House price went up by 9.7% in the year to February and were 3% higher in the three months to February than in the previous three months, according to new data from Halifax.
Its House Price Index – which put the average price of a house in the UK at £209,495 – also found that house prices fell by 1.4% between January and February.
Want to pay off your student loans three years early? If you get hired for the right job, your employer might do it for you.
Student loan repayment is part of some companies’ benefit packages, according to a new study by Nerdwallet.
By adding the company’s contribution to your regular minimum monthly payment, you can pay off your loans much faster — and pay less in interest. The average borrower, with $29,400 in loans, will save about $4,100 and get out of debt three years sooner than they would on their own.
Financial tech firm CommonBond contributes $100 per month toward employee student loans until those loans are paid off — as long as the employee is still with the company, of course.
At PricewaterhouseCoopers, Fast Company notes, recent grads can receive contributions of $1,200 per year for six years.
The average recent grad has more than $35,000 in student loan debt, according to a 2014 White House Report on millennials. That’s more than the salary for entry-level jobs in many fields.
Who cares about retirement matching when you’re worried about paying back your loans for the next 10 years?
And parental leave is awesome, but the likelihood of you taking that leave in the first few years out of college is pretty low.
Student loan repayment might be the best perk for this young generation. It might even prevent some of the job hopping millennials are notorious for.
Three percent of U.S. employers offer student loan repayment in their benefit packages — so far. What do you do if you don’t work in the financial sector, where these repayment programs seem to be centered?
Registered nurses, nurse practitioners, and nurse faculty working in poor urban and rural regions can apply for the NURSE Corps Loan Repayment Program, which helps pay 60% of unpaid nursing student loans in two years.
Military officers may be eligible for loan repayment programs through their branches.
Teachers can receive loan forgiveness totaling $17,500 of federal loans, so long as they commit to teaching for at least five years.
Full-time teachers at low-income schools or teaching certain subjects may be able to have their federal Perkins loans canceled completely.
Peace Corps volunteers can have 15% of Perkins loans cancelled in their first year of service, 15% for the second year of service, and 20% for each of their third and fourth years served.
Government employees at federal, state, local or tribal levels, along with nonprofit workers, become eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.
But this one is a long game: You must make 120 loan payments (one per month for 10 years, basically), before you can apply to have the remainder of your federal direct loans forgiven.
If you don’t qualify for one of these repayment programs and your employer doesn’t seem to be shaking a tail feather toward its own program, there are still options to make paying your student debt easier.
Consolidating and refinancing your loans could cut months or even years off your repayment schedule. Or try one of these other strategies for paying off your student loans faster.
Your Turn: Do you have a brilliant plan for getting someone else to repay your student loans? Share it in the comments!
Lisa Rowan is a writer, editor, and podcaster living in Washington, D.C. She has a whole boatload of student loans and isn’t shy about celebrating every time she makes a payment.
The post Best Job Perk Ever? These Companies Will Help You Pay Off Your Student Loans appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.
Make a wish!
How much money have you tossed hopefully into fountains in your life? $5? $10? Maybe even $100? (Hope some of those wishes are coming true, big spender.)
As it turns out, we collectively toss a whole lot of change into the world’s wishing wells.
Take, for instance, the beautiful lake in front of the famous Las Vegas Bellagio, which made $12,000 in 2010.
And Rome’s Trevi Fountain regularly makes $3,200… a day. That’s an annual salary well over $1 million.
Even smaller fountains — and those with explicit instructions not to throw money at them, please — pull in thousands of dollars every year.
Just for sitting there and being watery.
How’s that day rate of yours looking?
Good news: All that money you’re throwing away isn’t wasted.
Most of it’s going to various charitable causes, according to Buzzfeed. Some of it, like in New York City’s Bryant Park Fountain, just pays for itself to be dredged and cleaned.
So you can rest assured the money you spend on wishing wells isn’t a total loss.
However, for the best chance at making your wishes come true, we’d still recommend you hoard those pennies rather than chuck ‘em, no matter how lovely the fountain!
Your Turn: How much money have you spent on wishing wells in your lifetime?
Jamie Cattanach (@jamiecattanach) is a junior writer at The Penny Hoarder. She also writes other stuff, like wine reviews and poems.
The post You’ll Never Guess How Much Money We Throw Into Fountains Every Year appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.
You’re checking the backlinks pointing to your site, as you do occasionally, when you see it:
a huge spike in links.
At first, you’re not sure whether to be excited or scared, but when you look closer, your fears are confirmed—you’re being attacked.
Someone is bombarding your site with spam links (like the ones below) in the hopes that you will be penalized by Google.
It’s likely a competitor, but it’s almost impossible to tell who.
While this type of scenario is most likely to happen in competitive niches, it can happen anywhere.
The term for it, as you may know, is negative SEO.
Will it hurt your rankings?
It can. There are many stories in forums of negative SEO causing organic search traffic to crash.
However, you should first understand whether there’s a real risk to your site.
In order to get penalized by Google, the number of spammy backlinks would have to be overwhelmingly huge compared to the number of good links.
For a site such as Quick Sprout, there’s almost no risk that a negative SEO attack would be successful because it has hundreds of thousands of quality links pointing to it.
If your site has only a few hundred links, or even a few thousand, that’s when you need to be concerned.
I have some good news for you (among the bad): If you do get attacked, it sucks. It will cost you weeks or months of lost revenue. However, you can almost always recover from negative attacks.
Additionally, if you follow the four steps that I lay out in this post, you’ll be able to prevent negative SEO attacks from causing any real damage most of the time.
The first thing you should do is get regular updates about your site’s health.
To do that, log in to your Google webmaster tools account and go to Preferences. Next, make sure that the “Enable email notifications” box is checked:
While you can pick specific issues to be notified of, it’s best to set the type to “all issues.”
You’ll immediately get notified if there are any signs of foul play like getting hacked or having malware on your site.
Next, get email updates about new backlinks: The longer you wait to address a negative SEO attack, the more likely it is to be successful.
If you get a daily email that gives you a quick overview about new links pointing to your site, it will be obvious when someone spams your site.
