Routine Order

Hosterio offers reseller hosting in India at very competitive rates. For example, the smallest package is only just $11.08 per year. You get complete cPanel access and a lot more. The smallest hosting account is good for a blog, since space is limited to 20MB. My blog, for example, uses not more than 4 MB of disk space, so far. Hosterio also offers website design services, which covers the entire spectrum of design services. I don’t know what the rates are, but if the hosting rates are anything to go by, they must be affordable for small businesses and individuals too.

If you have more than one domain - it is not unusual for one person to have more than one blog, each dealing with a separate topic, then you might want to check out Hosterio’s multi domain hosting offers. For $100 a year, you can have up to 7 domains hosted on the same account. for $37.77 more per year, you can get the privilege of hosting unlimited domains/sites on the same account. These are powered by cPanel too, which makes managing the sites a breeze. If most of your visitors are from India, or you expect that to be the case, then a server in India would be much better than a server in Europe or the United States. This will provide you lower latencies and delays. Until recently, however, I had been unable to find a host who offers reasonable rates for hosting in India.

We all know we can buy medicines online, since that is why we get solicitations via mail to buy them online for better sexual/mental/physical performance, but I was kind of late in catching on the fact that you can by pet meds online too! At least the pet meds website is a lot more interesting than the online pharmacies. Check out this list of Pet top 10s - including the top 10 distances covered by cats looking to return home after getting lost. How they get lost at such great distances is a mystery, but the stories are interesting.

With regards to pet health, there’s a list of inherited health disorders for dogs by breed! Amazing stuff. There’s a similar list of inherited health disorders in cats. When it comes to pet medications, the site has a listing of which online pet pharmacy offers the various meds at the lowest rates. Nice site will easily keep you busy for an hour if you have a pet, and like knowing more about your breed.

Dave Ramsey of the Lampo group is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. He says he was worth a quarter of a million when he was 26, then lost it all in a couple of years due to bad financial decisions and due to paying too much “stupid” tax. He has since got back on his feet and his radio show features nuggets of wisdom for us - those without an MBA in Finance. You can see his free videos at YouTube and read of him from time to time on consumer-oriented blogs. Needless to say, his radio show is very interesting, and he has a cheerful, optimistic voice. The other day, on his show, he was answering a question about long term care insurance agent issues.

Dave Ramsey suggests long term care insurance for people who expect to live beyond the age of 65, and expect to need long term care - which can turn very expensive very fast. Specifically, Dave suggested that if rates where under $1,200 it would be a good investment. Now to find something good, you will need to go shopping for quotes for long term care insurance policies. The site I mentioned above seems to enable just that, and hey, they know of Dave Ramsey I was surprised to find that article I linked to when I searched for Dave’s advice.

Ben Bernanke took out his wallet and lowered the key interest rate by a full half point. When the Fed lowers prime rate, market become uppity. Think of it as everyone getting their loans cheaper from the government. Banks can now borrow money from the Federal Reserve at 4.75% interest. This discount will make its way through all the financial markets. Big firms, and investors in the stock market and other financial indices will borrow money, expecting their investments to appreciate in value, thereby generating profits. The whole idea behind the Fed controlling interest rates has been that the unemployment has to be kept low, as also the inflation. For the first time in many years, the US market was showing a downward trend in employment rates; also, the sub-prime mortgage crisis has meant that borrowers have had to live in a very cautious market.

If less money is available on the market, economic growth will stumble. These are the reasons why Ben Bernanke pushed for lowering the interest rate. Ben is quite accomplished, with his being an expert in the study of the Great Depression. In fact, two rates have been lowered, the Federal Funds Rate and the Discount Rate. The former is the rate at which banks lend each other money. With a lowering of the fed rate, low rate mortgages are possible, and so this would be a good time to try and refinance your mortgage. A direct result of the fed lowering the rates should be a decrease in the Prime Lending Rates of various banks. Of course, they need not be the same across all banks, but overall, there should be a decrease in the rates of loans offered by lenders. If the rate falls too low, however, you will soon have “too much money chasing too few goods”, and everyone will realize they can charge more for their products and services - leading to inflation. So that’s why a half-percent fall in the interest rate is significant. Everyone was expecting the cut to be a quarter-percent. Let’s hope Ben got it just right, and that this cut should get the markets on track, and everyone employed

If you are a small business owner in a crunch situation, then your options with regard to raising short term funds need not be limited to Unsecured (or secured) business loans. A Business Cash Advance can let you get back on track much sooner with much less hassle. If the terms confuse you, it ain’t your fault. What essentially defines a business cash advance is that the loan is against your future credit card invoices(income). So if you accept credit cards at your business and generate over $1000 per month via credit card charges to your customers, you can qualify for a business cash advance.

