Routine Order

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s no comparison of the rates for gas cards in the UK, but otherwise, UK Financial Options is an excellent resource to compare credit card rates. Surely, they must have Gas cards in the UK. Or are they “petrol” cards? I could find neither at UK Financial options, but I did find a good table comparing credit cards. The credit card comparison page lists the top 5 cards for the various categories, such as the best cards for balance transfer, the best cards for those with bad credit, etc.

The site also has a list of pages, each dealing with a particular kind of credit card. Here’s the page comparing the football credit cards, for example. Football as in the game played almost entirely using one’s feet, as opposed to the game where the foot-long ball is thrown around.

I know, Christmas still seems far away, and that is precisely the reason why you should start shopping now. Starting now will give you the time to hunt for the best deals, and wait for the right price - before the whole world crowds the mall. The most difficult part of Christmas shopping is, of course, deciding what to buy. If you’re short in this department, check out these Christmas gift ideas. The true measure of a list of ideas is ideas for Christmas gifts for boyfriends and males. It is easy enough to pick gifts for girls, but girls must find it difficult to pick gifts for boys. The gifts I get from women are usually “nice” but I’d love something more practical. The more impractical a gift is, the more women seem to appreciate it But I guess it is just different for us.

Shopping for Christmas gifts in September reminds me of the December Effect in stock markets. Thing is, a few people caught on that buying shares in Decembers and selling them in January or February can be profitable since stock prices go up a little at the beginning of a new year. So not long after, some started buying stocks in November, since they expected the December Effect buying to increase prices. That then meant that some started buying stocks in October, and so on, till the December Effect all but vanished! But even if everyone starts thinking like me, there will still be the advantage that I have more time to decide what to buy and to wait for the right prices.

Ever wondered how, or who makes the digital signs that seem to be everywhere these days?

Image from user wfryer (Wesley Fryer) on flickr

Digital signage is popular for a reason - they are highly effective in getting across to the casual consumer. That’s why you see them everywhere from the checkout counters at grocery stores to subway trains. Helius is an example of a company that offers digital signage, among other things. I think that in a few years from now, all the billboards will become digital signage of one kind or the other. They are more intrusive in a way - it is hard to ignore a moving image, or a sign that keeps changing. Some of these by the highway might even be dangerous, depending on what is shown on them, but I, for one, welcome our digital overlords. They beat looking at the covers of the B magazines at the checkout counter.

The technology behind all this is incredibly well-done. Helius’ IP video solutions are pretty neat, for example. The following figure taken from their site shows how video content from multiple sources can be transmitted via multiple channels to many things, including digital signs. If you are in marketing, then this pretty accurately describes the immediate future. Or is it the present?

Certificates of Deposit are a fixed-term investment option offered by banks, credit unions and other financial institutions. So basically, in a CD, you put in some money, and after a fixed period you get your money back with interest. You can’t take out the money you put in until it matures. The lack of liquidity is offset by the fact that the deposit is insured and the returns are guaranteed, unlike, saying, money market accounts or stock market shares. Curiously enough, these days, you don’t really get a paper “certificate” for your deposit

The general rules for CD interest rates are that the higher the amount, or the longer the period of time, the higher the interest rate. Also, generally, smaller institutions, like your local credit unions, often offer higher CD rates. In shopping for the top CD rates available, I did a google search for top CD rates. Among the results was a site promising the highest CD rates. This was the 8th search result, and the URL was http://www.topcdrates.org. Clicking on the link took me to the site, in a weird way. Strange, try it out, and that site does have some interesting information about CDs, among other things.

If you are investing in CDs, remember that it is not enough to find the biggest, or best bank. Since CDs are insured anyways, you might do better by seeking out smaller banks. Also, if you can beat the machine by finding a good rate for a shorter period of time, then that’s all the better.

My landlady is a real estate broker with a local firm. When she gave me her business card, the first thought I had was, “Wow, they do them with a photo in the foreground and the background?” Her card managed to pull it off without looking too gaudy, and I have been searching for cheap ways to get the cards printed in full color, with color photos or pictures on them. Black and white text doesn’t quite leave an impression. I found this business card website which offers similar cards. They offer 1000 cards at $125, which is 12.5 cents a card - not too expensive. The cards look pretty snappy too, here’s an example from their site:


Not so surprisingly, real estate business cards deserve their own section on the site. What is it with real estate brokers always having the best business cards? I understand that they are in the selling business and the margins are large, but the same can be said about a lot of other careers, like selling cars. The last time I got a card from the salesman at the Ford dealership, I did not want to put it in my wallet. I still have my landlady’s card. I guess a year or so from now, the car salespersons will have the same kind of card the real estate folks have, and the real estate folks would have moved to the next thing. I wonder what that next thing could be, though, I mean, where do you go from having multiple color photos prints on your card, in a glossy or matte finish!