If you see an abnormal quantity of links or tons of links with anchor text such as “pills,” “payday loans,” etc., you have an issue.
There are a few tools that can help you track your backlinks.
A free option is OpenLinkProfiler.
As a free option, it’s limited, but it’s still a decent solution for small sites.
Once you create an account, go to the Backlinks panel, click “Link Alerts,” and then input your website and email:
You’ll then get a daily email that lets you know whether any new backlinks were detected.
Alternatively, Ahrefs (a paid tool) also has this feature, but it has a more reliable (and sizeable) database.
You can either look at new links manually by going to the “new links” page:
Or you can also go to the “email notifications” section and change the status of new/lost backlink notifications to “Daily”:
Again, you’ll get a nice email summary every day.
You don’t need to do anything big with these email summaries. Just take a 10-second scan of them for anything out of the ordinary.
There’s one more type of negative SEO attack you should be aware of although it’s far less common than the ones I mentioned above.
Sometimes, someone doing negative SEO will create a new email account similar to yours (e.g., Neil.Patel38388@gmail.com) and then email sites that link to you asking them to take down the link to your site.
This is clearly unethical, but some people don’t care.
While you can’t monitor all of your links, you can keep track of the best ones.
You can find your best ones with any backlink database tool. On Ahrefs, you type in your site in the “site explorer” tool, and then click on “links” in the sidebar:
This will bring up a list of links to your site, sorted by URL rank by default.
Get to know your top 20 or so links well because they’re likely the ones that will be targeted.
From here, do two things:
Finally, you may be able to prevent a negative SEO attack from being successful by doing all your outreach from an email address for your domain (e.g., Neil@QuickSprout.com).
Then, add a line to your signature that reads something like this:
This is the official email address I use for all matters regarding (site name).
That way, some of your contacts may notice something fishy when they get a removal request from a different email.
This next step applies mostly to local businesses although any website can implement it to be safe.
Many businesses get links from review sites such as Yelp:
These links often carry a lot of weight since Yelp is an authoritative site in the eyes of Google.
However, the quality of the link you get from Yelp depends on how your business is weighed compared to other businesses in your industry.
For example, if someone searches for plumbers in Florida, they get a page like this:
That’s the page that’s most authoritative to Google, not the individual profile pages for each business.
But the profile pages are the ones with links going back to the businesses’ sites.
Finally, the higher up on the page the link is within the search results, the more authority is transferred to the profile page, which is then transferred to the actual business website.
This is because links higher on a page are generally more important than those lower on the page.
A competitor involved in negative SEO has an opportunity to hurt you in a few ways here.
The plan will be to leave negative reviews on your profiles, which will lower your rankings on sites like Yelp. This in turn hurts you by:
If someone resorts to those dirty tactics, react quickly.
Since you should know all your customers, it should be easy to spot fake reviews right away even if they’re well written.
Dealing with them is pretty easy in most cases. Sites like Yelp usually have a “report this review” button available to the owner of the business profile:
The tricky part is finding the fake reviews in the first place and doing it fast enough so that you can remove them before they cause any damage.
To find them, use some sort of a monitoring tool.
Google Alerts is an amazing free tool that is enough for most, but there are also advanced tools you can use if you feel that you need more.
Once you’re signed in, enter the term you want to create an alert for into the text box. Then, click the Options link below to expand your options:
I recommend getting these alerts at least once a day.
You should set up alerts for all the names that could be used for your brand. For example:
From the emails you get, you can quickly find reviews of your brand and its mentions in groups and forums.
This will help you not only protect yourself from negative SEO but also maintain a good brand image in general.
Finally, you also might want to manually monitor specific review sites that are really important to your business.
They could be Yelp, Amazon, Angie’s List, etc. If they send you customers on a regular basis, check in with them once every day or two.
The final step is a last resort.
In theory, the best plan is to just not make any enemies, but even that doesn’t always work.
Eventually, you may be faced with that huge spike of spammy links that threaten to destroy your Google rankings.
You need to make sure that Google doesn’t count those links when the algorithm is deciding where to rank your pages.
It’s a tool that can be dangerous because it can actually harm your rankings if used incorrectly:
Basically, you create a text file that contains all the URLs that should be ignored, and Google will do that the next time it crawls any of those pages.
However, if you disavow a link that was actually helping one of your pages rank well, that page now has one less good link.
What this means is that you need to be careful, and I’ll show you how to do just that.
A possible shortcut: If you have an Ahrefs account with a standard plan or higher, you have access to a disavow feature.
You can turn it on beside the main search bar:
In the link reports, you’ll see an option to disavow a URL or domain by clicking a link:
At any point, you can go to your “disavow links” and export a file that could be uploaded into the disavow tool.
This will save you time in the long run because you don’t need to worry about tracking old links that you’ve disavowed, but it’s not mandatory either if your account doesn’t support it.
Disavowing manually: This is the option that most use, and it works fine.
First, you’ll need to download as many backlinks pointing to your site as possible. It’s difficult to get all the links, but if you use multiple sources, you can get a good number of them.
Start with Google Search Console (former Webmaster Tools). If you go to the backlinks section, there’s an option to download sample links and “latest” links. Do both:
Then download whatever links you can get from backlink databases such as Ahrefs, Majestic, Open Site Explorer, and Open Link Profiler.
Add them all to one giant spreadsheet. All you really need is the URL/domain name.
Here’s the scary part:
You need to determine whether each link is legitimate or not.
This involves a lot of manual tedious work for large sites.
You can use some shortcuts such as:
That’s the bulk of the work. You’ll have to visit many URLs to check them. Consider dividing this work up if you have a team.
Next, you need to strip the trailing URL data so that all you have left is the domain name.
To do that in Excel or Google sheets, use this formula in a column next to the URLs:
=left(B1,find(“/”,B1,9)-1)
Drag the corner of that cell down so that the formula is applied to all the URLs in the column:
In the example above, you’d start with column B and end up with the bare domains in column A.
Next, get rid of the “http://”, “https://”, and “www.”. You can do this with a simple “find and replace” function (replace each phrase with a blank space).
Next, highlight all the domains and remove the duplicates.
