The Credit Padlock

I have an announcement and an explanation.

You know when you see credit protection services, like the one where the CEO comes on and tells everyone his social security number? What those companies do is something anybody can do for themselves if they know how.

A few posts back I mentioned how I’d be coming out with a credit and identity theft protection book, and it’s now available. It’s titled The Credit Padlock and it explains exactly how to lock down your own credit without paying the monthly fees of a large service.

I had some people review the book and they told me I should be charging at least $500 for it, because someone could take the book and start their own credit protection service in their area or online and make a lot of money. It’s true that the book explains how those services work, but that’s not my intended goal. I suppose it’s also true that someone could start a service like that for almost nothing using this book, but I decided against a high sales price for several reasons.

I wanted to keep the price low, because I think most people who are looking for this information are wanting to save the thousands of dollars that a credit protection service would cost. I remember in the late 1980’s, when the country was last in a serious financial crisis, and I was looking for work. Day after day I’d hit the streets looking for a job, and at the unemployment office, the size of crowd looking for work was growing. It was a terrible time and I was broke.

I recall that I was watching some economics ‘experts’ on television and one stated the reason that the economy was down is that ‘people just aren’t spending their money’. They couldn’t fathom that the reason people weren’t spending is that people like me just didn’t have any money.

So I can’t bring myself to charge what the book is probably worth, but I can live with that decision. I realize that this flies in the face of conventional business wisdom to charge ‘whatever the market will bear’, but what can I say?

Anyway, if you are interested in how you can protect your own identity, please check out the Credit Padlock, which has a 100% money-back guarantee. I not offering it for $500, obviously, or even $100. I’m offering it for only $27.

And I won’t get upset if you take the book and start a massive money making venture, that’s fine, too.

Internet Marketing Degree? Wow.

Okay, so now Internet Marketing is a career path? Apparently so, since Full Sail is offering an Internet Marketing Bachelor of Science Degree.

This is no way an endorsement of the idea, or of Full Sail, or the degree itself. I think that it’s most likely that companies are looking for people to put on staff who understand how to market over the web, things like social networking, twitter, blogging and pay-per-click. Not sure if they touch on the whole idea of relationship marketing or copywriting.

Probably a whole component – or more – on “going viral”, though.

Of course, it stands to reason that companies might be looking for these type of people. If you look at Barack Obama’s campaign, they obviously have staffers who completely understand that this type of marketing isn’t just buying banner ads or pretending to use Twitter. What works in politics is likely to work in advertising, and vice-versa. Well, who are we kidding? It’s all advertising.

Parking Places for Your Money: Big Money Basics

I wanted to take a moment to talk about what a “good” rate of return is for investments, particularly now when the stock market is tanking.

I call this type of information “Big Money Basics”. It’s this type of information that we should know if we want to go from poverty to wealth.

We all know about inflation. It’s been since we in the U.S. went off the gold standard, which led to a gradual lowering of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar. If the purchasing power drops, prices go up.

I can’t control inflation, but I can be aware of effects. Knowing the rate of inflation is the first piece of knowing what to put your money in. For example, if inflation averages 3% per year, then you should consider that unless your money is earning at least that much, it’s lowering in value.

Inflation isn’t just overall price increases. From Fall 2007 to Fall 2008, grocery prices in the United States have risen 10%. That’s a whopping number and hard to keep up with. Now, not all prices jumped at a 10% rate, but gasoline and groceries – two things that U.S. residents need – sustained huge price increases this year.

Thus, unless you got a raise of 12-15% this year, you are probably making less in spending power than a year ago.

Now consider the long term effects: if you had $100,000 sitting a checking account earning 2% interest, it would be dropping in value year after year. You need to keep up with the rate of inflation just to maintain the same level of value, let alone get ahead.

The Bailout: Necessary & Evil

It’s crazy, and it really makes me angry. We’re stuck.

One one hand, you’ve got a bunch of politicians who lobbied their way into deregulation and made horrible business decisions, and now they’ve managed to do their jobs so badly that they’ve cracked the economy. It would be really nice to see these guys suffer, get what’s coming to them and put them on the soup line.

On the other hand, like a parent who has to make the hard choices when their children screw up, we have to make moves to keep the economy stable. All the hand wringing in Washington is pointless, and there is NO option. The US government is a behemoth with massive, unprecedented cash reserves, built from decades of prosperity and it will be forced to push money into the financial markets to keep them afloat.