Continuing the results of my research on credit cards here. So I got turned down for the AmEx Business Card too. I thought I should be saving some money at the gas pump. BP had an ad at the pump promising some discounts for the first few months I use their card, and I made a mental note to check if there are other cards with better deals. I wanted to save the trouble of getting the BP card, using it till I get some benefits, and then canceling it to get a new card, and so on, ad infinitum.

Best Gas Credit Cards is a site dedicated to only gas credit cards. They have a cool table to compare gas credit cards. Of all the cards, the Wawa Visa Card looks really good. The APR is kinda high, but the rebates are the highest at 10% for purchases at Wawa, and rebates for purchases elsewhere too. The Chase BP card looks good too, but like I said before the rebates are top-heavy, so as time goes by, I might forget to cancel the card, and get less rebates. The Discover Gas Rebate card is good, too bad Discover doesn’t get accepted everywhere, like VISA or MasterCards.

In the US it is relatively easier to find great deals on car rentals when you are planning your travel. In planning for a Europe trip, I found that it is not so easy to find a website that gives you all the deals up front for different countries. Of course there are the big-ticket sites but how do I know they are specialists in Europe? Well, finally I found a car rental site, though the European’s seem to prefer calling it “Car Hire” instead

I expect to need a car for use in the UK, France and Spain, and it is kind of neat that Argus has seperate pages for car hire UK, car hire France and car hire Spain. I sort of wish there was a way I could hire a car in France and return it in Barcelona, Spain. Maybe I should give Argus Car Hire a call and find out if that is possible. They do have a couple of numbers in the US, so its easy enough. The company says it’s been around since 1996 - they must surely have figured out a way to do what I want

One of the biggest factors affecting how visible a website is on the web is its pagerank. Google’s method of calculating pagerank has led to a flourishing economy around one-way link building. Whatever the faults in the technique used by Google to determine the best search results, you have to build links pointing to you website to be successful in web-based business. Pagerank and search engine results don’t matter so much for personal blogs such as this one, but they are critical to business. Ironically, it is easier for this blog to attract incoming links than, say, a business. Because linking to my blog is a person-to-person or blogger-to-blogger thing. Linking to an obscure business is not usual.

This has led to the practice of business (including the biggest and best) to supplement offline advertising with online advertising in the form of link, and banner ads. When it comes to building one-way links, there are several ways a small business can go wrong. Here’s some tips to get one way link building right:

1. Never buy links from services like ReviewMe or PayPerPost - these have a 50% overhead, so the good bloggers won’t use them, and surfers will immediately detect that it is a low-quality paid post
2. Directly approach bloggers to purchase links - either directly email them, or ask in forums
3. Don’t waste your time - set a time-value for your money, and use a professional one way backlink building service - these guys will do things right, and you are just paying them for the time and effort it takes
4. Subscribe and read blogs that deal with one way link building methods and stay up-to-date
5. Never, ever buy a whole lotta links just because they are cheap - such cheap “blog networks” forward very little of the little pagerank they have, and will sooner or later be penalized which may ripple forward to your site.

Credit Card Flyers is an awesome way to compare credit card offers. The Quick Credit Card Compare tool lists all the cards you’d like to compare, and you can keep removing cards till you find one that suits you.

I was looking for good business credit cards to replace my current card, which insists on giving me free credit scam protection. I have already called them thrice and asked that I be removed, but month after month I keep getting billed some extra or the other for one “essential” useless feature after the other. So I am gonna get that out of my wallet, and get another. I so wish I could get my hands on the AmEx Platinum Business Card. They have a 20+ day grace period for payments, and 0% APR for the first year. I doubt if I will get one - I applied and was told that I would be informed of the application status later, via snail-mail. This usually means that my credit rating didn’t quite make the cut, but we’ll see. Let’s hope for the best

What’s the perfect way to spend a weekend? The answer might be “save some money”, or “make some money”, or “no, you dollarhead, money is not everything, dedicate some time to a hobby”. I found the perfect solution for all three groups of folks. Make jewelry over the next weekend.

The jewelry blog has very cool tips on how to make jewelry all by yourselves. The post has a very informative video that shows you how to create simple beaded earrings, wire wrap jewelry as well as heart jewelry. If you decide this is your thing, there is a lot more detail on the page that describes how to make your own jewelry at jewelrymall.com. It ends with a link to an article on how to sell the jewelry you just made. That’s right - that is how you “make some money”. Who knows how many of the item you buy on ebay are actually just made at home anyway?

For beaded jewelry, there is another detailed post on the blog that describes the calculations to find out how many beads you need, as well as bead handling tips. Impressive attention to detail. Though the blog uses the boring default wordpress theme, the content is good. Its almost enough to make me want to buy the tools of the trade and get started on making jewelry.