Finally, you need to add the term “domain:” in front of all the sites so that the disavow tool knows to discount links from the entire site.
While you can disavow specific URLs, it’s usually best to remove all the links from the spammy domain.
Do this by using the formula:
=”domain:”&A1
Here is the resulting table:
You should now have a list like the one in column B above.
Finally, copy and paste these into a simple text file:
You can add comments using the “#” sign, but those are just for you. The disavow tool simply relays the information about the links to the search engine’s algorithm.
Finally, go into the disavow section of your Webmaster Tools account, and choose the domain that these links affect:
After clicking that button, you can upload your disavow text file.
As long as you did everything right, you’ll get a success message like this:
It’s a lot of tedious work, but it’s not too complicated.
Within a week or two, Google should remove most of those bad links from consideration.
Negative SEO is a terrible business practice, but some people still use it.
I’ve given you a 4-step process that will protect you against the bulk of potential negative SEO attacks or at least limit the damage they do.
I encourage you to employ these steps as soon as possible because they aren’t very useful if you use them long after the damage has been done.
Have you ever been affected by negative SEO? Share your experience in a comment below.
Ken writes:
Golf really isn’t that expensive of a hobby if you do it smartly. My friends jokingly call me the “cheap golfer.” I mostly play at the inexpensive public courses near where I live and I gather up balls that other people have lost and just use those. The only expense really is the green fees and I use coupons most of the time to make that cheaper. I’m not an “every single weekend” golfer but I probably go twenty times a year and I can guarantee it’s cheaper for me than a lot of other hobbies would be.
Ken makes a great point: hobbies really are only as expensive as you make them. However, many hobbies – and golf is certainly one of them – create situations that predispose people to spending a lot of money.
I tend to identify golf as an “expensive hobby” because it shares a few traits with other expensive hobbies. In fact, virtually every expensive hobby has most (if not all) of these traits.
First of all, expensive hobbies often require you to spend to participate. You can’t participate in golf without paying the fee for a round of golf. Similarly, you can’t drink wine without buying an endless supply of wine, so must consumption-based hobbies fall into this category. You can’t dine out at all the latest restaurants in town without keeping your wallet open. You get the idea.
Second, expensive hobbies have an endless array of tempting purchases. With golf, there are always better balls and better clubs and so on that will theoretically make your gameplay better. Almost every consumption-based hobby has new things to try out, from a new craft beer on the market to a new bottle of wine at the store to a new restaurant in town. Those new things are generally expensive and the hobby naturally encourages those purchases.
Third, expensive hobbies are often very well marketed in order to leave you feeling “incomplete” if you don’t indulge in all of the optional buys. I’m not just talking about advertisements here. Most expensive hobbies have a litany of online and offline publications that are packed with articles about things you “need” to buy or places you “need” to visit. All of these things encourage a hobby participant to spend more and more and more in order to have a feeling that they’re “keeping up” with the hobby.
Fourth, the price of new gear and new experiences related to the hobby can be astronomical. Want to golf for a round at Pebble Beach? $500. Not a joke. Want to dine out at Masa in New York City? $2,500 per person. Sure, these are incredibly expensive high end options, but many hobbies have nothing that can even remotely compare to it.
Finally, participating in these hobbies socially can create a “keeping up with the Joneses” effect. If you go golfing and everyone else has expensive gear while you’re using a starter club set and balls you found in the rough, you can feel out of place and feel jealous of their gear. If you go out to eat with friends regularly and they can’t stop talking about some new restaurant, it is going to be very tempting to go there. Those are perfect emotions to encourage you to spend more money.
Each of these factors play into the expense of a hobby, and some hobbies manage to hit all of these factors at once.
Of course, each of these factors points to a smart strategy for saving money on that hobby.
Unless something is in incredibly high demand (where they’re selling out all available slots and items at whatever high price they’re charging), you’re going to be able to find discounts and coupons for that thing if you’re patient and watchful.
There are many different ways of doing this. My preferred method is to simply seek out online forums dedicated to frugal participation in the hobby – for example, this one dedicated to cheap video games. Virtually every pricy hobby has an online forum and community dedicated to participating in that hobby at a discount.
Another good strategy is to sign up for the mailing list of retailers associated with your hobbies, but sign up using a special new email address (through Gmail or another free online email service) that only collects such email so that you can search through it whenever you’re considering a specific purchase.
When you are considering a specific purchase, definitely shop around. Look at a variety of retailers that cater to your hobby, as well as general retailers like Amazon. For example, in the boardgaming hobby, two retailers to always check for prices are CoolStuff and Miniature Market.
If you’re considering paying for an experience or an entry fee, don’t be afraid to haggle. I often do this over the phone. For example, I might call several different golf courses in the area and directly ask if they’re offering any discounts right now as I’m considering golfing in the next day or two. This works well if all of the slots aren’t taken. Sure, most businesses won’t offer a discount, but some will and that can make a big difference.
Rather than focusing on buying the “best” item possible – which usually translates to the most expensive item – focus instead on maximizing your “bang for the buck.” Look for purchases and experiences that offer the most value for the dollar.
Often, the most expensive purchases fall far short in that area. You’ll pay ten times as much for something that’s only 50% better than the next best option, for example. This is particularly true with new items, as new items often come with a premium that will vanish after a while and which makes other versions of the item a great bargain by comparison.
For example, rather than considering all cell phone options when you go to buy one, look instead at just the ones that are free or just a few dollars with your contract renewal and choose the one that best meets your needs from among those options. It will do almost everything that the expensive item will do at a vastly lower price.
Another great example is the library. The “bang for the buck” here is at an awesome price point – you can get the books you want to read or movies you want to watch for exactly $0.
While hobby publications and websites often feel like a fun place to read to learn more about your hobby, most of the time the articles and material there are nothing more than sales pitches for new and high-end items.
Sometimes, the articles are little more than a re-written sales pitch or press release, lauding some new experience or new item as being the greatest thing that has ever existed.
Even when writers have the best of intentions at those publications, they’re often reviewing items that they received for free and thus the cost is not really a factor for them, so of course they’re going to review the ultra-expensive item as being a little better than the moderately-priced item. They’re not actually sacrificing anything in their life for those items.