In other words, the bailout has to happen. We have to grit our teeth and do it, even though it feels like…well, it is… giving some very greedy people a pass.

The issue here, is not this particular bailaout. The issue is that what happens in a few months if another big company, left to it’s own devices, wipes out another big chunk of the economy? And then another? What about five companies?

How many ‘bailouts’ can the US afford? Even though the United States is rich, it is not unlimited wealth. Our resources, vast as they are, remain finite, and with the US dollar falling against the Euro, our wealth diminishes by the minute.  Writing a check for $700,000,000,000 isn’t something the US can be flippant about.

Don’t bother to email me with political posturing and rants. We need real solutions, and the current system has failed us. People who want to argue about political parties and nonsensical issues should go to the back of the room while the adults figure this one out.

I do hope everyone is actually paying attention.

Credit Freeze How To

I’m going to be offering a comprehensive guide on how to freeze your own credit in the near future, so let me know if you have specific questions you want me to research.

The Housing Market: Up or Down?

Okay, so we’ve all heard about the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. What does this mean?

For one thing, expect banks to have to step through a lot more red tape.  However, this entire development is concerning. On one hand, this had to happen, or the mortgage industry stood a good chance of collapsing, which would crash the weakened US economy.

On the other hand, we now have a government that can’t manage it’s own finances running the biggest mortgage lenders in the world.

Lifelock Gets Busted

It turns out that the touted LifeLock service isn’t as bulletproof as they claimed. The CEO of LifeLock would appear in advertisements and state his SSN as a stunt to prove how safe the service is.

But it turns out, it isn’t as safe as they claim.

Common Identity Theft Methods

You already know what identity theft is, and you are always looking for ways to protect yourself.

This video gives some basic ways that identity theft occurs, including the method I think many people overlook, ‘change of address’:

How to Raise Your Credit Score

How to raise your credit score, for free?

I’m offering this guide on raising your credit score, for free, yourself. Click here to get the guide and keep your money in your pocket.

Your Money for Your Life

Let’s talk for a moment about buying and selling our lives.

Most of us are born with very little personal possessions. Rarely are we born into great wealth, so for the vast majority of us, when we reach working age, we bargain with the businesses offering employment with the only valuable commodity we have: chunks of our life, usually sold in blocks of hours.

In high school, I worked two jobs, which probably accounted for a 45 hour workweek in addition to attending school. To put it more bluntly, I sold 45 hours of my life every week, week after week, for less than $4 for each hour (this was in the eighties). I also missed out on a lot of teenage activities because I was working- or rather, I sold those hours to corporations.
This is where the choices of what we do to spend our money (or gain debt) come in. I was fortunate enough that I did not accumulate a lot of debt, but I did spend what little money I had pretty quickly on inconsequential things. And that’s really the issue: we generally sell of vast quantities of our lives (which are finite), then we take that money and spend it on irrelevant things. As we get older, we tend to earn a lot more for our time, but the spending habits often stick with us.

You must stop yourself as you get ready to buy that next consumable purchase and ask, ‘Is this really what I am working for? To buy this object?’.

This is not to say you cannot purchase anything, ever. It is to say that every purchase comes with a higher price tag than just the one marked on the label, and if we recognize that, we can change our habits.

I recall when this point really occurred to me, and it occurred in an unusual place – walking down the street in a run-down neighborhood, which was all I could afford at the time.

I was usually approached by bums and winos anywhere I walked (I had no car), and they would always ask for a couple of dollars. I barely had grocery money. But the kicker was this: one day, as I had spurned the request from yet another bum, and he yelled obscenities after me, I realized that at my salary I had to work twenty minutes at a back-breaking job I loathed to get the money he was asking for. He, who had been living in the bottom of a bottle, had not worked a moment of that job, but wanted me to turn that money I sold part of my life for over to him for him to use. Pretty convenient for him. I work, he gets the money.

That’s the epiphany; I had sold those chunks of my life, I did have the right to use the money I’d gotten, but what was worth that chunk of life? Really, nobody’s life is worth $4 an hour, or $10 an hour, and probably not even $50 an hour. So if I was selling it off so cheap, what was I getting for it in return? What was I buying with my life?

What are you buying with your life?