Archive for May, 2007
May 26th, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
Tonight ABC News filed a story about how some gas stations are ripping off credit card user at the pump with the old bait and switch.
How this works is posting a price per gallon on the reader board to lure customers into the station. Once the credit card is swiped the price per gallon goes up. In one New York station, as much as 50 cents per gallon.
Given that people are cutting back on fuel consumption, many gas stations are hurting. So they are passing on the discount rates the credit card companies charge them. I don’t like it, but it is fair.
The example ABC used was visa card, charging 2% per purchase, translates into an 8 cent increase per gallon on gasoline that is $4.11 a gallon. Raising the price to $4.19.
The best way to protect yourself from this abuse is to look at the meter after you have swiped your card and after the purchase check your receipts. Many of these stations know people seldom check the receipt and that enables these crooked merchants to get away with larceny.
Those that will be traveling this summer, you are even more vulnerable, there isn’t always another station around the corner on the highway. Protect yourself by taking American Express or travelers checks with you. They as good as cash and accepted most everywhere. Unlike cash, they can be replaced if lost or stolen.
As gas prices continue to rise, so will the gas scams by stations that are not honest. This is not to say all petrol stations are practicing this gas scam. Just be aware that some are. Practice due diligence at the pump and hit the clear button when done filling the tank.
We are the only ones that can protect our selves from gas scams. These stations cannot get away with price rip offs with out our permission.
Andrew Berkey
http://www.scoretouchdowns.com
May 22nd, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
Britons are set to spend almost 12 billion pounds on Christmas presents this year, newly-published figures reveal.
Research conducted by Halifax suggests that the typical consumer is to splash out some 384 pounds 40p on gifts this year. With an estimated countrywide total of 11.92 billion pounds, many people could find that a loan is one way in which to meet the costs of such expenditure. However, findings from the financial services firm also indicated that only one in three people will create a budget to help manage their spending. It was suggested that such a lack of planning often indicates overspending on the part of shoppers. In turn, these people are often reported to use secured personal loans, credit cards and other types of borrowing to help fund their purchasing.
Applying for a loan to supplement the festive season could be particularly good advice for those from the north of England as people in the region are on track to spend 627 pounds 70p on presents this year – more than 50 per cent above the national average. Meanwhile, those living in Wales, the east Midlands and the north-west are due to spend 489 pounds 50p, 456 pounds 50p and 444 pounds 40p respectively. On the other hand, consumers in Anglia are expected to splash out just 242 pounds 20p. Research from the financial services firm also showed that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland will pay out 433 pounds 70p and 321 pounds 70p each on presents.
Britons were advised to take steps to ensure that their finances are in shape. By regularly saving money each month, Halifax claimed that consumers should be able to “more than meet the needs of the average shopper’s Christmas present list”. Doing so may also result in homeowners finding themselves in a more capable position to meet other demands on their spending during the festive season, such as utility bills, mortgages, home loans and transport costs. In addition, it was suggested that helping their children to save money regularly could see parents help boost the financial capability of their offspring.
Commenting on the figures, Mike Regnier, head of savings for Halifax, said: “We all know how expensive Christmas can be but by saving little and often we can make next Christmas that bit more manageable and that bit more enjoyable as a consequence. We can also take the opportunity to get our kids to appreciate the value of putting some money aside.”
Those worried about their ability to meet the costs of buying presents or any other expense associated with this festive period may wish to consider applying for a loan to help finance their spending. However, those who in the past have struggled to make repayments on previous borrowing may find that their access to competitively-priced loans and other types of credit is curtailed. For such consumers, getting an adverse credit loan could well be recommended.
Speaking earlier this year, Keith Greening, debt adviser for the Dorchester branch of Citizens Advice, told the Dorset Echo that an increased numbers of people look for help with money in the early stages of the new year after overspending during the Christmas period. In turn, those who find that they have fallen behind with mortgage payments and utility bills as a result could wish to take out a poor credit loan as a means of getting their finances back on track.
