Fuzzy’s Financial Blog

While checking the college savings programs I participate in I noticed that UPromise has come out with a new program. The are eCoupons and they get associated to your grocery store loyalty cards. What does this mean to you? Well now instead of just earning a little here and there off of your purchases you can activate the ecoupon and then purchase the item earning extra money. And the more money the better right.

AOL’s Shortcuts.com is out there for eCoupons also, currently they are only good for Kroger stores. Then there is SmartSource currently serving Golden Eagle customers. And coupons.com is currently working on an eCoupon solution along with their print coupons.

And if you have a data enabled cell phone you can use programs such as Cellfire and QPonix. These use coupon codes that you can give the cashier in certain store chains.

If you find any other programs feel free to let me know.

If you are like me and have idle gift cards lying around then you could possibly earn interest on them. A site called LeverageCard allows you to register a large number of different gift cards and you can earn either 1% or 3.65% interest a week on them.

While this may not add up to alot it is basically free money that is being earned off of the gift card until you use it, and if you actually lose the card you still have the possibility of using it online from the saved information. I have been using it for almost a year now and I am up to $8 earned over the year. Leveragecard is a great service and it is still under going further improvements. 

If you have gift cards you can’t use because you recieved it as a gift and the store is not in your area you can use the gift card swap feature. It may take some time before they match the gift card with someone who wants that card at the specific denomination. Once the gift cards are matched you simply send the card to the other person and they send you the card you want.

Any other gift card opportunities out there like LeverageCard that you know of let me know.

If you have not heard of social lending or peer to peer lending then you may be missing out on an opportunity to diversify your total investment portfolio. While there is various levels of risk in any investment lending money has its own risks and there are programs out there to help mitigate that risk and also allows you to choose your risk comfort level. These sites allow you to loan out money to people, or borrow money as the case may be, in smaller packets then loaning out the entire amount to someone.

Well what do I mean in smaller packets, well if a person is looking to borrow $5000 and all you have to risk is $100 you would put up your $100 at an apr you like and other like minded investors put up funds starting at $50 to fulfill the loan. What does this mean to you? Well for starters you are risking only what you feel you can risk and earning what can be a decent interest on the money you put forth. What it also means is if the loan goes into default you are only out a small amount as opposed to the entire $5000, and then there is the possibility of collections.

If you want to loan money and at the same time help others by funding their education then Fynanz is for you. You can get friends on their and if you loan to the student they can recieve a match of what you put up to loan them dollar for dollar. These loans are like standard student loans and can be deferred while still in school and can range from 5, 7 or 10 year loans, the interest rate will be determined by auction style bidding. You can start loaning money with as little as $50. Fynanz also will guarantee a portion of the loan depending on the borrowers credit anywhere from 50% to 100%, very handy and helps to cover your money.

Want to start seeing the money within a month then Prosper is more your style. These loans can be for pretty much any thing and are for a set three year period. This is another auction style loan place where you can bid amounts starting at $50 and the lower the interest rates are the winners. Just because you bid on a loan and it was filled does not mean that loan will actually get filled, before Prosper considers the loan valid the borrower is given the option to accept the interest rate they end up with or try and get a new loan request filled, Prosper will also go back over the loan information to ensure it is a valid loan.

There are other social lending sites out there but not all sites pay interest on your loans to you. Prosper and Fynanz are both for in the United States. There are other programs available for Europe, Australia and Asia.

So you have gotten tired of taking your film to get developed and went and bought a good digital camera. You have been using it for awhile and now your running into a different issue, you have all these photos just sitting on your hard drive collecting virtual dust. Well have you thought about trying to sell your pictures? Even if you are not a professional you may be able to sell some of your photographs as stock photos.

Stock photographs are images or pictures that are used for various things, like the image at the top of this screen. While most of these are of places and objects some pictures of people can work to. If a person is a focal point of the photograph you will need to have a model release form to try and sell the photo but most other photographs will be fine, as long as it is of high quality and at least 4 megapixels.

Where can you place your photos for possible sale? Well that is easy there are several stock photo sites available to you. You can join one or many, but if you use one exclusively you can earn more money. Some sites are more restrictive then others, some have a tougher initial submission review with easier submission review after the first. So now you may be wondering what sites are these, well here are a few Fotolia, iStockPhotos, Dreamstime, Crestock, and 123RF. 

If you don’t want to go the route of the above mentioned stock photo sites you can create your own site and sell your photographs that way, but to start you may not have as much traffic, although this does show that you are a photographer better.

And you can submit your photos to photo sharing sites and while this may not actually make you any money if you include a link to your website or photo locations letting people know that the image can be bought you can potentially make money this way to. Check out Flickr or Webshots to suit your needs.

Of course if you are good you can make money from your photography by doing portraits and this would be done offline but you can advertise online.

Do you have a hobby you make money from online please let me know I am always interested.

