My most recent power bill was 30% higher than usual. Yikes! So how to save some money?

If you are using TomatoUSB and have a USB hard drive connected to it, then you can save some money — and extend the life of the drive — by having it spin down when idle. For some crazy reason this doesn’t happen automatically.

Luckily, some kind individual wrote a small program that can easily be run on TomatoUSB. The instructions are pretty easy to follow, but here are the basics:

1. Download sd-idle-2.6.
2. Uncompress the binary and put in a safe place on your USB hard drive.
3. Create a file called mount.autorun so the program will run automatically.

That’s it! You’ll need to either reboot your router, unmount/mount your hard drive, or manually start the program for the first time. By default it will spin your drive down after 15 minutes.

My baby girl had her first half-birthday yesterday. It is crazy to think that it has been 6 months already since my first “holy cow I’m a dad” moment.

Anyways, my wife and I have a lot of goals for how to raise our daughter. We want her to have the resources to go to college, start a business, buy a car, go on a mission, or do whatever she wants when she leaves the nest in many many years. We also want her to be excited about investing, to understand how it works, and to see the benefits of it.

So tonight, after a few months of pondering, we settled on a plan: for Anna’s half-birthday each year, we’ll invest $250 into GE for her (keeping it in our name until she is old enough to really understand it).

Why GE? It pays dividends every quarter. She’ll get to see returns from the investment several times a year, even if the stock prices are down. We’ll reinvest the dividends, so she’ll also get to see her number of shares going up each quarter, even when it isn’t her half-birthday yet. GE is also very stable and diversified, so the likelihood of it disappearing is slim. It also tends to be cheap enough per share that we can get a decent number of shares.

There are a few cons to going with GE. Its performance hasn’t been phenomenal over the past decade. There are definitely stocks that have done better (and many that have done worse). It also isn’t a very exciting stock. A kid today would be much more excited about owning some Apple stock than they would about GE.

Why not a mutual fund? Well the goal is to teach Anna about stocks, investing, and to get her excited about it. It is hard to see why a mutual fund’s price has gone up or down. With an individual stock, like GE, we can look at the news or read press releases to find out why the price has changed. We can also talk about how the policies and decisions of our elected leaders can affect the price. I imagine her coming to me and being like “oh my gosh dad the GE earnings report is out!”, and then we’ll sit down together and look over it. (A father can dream…)

We plan on investing $250 each year and, unless she has a dang good reason, we won’t let her take it out until her 18th birthday. This means we’ll invest $4,500 for her over the next 18 years. If my parents had done this for me, then I would have had about $22,000 on my 18th birthday (and that isn’t even counting dividend reinvestments). Of course $250 was worth a lot more back then, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future performance, but I still think Anna will have a very healthy chunk of cash waiting for her.

Of course, I’m not sure how we’ll afford this once we get up to 8 or 9 kids…

Problems:

1. Becca and I feel guilty whenever we buy things like candy, treats, or soda.
2. We hate spending money, but love the entertainment of finding stuff to buy.
3. We are awful at consistently holding Family Home Evening.
4. We have a bunch of dollar coins from the US Mint.

Solution:

1. A $1 per day allowance paid out every Monday but only at FHE.

Becca and I came up with this idea on Monday, almost by accident, to solve a problem with Becca being bored at home but not wanting to go waste money by shopping. I grabbed a few dollar coins and told her she had $1 per day to spend on absolutely anything she wanted. Want a candy bar? She could buy it. Want a taco? She could buy it. Some craft supplies? A soda? An MP3 on Amazon? Sure, whatever she wanted, as long as she stayed within her $1 per day budget.

At FHE, we talked about how the allowance worked out, and Becca said it went well. Becca bought a piece of felt for a project she was working on, so her trip to the store was productive without being expensive.