I’ve come to avoid such publications for my hobbies most of the time. I really only participate in online sites for hobbies that are basically free – like geocaching – or ones that are focused solely on participating in the hobby at a discount.
Sure, high-end purchases can sometimes be better than the “bang for the buck” items ore the more reasonably priced items. At the same time, however, the top-of-the-line items are usually incredibly expensive and rarely add enough features to make the extra cost worthwhile.
Whenever I’m shopping for an item, I almost always just completely ignore the most expensive 10% of options out there. Those choices are eliminated right off the bat for me – I don’t even consider them in my buying process.
Since I immediately put those purchases and experiences as being “out of range,” I’m usually left with a field of options that are reasonably within the same price range and reasonably within the same level of quality. Doing this makes it much easier to choose the option with the best “bang for the buck.”
Like it or not, social influence has a huge impact on which items and experiences you might consider purchasing within your hobby. The things that your friends covet often end up being the things that you covet, and vice versa.
Thus, if you’re participating in a hobby socially, it makes sense to strive to participate in it with people who have a similar frugal “bang for the buck” approach as you do. Actively choose to spend more time with people who have an attitude toward the hobby that doesn’t involve tons of spending, and at the same time pare down your time spent with people who always covet the expensive things and often throw their money down for those things.
You’ll find that your appreciation for the frugal side of your hobbies grows and grows and that your desire for the expensive items dwindles and dwindles.
Using these approaches in concert can turn a hobby that seems to eat up a lot of your money into a hobby that’s still incredibly rich and enjoyable without devouring every spare cent.
I use these approaches for my own hobbies, which includes playing board games, reading, and making home brewed beer. In each of those hobbies, these approaches have helped me to deeply enjoy the hobby while keeping a reasonable and healthy cap on my spending.
Good luck!
The post Managing Expensive Hobbies So They Don’t Destroy You Financially appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Even if you’ve moved past your “New Year, New You” January resolutions, there’s still lots of time to get amped up for spring cleaning.
After all, good Penny Hoarders know clutter can cost you — big-time.
Bonus: We’ve found a way for you to declutter your closet while supporting your favorite school!
Schoola is a secondhand clothing vendor that turns quality hand-me-downs into money for your child’s school.
They sell gently used, donated clothing online at steep discounts from original brand prices.
Plus, 40% of proceeds go directly toward the fundraising campaign of your school of choice. That’s $2 of every $5!
Parent of two Julie Verslues spearheaded a campaign that’s raised more than $11,000 for her daughters’ St. Louis, Missouri, Catholic school, St. Justin the Martyr.
Tired of asking parents to buy goods like cookie dough and wrapping paper, the St. Justin’s Home & School Organization turned to Schoola.
Verslues donated a dozen bags of clothes in the fall of 2013. She was “shocked” to learn her school raked in $340 by spring.
As more parents got involved, the money multiplied.
It’s now funded iPad purchases for students in kindergarten through second grade, as well as a chicken coop.
This year, Verslues plans to put the funds toward a new playground. She estimates the school pulls in $34 per donation bag.
“Schoola is so easy,” Verslues says. “They have coaches available anytime to provide you with all the promotional material, and reminders throughout our clothing drive. We are just a collection point.”
The company also sends coupons and promotions to share with friends and family. It also encourages involvement by allowing you to track when and where your donations sell.
So when that jacket you outgrew last year is keeping someone warm in New England or the Pacific Northwest, you’ll know — even if you’re in the Midwest!
Even if you don’t have a particular school in mind, your donation will benefit someone in need.
In fact, even major athleisure brand Athleta has partnered with Schoola to benefit the Malala Fund, which works to ensure that girls all over the world have access to the education they deserve.
Request a postage-paid bag and fill it with high-quality used kids’ and women’s clothing. Choose a school, or if you’re without an allegiance, ask the site to suggest one for you.
If you know other passionate parents at your child’s school — or just a neighborhood school you care about — you can even set up a school-wide drive.
Schoola makes it simple either way, and they can help get you set up in as little as two weeks.
Or, just shop online for awesome discounted women’s and children’s clothing. You’ll get like-new, name-brand clothing for up to 70% off retail prices!
You can search for a local school or just shop and support a random school. Either way, someone benefits from your purchase!
Psst — did I mention you can get $20 for every friend you refer? Since they’ll get paid, too, it shouldn’t be hard.
Win, win, win.
Your Turn: Will you clean out your closet and support a school with Schoola?
Jamie Cattanach is a junior writer at The Penny Hoarder. She also writes other stuff, like wine reviews and poems — you can read along at http://ift.tt/1RiB7sH.
The post This Woman Raised $11K for Her Kids’ School — Just By Organizing Her Closet appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.
Investors should usually ignore new fund launches. Usually, until a fund has a decent track record it’s not worth looking at because there is so much choice already.
Despite poor returns on cash deposits topping the list of investor worries, more than a quarter of investors are favouring cash individual savings accounts (Isas) this year.
A recent High Court judgement on a pension transfer request could 'open the floodgates' for pension fraud, according to pension scheme administrator Equiniti.
I’ve had another busy month tracking down class-action settlements that will pay you cash.
Last month, I told you about six settlements accepting claims. We covered everything from Blue Buffalo pet food to Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi — even Whirlpool dishwashers!
I’ve tracked down five more class-action settlements this month from major companies like Abercrombie & Fitch, Mitsubishi and Ford.
Most of the time, it only takes a few minutes to file a claim, meaning if you’re eligible, you could get free money just by clicking on the links below.
Let’s stop talking and start making you money!
Did you get unsolicited text messages about upcoming sales at Abercrombie & Fitch, Abercrombie Kids, Hollister or Gilly Hicks?
If so, you could get a portion of Abercrombie’s $10 million class-action settlement!
Abercrombie & Fitch (along with its subsidiaries) agreed to settle accusations the company sent spam texts to customers without consent — or any way to opt out.
The $10-million settlement will be divided up between all those filing claims, but you must file by May 15, 2016.