Don’t you wish you could make money from your computer while you sleep? Well you can now with Gomez Peer. This is a paid distributed computing software model that is testing various websites uptime. The current pay design is the following:

While the maximum payout is currently $45 that is money that your computer is earning no matter what you are doing. You can even install the software on multiple computers to insure that you make money. Be warned though you can’t have multiple accounts or you will be banned. We shall see if I make any moeny from this next month.

I love when I see another article that just makes me feel better about decisions I have made in the past. Such as this article “The Health Scare Lurking In Your Retirement Plan” by Suze Orman on Yahoo. What this article is talking about is how it is estimated that in retirement a 65 year old couple can expect to pay over $300,000 in retirement for medical expenses and can go as high as $1,000,000. That can be quite a lot and this is on top of what medicare will cover.

What Suze is basically advocating is if you are younger and the plan works for you use a high deductible health plan(HDHP) paired with an health savings account(HSA). While this option will not work for everyone, especially if you typically have a high amount of medical expenses it is an option to look into. One problem you may run into is that while you are building up the savings in your HSA is if you suddenly have a several large incidents occur that are greater then your savings and seperately are below your deductible limit and together are below your max out of pocket expense limit, but there is hope you can talk to the doctors when these incidents occur to help keeps costs low and even afterwards you can negotiate to get the total amount lowered.

You jsut need to think smarter when you are using these plans, shop around and remember to negotiate. Personally I put the savings from what the premium I would pay from my old health plan and the the premium on the HDHP into my HSA. These  can be a greater opportunity to lower your health care costs and increase your savings.

We all get that electric bill some are just smaller then others, or pay you money. Why is it that someone who has a bigger place winds up paying less a month in electricity? Its simple they use energy efficient items.

Do you know how much money just your lighting is costing you in a month? If you are using a standard incadecent light bulb you on average or spending about $7 a month to run that light. Switching to an energy efficient CCFL or cold cathode flourecent lighting will save you about $3 a month and will have paid for themselves in about a year with an average life of five to eight years. You can save even more by going with LED lighting, but the initial cost tends to be greater then the CCFL lights and they are more of a directional light. Future technology is working to disperse the LED lighting better.

If you still have single pane windows your heating or cooling is mostly going out the window. Replacing the single pane windows with double or even triple pane windows greatly enhance your home and provides better insulation. Some windows are even gas filled with different gasses to provide more insulation.

If you have an electric water heater placing the heater on a timer will save alot of money. And if you do need hot water while you have the heater off you can turn it on and in about 15 minutes you will have hot water. While you are looking at your water heater insulating the pipes can help retain the heat. And wrapping the water heater in an insulating blanket can help keep the heat longer, but beware some water heaters are designed to not be used with an insulating blanket and the blanket will actually do nothing to help.

Insuring that you have adequate insulation will help your bills too. Where there is not insulation is sapping your heating or cooling. Consider getting some outlet insulation pad which you can install in the electrical outlet boxes on your outside walls to help.

Consider putting electronics you don’t use as often on a power strip and turning the strip off when you aren’t using them. Electronics whether they are on or off are drawing electricity when plugged into the wall, when they are off they are using less electricity then when they are on but unplugging them or putting them on a power strip turned off means you are not leaking money out the electrical lines.

How do people make money from the electric company? Well they install power generators in their home. These can be solar, wind or water powered generators. Solar power is becoming all the rage, but it is expensive to setup and will take 5-15 years to recoup the costs of the systems, but there are tax advantages offered to help offset the costs. If you use energy efficient living ideas then when you are not home the solar power that you are not using will be going back into the elctric grid(you did connect it to the grid right) and then electric company will actually pay you for the energy. Even if you live in a cloudy area solar power will work for you since they work off of different wave lengths of light, at night there is still a little bit of power be generated but not much.Wind power requires more space, and water power has a greater environmental impact since you are messing with the flow of streams and such.

Buy appliances with the energy star symbol on it. These devices have met the Energy star requirements for their electric usage.

Clean out that refridgerator, refridgerators work best when there is space around items if your fridge is so packed that there is no real air flow around items then the refridgerator has to work hard pulling more electricity. The freezer is just the opposit, here it is alot more efficient the more packed it is.

Once a month vacuuming out your dryer vent and inside the lint trap will greatly improve the efficiency of your dryer. This not only lowers drying times but lowers the wear and tear on your dryer making it last longer.

Any other energy savings ideas you have? I know I have more that I will give at a later time. Have a nice day.

Most people drive a car and if you drive a car you a required to have car insurance. No one likes having automobile insurance but it is a necessary evil. So what can you do to help limit this financial sink hole?

Many items affect the price of your premium. The first one is what color and make of car it is. If you are driving a performance vehicle the premiums are higher, the same is true if you have a vehicle that is a prime theft target. The next would be your driving history for the last three years, if you have been in any accidents or gotten any tickets you will pay more. If you haven’t had insurance for the past six months your premiums will be higher. And don’t forget if you have bad credit this can also increase your premiums, since obviously if your credit is bad then you are a terrible driver or more likely to file a claim. If you still have a loan on your vehicle then you are supposed to have comprehensive and collision insurance also, sometimes refered to as having full coverage. The younger you are the higher the premium and once you start going over 55 you may find your premiums rising also. And there are others I am sure, like being a male driver.