Mark Dawson writes for the the Loan Arrangers where you can compare loans and apply online for cheap home loans, and bad credit loans.
May 19th, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
Welcome to the Orangutan Sanctuarys at Semengok located in Sarawak, Borneo. One of the best Orangutan sanctuarys in the world. Semengok Wild life center is the best place in Borneo to view semi-wild orang utans, who have been rescued from captivity and trained to survive in the surrounding forest reserve. The rehabilated animals roam freely in the rain forest, and often return to the centre at feeding time. Thanks to the successful breeding programme at Semengok, there is a good possibility of experiencing one of the most heart-warming sights in Borneo – an orang utan mother with a young baby.
The centre is 30 minutes drive from Kuching and another 20 minutes on foot. Along the way visitors pass by the ethno-botanical gardens, with their unique collection of rain-forest plants. Semengok also has a number of short jungle trails and optional forest walks can be incorporated into the tour.
How to get to the Orangutan Sanctuarys at Sarawak, Malaysia, Borneo?
You can either choose to fly into Malaysia’s capital city – Kuala Lumpur, and from there you can use either Malaysia Airlines or Air Asia to Kuching, the capital city of Sarawak. You can contact us or book a tour with us and we will personally take you to the Orangutan Sanctuarys, where you get to see these amazing animals. More info can be located at the bottom of the resource box.
What else can we do in Sarawak?
Sarawak, Borneo – A land full of mysteries, covered under the tropical rainforest. We would usually advise our visitors to stay here for 2 weeks, and to experience living in rainforest, exploring the world largest cave systems – Mulu caves, do kayak in the rainforest, visit the local long house owned by the head hunters, visit Orangutan Sanctuarys, stay in the tree house on top of the tree, enjoy the nice and beautiful beach and take a trip down to Satang island for turtle conservation and hatchery area. Enjoy the local food and meet the local peoples.
How is the weather in Sarawak?
On the whole, Sarawak has an equatorial climate. The temperature is relatively uniform within the range of 23°C to 32°C throughout the year. During the months of March to September, the weather is generally dry and warm.
Humidity is consistently high on the lowlands ranging from 85 per cent to 95 per cent per annum. The average rainfall per year is between 3,300 mm and 4,600 mm, depending on locality, and the wettest months are from November to February.
Getting around?
We usually would advise our visitors to plan their trip before they come to Sarawak, or we plan it for them. Please contact us in the resource box.
Is Sarawak, Malaysia Safe?
Among South-East Asia, I can say Sarawak, Malaysia is one of the best and safest places for visitors to travel. The people here are friendly and helpful, the majority of them are a mixture of Dayak, Chinese, Malay and some Hindu.
Is there any Money Changer in Sarawak?
Yes, there are plenty of Money changer and banks in Sarawak and yes, they are safe and legal.
For visas questions or any other tour, car rental or hotel accommodation information, visit our link below, thanks.
Borneo Explorer Travel Agency were the pioneers of Borneo Travel Online and we are currently working with the biggest and most effective tour company in Sarawak. We were the first company to introduce visitors to the wonders of Sarawak and we are now the first online travel company in Borneo too! we have continued to show them a warm Sarawak welcome for more than 30 years.
Please do visit our website at : http://www.KuchingTravel.com We give you the best rates with the best service!
May 19th, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
If online sales are any indication, the number of people actively shopping online is also on the rise. According to 1 research company, online sales reached a mind blowing $172 billion in 2005, a number they will predict will rise to $329 billion by 2010, that is just 3 years from now.
New technologies and tools have opened up worlds of opportunity that make it easier and cheaper than ever before to start your income opportunity home based business. Over the years and through all the changes in technology the core principles of internet marketing have remained essentially unchanged, in-fact they have finally been tested ,tweaked and honed to perfection.
Discover a way to make money online, whether its to make a few hundred dollars, get your self out of debt, buy a new car, or to save for a overseas holiday, what ever the reason for needing a second income, then you have come to the right place. Now you might ask, what is required and how do I start my very own income opportunity home based business.
