Tom Dziubek and Flexo speak with Mark Frauenfelder, the creator of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of the MAKE magazine. Frauenfelder also writes for Credit.com, and within this interview he shares details about some of this website’s new services including the Credit Report Card (reviewed here).
Frauenfelder is a proponent of the do-it-yourself (DIY) lifestyle, and he explains the source of his interest in this lifestyle as well as details about a forthcoming book on the subject.
To listen, use the player above (Adobe Flash required), download the podcast here, subscribe to the podcast RSS feed, or use the iTunes link. Note: open links in a new window (Ctrl-click or Command-click) to avoid interrupting the podcast.
[00:00] Introduction from Flexo
[00:32] Interview with Mark Frauenfelder
– [00:55] Boing Boing
– [01:50] Mark’s move to the Cook Islands
– [03:59] MAKE magazine
– [05:15] Mark’s involvement with Credit.com
– [08:12] Services offered by Credit.com
– [09:05] Credit.com vs. credit reporting bureaus
– [10:12] Personal information on Credit.com
– [11:21] Improving your credit with the Credit Report Card
– [13:57] Building cigar box guitars
– [15:45] Beekeeping
– [19:21] Upcoming book on do-it-yourself (DIY) experiences
[23:42] End
We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.
In addition to Sony’s and Amazon’s electronic bookstores (about 100,000 and 330,000 titles available, respectively), booksellers now have another huge option for getting their books into our hands: Google Editions, which will launch next year with between 400,000 and 600,000 titles.
Not necessarily a store or a device
Google Editions is built on top of Google’s enormous book digitizing project called Google Books, and is a platform that stores can take advantage of.
Google plans to share the sales with both publishers and the online bookstores. For books sold directly from its Web site, the search giant said at the book fair that it would give publishers 63 percent of the sales and keep 37 percent itself. For books sold through Amazon or other retailers, the publisher would get 45 percent, while the retailer would get almost 55 percent with a small share for Google.
Google has not (yet?) announced any plans to sell a reader device, primarily because they are making the purchased books available on any device with a browser. In theory, as long as you are logged into your Google account, you can read the same book on your laptop, mobile phone, the netbook you keep in the kitchen, etc.
The electronic ink difference
I’ve periodically tried to read entire books from a computer screen, and I’ve never been able to finish one. Daily computing tasks are different from reading paragraph after paragraph for hours. Conversely, devices like Amazon’s Kindle use an electronic ink that is much easier on the eyes and feels like reading off of paper.
In addition, computers like the iPhone use a kind of screen that drains the battery much faster than the Kindle. Hopefully, competition will be spurred forward with an electronic ink device that has support for Google Editions.
Saving money and peace of mind
My wife has had a 2nd-generation Kindle for about eight months, and loves it to pieces. I asked her the other day whether, because electronic versions of books are cheaper, she thinks she’s saved money on her book purchases, and she nearly guffawed. She figures she’s bought three times as many books as she otherwise would have. It even affords her the ability to read books that normally she’d be embarrassed to be seen with, like the “Twilight” silliness series.
However, having your book purchases on one thin device also means that you’re not storing the ones you’ve already read somewhere in your house, on the off-chance that someday you might read it again. Many of you might be in the habit of donating your old books to a local library or Goodwill, and for that I salute you, but at our house we never seem to get around to it.
Conclusion
No matter what, it’s always better to have more than one store for a given product. I’m particularly pleased that Google is entering this market, because in addition to their motto, they actually do have a strong past record of not being evil.
By the way, did you know you can subscribe to Consumerism Commentary on the Kindle?
Photo credit: Robin Iversen Rönnlund
Reports: Google to launch online bookstore, Lance Whitney, CNET, Oct. 15 2009
Google to launch Google Editions platform, Peter Zschunke, Associated Press, Oct. 15 2009
Update: The giveaway has ended and the winners will be announced shortly.
Note: This is a long article containing an in-depth review of the new version of Quicken. If you are just interested in the giveaway of Quicken 2010 Deluxe, scroll to the bottom of this article.
It took me a long time to warm up to Intuit Quicken. When I first saw the software in the early or mid 1990s, I wasn’t very interested. That’s not the software’s fault; at that time I most likely did not see the need for tracking money I did not have. When I finally realized I needed to build some control of my personal financial situation, I first looked for free solutions.
After several months of spending less than I was earning and tracking my progress using freeware, I evaluated Microsoft Money alongside Quicken. Money looked nice and ran smooth while Quicken was clunky and unattractive, so I stuck with Money for a few years. After some time, I came to realize that Money’s features for dealing with investments were not as comprehensive as I would like, and for some reason it interpreted the downloaded data from my 401(k) incorrectly. I decided to give Quicken another shot.
