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Week of August 28 |
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Friday, September 1, 2006
Let’s Hear It for That Old Savings
Standby: Coupon Clipping
It may be time
to reconsider that old savings standby:
coupon clipping. Experts
say the average shopper can save 30 to 40 percent on her monthly
grocery bills by using coupons. That’s a big deal! Given the latest
news on wages not keeping up with inflation, no one can afford to
ignore that sort of saving—which may explain why coupon use is on
the rise. Another reason: there are more places to get your coupons
these days. They’ve gone high tech.
More
and more Internet sites offer printable coupons, the most famous
being
www.coolsavings.com and
www.ValPak.com. But visit
www.acmemarkets.com or
www.genuardis.com or
www.traderjoes.com, or the sites of any of your other local
grocery chains, and chances are you’ll also find printable coupons
there. The latest coupon coup: Google recently announced that local
discount coupons will be offered to those who use its
Google Maps service.
When you look up a local business on Google Maps, that business may
now offer you a printable coupon to claim a discount when you shop
there. Word has it that we’ll all soon be able to claim instant
discounts at various shops and restaurants by downloading them onto
our cell phones.
Another resource:
www.couponmom.com, where you can find “best grocery discounts by
state,” and learn the “greatest secrets of the Coupon Mom.” There’s
even a Coupon Mom forum, where veteran clippers share tips and
trade coupons.
The
best tip of all is reminding yourself not to use a coupon for
something you wouldn’t normally buy just because you have it. Find
someone who can use that coupon and trade it for one you can use.
This is beginning to sound like fun.
Another savings opportunity that many people, including moi,
too often pass up is sending in that darn form to claim a rebate on
the purchase price of something you’ve just bought. A month ago, my
cell phone died and I got a new one, which came with a $50 rebate. I
never take the time to send those things in. Well, this time I did
(it took a grand total of three minutes to fill out), and lo and
behold, in the mail several weeks later came a nifty charge card
loaded with $50 to spend wherever I want. It’s nice to imagine what
I might splurge on with this found money, but I know, even with
prices heading down, it will probably go for gas…
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Thursday, August 31, 2006
Tune in to the ‘Desperate Housewives’
of Africa
Last Sunday, I was watching the prime-time Emmy Awards
and was reminded of a film that I’d never gotten around to seeing.
HBO’s
“The Girl in the Café” won three awards on Sunday: Best
Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie, Best Made-for-TV Movie,
and Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries. All those accolades, plus
the little I knew of the plot, sent me to my local Blockbuster store
to pick up a copy, and I’m glad I did.
Written by Richard Curtis, best known as
the man who gave us the fluffy romantic comedies “Four Weddings and
a Funeral,” “Notting Hill, and “Love Actually,” this film probes
more serious emotional territory like a tongue probing a toothache.
It follows a tired British bureaucrat’s tentative relationship with
a much younger, very idealistic woman, whom he meets in a café and
invites to accompany him to a G8 summit, where the leaders of the
free world are gathered to solve the planet’s problems. On the
agenda, but underfunded and in danger of being overshadowed by other
more practical issues, are the Millennium Goals—pledges to cut
extreme poverty in half by the year 2015.
While the bureaucrats in their pinstripe
suits shuffle papers and try to come to some sort of compromise
agreement, it is the young woman, Gina (played by Kelly Macdonald),
who cuts through their mumbling excuses to quietly speak the truth:
There are no excuses. Our generation has “an opportunity for
greatness”—the chance to end the poverty, hunger and sickness that
plague Africa, killing one child every three seconds. This
issue-driven drama, which could have seemed contrived, turns out to
be utterly human, believable and moving. It made me wonder whether I
would have the courage of my convictions to speak up were I ever
placed in a comparable position of access to men in power.
Nearly five million of us watch the antics of
Desperate Housewives every week; meanwhile, the truly desperate
housewives of Africa are watching their children die before their
eyes, helpless to save them. Hundreds of governmental bureaucrats
continue to shuffle their papers, while a patchwork of
nongovernmental agencies, often at cross-purposes, throw money at
the problems. It seems to me that what is desperately needed
is a more organized, systematic approach to achieving the Millennium
Goals, to raise and funnel sufficient money where it is needed.
To find out more about the issues involved and how some
nonfictional heroes and heroines are raising their voices against
poverty, visit
www.un.org/millenniumgoals,
www.millenniumcampaign.org, and
www.one.org.
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Finances 2 Go: A Movable Feast of
Files
It doesn’t take an event the magnitude of Katrina or
9-11 to wreak havoc on the lives of those affected. A house fire, an
incapacitating illness or a death in the family can have
catastrophic consequences, far beyond the emotional damage done, if
we haven’t kept important records in an easily accessible place. In
the aftermath, we can find ourselves scrambling to find the
financial documents needed to manage accounts, file for insurance,
tap credit lines, or sell property to access the money we need to
get through every day.
Experts often remind us to “get organized” so that we
can avoid this drama. They tell us to keep a list of the
professionals we and our significant others deal with (lawyer,
accountant, insurance agent, stockbroker, etc.) and their contact
information in one file, and note in that file the location of all
our important documents—wills, living wills, powers of attorney,
bank accounts, insurance policies, investment statements, retirement
accounts, real estate titles, marriage licenses, divorce papers,
military discharge papers, etc.