Tools required
Any lap- top or home computer, it does not even have to be a top of the range model either.
An internet connection, preferable with broadband, but dial up will work as well. Most house holds already have a PC, so now is the time to put your PC to good use, to get rid of all your household debt, so you can finally be debt Free.
Start Making Money Online with as little $50 a month
The following steps are what is required to get you up and running in a matter of days, with your income opportunity home based business, with the least amount of capital required.
*Choose a domain name.
*Set up a hosting account.
*Design your web site.
*Put it all online.
*Optimise and test your web site.
You don’t have $50 a month to spend.
Well that is not a problem either, because this must be the only business in the world where it’s possible to start your own work from home business, with out you spending a single cent – that’s right not single cent or penny.
Some of the easiest ways to get started online today is.
*Start selling on the Worlds biggest e-commerce site: .ebay.
*Start a Blog.
*Use Google Page Creator
You can take advantage of any of these tools to make your first online profits today.
You don’t have anything to sell.
Well that’s good news as well, in-fact even if you don’t have a product, don’t have a website or domain name, you can still make money online.
*This is achieved with Affiliate marketing, there is hundred of products to sell in hundred of different markets, have a look at clickbank.
*Another good site with good affiliate products is Paydotcom
Conclusion
Can you see why now is the best time to start your own income opportunity home based business. Where else can you start a company either part time or full time on only investing as little as $50 a month, in most cases you can start for free. You can start paying all your household Debt today and soon you will be on the way to been Debt Free
Alan Scholtz is the owner of How to Be Debt Free
If you are looking for the best products to Start Making Money onLine, then just visit my site, all products have been tested and are scam free
May 14th, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
You can’t really talk about economic expansion today without muttering a sentence or two about a commodities supercycle. To a large extent, growth in the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – are fueling this supercycle by gobbling up ever-greater shares of the world’s available resources.
Let’s put that in perspective. If you sift through history and study its cycles, you will find a telescoping of linear time. Each era is becoming shorter than the last. The agricultural revolution lasted 7000 years. The scientific revolution took 400. The industrial revolution took a mere 150 years. Wiring our planet with copper cables to transmit and receive messages took the century that ended in the 1980s, while rewiring it with optical cable took only a couple of decades. The speed of global messaging went from years in Magellan’s time to immediacy by email. The telescoping of time cycles appears to be the norm rather than a perfect set of coincidences.
Perhaps this commodity supercycle will be the shortest cycle of them all. Perhaps peak oil will bring on its collapse.
Enter the Dragon: Here in China, there is a palpable frenzy of about the birth of a new commodities supercycle driven by the BRIC countries as they industrialize and modernize. That takes a lot of material and newly created money. In the last 130 years, there have been three commodity supercycles – periods of intense demand and rapid price escalation. The first lasted from the 1880s to the 1920s – 45 years – and was followed by the Great Depression. The era of post-war reconstruction lasted from 1945-75 – 30 years – and sank into the dismal morass of stagflation.
The new supercycle began barely five years ago. Will it be shorter than the last? How will it end?
China’s economy is at least 50 per cent manufacturing driven. New foreign direct investment, joint ventures and factory construction is the main force behind expanding internal demand for commodities. It’s the factory owner who is purchasing the new apartment, the factory manager who is buying the latest-model car, the factory employees that go to stores and buy drinks in plastic bottles from hyper-marts or corner stores.
As the world shifts its plants to China and buys Chinese goods, it puts newly created money into the society. This allows the average family to buy once unobtainable products. Stores, real estate and stock markets are booming as new money created in the last five to ten years trickles down. And that money relies on manufacturing and export.