You can read more about how this compares to unsecured business loans. The big differences are that business cash advances are not available for start-up firms, and that the cash advance option is available with variable pay-back rates - depending on how much credit-card-sales you generate each month - so you can pay these back according to how well your business picks up down the line. Business cash advances are great for businesses with lower credit scores (below 650). Bad Credit Business Loans might not solve your problem in such situations, since if you need money to grow, there might be other factors in the past that adversely affect your borrowing power.

Check out the business cash advance FAQs for more info and a toll-free line you can call to have your questions answered. All these non-traditional ways to raise money are fascinating to me - some like Business Cash Advances and reverse mortgages can be made to work if you play your cards right, but others, like debt-consolidation loans can dig your hole for you.

In researching for my upcoming trip to Europe, I have had a tough time finding good, pointed information about what to do in the major cities. I found some useful information about hotels in Paris at cityvacations.com. Looks like accomodations in the Rive Gauche area are more affordable for tourists like me. Rive Doite is the other extreme, and perhaps, when I am old and (hopefully) filthy rich, I’ll get to look for the better options there.

If you visit Barcelona, cityguides has a little useful information. The pages containing information about cities are organized by function - here’s an example shopping in Atlanta page. Since I have been shopping in Atlanta before, i can see that the page doesn’t yet list all the options. The pages are not all complete, and the site advices visitors that there are more blogs, forums and reviews coming soon. It can’t come soon enough. Posting on travel forums and waiting for responses gets old too fast, and the information you find on website might not be the whole deal. So forums, articles, blogs and reviews are all essential in one single website to minimize my effort.

Domdat is a website that provides powerful tools to search for expiring and expired domains. I just signed up for the service that costs $25 per month to take it on a test ride. It came highly recommended by a friend who finally found a domain name he liked for his flower delivery service. What’s really cool is that the domain he bought had been promoted by the previous owner, and so he will benefit from all those search results that will lead folks to his site, for free.

Expiring domains are much better in many ways. Since the domain hasn’t expired yet, but certainly will, you can bid and buy the domain as it expires and serve your website with that domain name. This will give you the page rank, the search result traffic, and even some traffic from users of the old website.

The expired and expiring domain names search tool at domdat is very powerful - As seen in the pic above, you can search by minimum Pagerank, number of links in the search engines, whether or not the website is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories and so forth. This can save you money since unlike DMOZ, you need to pay Yahoo upto $200 to be included in their directory - so if someone has already done the grunt work with a domain, you save a bunch of money. You can set up alerts (upto 5) that will send you an email as soon as any of the domain name searches that you define return positive results.

Domain name prospecting is hot right now. A lot of folks buy expired domains and just sit around waiting for their value to appreciate. Already, it is impossible to find websites that have three characters in the domain name, and domain names that are common words. Domdat is one of the tools these guys use, and if you want a leg-up in your search for a good domain name, it is a vital tool for you.

Extreme Cars is a fascinating website with interesting information scattered all over. The site has details of all cars from Ariels to Paganis. I did not know previously that the Italians have been at designing cars since way back in the 1400s when an Italian designed a wind-propelled car. I also learnt the distinction between sports car, muscle cars and super cars. A muscle car is a mid-sized car with large, powerful V8 engines and special trim designed to maximize torque. The golden ago of these cars in the US was the period from 1962-1973. They are not sports cars, since sports cars are usually smaller, two-seater automobiles with a higher than usual weight-to-power ratio.
No list of extreme cars will be complete without the behemoth Hummer, which traces its lineage to the HumVees used by the the US Military worldwide.