While Quicken wasn’t perfect, it worked better with the transaction data I downloaded from the banks and offered configurable reports. So I stuck with it, and I still use a desktop version of Quicken almost every day. I receive questions about why I haven’t switched to popular Web 2.0 applications like Quicken Online (review here) or Mint.com (review here). These websites offer interesting features, particularly those powered by community aggregate information, but they lack some of the basic investing functionality that I get from the desktop version of Quicken.
Quicken 2010 review, first impressions
I received Quicken 2010 Home and Business in the mail yesterday and gave it a test drive tonight.
The upgrade from Quicken 2009, including downloading updates to the software online, took about ten minutes. Tens of thousands of transaction records needed to be converted to the new version, and this took the bulk of the time for the upgrade.
After the upgrade was complete, the software brought me to Quicken.com to register. Although I am already registered at Intuit, I was required to provide my information again before using all of the software’s functionality. Although required, the registration process was quick.
I was impressed with the new version’s look and feel. The interface is redesigned to be cleaner, and switching from one page to another within the software seems to move faster. One of my biggest complaints about Quicken has been its sluggish display but this seems to be greatly improved.
Quicken 2010 opens to a new main screen with three horizontal sections. The top includes a pie chart describing your spending within categories and the middle of the screen lists your anticipated expenses.
The focus here is on your cash flow: how much is left in your spending accounts at the end of the month. Here is the top half of my screen. Click on the thumbnail to view the image full-size (and note the exceptionally large tax expense thanks to quarterly estimated payments).
The bottom section of this screen is new. According to Quicken, it would take 5 minutes to begin tracking spending goals. I began creating spending goals, which seem to form a softer style of a budget. Unfortunately, because I use sub-categories, Quicken’s “average monthly spending” in categories like “Auto,” “Dining,” and “Entertainment” were inaccurate. As a result, the “suggested monthly goals” were not appropriate. I solved this by choosing my own categories, such as “Auto:Fuel” rather than “Auto.”
After assigning several categories to watch, here are my results so far for October. [click to continue…]
In my article the other day about the deal I got on a new computer despite my immediate need, I neglected to mention something important: I refused the extended warranty that the salesperson offered numerous times. Any extended warranty is almost always a bad deal.
When I was a teenager, I had a short-lived job at a ubiquitous electronics store; let’s call it “Transistor Hut.” This was the only job in retail I ever had, and I can’t say I was a fan. Our bonuses were determined by our success in selling the “TSP,” an extended warranty. Let’s say that stands for the “Candy Service Plan (with a T),” and I don’t know whether this is still in existence.
The price of the TSP depended on the price of the item, and TSPs were available for almost every product. If you buy a $19.99 pair of headphones, you could spend another $9.99 for unlimited replacement, no questions asked (other than your phone number). If you buy a $299.99 DVD player, $79.99 (or so, keep in mind this was fifteen years ago) would allow you to bring the broken device into the store, have them ship it to a repair facility, and fix or replace it. That’s a process that would likely take several weeks.
The TSPs and any other store’s extended warranties are pushed hard by salespeople because they are often rewarded for them, and they are rewarded because they are very profitable for the store. Most people who buy the warranty will not use it, so the funds become significant income for the company.
Most credit card companies automatically double the manufacturer’s warranty on products purchased with the card for up to one additional year, so that automatic, free protection is often more than enough. Check your credit card’s terms to see if this is available to you. I knew it was available to me on my American Express Blue Cash for Business Card when I purchased the new desktop computer for Consumerism Commentary’s multimedia production.
Perhaps a smarter way to deal with the possibility of broken items — besides not buying anything — is to self-insure. Rather than spending an extra $50, $300, or $2,000 for an extended warranty depending on the product, put that amount into a new savings account designated for your own personal warranty extension. Do the same for all the products you buy for which a salesperson attempts to sell you the extended warranty. What you have created is a pooled funding source for repairs. It is unlikely that all of your products will break or stop functioning, so you can withdraw from this fund to pay for repairs for the one item that fails.
With this strategy, you keep all your money if nothing goes wrong, and if the money is sitting in a high-yield savings account, it’s working for you rather than lining the pockets of major retail chains.
Here is the step-by-step process.
Step 1. When you purchase an item, make note of the cost of the extended warranty. Don’t buy it.
Step 2. Transfer this amount to a special savings account that you will not touch until one of your “protected” items needs to be repaired. ING Direct lets you create sub-accounts, one of which you can name “My Extended Warranties” or “Warranty Fund.” Don’t create a sub-account for each item. One for all of your items will do. Thus, the “Warranty Fund” is pooled.
Step 3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 using the same Warranty Fund you already created for all products you buy that might break or are associated with an extended warranty. This will build up a sizable Warranty Fund in your own name at your own bank earning interest for you.
Step 4. When one of your self-insured products breaks or otherwise needs repairs, dip into your Warranty Fund. Try to avoid using your Emergency Fund unless the Warranty Fund doesn’t cover the full expense and the product must be fixed or replaced.