Think of all of the industries and enterprises involved just to keep the supply chain of raw materials and energy flowing to factories so they can continue to manufacture the world’s goods. Everyone involved with logistics and freight forwarding, construction, computer networking, materials importers, middle men, trickling all the way down to the uniform producer for the factory workers themselves and the snack truck at the front gate. They are all involved and now heavily dependent on low energy prices to be able to sell goods and services to foreign markets. As the cycle continues, it generates wealth that drives internal consumption that keeps the cycle going. In the worldwide commodities supercycle, China is behind the wheel
Supercycle Buster: If the buying outside China stops, so will its internal consumption. The supercycle buster will be a reduction in manufacturing orders from other countries also affected by constricting economies in recession or depression due to soaring prices for fuels and other commodities. China is highly vulnerable to and dependent on a system that relies on the consumption of manufactured by customers outside its borders.
The Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hong Kong stock markets are pulling in billions of dollars in IPO offerings for a host of Chinese companies. If the global monetary base begins to contract under the weight of soaring oil prices and the gathering global credit crisis, many of China’s listed companies will lose market value and stock prices will slip. The Chinese are the world’s great savers, but their savings will be lost. Disposable income inside China will shrink. So will demand for commodities.
The present commodities supercycle will end in a world in which power black-outs are a regular daily occurrence and fuel supplies have been rationed, and only then will sustainable alternative energy sources be considered. Now that China has more than doubled its oil imports compared to the last five years, they are as dependent upon the black liquid as those outside this country.
Minicycles Within the Supercycle: I see a quick end to the present base metals supercycle. I also see two minicycles before the actual collapse of the present global economic paradigm.
As you can see in the graphic at the beginning of this article (Chris Skrebowski Mega-Projects List; World Total Supply & Demand and Oil Price 2012) oil prices started to rise on schedule with the forecast of deficient oil supply versus demand. The first minicycle will run from October 2007-April 2008. Prices will skyrocket, plateau sometime around December 2007, stay at their lofty levels for three months, then decline around April, 2008.
Using this pricing model, after we come off of the “high” prices we will return to oil in the “inexpensive” 90-dollars-per-barrel price range. China will have greatly reduced factory orders during the high plateau from December 2007 to March 2008. That will trickle down, reducing consumption for all purchasable products within China.
The second minicycle will begin in late September 2008 and repeat the same pattern until April 2009. If depletion forecasts from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) are accurate, after that point the world will be unable to balance supply with the optimum demand needed for sustained economic growth.
During the two minicycles there will be an enormous amount of money made in a short period of time. Prices of commodities and materials of every conceivable type will be at their highest levels ever as oil will be at its highest price ever as well. It will last for a short while, and then demand destruction will take its toll worldwide.
An age of insufficiency is beginning. The super-contractionary phase of the world economy is getting underway. Only the economies of the large oil-producing regions of the world will prosper.
As this supercycle slides to a halt, I believe we will begin to think differently. Instead of focusing on consumption and profit, perhaps our mind-set will shift toward conservation, durability and sustainability. If we don’t, it will be because we have not learned from our past.
David DuByne is from the United States and is presently living and teaching Business English in Chongqing, China. He and webmaster Marc Hastenteufel are translating http://www.daveseslbiofuel.com an English teaching web site devoted to bio-fuel and oil depletion, for those studying English around the planet into Mandarin Chinese.
May 10th, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
Banks offer us many convenient services, but they hardly do so out of the kindness of their hearts. Almost any little service imaginable that a bank provides has at least a small fee associated with it. These fees individually are usually small, but together can add up to a great deal. Better understanding these fees and how they’re triggered should give a greater ability to judge how useful they are in relation to the cost and whether or not they should be avoided in the future.
- Overdraft Protection/Fees
An overdraft is like a self-incurred NSF, or insufficient funds charge. If you try to withdraw funds from this account when there are not enough to do so, you’ll incur an overdraft fee, even if the bank hasn’t actually done anything on your behalf. This most frequently occurs when one cashes a cheque that they believe will be deposited to their account immediately, but in actuality is held up for some days, common with personal or out-of-area cheques.
Some accounts will provide overdraft protection, whereby the bank will actually cover the cost of the amount even though you can’t fund it, effectively giving you a small line of credit. Most overdraft protection will be fixed at a relatively small rate, as little as $50. You’ll be charged anywhere from $20 to $35 for using this service as well as interest on the negative account balance, making this a costly option.