Abercrombie customers will need to provide the cell phone number where they received the unwanted text messages.
Click here for more details.
Did you pay more for the sweetener Stevia In The Raw because it was labeled as “100% Natural?”
You could be owed $16!
The maker of Stevia In The Raw agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit claiming the product label tricks customers into believing the “100% Natural Zero Calorie Sweetener” is all natural.
It actually contains chemical ingredients dextrose and maltodextrin.
Customers who purchased Stevia In The Raw can get $2 back for every box they bought, up to eight packages.
You don’t need to show any receipts, but you must file a claim form by June 6, 2016.
Are you a current or former owner or lessee of a Ford F-150, Ford F-Super Duty truck, Ford Expedition, Lincoln Navigator or Lincoln Mark LT?
If so, you could receive partial reimbursement for the cost of replacing spark plugs.
Ford and Lincoln owners who kept receipts or other documents showing the cost of replacing the spark plugs will receive higher reimbursement.
However, even if you don’t have any proof to submit with your claim, you can still get up to $50!
If you had your spark plugs replaced, you must file a claim form and submit receipts (if you have them) by Aug. 25, 2016.
Do you bank through HSBC?
You might be owed money from an overdraft fee settlement.
HSBC agreed to pay $30 million to settle allegations the banking giant intentionally posted debit transactions on customer accounts in highest-to-lowest dollar amount order to charge overdraft fees.
If you were charged an overdraft fee after June 30, 2007, you don’t need to do anything to receive a payout from the settlement. You’ll automatically receive a portion of the $30 million settlement.
Those charged an overdraft fee between Dec. 17, 2004, and June 30, 2007, must submit a claim form, as well as bank statements showing the overdraft fees.
You have until June 6, 2016 to file a claim.
Click here for more details.
Did you buy a Mitsubishi LaserVue TV, only to find the video and color quality isn’t as good as you thought it’d be?
If so, Mitsubishi owe you money.
Mitsubishi agreed to offer several options to customers who purchased a LaserVue DLP TV as part of a settlement alleging the TVs have a defect that causes video and color abnormalities.
Mitsubishi TV owners can get a free repair, get reimbursed if you fixed the defect on your own or get a refund of at least $500.
To get money back from the TV settlement, file a claim form and a copy of your receipt showing the date you bought the TV by July 25, 2016.
If you think you qualify for any of these settlements, file a claim before the deadline so you don’t miss out on free money!
And be sure to check in next month to find out more ways to get cash back from even more settlements.
Your Turn: Have you ever received money from a class-action settlement?
Melissa LaFreniere is the News Editor at TopClassActions.com.
The post Abercrombie, Ford or HSBC Might Owe You Money! Here’s How to Find Out appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.
Forget your resume and throw out your LinkedIn profile; here’s a gig you can get with tilt-shift and filters.
If you’re addicted to Instagram, start strategizing to be one of four “Grammasters” working for Netflix.
The temporary gig pays $4,000 and includes travel to iconic European and Middle-Eastern film and TV locations — maybe even a few shooting sites from Netflix originals.
To apply, follow Netflix on Instagram and add hashtag #grammasters3 to three of your Instagram shots by March 6.
While the company’s hoping to stumble upon a few good binge-watchers, you’re encouraged to share your passions and personality in your selected images.
You must be at least 21 to enter, and your account must be set to public.
Twenty-five finalists of the inevitable bajillion entries will be notified via Instagram on March 11. Be sure to check your account over the weekend, because if you don’t respond in a timely manner, they’ll move on to another finalist!
If you’re on the list, your next task will be to do a slew of paperwork, and potentially “upload additional photos to your Instagram account that depict a movie inspired theme, location or scene,” with the applicable hashtag. You might also be interviewed by phone or Skype.
As you might have guessed from the hashtag, this is the third year Instagram is sending amateur photogs to shooting locations. Last year’s team of three visited locations around North America.
Our plan: Start banking vacation days at work and take a two-week working holiday on Netflix’s dime. Talk about a side hustle.
Your Turn: Will you apply to be a Netflix Grammaster?
Lisa Rowan is a writer, editor and podcaster living in Washington, D.C. She would give her own Instagram feed a B-.
The post Dream Job Alert: Netflix Will Pay You $4,000 to Instagram and Travel appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.
Think you have the next great business idea?
How do you know if it’s a money maker or another flop?
Author and blogger, Pat Flynn, offers his tips from his latest book, Will it Fly, on how to make sure your business idea soars.
Flynn’s newest release will teach you how to validate your ideas. In other words, this book is designed to help you determine if your idea for your business will succeed, or if it will struggle and ultimately fail.
Will It Fly? takes you and your ideas through extensive exercises to determine:
In other words, will it fly?
Chock-full of practical suggestions you can apply to your business idea today, Will It Fly? combines action-based exercises, small-scale ‘litmus tests’, and real-world case studies with anecdotes from the author s personal experience of making money online, hosting successful podcasts, testing niche sites, and launching several online businesses.
Will It Fly? will challenge you to think critically, act deliberately, and dare greatly. You can think of the book as your business flight manual, something you can refer to for honest and straight-forward advice as you begin to test your idea and build a business that takes off and soars.
Pat’s blog – Smart Passive Income
Over 1.5 million customers have made claims against Barclays for mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI), with the average pay out worth £1,808, according to the bank’s end of year accounts, published today.
Warehouse membership clubs can save you money if you shop smart.
The big three — Sam’s Club, Costco and BJ’s — offer significant savings and benefits to their more than 120 million members, said L.A. Times consumer columnist David Lazarus in an interview on Marketplace.org.
While annual membership fees typically start at around $50 and go up from there, offering more incentives and benefits at higher levels, many members leave money on the table by not taking advantage of everything membership has to offer.
While your trip to the warehouse club will not entirely replace going to the grocery store, Today.com reports that, “according to a Consumers’ Checkbook survey published by the not-for-profit Center for the Study of Services, BJ’s prices were on average 29% lower, Costco’s 30% lower, and Sam’s 33% lower than the largest supermarket chains.”