We decided to make the dollar allowance a permanent thing, with just a few rules:

1. We each get $6 per week ($1 per day, but not Sunday because we try not to shop on Sunday).
2. Coins are distributed on Monday at FHE. If we don’t have FHE, we don’t get paid.
3. The allowance is only for personal use. It isn’t used for date nights, gifts for each other, major crafts that we are working on together, educational materials (like “how to” books), etc. We could easily abuse this rule, but I don’t think we will.
4. We aren’t allowed to get advances on our allowance. If we run out, we have to wait until FHE. No exceptions.
5. Any money we find on the street is added to our allowance. This rule was added today because Becca found a penny. :)

Is this the perfect solution for us? I don’t know. We haven’t been using it long enough to find out.

I do know, however, that we went to Michael’s yesterday and had a blast spending as little as possible while still coming away with something useful. I also know Becca is excited to have some guilt-free vending machine money to spend when she goes back to school next week. And we are both more excited about FHE than we have been in a long time.

What do you think? Do you give yourself a budget or allowance for fun purchases?

Connecticut passed a wonderful little piece of legislation that requires online retailers to charge sales tax if they have affiliates in Connecticut even if the retailer doesn’t have a physical presence in Connecticut. This is ridiculous!

As an Amazon affiliate, I am not selling anything on behalf of Amazon. I am simply pointing people towards Amazon, and getting paid a commission for my efforts. It doesn’t make sense that this would count as a physical presence.

So how does Amazon respond? They’ve terminated all their affiliate contracts for people in Connecticut, including myself. While I’m very frustrated by this, I understand why they did it and I’m more frustrated with my state’s government. They knew Amazon would leave, but they didn’t care. So now they are losing piles of tax revenue because Amazon’s affiliates are no longer making taxable income from Amazon.

The text of the email I got from Amazon:

Hello,

For well over a decade, the Amazon Associates Program has worked with thousands of Connecticut residents. Unfortunately, the budget signed by Governor Malloy contains a sales tax provision that compels us to terminate this program for Connecticut-based participants effective immediately. It specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers – including but not limited to those referred by Connecticut-based affiliates like you – even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.

We opposed this new tax law because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It was supported by big-box retailers, most of which are based outside Connecticut, that seek to harm the affiliate advertising programs of their competitors. Similar legislation in other states has led to job and income losses, and little, if any, new tax revenue. We deeply regret that we must take this action.

As a result of the new law, contracts with all Connecticut residents participating in the Amazon Associates Program will be terminated today, June 10, 2011. Those Connecticut residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com, Endless.com, MYHABIT.COM or SmallParts.com. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned on or before today, June 10, 2011, will be processed and paid in full in accordance with the regular payment schedule.

You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you are a resident of Connecticut. If you are not currently a resident of Connecticut, or if you are relocating to another state in the near future, you can manage the details of your Associates account here. And if you relocate to another state after June 10, 2011, please contact us for reinstatement into the Amazon Associates Program.

To avoid confusion, we would like to clarify that this development will only impact our ability to offer the Associates Program to Connecticut residents and will not affect their ability to purchase from www.amazon.com.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Connecticut-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program and, if this situation is rectified, would very much welcome the opportunity to re-open our Associates Program to Connecticut residents.

Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

A long time ago, in a city far far away, I started writing a book codenamed The Project. My secret mission was to write a Choose Your Own Adventure-style book outlining the entire dating history of my at-the-time girlfriend (Becca) and myself.

If you aren’t familiar with Choose Your Own Adventure books, I’ll give you a brief summary. Basically every page or two you are asked to make a decision. For example, you may be getting attacked by a sharktopus and so it will say something like “If you cower like a little baby, turn to page 29. If you show that sharktopus who is boss, turn to page 83.” So you choose to attack the sharktopus, turn to page 83, and get dismembered by the sharktopus’ mighty sharktacles (sp?).

My book is a little different because every page makes you make a decision, and one decision always takes you to “The End”, and one always keeps the story going. At the end, I break off from reality and go into hopeful thinking and ask the beautiful Becca to marry me. Keep in mind she was just my girlfriend at the time.

Writing a book takes a lot of time. Keep in mind this isn’t some dinky pamphlet. This is a 208 page book. I needed Becca to know I was working on something important for her, but I didn’t want her to guess what it was, so it became The Project.