I am kind of toying with the idea of driving visitors to Clickbank using affiliate links. Fear not, it is not on this website, but on another one. Clickbank is probably the largest internet retailer of digital products - mostly ebooks, guides, scripts, tools and even some merchandise. The most difficult part of becoming a clickbank affiliate is finding the right products that talk to your visitors and setting up the links to those product pages. In clickbank terminology, these links are called “hoplinks”. That’s what put me off so far - the process of creating those links on your website and updating them periodically is tenuous, but even that is nothing compared to the process of finding new products on clickbank that are worth promoting.

So why am I thinking of doing this now? What has changed, you might ask? Well, I just found the killer tool to make life easier for me as a clickbank affiliate - hoprss. HopRSS provides an easy to use Clickbank RSS Feed that allows you to display the latest and greatest products on Clickbank forever - with just the initial setup.

What’s great about hoprss is that it does not rely on javascript. So the RSS feed gives you a list of products related to specified keywords or niches and once you set it up, the HTML source of your website that displays the item links is updated automatically. What this means is that in addition to being a valuable monetization tool, hoprss also adds new, relevant content to your website regularly. This can only be good for your website as seen by search engines. Try the Clickbank affiliate feed for your site, if it is oriented towards some commercial niche. And no, the links in this post are not affiliate links, I gain no kickbacks from these links whatsoever. The service is 100% free too - the author of the script probably hopes to earn enough from the ads on the hoprss homepage.

There are lots of websites where you pay less than retail prices to get your electronic gizmos, sports equipment, digital cameras - well just about anything. There is even a site called Dont Pay Retail though it is for the Australian market. So how do all these merchants that show up in a price comparison at sites like pricegrabber.com actually manage to cut costs so low?

For one, there is a heavy markup on the price by the time it hits the shop floor. If the price the retailer paid for a product is, say $100 per piece, the “retail price” at which it is sold will be a minimum of $160. Yes, that is a 60% markup. And that is the minimum - much higher markups exist in real life. So the resellers who sell stuff after buying them in bulk can still make a profit by selling the same product for $120. However, they might be paying $110 per piece since they don’t buy in the huge volumes retailers do. Add to this the savings resellers pile up in terms of renting commercial space, decorating the store, hiring the foot staff, the cashiers, the parking space etc, as compared to the retailers and it all makes sense. Oh, and I did not come up with this stuff all by myself. I found an article that explains the cost difference between retailers and resellers at the blog for the don’t pay retail website:

You decide where your money is going.
Do you like the flash associated with a retail store?
The friendly floorstaff, the neatly presented product displays?
Is the warm cushy feeling worth the extra money?
We didnt think so.

The common retail myths listed at dont pay retail makes for good reading too.

What would suffer, you ask? Customer service, if the reseller decides to save even more money! So get started with one small purchase with a reseller and call them up and see how they follow up on a request. What is the wait-time on the phone? How courteous are the phone staff? Are they willing to let you customize your order after it has been placed? These are just a few of the things you should watch out for when ordering the first time. I personally have stopped buying stuff offline, especially electronic goods. Earlier today, I wanted a 2.5″ inch hard drive to USB connector to retrieve data from a dying laptop hard drive. I stopped by at Radioshack, willing to pay up to 150% of the price I can get online, but you know what, that cheap piece of equipment - a couple of cables and connectors - was selling for $25 at radioshack, when I can easily find offers that sell the same thing for $6 or less online - this deal on slickdeals for example. So that is a 400% markup. You must be nuts to shop retail anymore, really - unless you are really in a hurry.

The world’s first fully touchscreen Phone is not the iPhone (which I wrote about earlier). It is LG’s Prada phone.

Image Credit: Mobile Phones

Ooh, doesn’t it look sexy? The phone is limited to tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 with EDGE data, and so will not be too popular in the US from the get-go. It’s smaller than the iPhone and it has a 2 megapixel camera (with Schneider-Kreuznach lens and LED flash). It is also Bluetooth 2.0 enabled (what phone isn’t eh?). It’s already listed as a top-seller at the UK mobile phones site. It totally sucks to be in the US of A, for those of you who are there. First there was the Nokia N95 which became popular in Europe way before it was launched in the US, and now this. The US has some serious technology lag, except when it comes to junk like the PS3 which hit the stores in the US first.

The sad part is that most of it is free samples. I can’t see what the catch is, since it looks like you have to apply for most of the free offers.

The website does have a lot of discount vouchers which seem to be absolutely free. I will be watching the site to see how good it is. I regularly browse fatwallet’s forums looking for deals, and those forums are busy, and I mean really busy. I wonder why no one has come up with a simple service on a website. Here’s what I would like it to do: Given a person’s postal code, and a grocery list, it should come up with a list of cheap grocery coupons tailormade for that person with the best deals across the various shops near the person’s house. One would think that with modern technology, that should be easy enough to do. A google search returned no such sites. Lots of money to be made with referral links etc, I suppose. Someone take my idea and run with it, please. Oh, and don’t forget to give me a royalty for borrowing my idea