Adds Lazarus, “According to one recent study, any family that spends about $150 a week at a typical supermarket could save more than $2,000 a year shopping at these big clubs.”
Make the most of your membership fee with these strategies.
It sounds simple, but many people overlook this option: Compare prices on your common purchases between the warehouse store and your usual grocery store.
Lifehacker.com suggests “[using] your old grocery receipts and a day pass to the warehouse store to see how much a membership would — or wouldn’t — save you.”
Frugal Farmer blogger Laurie notices her biggest savings on dairy products. “Just on dairy products alone, our family saves a good 30-40% off of regular Walmart grocery store prices when we buy at the warehouse club instead,” she shares in an article on Frugalrules.com.
If you find a friend to split the cost of the membership with you, you’ll both save and no one has to store or use everything you buy.
Another option, if you live near family members with memberships of their own, is to tag along on their shopping trips to pick up a few items without committing to a membership.
Warehouse stores aren’t just good for toothpaste and toilet paper. Be sure to thoroughly review the membership pamphlets and paperwork available at the club you join to see what else they offer.
Other deals available at your store might include:
Many clubs also sell gas at a discounted rate.
In fact, his warehouse club is the only place my father fills up, often saving up to 10 cents a gallon over nearby gas stations.
You could save up to 50% on big-ticket electronics when you purchase them at a warehouse club, according to Allyou.com.
Trent at The Simple Dollar suggests this might be the sweetest deal of all.
“Many prescriptions are substantially cheaper through warehouses, so this can be a real boon to your budget. For example, 100 pills that cost $40 at WalMart may run just $10 to $12 at Sam’s Club. Surveys indicate you can save anywhere from 25 to 77% on many prescriptions at a warehouse.”
Sam’s Club shares on their website that “in 2012, plus members using the discount saved on average $16 per prescription versus the regular Sam’s retail price.” (Like this idea? Click to tweet it!)
While not all the clubs outline their exact member benefits and savings on their websites, Sam’s Club boasts $40 off a regular-priced pair of prescription eyeglasses as well as free hearing tests and health screenings at some of their locations.
You can save 35% or more on hard liquor and 25% on beer, according to Consumer Reports, with the best savings on high-end items.
The Organic Consumers Association offers these suggestions in their website’s Dollar Stretcher feature:
“The big warehouse stores are carrying more and more organic products and you can often get a great deal. In our area, eggs, canned tomatoes, milk, dog food … and environmentally friendly laundry soap are cheaper here than anywhere else.”
Consumer Savings expert Sarah Platte found and shared with KARE 11 in Minnesota that “for a 52-pound bag of dog food, it will be $24.99 at a warehouse club — the same price as a 30-pound bag at the grocery store.”
She suggests stocking up, since the warehouse price is 40% cheaper.
Yahoo Finance suggests that, “the price may be cheaper and the installation practically free. What’s more, your tires can be changed while you shop, making it a convenient way to cross one more thing off your to-do list.”
It’s not something many people like to think about, but these items can be pricy.
Both BJ’s and Costco offer caskets and urns for sale online with shipping included. The rates are most likely less than you’ll pay at your local funeral home and FTC regulations protect your right to shop for your casket or urn anywhere without the funeral home charging an additional fee.
It pays to read the membership paperwork at your local club.
Other benefits can include discounted movie tickets, small business loans, discounted merchant services processing for businesses, or discounts on car purchases and travel.
Looking for an even better deal? In many states, you can skip the membership and still save on alcohol and prescription drugs.
According to KnowHowTo.com, “what Costco and other warehouse clubs such as Sam’s Club don’t tell you is that there are a couple of items that they are legally obliged to sell to anyone in the general public — even if you don’t have a paid membership.”
States where you can purchase alcohol without a membership include California, New York, Hawaii, Texas and apparently my home state of Massachusetts. You’ll need to do some investigation of your state’s rules and regulations or speak to a manager at your local warehouse club to see what rules regarding alcohol sales apply to your state.
As for prescription drugs, Trent at The Simple Dollar notes, “Federal law stipulates warehouse stores may not require club membership to use the pharmacy, meaning you don’t need to recoup a membership fee to save money on prescriptions.”
KnowHowTo.com states, “unlike the alcohol regulations, purchasing medication without a membership is nationwide and is very well known.” If you’re having issues, get in touch with your state’s pharmacy board.
Your Turn: Are you a member of a warehouse club? How do you make the most of your membership?
Ally Piper is a writer, designer and marketing director living on Cape Cod. She blogs about life, business and balance at allypiper.com.
The post Have a Costco or Sam’s Club Membership? Here’s How to Get Your Money’s Worth appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.
I’ve read it in emails and Facebook messages from readers. I’ve heard it from people who I talk to about The Simple Dollar. I even hear it when I do interviews.
“What you’re describing just isn’t possible for a modern family.”
“I can’t even come close to doing this. It’s just not realistic.”
“I call shenanigans. There’s no way you paid off tens of thousands of dollars of debt in a year while your household income was well below $100,000.”
“The only way you could pull that off is if you had a bunch of secret income that you’re not talking about.”
The truth is that being completely free from debt certainly is possible. It is realistic. And it doesn’t require a bunch of secret income (though that would make it easier).
I’m going to explain in the clearest terms possible exactly how my wife and I paid off tens of thousands of dollars in consumer debt over a period of a little over a year, then paid off a six figure mortgage in about four and a half years. If you’ve ever doubted how it could be done, or you want a clear explanation to convince your spouse that this is the path you should be following, this is the article to share.
First of all, let’s look at our situation at the start of all of this. Sarah and I lived in a tiny apartment with our infant son. It was theoretically a two bedroom apartment, though the second bedroom was practically a glorified closet.
Sarah and I both had reasonably good jobs, but we were only a few years out of college. Our combined income was far less than $100,000 a year, though we had dreams of seeing that income grow over time. I supplemented my job income with a number of side businesses and other gigs – I played online poker, did some computer repair work, and earned just a tiny trickle from blogging – but it didn’t really add a whole lot to the heap. Our income remained well below $100,000 a year.