I didn’t know they were made in South Africa as well! The new Hummer H3 is cheaper than the rest, and a little bit smaller. The H3 has an amazing 37.5 degree approach angle and cover almost all terrains with the greatest of ease. It is ironic that in the US, most H3s are bought by families with school children - for its space and safety features, or, as I suspect, for the image of being safer in a Hummer. They are a lot cheaper at around $29,995 for a new base H3, and this has helped a lot with customer adoption, too.

Hummers aside, I spent a cool half hour at x3mcars.com going through the list of mythical, almost unreal, vehicles.

If you want to learn what constitutes life as a dentist, doctor, or any one of the other careers, check out the descriptions of careers. Each description at the website gives you the following information:

1. Overview of the job
2. What you will be doing in a particular work
3. What kind of personality is suitable for the job
4. Which type of companies offer jobs
5. Whether you will be able to open your own business?

For example, you learn from the dentist career description that the skills required, and therefore kind of dentists are as follows:
Diagnostic, Preventative, Surgical, Corrective and Managerial. It leaves out my favorite kind of dentist - cosmetic, but I suppose that comes under “Corrective”. After the dentist, the job description of the greatest interest to the most should be the pharmacist. Anything related to medicine is hot with regards to income-generation prospects, and since everyone can’t work as hard as required to become a doctor, becoming a dentist or a pharmacist may be just the thing for many.

I wish I was a dentist or a pharmacist. Then again, looks like I wished I wasn’t one when I was younger, because I am neither now.

For those with terrible credit having trouble paying off their debts, there are a variety of credit management programs to choose from. I decided to try out how these programs work, and wanted to put some real numbers to the test. So I was looking for a site that does not require too much personal information to play around with. This debt management program that allows users to evaluate their options seemed perfect, so I took the dive. The Consumer Alliance Processing Corporation Debt Management program seems to be good - it has a BBB affiliation, and seems to be honest.

They have a free debt management quote tool, which is we are most interested in. I filled out the form and the end results looks like the following:


I had plugged in some numbers that I thought to be typical for someone with 30% APR credit cards, choosing a sum below $10,000 for the total debt. I entered a total of 4 cards, with APRs from 20% to 30%, with the outstanding balance on the higher APR cards being about 75% of the total outstanding debt. The free quote tools gives estimates for how much money can be saved. It shows a monthly fee of $35 for the debt management program, but even after this, the total monthly payments are reduced by almost a hundred dollars. The tool also shows that the person can save a total of $18,476 (!!!) by enrolling in the debt management program. I expect this figure is calculated by comparing the total payments made over the lifetime of the debt if one were to pay only the minimum outstanding, to the amounts paid using the debt management program. What’s also interesting is that the monthly APRs are almost halved. If one were to continue making the same payments as before starting on the debt management program, then I suspect the debts will be paid off much sooner.

Debt management programs are not for everyone - of course, if you earn $1000 a month and your financial expenditure is $1200, you won’t find someone to manage your debt. These programs are not for those with less than $3000 in debt, neither are they for those with low APRs on their cards. One of the conditions of the program is that the credit accounts will be cancelled as they are paid off. Once you pay off all the debt, I bet your credit score will improve drastically - enough to get you another card, if you want to play the game all over again!

Thoughts is a place you can create a free blog. There are lots and lots of free blog providers and this is one of them. I got there by typing in the url, I was just curious to find out what’s at the URL thoughts.com - it sounds like the perfect URL for a blog, or, rather, a journal. Now the difference between a blog and a journal, in my opinion, is that a “weblog” or “blog” is a collection of articles and links to sites, and a few opinions from the writer. A journal, on the other hand, is a more personal thing, written for the benefit of the writer more than anyone else.

Most of the free blogs on thoughts come under the latter category, with most of the posts being introspective and very personal. I wonder if the folks blogging there got there the same way I did, and decided to start writing there that way. There’s also a thoughts forum that seems quite young. Mostly bloggers asking about thoughts, and discussing general stuff. The thoughts.com domain name must be worth a lot, and I hope the thoughts free blog service ramps up to realize the full potential of the domain name.

