Many people want to become artists but aren’t sure how to earn a living selling art. Maybe you already consider yourself an artist, but you are having trouble making money with your art. I’m sure you’ve heard the term ‘starving artist’, am I right? Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. In this post, […]
The post How to Sell Art Online and Make Money appeared first on The Work at Home Woman.
I don’t like to throw away an old computer unless it truly no longer works. A computer might not work any more for a specific purpose, but as long as it can still do something, I try to find a use for it. In fact, if I have a good idea floating around in my head, I’ll even look out for inexpensive older desktop computers and laptops on places like Craigslist, take them home, reformat them, and put them to some specific use. Back in the day, I also used to go to public sales at the local university where they sold outdated computers, buying them for these kinds of specific purposes.
This is a great way to take something out of your closet that’s just gathering dust and is probably on its way to the landfill and turn it into something useful again. There are many, many uses for old PC hardware that go beyond writing an email or checking a website.
Here are ten great uses for old computers, laptops, and tablets.
A computer in the kitchen is a great tool for looking up recipes and listening to streaming audio while cooking. It’s a purpose that’s wonderfully suited for an older tablet computer or an old laptop or even an old desktop if you have an off-counter place to store the hardware and have a few longer cords to use.
Simply wipe the computer and start from scratch with a basic operating system on it, then put a few applications on there like Paprika and AllRecipes for recipe research, Kindle if you have some cookbooks in Kindle format, and some audio apps like Spotify and a podcast manager.
A great setup for this would be an older iPad with these apps and a pair of Bluetooth speakers. Simply run a power cord to that old iPad, set it up so that it’s standing (perhaps using an old cover, if you have one), and put some inexpensive Bluetooth speakers in your kitchen that the iPad is always connected to. Fire up a music or podcast player and get some audio running in your kitchen, then look up a recipe. Sit the iPad off to the side so that you can see the recipe while preparing the meal and enjoy the audio that’s streaming from the iPad.
If you have an old desktop computer that you can stick at a desk in an out-of-the-way corner, or you have an old laptop, you can simply reinstall a very basic version of Windows, install a bunch of security updates, and set it up so that it can be easily used by guests for things like checking email or social media or looking up websites.
Personally, I find that this is a perfect use for Linux, as it can run on very old hardware and it can provide a secure, Windows-like environment for people to do basic web browsing and web-based email checking. Zorin is a wonderful free place to start if you want to try this out, as it’s intended to be as much like Windows as possible. If you want something that emulates a Mac really well, try Elementary OS. (More on this later.)
Here’s a great guide for setting up a guest account on a computer of almost any kind.
If you’ve ever wanted to try out an alternative to Windows on a PC, an old PC is a perfect place to do it. You can simply wipe out the operating system and install something new in its place.
There are a lot of alternatives to Windows out there. I’m a particularly big fan of Ubuntu Linux as a starting point, but Zorin is another good option if you’re coming from Windows, or Elementary OS if you’re coming from a Mac.
What’s the advantage to even trying another OS? They’re free. The options above, at least, are very stable. It’s very secure unless you’re trying to do something specifically with it that makes it less secure. If you’re trying to learn how to program a computer, it’s a brilliant environment for that, as it usually has everything you need to learn a bunch of computer languages.
Another great option is to turn your old PC into a home entertainment center. Windows does this extremely well – the Windows Store allows you to download apps for all kinds of streaming media and then displays them on a menu that’s really easy to navigate with a remote. The only thing you’ll probably need is a Bluetooth remote control and possibly a cable or two, though having a keyboard and a mouse attached to the computer might be useful sometimes, too.
Once you have this set up, it functions much like an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire stick except you’re not locked into being presented the content from those providers first. Rather, you can pick and choose what you want to see first and it’s easy to change options and interfaces if you’re familiar with Windows. This is a great way to start if you’re interested in cord cutting.
Another nice feature of this is that you can create a “screen saver” of sorts for your television, where you essentially turn on a “slide show” application and it can display all kinds of family pictures that you’ve accumulated on your television while you’re not using it.
Speaking of which…
If you have an older laptop or tablet, or you have a smaller flat screen monitor and a small PC or Mac you can stow somewhere nearby, it’s easy to turn those items into a digital photo frame that can just continually display family photos or other images that you’d like to be displayed. Many flat panel monitors can be easily wall mounted with their cords dropped through a small drywall hole, for example, or a tablet can be set up on a table with a cord running down to a power supply.