However, we spent like we earned more than that. We had all the latest gadgets. We had all the cable channels. We had piles of DVDs and video games. We both drove pretty nice cars that weren’t very old. We went out to eat a lot.
The reality was that we were spending a lot more than we earned. Not only were we dealing with student loans that were well into the five figures, we also had a pile of credit card debt that had inched into the five figures as well and saw no signs of abating. We also had two outstanding car loans.
It was not a good situation and, in April 2006, we reached a point where we were starting to struggle to pay the bills. Our visions and dreams for the future looked cloudier than ever.
I’m going to guess that quite a few readers know exactly what I’m talking about here. This probably sounds like you at some point in your life, perhaps even today.
So, what did we do?
It doesn’t take much reading about personal finance to realize that all of it really boils down to five magic words.
Spend less than you earn.
Everything else is just a specific implementation of that sentence. If you are spending less than you earn, you are going to be heading in the right direction almost regardless of what you’re specifically doing. Similarly, if you’re spending more than you earn, you’re heading in the wrong direction.
So, our first step was to figure out how we could start spending less than we earned.
The first thing we did was make an old-fashioned budget, not so that we could live by it, but so we could see where our money was going. At the time, we used a software package that is now defunct called Microsoft Money. Today, I’d probably encourage people to use the free Pear Budget spreadsheet to get started.
We simply went through and figured out every dime that we spent over the course of a few months, using receipts, bank statements, and credit card statements. We divided that money into some sensible categories – rent, utilities, entertainment, food at home, eating out, hobbies. The point of the categories was to see how much we were really spending each month in various areas. How much were we blowing on entertainment in an average month?
The results were painful to say the least. We were spending over $1,000 a month on eating out. We were spending over $1,000 a month on entertainment and hobbies. Huge, huge numbers.
So, obviously, we needed to cut back in those areas. But there was another problem at the same time. We were actually mailing out about $2,000 a month in debt repayments. (If you start adding these numbers together, you’re getting a picture of how precarious our situation was.)
Together, we came up with a game plan to address all of these things.
First, we stuck a fairly tight allowance for each of us on our hobby/entertainment spending and on our “eating out” spending. We didn’t drop it to zero, but we agreed to limits for each of us in those categories. I don’t remember the exact number, but let’s say we agreed to each limit our entertainment and hobby spending to $100 a month, which drops our monthly total from “over $1,000″ to $200. We also dropped our “eating out” budget by a large amount, though mine was slightly higher due to a work custom of my work group eating out together twice a week.
That may be too tight for some people, but let me tell you this: when you apply that kind of cap, you begin to quickly see how much of your spending is utterly forgettable. So much of the hobby and entertainment and eating out money that we previously spent in a given month just kind of disappeared, as it was spent on things that were almost entirely forgettable.
In other words, when you cut down on your spending in these kinds of non-essential categories, the things that go away first are the most forgettable purchases. If you cut your budget by half when it comes to entertainment spending, what you’re going to eliminate is the 50% that you care about the least and, honestly, you barely notice it. This often surprises people who actually commit to these kinds of changes because when they think about their entertainment or their hobby spending, they think about the handful of things that they care about the most and dread the idea of cutting them. The truth is that unless you’re cutting to practically zero, you’re not going to be giving up those things that you’re thinking about. Instead, you’re going to be giving up the things that you’re forgetting about, the little forgettable expenses. The books you didn’t enjoy. The forgettable meals. The DVDs that just sit on your shelf. The membership that you never use.
We gave up things like buying more books when we already have a ton of unread books on our shelves and a well-stocked library within walking distance of our apartment, for example. We eliminated a bunch of channels that we basically never watched from our cable service. We actually started digging into some of our backlog of unread books, unplayed games, and unwatched DVDs, as well as hitting the library that was just down the street and checking out other DVDs and books. And, honestly, we really didn’t notice the changes very much, even though we expected it to be miserable. We could still spend money when we really cared about something. We just stopped spending when it wasn’t important.
In terms of food, we just started cooking stuff at home a lot. This was a transition that was already happening due to the new presence of a baby in our home, of course. We simply taught ourselves how to make different meals – and, yes, some were disasters at first. Eventually, though, we learned what meals we liked and we built up skills that made making those meals pretty easy and quick, and we started taking leftovers to work more and more often. Cooking at home was probably the most noticeable change in our life, honestly.
We also started looking for ways to spend less without making significant lifestyle changes. We started adopting what little energy efficiency improvements we could get away with in our apartment, like switching our incandescent bulbs to CFLs (LED bulbs weren’t on the market yet at that point). We put a weather strip on the two outside doors in our apartment, which helped with drafts in both the winter and summer.
These changes brought us to a point where, month over month, we were actually spending significantly less than we were earning. These changes trimmed somewhere around $2,000 a month from our monthly spending and we were previously in a situation where we were spending $500 a month more than we were bringing in. We were now spending less than we earned and we had a lot of money to throw at our debts.
Our first step was making lifestyle changes, but it took a little while for the financial benefits of those lifestyle changes to really start making themselves apparent in our checking account. At the end of the first month, we definitely had more than we started the month with, but it was merely enough to make a big payment on one debt.
We wanted to start slashing those debts. We were making almost $2,000 a month in debt payments, so the sooner they started disappearing, the better.
We took the common advice from personal finance books and lined up our debts according to interest rate. Interestingly, this was almost exactly the same order as if we lined them up from smallest to largest, as the smallest debts seemed to have higher interest rates (credit cards, in other words).
Our plan was to keep making minimum payments on all debts, but to also make extra payments on the first debt in line – the one with the highest interest rate – until it was gone, then move on to the next one. Since we no longer had to make those minimum payments on the debts that we’d already paid off, this meant that we were able to make progressively bigger and bigger extra payments each month.
Still, we wanted to start off with a bang.
What I did – this was mostly my project, though Sarah helped – was go through a lot of my various collections and possessions and identify which items that I rarely looked at or used. I had a sizable vintage baseball card collection and Magic: the Gathering collection, most of which just sat in boxes for months and years without me even looking at them, so I sold those off. I went through our DVD collection and identified ones that we were highly unlikely to ever watch again and sold all of those off (I remember selling off many full seasons of television shows).