For times when the romance has gone out of your life, it is time to think in cliches. Or, better still, not think at all, and spark off the romance once again, by just doing romantic things. After a few years of knowing that someone special, doing anything romantic seems to be something that is contrived. You might think, “Oh, but that is so cliched - I have done that before,” and so on. So stop thinking, and pick up a list of romantic ideas and start ticking things off at regular periods.

Honestly, how long has it been since you wrote (or read) a love letter? Get started with some of these free love letters. Then improvize to come up with your own ideas. Since ideas are free, here’s one - call up your S.O. at the office and leave a message. It is better if a person takes down the message, as opposed to an answering machine. Make it go something like… “this is a message for my only true love,… yes, , .” Romance, like everything else in life, needs gentle care. The more romantic you get, the more romance you will receive, too. Trust me on that. I just survived to tell the tale of how a post-it note on the bathroom mirror got me an absolutely fabulous Saturday in exchange.

Lowcostpahealthinsurance.com is a site that offers affordable Pennsylvania health insurance. I was looking up plans for my employer when I came across the site. The offer coverage for Pittsburgh health insurance plans including Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Aetna.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that these don’t work in Philly. There are some very useful tips for Philadelphia health insurance needs too. Though the information on the site is more attuned towards companies looking for group health insurance plans, individuals can get a quote from multiple providers too. Here’s 5 steps to save money on health insurance plans when you are shopping for group plans. There’s always a way to say on even unavoidable costs, if you know where to look. Your savings don’t have to come at too much of an additional cost to the employees, both can save:

Consider a premium conversion plan. With this plan, any contributions towards qualified health benefits made by employees through their employer are tax advantaged. Employees save on federal and state income taxes. Because they are reporting less income, their social security contributions are also reduced. As an employer, you would also save 7.65% on the employee income which no longer has to be reported to the IRS. Because the employee pays less social security tax, you have less to match.

The service also has a toll free number, 1-888-831-7886, for any questions one may have. Check it out if you are shopping for health insurance rates in PA.

GIC Argentina’s program where you can learn Spanish in Argentina sure looks tempting. The deal is - you spend some time in Argentina, either teaching English, or participating in an outreach program, in one of the many volunteer programs in Argentina.


So you volunteer in Argentina, and in exchange, you can learn Spanish, in situ. The program is not entirely limited to Argentina, in fact, you can volunteer in South America, including in Misiones and Iguazu National parks. It sounds like the perfect thing to do between academic programs, or after college. You have to be at least 18 years old to participate in the program. The minimum time commitment required is 2 weeks, though, of course, a longer period of time might be more beneficial. The best of both worlds is if you can make it in winter. You can get away from the cold and immerse yourself in Latin American culture, and learn Spanish the natural way. I wish I had looked up something like this and taken a year off after college.

Juicy Couture is a hip line of contemporary casual clothing from California. You’ve probably already seen it on some pop and hip-hop stars, and found yourself wondering, “Wonder what brand it is.” It’s Juicy Couture, with taglines like , “The joy only bling can bring!”.


The line is best known for the terry cloth and velour track suits and is sold almost exclusively at up-scale stores, such as Neiman-Marcus. However, you can always find Juicy Couture deals if you know where to look for them. Here’s some of the Juicy Couture Velours I was talking about. If success is here, can the replicas be far behind. Not so! Here’s a bunch of Juicy Couture replicas for those of you trying to same some greenbacks. There’s nothing for men from Juicy Couture, but there is Juicy Baby, for babies, of course. I can almost see some marketing professional making the connection, “We sell to women, and women shop for babies, so…”

Since I wrote about the wedding magician, I have been browsing the web for small magic tricks that I can manage to pull off. In addition to the videos on YouTube, I came across Magic Trance - a site with a lot of “magic”. If you sign up for their mailing list, you get some good magic trick ebooks. In fact, one of the videos on youtube is how I got to the Magic Trance website. You can catch a video with some simple magic tricks for beginners on the site. Check out the magic tricks page for more videos and tricks.