So wow after all those items which can raise your premiums what can you do to lower your premiums? Well you can receive discounts for being married. Having a clean driving record is really good. Improving your credit score and maintaining insurance for longer then 6 months will help lower it too. Sticking with the same insurance company can trigger loyalty discounts over time. If you can insure all your vehicles, boat and home with the same insurance company and you can often recieve a discount, some people have wound up paying the same amount for there car insurance but basically gotten the home insurance for free. One of the easiest ways is to only get the state minimum required insurance and then increasing your deductible. The higher your deductible the lower your premiums will be.

And do some shopping around for insurance, you will find large differences between the insurance companies. While you do need to watch the service from some companies others are cheaper and do provide good service while still being timely with claims.

Picture this, you come home from work and check the mail. You get back inside sit down on your recliner while popping open a beer.  You start sorting through your mail and you open up a letter from your mortgage company. What does that letter say, well of course it says you are two months past due on your payments.

Wait a second I have that getting sent out through my banks bill pay service and I know the money has been getting withdrawn. So you go and check your banks bill pay to make sure you have all the right information in there and sure enough it is all correct. so you hop  over to your mortgage companies website and check, yep they have been getting the payments. Now you are worried yet alright so you try and call them only to find out it is after hours and no operators are available to assist you.

Now you can’t sleep because you are worried you missed something and you really aren’t caught up. Was that a siren are they sending the sheriff to serve me foreclosure papers now? Oh know what is going to happen. The morning come and first thing you call the mortgage company and get ahold of an operator, you tell them you got this notice saying you are two months past due, well of course they tell you that everything is current and that sometimes when you do payment through your banks bill pay and not them it messes up there system and it sends out erroneous letters.

What in the world that makes no sense at all, if all the computer systems you can access say that you are current and they have been receiving the payments when they are sent then why the letter? It really must be some serious time lag between systems to get a two month past due notice when you have been paying each month.

Anyways have a nice day, I have had my excitement for the week.

Every one likes free, but how many people actually look for free items or services? There are many opportunities out there that people do not realise. Free goods and services are a great way to increase those dollars.

If you only watch a few different shows on cable and are never home to watch them then consider getting rid of your cable tv access and using Hulu.com. While it does not have every tv show it does have a wide selection to choose from and even some movie. If the shows you watch are on Hulu then get rid of the cable and just use Hulu. And if your show is not on there you can check with the different networks website ABC, CBS, NBC and the SciFi channel among others.

Don’t know that phone number to call for that great restaurant downtown? Then call the free directory assitance at 1-800-FREE-411. Offering free residential and commercial listing guidance. After navigating the voice prompts, and an ad(hey gotta make money somehow) you are given the option to connect to the business you wanted or to the advertisement sponsor.

How about free savings for college? Saving for you children’s college is one of my personal favorites as you can tell from some of my other blog postings, such as Rethinking college loans. There are several free programs out there to help you save for college. UPromise is one of my favorite and very easy to use register your grocery store VIP cards and your credit card and you can earn money buying groceries or eating out at some restaurants. You can earn savings online shopping for college with Baby Mint or littlegrad. There are a few other but those are the best three I have found.

Kill that junk mail with a few free programs too. You can end those pre-approved credit card offers by going to optoutprescreen or by  calling 888-567-8688. To stop recieving those wonderful catalogs that you don’t want goto catalogchoice.org and they will do all the work of getting you address removed for you.

Everyones favorite is free books. This is simple goto your local public library, sure you need to return them but you don’t have to buy them and I am sure you will be able to find something you want to read. Just make sure you return them on time or you will start paying fees.

Save on postage by using the online billpay through your bank. Many banks offer free online bill pay and you can set when to send the payments so you won’t have to worry about late fees. I would avoid using the bill pay through the various biller’s as they sometimes tack on fees for your payments and once you set it up for them to access your account it makes it easier for them to do it again, besides doing it all in one place is better.

Free furniture can be found on craigslist.org and freecycle.org for your area. The furniture may be used but it is free. This is a great idea for when you get your first apartment or dorm room. If you watch the sites you can wind up with some great furniture sets for free.

Find free wireless internet in your area by using WiFiFreeSpot. Great for when you are traveling so that you can avoid paying those wifi providers that charge you money.

Traveling soon, have you thought about possibly trading places with someone else for that time? Hospitality exchange web sites are growing in popularity and you should check them out. You can either trade homes so that you can each visit a new place or you can host each other. A few of the popular sites are CouchSurfing, HomeExchange, IntervacUS, and HospitalityClub.

And after making arrangements to trade homes you can hop on over to BBC Languages and begin learning a new language. This is a great site providing free language learning tools.

There are many other free offers out there. If you know any good ones please let me know.