Rage Against the Machine, pt. 6 "Mishaps"

In my RATM series, I've chronicled my love/hate relationship with technology. In this latest installment, I'll recount our season of technology mishaps. It all started when I cracked Jennifer's Mac screen. Fletch grabbed for the plug and as I quickly yanked it away, it fell from my small girl hands and onto the computer screen. Fletch was involved in the next mishap as well. Jennifer had her purse teetering on the edge of the kitchen counter. His extremely curious nature made him reach for it, pulling the purse off the counter and her phone and iPod touch into the dog's water bowl. It gets worse.

As I walked through the door after attending a Redskins game (which they lost - no big surprise!), Jennifer had the look of dread on her face. "I've got some bad news. The TV blew up!" I looked at the blank black screen and hung my head. After five years (a short lifespan for a TV) my first generation plasma went dark-permanently. Show's over.

A few days later my trusty Windows XP laptop started acting funny. It wouldn't boot up. While it lived much longer than expected, the end was very sudden. There were no signs of problems. It went from working to not in a matter of a few hours. It must have caught a virus! Ha, pun intended.

To add insult to injury, the home theater computer, the one that started the rage, died again. I say again because the replacement motherboard crashed and burned. That computer was jinxed. I wasn't going to spend another $300 to fix it. Our reason for buying the HTPC was to save money by getting rid of cable TV. Turns out we've spent nearly the amount we would have spent on cable TV fixing and maintaining the computer. Stupid technology.

Everything worked out in the end. We got the Mac screen repaired. Jennifer successfully dried out her phone using rice. However she wasn't as successful with the iPod Touch. The screen was permanently damaged so we replaced it for half price. We bought a bigger and better TV. We had a 50" Vizio plasma and upgraded to a 55" Samsung LCD. I replaced my laptop with a sweet Gateway netbook. And we sucked it up and subscribed to cable television (no premium channels though). Hello high def on every channel!

Here's hoping the tech mishaps are behind us. They have to be since we've replaced everything. :)

Free Money

Image via WikipediaI know what your thinking - "money ain't free". I not talking about a handout. What I mean by "free money" is unearned money; obtained through means other than my paycheck. I guess you could call it random passive income. I always seem to get some free money here and there, whether it be a rebate, a class action settlement, or selling something on Craigslist. I wanted to know how much free money I received, so I started tracking it in 2010. I created a Google Docs spreadsheet to do so. The total free money amount for this year is a whopping $1337! About half of that came from a contest I won which had an approximate retail value of $598. I won the Redskins "AAA Ultimate Fan Zone Sweepstakes" for the Sunday night game against the Colts back on October 17. The prize included: 2 suite tickets to the game, 2 passes to the AAA Ultimate Fan Zone pre-game hospitality area & 1 FedEx Field purple parking permit. Although technically not cash, I didn't pay for it out of pocket and is in essence free money so I'm counting it. The second biggest amount was $200 in Southwest Airlines credit we got for a long delay coming home from Louisville, KY for Lebowski Fest a couple years back that I used to purchase my flight to the National Beard and Moustache Championships in June. Rounding out the top three is $101.65 in oil royalties. My wife's family owns a small stake in land leased for obtaining oil in Texas. The smallest amount is $.59 which was another oil royalty. We actually cashed a $.59 check. It probably cost more to drive to the ATM. But every little bit counts.

Debt Free

Image via Wikipedia(Cross-posted on the Shock Family Circus blog.)


My family is debt free! That's the best holiday present money can buy. We paid off our car two years early in August and I paid off my student loan a few days ago. We pay our credit card each month in full, so we don't have any credit card debt. As one of my friends so eloquently posted on Facebook "Congrats! not owing shit to anyone is a great feeling." It is.


We celebrated by spending money! We are going to an exclusive New Year's Eve party in New York City with my sister Lisa (a.k.a. Aunt Lili) and bro-in-law Steven. My company has an office on the 31st floor of a building in Times Square, eye level with the ball drop! We're going to be all dressed up with an awesome place to go. We also booked a weekend getaway to a quaint riverside inn at historic Smithfield Station for just the two of us. Thank you Living Social Escapes.

Related articles

• 60 Seconds: Guide to Getting out of Debt (creditloan.com)
• Debt - Settle It and Pay It Off! (socyberty.com)