Almost all operating systems have an app of some kind that will continuously display photos from a folder on an endless loop. Just fill up that folder with the images you want to see, start the app, and leave the display sitting there showing the images. One great strategy is to point the photo display program at a shared folder on Dropbox so that you can continually update the photos without making any changes to the device at all. It just runs forever, displaying the loop of images.
This is a great use for an old tablet or for a small older PC or an old Mac Mini. They’re up to the task of running such a simple program for a very long time without interruption, and it uses very little power.
I currently have two older machines working for this exact purpose. One is an old PC that’s currently running Steam OS and attached to a television. It plays a wide variety of PC games that are controlled with a normal USB video game controller and shows on the television. It plays a bunch of games from my Steam account.
Another is a home-built Raspberry Pi device (basically a micro PC about the size of a credit card) that exists solely to run emulations of really old video games from my childhood years. It also has two controllers attached to it and hooks up to a television. Here’s how this was done – I received the components as a Christmas gift a few years ago. (The legality of video game emulation of abandoned software titles is in a grey area – just stay away from games that are currently available elsewhere, because that’s not a grey area.) You can do this with an old PC as well.
These consoles essentially function as video game consoles attached to the television, except that the consoles are just old PCs and the games are really cheap. You won’t be able to play the latest and greatest 3D jaw-dropping graphic games with this setup, but you’ll have access to tons of incredibly enjoyable titles.
One of my good friends repurposed a PC so that all it shows is a constant stream of the input from six different video cameras on his property. Three of them are for home security and the other three are for wildlife monitoring. He keeps it running all the time in his home workspace so he can see if anyone comes to the door.
While this does require some investment in cameras, using an old PC to monitor the video coming from those cameras and perhaps relay the video to a service that allows you to view the video remotely on your smartphone is a great use for an old PC, as it can definitely handle that kind of work.
For example, let’s say you work from home and want a camera by the front door and a camera in the nursery and a camera off the back deck to watch for wildlife. You could easily set up an old PC to constantly stream video from all three cameras for you in your workspace.
If you’re interested in doing this, here’s a great guide for turning your old computer into a video surveillance system.
Let’s say that you have a family member or a friend who would love to have their own personal computer to use for things like email, social media, and web surfing. This is a great use for an old computer. You can simply do a fresh install of Windows (or your preferred OS, like Linux mentioned above), install basic security software and a good web browser, and hand it over to them.
This is a great gift for a child who is starting to reach the age where they need to get homework done on a computer, an adult who might not be able to afford a PC of their own, someone in a retirement home who can use the Wi-Fi there to get online, and so on.
Often, for people who need such a computer, a gifted computer like this is a godsend and can make a great positive impact on their life. If you keep it simple, it shouldn’t require much effort or much maintenance on your part, either.
Another use for an old computer that’s just sitting around your home is to donate it. There are many, many charities that can put an older computer to good use, whether for an additional desktop computer for office work, a print server, or something else entirely. It may even be repurposed and given to someone in need.
Before doing this, you would want to carefully clean the entire computer to the best of your ability, inside and out, and wipe all data thoroughly from the computer using a tool like DBAN. The goal is to make sure that wherever the computer winds up, it’s not going to retain any of your personal information.
Don’t just dump a computer on the front step of an organization, either. You’ll want to talk to that organization first and make sure that they actually want the old computer and have a good use for it. Otherwise, you’ve just dumped an additional problem on a charity that’s probably already struggling for time and resources.
One final thing you can do with an old computer is use it for distributed computing. There are many projects out there that will happily use the processing power of your computer to take on a complex data analysis task for the benefit of mankind.
Perhaps the best example of this is Folding @ Home, which is a project that uses computers in people’s homes to do data crunching needed to come up with cures for diseases. The analysis required to come up with many disease cures requires an absurd number of calculations, so the problems are split into tiny pieces and distributed to computers all over the world running the Folding @ Home application.
This is very easy to do, as once you have it set up and running on a PC or Mac, you can just leave it running in the corner without even a keyboard or mouse or monitor installed. It’ll run automatically, swapping data with the Folding @ Home servers and crunching those numbers. It will eat a bit of electricity in doing so, but the processing power is incredibly valuable in terms of being able to solve major health problems.