Nowadays, many of us do our recordkeeping on our
computers. It doesn’t take a hurricane to fry your computer. A
simple lightning strike can do that. But technology comes to the
rescue with a tool the size of a stick of gum, called a memory
stick. Ranging in price from under $20 to over $100, depending on
memory size, they’re available at any computer or office supply
store, or on
www.Amazon.com, and they’re simple to use. Apple’s Shuffle iPod
even doubles as a memory stick.
Just stick the stick in a USB port on your computer. An
icon will appear on your desktop or in your “My Computer” files on a
PC. Copy your important files and financial records to them—you can
even scan important documents, such as wills and insurance policies,
and copy them to the stick—and voila, you have a movable feast of
financial files. If an emergency occurs, all you have to do is grab
the stick and go. Anytime you update your records, be sure to update
your stick, as well.
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Tuesday August 29, 2006
Never Forget the Superdome
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the day the
levees broke in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina hit “the Big
Easy,” flooding the lower Ninth ward and leaving thousands homeless.
Ultimately, a reported 1.5 million people were evacuated from
Louisiana and more than 1,200 died as a result of Katrina and its
aftermath. TV news shows are planned to commemorate the day and the
devastation that occurred, and I have to admit, at first, my
reaction to these specials was, “Please, spare me” these attempts at
capitalizing on other people’s suffering.
That was until I watched Brian Williams’
documentary, “Katrina: The Long Road Back” on NBC last night. Seeing
again the shocking images of poor people left abandoned without food
or water or medicine, struggling to retain their dignity and save
their own lives, hearing Williams’ own wrenching personal
reflections on the failure of our government to react faster, get
there sooner with aid, should make us all reflect on what Katrina
says about the state of our Nation. Williams’ message: Never forget
the Superdome and what happened there. The unspoken message of the
faces in those moving images: NEVER let it happen again.
For more on Katrina, visit
www.katrina.msnbc.com. For another thoughtful personal
reflection on the disaster and the lessons it teaches about what
matters most in life, I highly recommend novelist and New Orleans’
resident John Biguenet’s “Back to New Orleans” Web journal entry on
www.nytimes.com, “What
Have I Learned?”
“I am much less
attached to my possessions,” writes Biguenet. “They don’t matter, it
turns out, as much as I had thought they did … It’s obvious to me,
with an insistence I can’t seem to shake, that nothing lasts—not
bottles of wine, not houses, not even cities. . . I
suppose I could have learned those lessons in other ways. But there
is something I don’t think I could ever have understood without
witnessing firsthand the events of the last year. I now recognize
how much leadership matters.” (Note: this feature is only available
to New York Times Select subscribers. If you live online the
way I do, it’s worth the $49.95 annual admission fee.)
Also not to be missed, if the reviews are to be
believed:
“When
the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” Spike Lee’s
documentary on the disaster, which airs on HBO tonight at 8 P.M.
Tomorrow we’ll look at steps you can take to keep your financial
information safe in times of crisis.
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Monday, August 28, 2006
The First-Ever ‘Man Conference’ PLUS
a Plan to Pay Off Your Mortgage Faster
Several weeks after refinancing my mortgage earlier this
summer, I received an interesting “special offer” in the mail from
my mortgage company. It was an invitation to participate in their
“BiSaver” program, and it works like this. After paying a “one-time,
nonrefundable, start-up charge” of $399, I would sign up to split my
monthly mortgage payment in half, paying that amount, plus $1, every
two weeks. By making 26 instead of 12 payments a year, I could pay
off my 30-year mortgage in 22 years and save “$118.881.80 in
interest charges, even though I would only be paying the mortgage
company an extra $26 a year—plus the one-time start-up fee.
Sounds like a good deal and well worth
considering for those who need the structure of such a program. In
fact, though more and more mortgage companies are offering this kind
of program, you don’t need one to accomplish the same sort of
accelerated mortgage payment. The reason you save so much money in
interest charges when you make biweekly payments is that, since some
months have more than four weeks, by making a payment every two
weeks, you effectively build one extra monthly payment per year into
your payment schedule.
You can accomplish the same thing yourself by simply
making an extra one-time payment at the end of the year every year,
or by adding one-twelfth more to each monthly payment. Just be sure
to attach a note explaining what the extra money is for so that it’s
recorded properly—and keep up the payments. Check with your mortgage
company for instructions on how to set up your own accelerated
payment system. Even if you’re well into your mortgage term, by
putting this sort of plan in motion you could save yourself
thousands and thousands of dollars.
Role Reversal of the Week: Women have long been branded
as consummate shoppers—a.k.a. shopaholics—maybe because we do
control 80 percent of household purchases. Now men are being
recognized as big spenders, too, and advertisers are aggressively
targeting them. Advertising Age is sponsoring the first ever
“Man Conference”—“a one-day seminar for top marketers on the
consumer trends and pop culture tastes of young, American men.”
Seminar topics include “Amazing Spending Habits of the North
American Male,” “Boys and Their Toys,” and “Getting Men to Say ‘I
Love You’ (to a Brand).” Instead of spending all that money for
research and a fancy conference, why don’t they just ask the real
experts on the subject of men—women?
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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If you like the blog, you’ll love the book.
For more savvy
finance advice, buy
“Making Bread: The
Ultimate Financial Guide for Women Who Need Dough,”
by Gail Harlow and Elizabeth Lewin, available on
Amazon.com and at your local bookstore |
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