Money, Love, and Change

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It’s not very often that I burst out laughing when we get the mail.  I’m usually annoyed at the amount of junk mail, or ticked off at the unexpected bill (ie. is it time to pay the garbage bill again?).

But today, on the day where all us common folk are wondering just how bad we’re going to get screwed, I get my annual Social Security statement in the mail.  What a nice touch Uncle Sam!  Waste some trees to send me paperwork on a system that is going to probably be nonexistent by the time I retire.

Furthermore, since I received a government stipend as a graduate student, I didn’t get taxed for social security, so even though I have worked since the age of 16, I am still 2 credits shy of being able to collect my nonexistent benefits.  Craptastic!

It’s days like today that I want to go to Washington with a pair of ****kickers and a shovel.  Of course, I’d probably need to purchase a bulldozer, but I’m not sure if I would be able to get a loan…

With the holidays approaching, I’ve been on the prowl for some good deals.  Although I try to make most of my purchases with gift cards, I do like using ShopDiscover (when you make the purchase with your Discover Card, you get cash back), UPromise, and Ebates.  The basic idea with all of these sites is that you shop online through their affiliate link and earn money back.  It’s great when you’re making a large purchase, and even small purchases add up over time.

Anyhow, I just received an e-mail from Ebates – if you use this link you can get $10 when you sign up (without the affiliate link, you get $5).  I also get $10, so be sure that if you do sign up that you get your own affiliate link to share (you can also send e-mails to friends and family if you don’t have a blog).  If you sign up 2 people, you get $30 instead of $20 – this could really help out when doing holiday shopping!

One thing to keep in mind that you won’t be able to cash in your $10 until you earn at least $5 cash back from purchases.  It’s not too hard to earn the $5; for example, I earned $1.43 when I spent $13 at Dale and Thomas for a gift, and $1.14 from a $38 purchase at Lands’ End.

Between the 3 programs, I can sometimes get more money back using ShopDiscover, and I have found that Ebates usually reaps the same benefits as UPromise.  ShopDiscover doesn’t have as many stores, though.  Also, if you don’t use a Discover Card, you won’t get cash back.

The $10 deal lasts until October 31st.  Enjoy!

TransUnion is offering free credit monitoring as part of the settlement in a class-action lawsuit, since they violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act and sold consumers personal and financial information to marketers.  Good stuff!

According to the site:

“The Settlement Class is defined as: All consumers who had an open credit account or an open line of credit from a credit grantor located in the United States at any time during the period January 1, 1987 to May 28, 2008.”

This pretty much means that any adult is eligible!  Today (9/24/08) is the last day to sign up at listclassaction.com.  Note that the six months of free credit monitoring will not begin until the final approval in the courts.  After approval in the courts, you will receive an e-mail that will allow you to take action.

I haven’t discussed Prosper.com much on this blog, but it is a peer-to-peer lending site that I have been thinking about getting involved with.  I was looking into the tax implications of peer-to-peer lending before getting started, but I guess I don’t have to worry about that anymore.

This morning, I got an e-mail from Prosper – basically, if you’re a resident of PA, you can no longer lend money out or sign up to be a lender.  Seems kind of sudden, despite “ongoing discussions”.  I would be pretty ticked if I were more involved in Prosper.

Are you a PA Prosper lender?  What do you think of the announcement?

I think that we may be lucky, but we started potty training about 2 weeks ago, and we’re doing pretty well.  The kid sometimes does the potty dance, but accidents have been very few and far between.  He does wear a  diaper to bed and a pull-up during naptime.  Other than that, it’s undies all day long!

Am I missing something?  I thought that the terrible twos were horrific, but we’ve had a lot of fun so far.  Of course there are craptastic days, but overall it’s been a wonderful experience.  Maybe he’ll turn into a demon on his third birthday?

I think we’re going to stop at one kid.  This one got all the good DNA

I have been a tutor with Tutor.com for a couple of years now – they have programs through local libraries so that students can obtain tutoring using their local library website as a portal. They also provide tutoring packages for individual users; you buy the minutes that you need, and they are good for up to 6 months. As an individual user, you can access tutors 24/7, which is a nice feature if you’re a late-night person. Each online session is as short or long as kids need and is recorded in case parents or kids want to review sessions later.

From working with Tutor.com, I can say that there is an emphasis on helping the students actually understand the material. If this is the kind of service you may be looking for, either for yourself or your child, please take advantage of the promotion code I have. When you go to the website, you can scroll down the right-hand side to the purple box that asks if you have a card or promo code. Enter the code ABISR50M in the box, and you will get 50 minutes for $1 instead of the 25 minutes for $1 advertised on the website.

Hope this helps someone out!

Edit: You can also get 25 Minutes of Free Online Tutoring in 4th – 12th grade Math, Science, English and Social Studies.  You will need a cell phone or credit card to receive the activation code, however.

Well, our Dell is still dead.  Because we had to deplete our emergency fund to pay for truck repairs, we’re not comfortable with buying a new computer before restoring our savings.  In addition, there is a good chance that we are going to have to make a trip home this month for family reasons, and we haven’t saved up for that yet.

However, we do have some data that we need to get off the old computer, and we currently don’t have the required hard drive space on the Mac.  So we decided to compromise.  We purchased an external hard drive that is both Mac and PC compatible for $95 (we will get 5% cash back, but we’re not counting that right now).  We also used an Amazon gift certificate to get the cable ($20) needed to connect our laptop hard drives to our current computer via a USB port.  I was thinking of an external hard drive enclosure, but we have two different hard drives that are two different sizes.  In addition, if we sell the laptop at a later time, the hard drive enclosure wouldn’t be worth the cost.

The external hard drive will be useful to us even after purchasing a new computer.  I think that it’s a good temporary solution until we get back on our feet financially.

Would you have done the same thing?  Why or why not?