There is a link to a “web page that can read your mind”. I think I have that one figured out. Try and see if you can figure it out for yourself. There’s another coin trick which was one the first I learnt, way back when I was in middle school - the disappearing coin act. It goes as follows: you show two coins, one on each palm face-up. You slam your palms down onto the table, and mysteriously both coins show up under your left palm. Learn how to do it.

Reverse Mortgages are mortgages in reverse. A financial institution will pay you money against your equity on a house or property owned by you. In a mortgage, as time goes by, your equity in a house goes up and the loan amount goes down. In a reverse mortgage, your equity decreases with time, and your loan (or debt) increases. So you buy a house, pay off the mortgage, and then slowly sell your house. Who’d do that? How about people nearing retirement, who want a regular inflow of cash? Yes, the older you are, the more valuable your house is, the more money you get every month out of a reverse mortgage. More details below:

Reverse Mortgage Information is an excellent site for you to bring yourself up to date with the terms involved and all the associated facts. Their reverse mortgage FAQ is pretty extensive and should answer most all questions related to reverse mortgages. You can also find an extensive state-by-state listing of reverse mortgage lenders in case you decide to opt for one. In case you can’t make up your mind whether you should try a reverse mortgage, try the retirement calculator - it has 11 input variables, varying from expected percentage decrease in spending, to expected inflation, to expected social security benefit. Once you think you know the facts about reverse mortgages, take the reverse mortgage quiz to make sure you got it right. All in all, the site is a prime destination for reverse mortgage information and leads.

Despite the recent downturn in the lending market due to the low-rate mortgage hassle, business is still on at many mortgage lenders. The key to finding low rate mortgages is to have a good credit score. If your credit score is great, then you probably will get the same low rates from a multitude of players. But what if your credit is not so good? Here’s where you get some help.
Try to save up a little before hand, so you have more of a percentage of the price of the house to put down as initial payment. Then try to get as many mortgage quotes as possible within a week. Getting multiple quotes within a week wouldn’t adversely affect your credit score, as all those lookups by prospective lenders will just show up as one credit application.

To make this process easier, you might want to use a mortgage rate comparison website. These sites are not lenders themselves, but they scour the market for lenders and give you a variety of quotes from firms big and small, national and local. Since it is free, think of it as a free secretary who looks up all the national and local firms that lend money to home buyers, and requests quotes from all of them. Once you have the quotes, you might be in a better position to decide whether to get the loan or not. If you decide not to, remember to wait at least 6 months (more, preferably) before trying for a loan again. In the interlude, try saving some hard cash - set yourself a goal and attain it - if nothing else, it will improve your own financial self-confidence.

Like I said earlier, a plan is in the making for a trip to Europe. I am planning to visit France while I am at it. In addition to the site I mentioned in the earlier post, I found a good listing of France car hire options at francethisway.com. In addition to that, francethisway.com also has listings for Gites. What’s a Gite, you ask? Here’s an appetizer:


Simple put, a gite is a house that you can rent for an extended period. Some call them vacation property. Some of the gites in France look really inviting. I wish I could stay there for a month, instead of the week or two that I plan on spending in France. Make that a week or two of driving. I wonder why we don’t have the equivalent of Gites here in the US. If they’re here, they’re really hard to find. Remember that movie with Drew Barrymore and that girl from the Titanic where they swap homes for the holiday season? I forget the name, and I really have to finish writing this soon. Something like that in real life would be awesome.

Here’s a site promising to deliver Mortgage Rate Calculators. It looks like it is a pretty new site, and very much in the works, but the idea is neat - have a set of calculators for things like mortgage rates, amortization payments and the kind. For those not in the know, amortization is the concept that lends to the fact that more of the initial money payments you make towards your mortgage counts towards the interest on the loan. This means that you’re not so much paying off the loan, as paying off the compounded interest. The amortization schedule defines the proportion between the amounts paid towards interest and the principal loan amount respectively.

After the recent sub-prime mortgage debacle, if one thing is clear, it is that gullible investors make for good prey for the sharks on wall street, and the river runs much deeper than one would have thought. Knowing your calculation and the terms involved in mortgages could just save you from ruin and bankruptcy. I hope MortgageCalculators.org keeps growing and provides what the website’s name promises. It will be really successful, of that I am sure.