Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

It’s that time of the year when Americans are finding the best gifts for the festive season. This year’s Thanksgiving weekend has shown an increase of sales from $45 billion last year to $52 billion this year, according to the National Retail Federation (2011). Cyber Monday also posted increased sales from $1.03 billion last year to $1.25 billion this year (Talley, 2011).

Shopping needs differ from one individual to another depending on his values, attitudes, cultural expectations, and preferences. So, it is very challenging to come up with a specific list for all on what to buy or not buy, but giving more thoughts to your purchase increases the likelihood of getting the gifts you won’t regret.

A list of 13 questions below can help consumers make the right shopping decision:

Composed by Sara Croymans (2004), this card comes in a wallet size card template for consumers to remind themselves, which would be very useful when considering purchases or when they’re one swipe/click away from paying for them.

*****

On a personal note, I thought this simple “Wise Consumer Shopping” card is a very effective tool to prevent spending leaks. The wallet-size card allows people to keep it in their wallet or purse – from where consumers would get their cash or credit card for brick-and-mortar and online purchases. This is especially if the card is used according to its instruction:

When you are considering a purchase take out this card. Review each question, answer honestly.

• Possibility of not using them: 6%, as noted in a recent Today coverage. This could be due to losing it, forgetting about it, and not liking the card-related products. That’s like consumers donating millions to the industry. According to the Today coverage, $100B gift card sales with $6B unused + most popular gifts, 5 years running. I remember a time where I had an w’aay extendedholiday trip only to realize a lot later that I had an outdated rebate check.
• Tie Consumers to the Stores/Products: Gift card issuer should sell them for lower value. Companies lover the, because it ties consumers to those products/companies (e.g. Lowe’s gift cards mean that recipients need to go to the store to get those money cards used). In addition, to use the full benefits of the card or to maximize the card’s value, one need to get products that are higher price that the cards’ values. For instance, if you have a $25 Target gift card, ideally, you’d spend on something that is $25, but c’mon, seriously, find something that is $25 … with sales taxes plus nd while you’re there, you might as well buy those other stuff.
• Why not Give Cash?: New taboo? Behavioral – as in most Americans like to put those on the cards? I like the subtitle Daniel Gross put on his article: “They’re the best insult money can buy.”

Currently, I have a $10 gift certificate from Kohl’s (valid after Christmas) and a $10 off coupon for gift cards sold at Albertson’s. I’m likely to use the Kohl’s gift certificate … and the Abertson’s – guess what? The cheapest gift card is a $25 ones. I’ll use the Albertson’s for something that’s I’ll use anyways (Hint: not Starbucks one).

• 2 slices of bread:$0.20 ($2 per 20-slice loaf)
• PBJ: $0.15 per table spoon ($3 per 20-table-spoon jar)
• Plastic wrap: $0.05

Total cost: $0.40.

vs.

on-campus’ $2.00!!!

TIME OUT!

Traditionally, we fill in the forms obtained from the libraries, post office, etc. With the advancement of technology, we can print these forms out along with the instructions from IRS.gov. And yeah, there are federal and state income tax – maybe a few big cities have them too. The paper method gets a bit messy because you have to read the instructions, do the math manually, and include all the documents (e.g. tax documents, receipts) that you’d mail a parcel to the IRS. The e-filing has made it so easy that almost all of these things are done for you. Imagine, I could have spend hours last night trying to figure the math and rulings only to find that my tax filing had been rejected – so have to go back to read the errors and rectify it, which is burdensome. With the e-method and e-filing, I fix it online and reclicked to submit.

For middle class like use, there are many companies that offer free federal filings for free as listed here. Note that you may need to pay for the state e-filing. I paid the $14.95 for the state filing and got the federal one free. We ended up getting some money back from the federal tax and paid $3. A purpose of taxes is to get redistribute the wealth so that the poorer will not lag behind too much wealth-wise.

When we purchase goods and service, we pay sales tax. I think NM’s is about 7.5 percent [5.125% to 8.6875% depending on the location of the business]. Normally, food is not tax because food is a necessity even for the poor.

When you eat yummy stuff (e.g. ice cream, apple), I tax you by having a (my size) bite or chunk out of them.

 

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 8:42 AM, My other daugther wrote:
How do you do tax?!?!

2011/3/29  and I replied

I shoulda done the tax with you …. but I was afraid of a lightning quick boy who would come and press the keyboard and click the mouse.

2011/3/29 Nnn wrote

On 29 March 2011 07:17, I wrote:
…. Our tax e-filing got rejected.

Nnn’s last name with IRS and SS is “X Y” – no hyphen. Although in previous years, I hyphenated the name and it was fine.