I have personally used old computers for many of the things listed here, and the ones I haven’t done personally have been done by friends of mine (like the security camera setup). All of these uses are perfect for old computers that you stowed away in a closet somewhere for some reason or an old laptop for sale on Craigslist for $50 or something similar.
Old computers provide opportunities for home decoration, for specific purpose computers, for learning, for helping others get online, for security, and for saving the world. It just requires you to pull that old hardware out of your closet and doing something useful with it.
If you don’t want to do any of these, at least consider finding a charity that wants the computer and donating it after wiping the hard drive. This will at least get the computer into the hands of someone who can and will do something useful and worthwhile with it.
Good luck!
The post 10 Worthwhile Ways To Breathe New Life into Old Computers appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
When that day comes, you’ll find yourself researching mortgages, and you may go straight for the Veterans Affairs (VA) home loan.
VA home loans look attractive: They come with lower interest rates, lower closing costs and no private mortgage insurance (PMI), plus you can put 0% down.
But before you jump right into signing papers, it’s worth taking a closer look to find out if a VA loan is your best option.
A VA home loan is a type of mortgage that helps service members, veterans and eligible surviving spouses become homeowners. You can’t use a VA loan on an income property or a second home; these loans can only be used for your primary residence.
VA loans are provided by private lenders — banks, mortgage companies, etc. — and usually backed by the government for up to 25% of the loan if the homeowner defaults.
Because 25% of the loan is guaranteed by the government, banks can lower eligibility requirements and don’t require you to pay private mortgage insurance.
That means veterans with lower credit scores are frequently approved for more mortgage than they would be otherwise.
“[VA loan] lenders tend to approve a higher mortgage-payment-to-income ratio and a higher total-debt-to-income ratio,” said Doug Nordman of The Military Guide.
But perhaps the most appealing feature of a VA loan is that you can put 0% down.
This might look like a deal, especially on a private’s housing allowance, but you’ll pay for it in other ways.
Before we compare VA loans with other options, let’s look at interest rates vs. APRs, or annual percentage rates. The interest rate is the amount you’ll pay each year to borrow money. The APR includes not just the interest rate, but also charges and fees from the mortgage broker.
VA loans have lower interest rates than conventional loans, but their APRs are higher.
At the time of this writing, one lender was offering a 30-year fixed conventional loan at a 4.62% interest rate with 4.69% APR, and a 30-year fixed VA loan at a 4.5% interest rate with 4.8% APR.
That’s because the VA loan has a funding fee. Instead of paying a set monthly charge for private mortgage insurance (PMI) to the bank, veterans pay a funding fee to the VA that is added at the beginning of the loan and compounds monthly.
The funding fee for regular military is 2.15% when you put 0% down, though it can be lowered by putting a down payment of 5% or more on the house.
For those in the reserves or National Guard, the funding fee is even higher at 2.4%.
It’s easy to look at the numbers with rose-colored glasses because you can afford the monthly payment. But it’s important to look at the big picture when taking on a loan of that size.
When you look at the breakdown of your mortgage, the funding fee will look lower than a PMI payment, but you can get rid of PMI when you reach 20% equity in your home. Unless you pay your funding fee upfront, it stays with you forever.
To put it in perspective: A $200,000 home with $0 down will have a funding fee of $4,300. That $4,300 gets put on the principal, which means you’ll be paying interest on it for 30 years. Even if you refinance, that $4,300 stays there.
The funding fee doesn’t mean the VA loan is bad — it has lots of features that make it a good choice for many service members and veterans. Interest rates are lower, appraisals are more affordable, origination fees are capped at 1%, and you can qualify at a lower credit score.
But it’s even better if you can get the funding fee waived.
Those eligible for a waiver are:
Over 4 million veterans receive VA disability compensation, so a waiver is actually an option for a lot of Americans.
The bottom line: Don’t rush a decision as big as home ownership.
“Research indicates that nearly half of all veterans move yet again within two years of leaving the military, because their bridge career doesn’t work out,” Nordman said. “They end up putting that ‘forever home’ right back on the market, or — even worse — becoming reluctant long-distance landlords.”
Waiting until you’re location-stable will give you time to build your credit and qualify for the best home loan available.
Jen Smith is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder. She gives money saving and debt payoff tips on Instagram at @savingwithspunk.
The Penny Hoarder Promise: We provide accurate, reliable information. Here’s why you can trust us and how we make money.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
Interactive investor, the parent company of Moneywise, has permanently scrapped exit fees for all its customers
The fund supermarket temporarily removed exit fees last December as it prepared to merge with TD Direct.
