding. They’re actually 15×6.5, 4×100, +40 offset, and only about 11 pounds each. Somehow convinced myself that I needed these new rims.

Unfortunately (or luckily), I received a refund on the $200 deposit today. The rims have been out of production in Japan for some time now, and the new attempt to get the rims back into production fell through.

Other lightweight 15″ rims are around $400 each. Argh.