Don’t worry, I just e-submit it again with the corrected info.

http://www.beckham-mandel.com/wp-content/themes/beckham/class_action_complaint_11-11-10.pdf … the example proposed is quite powerful [never knew they sell cars too]

Page 2-3:

QuiBids promotes itself (on its website, through widespread internet advertising and emails) as providing an opportunity for consumers to win luxury items at CLASS ACTION significant discounts compared to retail stores and E-Bay, and it claims that winning bidders on QuiBids.com typically save 80%-95% compared to retail prices. In one e-mail promotion, QuiBids cites a customer winning a $20,000 Honda Civic automobile for $1,740.78 in a two-cent QuiBids auction. That price means QuiBids sold 87,039 bids which were used in that auction. At $0.60 per bid, QuiBids grossed $52,233.40 from the bids alone, an amount that dwarfs not only any savings realized by the winning bidder individually, but the retail cost of the car. This illustrates the critical difference between QuiBids and E-Bay – losing bidders on E-Bay do not pay anything.

I can’t find much on this from the internet, but there’s a new coverage on businesswire.com.

Another way to increase profit to local businesses is by using cash. The more common concern about credit card use is the tendency for credit card users to spend more on unnecessary items and carry credit card balance with interests. The less mentioned aspect of credit card use is on how credit card companies benefit from each credit card swipe and how a slice of profit is taken away from business.

The main costs of using credit cards to merchants or business are the point-of sale (swipe) machine and interchange fees. According to Forbes.com [see article for other costs], a swipe machine costs anywhere from $300 to $800 while the interchange or per-swipe fee is 2% (1.5% -5%) of each bill. Now one could argue that 2% is small and having credit card option payment increases sales but they all add up. As an example of a 2% interchange fee, if you buy a scooter for $1,000, $16.50 (1.65%) may to the credit card issuer and 0.35% to the merchant’s bank. Now, if the profit of the sales was $200, $20 or 10% of the profit was taken away.

One has to take into account that for some transactions (e.g. hotel), credit card may be the better choice of payment. Otherwise, wherever possible, use cash.

THINK LOCAL, USE CASH

Appendix: How Interchange Fees Work?

The webmaster in our department has been getting e-mail on efforts to get certain websites linked via the my site at the university. They look so real. Unlike typical “Nigerian” scam, the e-mails that we have been getting looks professional – no spelling mistakes, professional looking websites, etc.

This is one that I got today:

From: __webmaster@nmsu.edu
Date: March 4, 2011 ______
To: __webmaster@nmsu.edu
Subject: Tech Web issue

This is an issue report from the college web server.
From: ______@______charterschool.org
Type of issue: Tech Web issue
Referrer: http://aces.nmsu.edu/ces/mymoney/links.html
IP Address:

Comments: I just wanted to comment on the great teaching resources you have compiled here: http://aces.nmsu.edu/ces/mymoney/links.html. My students will be embarking on their first ever stock market game experience which everyone is excited about. I found many of your suggested financial links helpful for our preparation and I wanted to share another with you that I found some great ideas from: http://valuestockguide.com/tools-for-teaching-the-stock-market-game/ I figured other teachers could also benefit from it being added.

To this e-mail, the expert in the Stock Market Game commented, “I am not familiar with this web site, but it looks interesting. Looks like someone is trying to make a buck on the Stock Market Game“

Another example

—–Original Message—–
From:  [mailto:      ]
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 _____PM
To:
Subject: compliment and suggestion

Hello,

Just wanted to thank you and let you know I’ve been using your page (http://aces.nmsu.edu/ces/mymoney/links.html) for some research.  I often do outreach to community youth on topics like debt, investing, and financial responsibility.

As a thank you for your helpful site here is another (credit_____.net) that you you may add to your page. It helped me break down topics like investing and money  management to young adults.

Hope this is helpful,

Perhaps, the first one

> From: ___webmaster@nmsu.edu
> Date: September 22, 2010
> To: __webmaster@nmsu.edu
> Subject: Personnel Correction
>
> This is an issue report from the college web server.
>
> From:
>
> Type of issue: Personnel Correction
>
> Referrer: http://aces.nmsu.edu/ces/mymoney/links.html
>
> IP Address:
>
> Comments: Hi, I came across your listing of links for shopping. I
> noticed you had not provided a link to \”__________.org\” which is a
> free online shopping site providing free shipping to over 3,100
> different online shops. We would greatly appreciate being added to
> this listing.

This one even point out a broken link on my site:

> From: ____webmaster@nmsu.edu
> Date: October 26, 2010
> To: ____webmaster@nmsu.edu
> Subject: HTML error
>
> This is an issue report from the college web server.
>
> From: @____deals.com
>
> Type of issue: HTML error
> Referrer: http://aces.nmsu.edu/ces/mymoney/links.html
> IP Address:
>
> Comments: Hello!
> My name is ______ and I came across your site\’s list of ; I noticed
> there were a couple broken links in the list and there are as follows:
> Cash Course – http://aces.nmsu.edu/ces/mymoney/www.cashcourse.org
> Spendster – http://aces.nmsu.edu/ces/mymoney/Spendster.org
> Every link under \”FTC
> U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)\” (Minus the
> link attached to \”state\”)
>
> I also wanted to let you know that my company BradsDeals
> (http://www.bradsdeals.com
> ) offers a variety of online coupons and discount codes for a wide
> variety of stores. I noticed you listed other online discount sites,
> so I wanted to put _____Deals on your radar.
>
> I hope that our site is something you\’d like to include in your list,
> and thank you for providing me even more resources to look through
> myself!

Legal? But …. .