It has now moved to ban exit fees entirely, with immediate effect. Prior to December 2017, it charged departing customers £10 per holding, capped at £250.
In addition, interactive investor has launched a cashback promotion offer, which will help reduce exit fee costs for new online customers who transfer. This will apply until the end of the year for investors who transfer to interactive investor.
The cashback offer will mean investors receive £100 for investments of between £25,000 and £100,00, £250 for £100,001 to £250,000, £500 for £250,001 to £1,000,000, or £2,000 for transfers of £1,000,001 and above.
Richard Wilson, chief executive of interactive investor, says: “For over 20 years, ii has fought for simple, clear prices so the consumer is free to make the choice that is right for them, without fear of hidden costs or constraints. Exit fees are incompatible with this principle.
“We have made our position clear with the Financial Conduct Authority, during its recent Platform Review, that while competition should be free it should also be fair, and the only effective solution to remedy today’s shoddy practices is to ban exit fees altogether. Talk is cheap, so we hope today’s announcement signals our commitment to stand behind our position.
“In fact, since 2017 we quietly waived all exit fees but we feel now is the time to remove them permanently.”
The Financial Conduct Authority has already proposed banning exit fees, which can often amount to hundreds of pounds. The regulator says the charges discourage customers from moving their money to a different provider and are effectively a barrier to competition.
The reason exit fees can end up being steep is due to the way the charges are applied per holding. Investors pay a fixed fee, typically ranging from £10 to £25, on every holding in their portfolio when switching brokers.
Therefore, someone who has 20 holdings will pay anything between £200 and £500, depending on their broker’s exit fee charge and whether charges are capped at a certain level.
Some fund supermarkets argue that exit fees are a legitimate way to cover the cost of moving a customer’s money. Imposing the charge may help them keep fees lower for other customers.
But sceptics point out that as exit fees can be excessive they can deter investors from shopping around for a better deal.
That’s backed up by a survey of 800 customers by the FCA, which revealed that 26 per cent found exit fees difficult or quite difficult to understand, with 28 per cent of people saying the charges were stopping them from moving providers.
Interactive investor is the second-largest investment platform in the UK. It currently has a total of £20 billion asset under administration (AUM) and 300,00 customers.
That number is set to increase as last month interactive investor agreed a £40 million deal to buy Alliance Trust Savings from Alliance Trust PLC. The deal, subject to regulatory approval, will bring together two of the UK’s largest fixed priced investment platforms in the UK.
The acquisition will result in total assets growing to £35 billion. In addition, customer numbers will increase to 400,000.
In early spring of this year, my husband and I did something drastic: We hired two separate contractors to add a family room addition and new patio to the back of our home.
Our initial idea was to add a three-season room, but we opted to do a traditional room addition when we determined the cost wouldn’t be significantly higher. Tired of our old, rotting deck, uneven paver patio, and excessive flower beds, we also decided to add a new paver patio or stamped concrete patio behind our home.
We did a ton of research to find the right contractors and had seven different people come over to give us quotes. When it came to the actual room addition, we ultimately went with the contractor who could start the project soon at a price we were comfortable with. At $60,000 for the 15-foot-by-25-foot room addition, his quote wasn’t the cheapest. However, we did feel confident in his methods and ability to get the job done.
Fast forward seven months later, and our entire project is fully completed. We have the family room we’ve always wanted, a pretty epic paver patio, and grass in our yard for the first time in several months.
But, it took a lot to get here — a lot of stress, a lot of disappointment, and a whole lot of money, some of which wasn’t exactly planned for.
While our project was well worth it and I’m happy with the results and the feel of my new home, we learned a lot about ourselves and big projects while enduring a long, hot summer with a torn-up backyard. Here are some of the lessons we learned after blowing through $85,000 and adding a room onto our home:
Almost everyone who has built a home or worked with a contractor in some capacity has their own list of horror stories. Sometimes contractors don’t show up. Other times they start jobs and leave them unfinished for months — or even years. Nothing quite that drastic happened during our project, but we did have our share of mishaps.
For starters, our home remodeling project was supposed to be done by mid-July. The thing is, that timeline quickly became impossible since our contractor didn’t even break ground until the end of July! Imagine how stressful that was, considering we spent weeks tearing out the old deck and patio in May. For most of the warm season, our yard was entirely unusable.