The big key was to not fall into nostalgia traps with the stuff I was considering selling. Looking at some of those items brought back waves of memories and nostalgia, but if I was honest with myself, it was clear that my life had changed and moved on.
I used eBay and Craigslist for most of the sales, and I took the money from those sales and applied all of it to extra debt payments. In the end, I sold off a bunch of stuff that I didn’t regret in the least and used that money to pay off the first two or three debts in line in their entirety.
That opening salvo trimmed the amount that was going toward debt minimum payments by a few hundred a month. That, along with the fact that we were now spending significantly less than we earned in the other areas of our life, made it possible to pay down the remaining debts with tremendous speed. Roll forward a little over a year and all of our debts were paid off in full.
That’s all we did. There was no secret additional income. I did start The Simple Dollar in that timeframe, but it earned almost no money for the first year or so of existence. There was no bonus at work. There was no inheritance.
We just cut back hard on our most forgettable spending, sold off some of our most forgettable and unused possessions, and applied all of it directly toward debt. Nothing more, nothing less.
Around the time that we achieved freedom from debt, we decided that we needed to move out of the apartment we lived in. Our second child was on the way and our apartment was simply not going to work well for a family of four.
We looked at a lot of options – houses for rent, larger apartments, and houses for sale. We eventually decided on a house for sale, which required us to take on a large mortgage – well into the six figures.
Going back into debt in that way after achieving debt freedom was a bit frustrating, sure, but we knew we had the skills to tackle it.
So, in mid-2007, we moved into a house with a big mortgage attached to it. It’s a pretty typical story.
In the latter half of 2007 and early 2008, The Simple Dollar took off like a rocket, becoming a huge success but also a huge personal time investment for me. During that period, we had a very healthy boost to our income, most of which went toward the costs associated with moving and furnishing our home as well as toward some big initial payments on our mortgage.
Then, in early 2008, I made the decision to start working on The Simple Dollar full time, which knocked the legs out from under our income for a while. Our income dropped below where it was a year prior. Sarah and I believed in what The Simple Dollar could become if I was devoting more than a couple hours a day in the evening to it.
Through all of this, we kept paying down our mortgage as fast as possible. Sarah and I kept contributing to our retirement plans, and when I switched careers, I started saving in a Roth IRA.
There’s something extremely important to note here, something that is vital to making a great financial future for yourself. Spending less than you earn is not a short-term fad. It is a change to how you live your life.
Many people approach personal finance change like they approach a diet. They make a bunch of very tight changes to their life, changes that aren’t sustainable over the long haul. They pledge to spend $0 on their hobbies and never eat out and so forth. They sell off a bunch of stuff that they actually really care about and come to regret it.
And then, like with many diets, it all fails. There are huge spending binges and you end up right back where you started.
One of the biggest keys to turning your life around financially is making sure the changes you’re making are sustainable, but that you don’t give into short-term temptations either. There are absolutely times where I want to spend my money on something I don’t really need, but those temptations fade pretty quickly if I don’t act on them impulsively. I usually just make a note of some item that I want so I can feel like I’ve “taken action” on it and then I usually just forget about it entirely, because the desire was very temporary.
Don’t make changes to your life that you can’t sustain, and if you do, just go back on that one change that isn’t sustainable. However, having said that, don’t be afraid to try out some changes, even those that seem like they might be tough. Quite often, you’ll find it’s not nearly as hard as you think, and if it is, just roll it back and try a different approach. The key is to never stop trying to improve, never stop trying to find the peak of your fulfillment curve.
The biggest challenge of this path for many people – and it can be for us as well – is overcoming temptations. We see stuff, we want it. It’s even worse when we know quite well that we have plenty of money in the bank to pay for it without skipping a beat.
The real trick to overcoming that kind of temptation is twofold. First, you have to recognize that the vast majority of those temptations are extremely fleeting. You won’t remember most of them in a few hours, let alone a few days. Second, television and the internet are giant floods of temptations. Between ads and direct product placement in the content, they often serve just to tempt you into wanting things that you hadn’t even heard of before you started watching or clicking – which means that you don’t really need the stuff at all.
I solve that conundrum by consciously spending less time watching unplanned television (meaning if I catch myself channel surfing or just browsing a streaming service, I find something else to do) or browsing websites without purpose (again, if I catch myself doing it, I go do something else). If I find that I’m wanting to buy something, I add it to a list somewhere and then tell myself I’ll buy it later if I still want it. Most of the time, I just end up purging those lists in a month or two.
So, throughout all of these changes – a new house, a new career, a second child, a third child – Sarah and I stuck with our financial changes – most of them, anyway – and we kept trying new things. Our children became very familiar with every park within a twenty mile radius of our house. We switched our light bulbs from the incandescents that were installed in the house when we moved in to CFLs and then eventually to LEDs. We started making meals and freezing them, to the point that today that we have most of a deep freezer full of meals that just need to be thawed and cooked. The list of these little changes go on and on.
In 2011, we paid off our entire mortgage and became fully debt free. Not too long after that, I sold The Simple Dollar to a company that specializes in managing blogs – it was getting to the point where I had a handful of part-time employees in place just to keep the thing running – and signed a contract as a long-term writer for the site, which I’m still doing.
Since then, our primary goal has been financial independence, meaning that we’re striving to reach a point where we have enough in investments so that we no longer have to work for an income and can meet our annual spending needs just from the income from those investments. We’re hoping to reach that point at about the time our youngest son leaves the nest.
We’re still operating with many of the same principles we started with in 2006. It’s all about spending less than we earn, and we do that by a very healthy margin. It’s all about keeping our non-essential spending under control, and we still put a monthly cap on our spending on non-essentials and keep a watchful eye on any lifestyle inflation.
There is no magic trick. That’s really all there is to it.
You can do it, too. It’s not impossible. It doesn’t require a miserable life. It just requires you to get a grip on the most wasteful parts of your spending and find a happy balance that provides true fulfillment.
Are you willing to make some changes and build the life you want? The ball is in your court.
The post “It’s Not Possible.” appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