- Wire Transfers
Wire transfers are a convenient way to quickly send money to an individual or company, foregoing the need for the need for lengthy payments via mail. These services are also costly though, with international transfers up in the $15 range.
Internet banking may offer you the same capability for a fraction of the cost, so this would be the ideal method to pursue for this type of transaction first.
- Monthly Fees/Minimum Account Balance Fees
Most banks will charge a monthly fee which is usually waived if your account has a good degree of money held in it, usually $1,000 minimum. These monthly fees are usually no more than $5.
- Debit Card Fees
Virtually all banks offer their customers debit cards that can be used to directly access fund from their accounts for daily purchases at just about any location. Money can also be withdrawn from any ATM.
Debit card purchases will usually incur fees ranging from .75 cents to $1.50, though some cards may actually charge nothing. Withdrawals from ATM’s on the other hand usually have at least a .75 cent minimum fee, plus an additional charge that the company operating the ATM levies on anyone who makes use of it, often an additional $1-$3. Another option can be credit cards with low APR rates.
- Miscellaneous Fees
These can be wide-ranging, and each bank usually has a couple of these neat little fees in their arsenal. You may be charged for excessive amounts of withdrawals or general account activity, charged for using the tellers, charged for calling their toll-free lines to get information, if you can dream, they may charge you for it. All of this information will be hidden somewhere in their terms, or should come to light eventually through scrutiny of your bill, so be sure and avoid any unnecessary extra fees.
- Conclusion
Banks provide a valuable service above and beyond just our basic banking accounts, and our economy would not be able to function correctly without them. This doesn’t mean we need to blindly give them fees at every turn though. Banks do quite well with or without your fees, so make sure you’re giving them as little as possible by knowing the most common fees and alternatives to using them.
Ready to fix the confusion on the topic of credit cards with low APR rates. Beginners and experts turn to us as their source for information everlife.com.
May 6th, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
It is estimated that 8,000 people join an Internet home business every day, and the failure rate exceeds 90 per cent, according to a press release issued in late 2006 by CyberFocused. So, now you have a choice for your work at home business: do you do what it takes to succeed, or do you become another statistic like 90 per cent people who join.
That fact is determined by one simple thing: You. I’m here to tell you that you can make a better than average income, with little or no formal education, little or no training, and with very little money in the bank to start. But, the success of that business depends solely on how much you want to put into the endeavor.
Instead of showing you reason why home businesses fail, I am going to provide for you 4 reasons why (and how) profitable home businesses succeed:
1.) Don’t get over-hyped – The truth of the matter is, most of what you read on Internet sales pages tells you that you can be a millionaire overnight. I believe you can be a millionaire with many of the Internet based home businesses out there – but NONE of them makes you a millionaire overnight. Each one of these businesses take some amount of time to succeed – but most people give up when the stack of money don’t appear once they sign up.
2.) Contrary to popular belief, the business rarely runs itself – Home business owners need to take a proactive approach to running their work at home empire. You can’t just pay $50 to secure the ideas for an Internet business and then expect it to miraculously begin printing you money. Get your hands dirty and MAKE IT HAPPEN!
3.) Learn what you can – the most successful online entrepreneurs will tell you that they try and learn as much as they can about how to run their business better. They are constantly on the lookout for new and better ways to promote their site, convert the traffic, and apply the fundamentals of Internet business to their own business. Spend time learning how other found success and apply their lessons to your work at home endeavor.
4.) Stick with it – For Pete’s sake, it is going to take time. The most successful work at home professionals understand that success always takes time. Those that take the time to do things right are often rewarded with success beyond their wildest imagination. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Start putting the time in to be a part of the 10% of people that succeed in Internet home businesses. You won’t get rich overnight, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be rich at all!
Bob Saville believes he is living proof that ANYONE can be a huge success working from home. He is a self-starter that has found life’s real rewards after working from home for over 4 years. You can visit his website at http://www.internetmarketingatoz.com/ to see how you can get started!