The strength here is that you are pooling your own funds. This is what the retailers do to ensure warranties bring significant profits to the company. Just like not every customer will take advantage of their purchased extended warranty, not every product you self-insure will break unless you are extremely unlucky or extremely careless. In addition, the best benefit of self-insuring is that you will never have to argue with a store representative about whether certain type of damage is “covered.”
With the current and upcoming changes in the credit card industry due to the Credit CARD Act and other regulations put in place by the Federal Reserve, banks and credit issuers are maneuvering as much as possible to be in a good position to continue making money off their customers. Public corporations have responsibility to their shareholders to protect their bottom line, and with the threat of reduced profits due to new regulations you can be sure these companies will try anything within the realm of possibility to survive.
Bank of America has announced some anticipated changes to their credit cards that shows what the future might look like: more credit cards will carry annual fees. These new fees, according to the bank, will range from $29 to $99. And unlike most fee-bearing credit cards, the customers receiving these charges may not have cards that offer premium services like a concierge or extensive rewards.
One of the criteria Bank of America will use to determine which customers are lucky enough to receive the fee is “profitability;” in other words, those of us who don’t send the bank extra in the forms of interest payments and late fees or those who use their credit card infrequently — the responsible users of credit — are likely to be assessed the fee. Bank of America could easily determine which customers are not profitable for the company and charge this annual fee to make them profitable.
For now, there are many fee-free credit card choices for responsible users. The climate might change soon, however. Even the most diligent credit card users, those who manage to use cash back rewards and other benefits while paying off their balance in full every month, might find that the new environment will point to a cash-only spending plan for the best deal.
BofA to charge annual fees on some credit cards, Candice Choi, The Seattle Times, October 13, 2009
Mention to your friend that you suddenly received an unexpected $1,000 and I would be willing to bet he could come up with several suggestions for you. Most of those suggestions will likely involve handing the money over to him. My first suggestion is to refrain from telling your friend when you have $1,000 more than you know what to do with. Once that is achieved, it is best to have some ideas in mind just in case this situation presents itself.
Money Magazine has eleven suggestions for people who find they have $1,000 sitting around without a planned destiny.
- Top off your emergency fund. If you don’t have an emergency fund, $1,000 is a great starting point. It is quite easy to open a high-yield online savings account so you can keep your emergency fund close while letting it earn as much as possible.
- Spend five hours with a financial planner. Here Money Magazine assumes you will go to a financial planner who charges $200 per hour. Unless your finances are unusually complicated, skip this suggestion.
- Buy a top-notch stock fund. Here Money Magazine suggest putting your money in actively managed mutual funds. I suggest sticking with low-cost non-managed index mutual funds. Vanguard requires $3,000 to start investing, but the low-cost Schwab Total Stock Market Index Fund (SWTSX) requires only a $100 minimum deposit.
- Upgrade your home appliances. I can see this being a legitimate option if you have problems with your appliances or need to switch to more energy-efficient models.
- Help on a large scale You can use the $1,000 for others’ good. Money Magazine suggestions buying sheep for farmers, offering small business loans through Kiva, and planting trees. Any charitable option is a good choice for an unexpected $1,000.
- Join a gym. If you know you can make your gym membership last, this could be a suggestion that saves money through your improved health. Otherwise, a gym membership could do nothing more than suck your money away.
- Beef up your IRA (if you’re 50 or older). Anyone age 50 or older with the appropriate level of income can invest an additional $1,000 above the standard maximum in a Traditional or Roth IRA.
- Pay down credit card debt. This should probably be towards the top of the list. Paying off expensive credit card debt saves you money in interest fees down the road. $1,000 can go a long way to getting out of debt.
- Update your estate documents. Money Magazine assumes you had your estate documents in order at one point. $1,000 should cover updates to your will, health-care proxy, and power of attorney.
- Start a young investor off right. Money Magazine suggests setting up a diversified portfolio for a child using a combination of Schwab’s low-minimum and low-cost index funds.
- Become a star at work. This is the most unlikely suggestion for spending your own $1,000. Money Magazine suggests taking a class, much like the improv class Smithee is taking, or any other course that might provide you with a competitive edge. Self-development is a good idea for your own money, but I wouldn’t spend $1,000 on an activity that does nothing more than increase my value to a corporation.
What would you do with an unexpected $1,000 right now?
What to do with $1,000 now, Money Magazine, October 12, 2009
I’ve been a relatively faithful user of Quicken for the past five years after switching from Microsoft Money and other more basic personal finance management software. Even though I continue using this software to track my income and expenses and to share my finances with the world, I have never been silent about the software’s drawbacks.
Here are the latest Intuit Quicken products available for download or for shipping.
More Quicken products are available here.
Unfortunately for Mac users, Intuit is still working on an updated version of Quicken. Quicken Financial Life for Mac is slated to be released in February 2010. I should have my hands on the latest edition of Quicken Home and Business in a few days and I plan on reviewing the upgrade as soon as possible.
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