Forget Frugality

We've been living on one income since we decided to start a family. It's hard to do living in one of the most affluent metropolitan areas of the country, but we're making it paycheck by paycheck. We cut our expenses to the extreme by selling one of our cars, eliminating cable TV and by me working from home full time. We recently paid off the car we still own two years early. I have a work issued Blackberry that I also use as a my personal phone so we pay for only one mobile phone contract. We started budgeting by using the best budgeting software for the money-YNAB, which stands for You Need A Budget. I found out about YNAB from my favorite personal finance blog, Bargaineering. We don't go out to eat or buy anything without a coupon or discount. We subscribe to Groupon and all it's copycat competitors. But you can only do so much cutting back before there's nothing else to cut.
2011 will be the year to "Forget Frugality". I've been looking into ways to make additional income, both passive and active. Passive income requires money but not time. Active income requires time and money, but less of the latter. We don't have a heck of a lot of money to invest in dividend stocks to generate passive income, and I'm not going to dip into our savings to do so. It takes a lot of money to make a lot of passive income, but anything is better than nothing. I don't have the time for a part-time job and they usually aren't worth the trouble for the amount (or lack of) money you make or the time investment.
I stumbled upon the internet marketing website Prosperly.com while researching YNAB's founder and online entrepreneur Jesse Mechem (He and I have something in common. See if you can figure it out by reading his profile ;)). Prosperly is a website flipping blog. The founder, Adam White, is supposedly a successful online entrepreneur and will teach you the 'Prosperly Way'. He offers personal coaching to help you buy and flip your first website. I'm intrigued but nonetheless skeptical.
The YNAB community also introduced to me Ramit Sethi of blog and book I Will Teach You To Be Rich and the "Earn 1K on the Side" course. I participated in a two part webinar hosted by him. He's an in your face/personal guerilla marketing kind of guy that really talks up his Earn 1K course. His hard sell worked. He only opens the course for very short internals at a time so we talked about it and we decided to sign up. It's an expensive course, so I didn't take the decision lightly. I was again intrigued but skeptical. He offers a 3 month money back guarantee, so what did I have to lose? When I went to sign up and pay for the course the website crashed. How's that for a sign? I contacted customer service and they gave me another link to sign up, but I saw the writing on the wall. I Googled both Prosperly and Earn 1K to see if they were scams, but nothing negative came up in the search results. That doesn't mean they aren't scams, it just means that no one has posted anything negative about either program or that both guys are very good at suppressing the negative feedback or they are legitimate. Has anyone ever used either course? I'd love to hear feedback from people I know.

Related articles

• 'You Need a Budget' Gets a 'Leg-Up' from App-Up (prweb.com)

Get Unlisted

I've been a privacy advocate for a long time. Admittedly that sounds hypocritical since Google has enough of my personal information to clone me, but I digress. If you want to take control of your personal information, Catalog Choice has a new service for you. On September 27th, they will be unveiling their Unlisting Service. Get all the details at their blog post Get Unlisted. For a $20 donation, their staff will act as your Agent to contact Third Party Marketing companies and Personal Search services and go through the process to opt you out of their systems.  Most of these companies have made the opt-out process complicated so you won’t do it.  But Catalog Choice knows you want to suppress your name from their systems, so like a valet, they do the work for you. I think $20 is not a lot to ask to stop getting junk mail and to go "unlisted". 

"Convenience" Fees?

Buying event tickets from anyone other than private buyers is a complete ripoff. But everyone knows this. I bought a ticket to the Redskins first game of the season, a Sunday night game against their hated division rival the Cowboys on September 12, for my brother Chris. He's coming into town to go to the game with the wife and me. It's an annual ritual. Long story short, I was able to purchase a ticket at face value through the teams official Ticketmaster website. But the final transaction price was not the ticket's face value.  You saw this coming. Let me break it down for you. The ticket's face value was $70.40. The team tacked on a whopping $25 FedEx shipping charge! It was the only shipping option. Presumably FedEx's partnership with the Redskins (FedEx owns the stadium's naming rights) is clearly being abused. It's not like the game is tomorrow and I need overnight delivery, the game is three weeks away. They could drop the ticket in the mail and it would get here in plenty of time and for the price of a postage stamp. To add insult to injury, Ticketmaster charged me a $3 "convenience" fee. What the hell is that? On Ticketmaster's FAQ page it states:

[The convenience] fee covers costs that allow Ticketmaster to provide the widest range of available tickets while giving you multiple ways to purchase. Tickets are available in many neighborhoods via local ticket outlet locations, our telephone reservation system and Ticketmaster.com. Tickets can be purchased through at least one distribution channel virtually 24 hours a day. The convenience charge varies by event and is determined by negotiations with arena operators, promoters and others, based on costs for each event.

What a line of crap. In the case of the Redskin's ticket, there was only one venue to purchase the ticket, online. They can shove the convenience fee up their ass. Here's the final breakdown:

Ticket face value = $70.40

FedEx shipping = $25

TM convenience charge = $3

Total Price for 1 Redskins upper level sideline ticket = $98.40

Getting ripped off buying event tickets = EXPECTED!

After all was said and done, I actually got the ticket for a good price. Going rate on StubHub "The Redskin's Official Ticket Reseller" is $200 per ticket. (Don't get me started on StubHub. They are an even bigger ripoff). Trying to buy a Redskins ticket on Craigslist is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It was worth it. We always have a good time going to football games. 

Merging Interests

I've merged my now retired beard blog Hirsute Pogonologist with this blog. The imported posts are merged with the existing posts, sorted by date. I'm still into bearding, but it has run its course as a hobby. Let it grow my bearded brethren!