This is how my backyard looked for most of the year.
Other problems we encountered along the way included:
The entire project seemed like a comedy of errors sometimes, although it was hard to laugh with so much on the line. I endured many nights with barely any sleep, and countless tears were shed. Each time something went wrong, it was also up to us to sort it out with our general contractor.
Part of “sorting it out” required us to firmly stand our ground and demand that different things were fixed when something went wrong. One situation where we had to be especially firm was when the siding and trim on our addition didn’t line up with our existing siding and trim.
While we didn’t watch the workers like hawks when they put the siding on that day, one would think you would automatically line up the base trim board with the existing one, right? Well, no. The subcontractors who did the siding said that they didn’t line it up and didn’t think it was a big deal.
Why wouldn’t you align the trim boards at the bottom?
But, I did think it was a big deal. There was no way I was going to spend a ton of money on a room addition just for it to have a shoddy, mishandled appearance. Once I noticed the siding was off, I knew it would drive me crazy for decades, and I told my contractor they needed to redo it.
While he initially proposed a few solutions that would make the siding look slightly better, I had to stand my ground and demand it was redone altogether. Our contractor did not want to hear this, but he ultimately agreed. And, in the end, they took off all the siding, added new weatherproofing underneath, and put it all back on.
I know for a fact that they wouldn’t have replaced the siding if we didn’t demand it. And we all know that, if I hadn’t stood up for myself, I would have been stuck with misaligned siding and trim forever.
One reason I was able to force the siding issue is that I didn’t pay the contractor the final half of the bill until the job was over and I was fully satisfied. He did ask for 45% of the total upfront to pay for an architect and all the materials, but I was free to withhold the rest of the payment until the job was complete due to the verbiage in our contract.
I am so glad I knew I shouldn’t pay early — even though our project took longer than expected. I was able to get our siding replaced because our contractor knew full and well that I wasn’t going to pay the bill until I was totally happy with the job.
Another thing we did “right” during our project was taking the time to think through each aspect of the job to come up with a realistic remodeling budget. While we knew the room addition itself was going to cost $60,000, there was so much more we had to pay for in order to receive a finished product. Some of the “extras” for our project included:
Because we thought through almost everything we would need to pay for ahead of time, we were able to save up enough money to cover the project without going into debt. This was very important to me since we paid off our home and didn’t want to have to borrow money again.
No matter how diligent you are, it’s impossible to plan for everything. Due to the excessive wear and tear our project caused, we ended up having to replace our privacy fence after the room addition and yard were complete. The fence didn’t look that great and had been falling down in some places, but we believed we could salvage it and make it last a few more years. In the end, we were wrong.
The fence replacement meant another $8,000 down the drain, although it really does look nice.
My new fence… surprise!
Another surprise bill came when we realized the project took so long we could no longer plant grass and expect it to grow. While we planned to plant seed and grow grass during late summer instead of sodding our entire yard, our late October finish date meant we had to sod, well… basically everything.
This pushed our final landscaping budget up to $2,600 from the $1,800 we had planned for.
My husband and I bought our home for around $187,000 in 2014, and home values in our area have surged since then. By adding a family room and paver patio, we were able to stay in a neighborhood we love, avoid all the hassles and costs that come with moving, and keep all the equity we gained by buying our home below market value in the first place. Based on recent sales in our neighborhood, it appears our home is worth a lot more than we’ve invested into it, factoring in both the initial sales price and the extra money we’ve spent fixing it up.
Now that the project is over and we’re able to enjoy it, I know for a fact that our $85,000 investment offered tremendous value in return. We now have a room we love spending time in, a backyard that’s much more usable than ever before, and an overall look that is much more professional.
While our home remodeling project was a huge pain and way more stressful than it needed to be, I’m still happy with the end result. And despite all the problems we faced, I would do it all again.
When you need more space or need to make a big change to the way you live, sometimes packing up and moving is the answer. Other times, working with what you have can get you a better result with less hassle and stress.
In our case, we spent a lot of money, endured a lot of hassles and headaches, and still feel like we made the right decision. We have $85,000 less in the bank than when we started, but we made our house into our dream home.
Holly Johnson is an award-winning personal finance writer and the author of Zero Down Your Debt. Johnson shares her obsession with frugality, budgeting, and travel at ClubThrifty.com.
More by Holly Johnson:
The post Six Huge Lessons We Learned from a Major Home Remodeling Project appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