I finished the text of the book, but still had a lot of editing to do and I needed to design a cover. I already had the engagement ring and my impatience finally got the best of me so I just showed it to her on the computer, read some of it to her, skipped to the end, and got engaged.

Finally, more than 2 years later, I’ve finished the editing and the cover and published my book, Awkward Turtles. It is available on Amazon for $10.95. I’m working on a Kindle version, but Choose Your Own Adventure books don’t translate well to the Kindle, so it’ll take a while.

I’m pretty excited to get it published! Yes, it is awkward and somewhat embarrassing. And yes, it cost a lot of money to publish (I bought my own ISBN number, I had to buy multiple proofs, and registering a copyright isn’t free). But how cool is it to be a (self) published author? And I’m sure our little baby girl (due in May!) will love to read this someday. Maybe it’ll even become the bedtime story book for her.

Anyways, I’ve sold 3 copies so far (probably to family members) for a whopping $2.73 profit. Woot! I’m rich! I can retire off my royalties! Well, maybe someday… maybe…

Update 3/30/11: Now available on the Kindle!

I’ve been watching The Kill Point on Netflix. This is a short series about a bunch of military guys that take hostages in a bank.

I’ve seen a bunch of these types of shows recently, and have started to wonder how often banks actually get robbed. I don’t get the news, and I never see anything about it in my feed reader, so it seems like it is an incredibly rare thing.

To find out for sure, I turned to my good friend Mr. Google and found a neat FBI Bank Crime Statistics page with 2010 Q3 stats (July, August, September):

I. Violations of the Federal Bank Robbery and Incidental Crimes Statute, Title 18, United States Code, Section 2113

Violations by Type of Institution

	Robberies	Burglaries	Larcenies
Commercial Banks	1,183	10	2
Mutual Savings Banks	11	2	0
Savings and Loan Associations	25	0	0
Credit Unions	90	1	0
Total	1,310	13	2

Grand Total—All Violations: 1,325

Loot Taken and Recovered

Loot was taken in 1,189 (90 percent) of the 1,325 incidents. Loot taken is itemized as follows:

Cash	$ 9,346,252.66
Securities—Face Value	0.00
Checks (Including Traveler’s Checks)	$ 2,703.78
Food Stamps	0.00
Other Property	0.00
Total	$ 9,348,956.44

Full or partial recovery of loot taken was reported by law enforcement agencies in 232 (20 percent) of the 1,189 incidents in which loot was taken. Loot recovered is itemized as follows:

Cash	$ 1,395,976.43
Securities—Face Value	$40.00
Checks (Including Traveler’s Checks)	$90.00
Food Stamps	$0.00
Other Property	$0.00
Total	$1,396,106.43

$9.3 million stolen just in Q3 of last year?!?!?! Assuming this was an average quarter, we are talking $37.4 million stolen from banks in the US every year. I seriously never would have suspected that bank robberies were that successful in today’s age of high tech security and abundance of cops.

Even crazier is the number of bank robberies. 1,310 robberies in 2010 Q3 means about 14 robberies per day. Worse, the robbers got away (at least initially) in 90% of the robberies. Me thinks TV over dramatizes the whole hostage-taking-bank-robber scenario a bit.

Have there been any bank robberies where you live? I think when I was a kid there was one with hostages in a city nearby, but it was short lived.

I watch a lot of TV and movies. According to FeedFliks, I watch about 75 titles per week on Netflix, and I probably watch another 5-10 titles on Hulu every week.

Watching so much Netflix has given me the opportunity to experience all the pros and cons of a Netflix membership. Overall I’d say my $7.99 per month is well spent: I get access to thousands of titles and I don’t have to watch commercials. However, there are a few things that drive me crazy.

First, Netflix doesn’t work on Linux. Some may say this is because of platform that Netflix uses to serve its videos, but in reality it is a anti-consumer choice meant to prevent Linux “hackers” from cracking their DRM. If they can get videos playing on:

1. Windows
2. Mac
3. PlayStation 3
4. Wii
5. Xbox 360
6. Apple TV
7. Google TV
8. Roku
9. Seagate FreeAgent Theater
10. Sony Dash
11. WD TV
12. A pile of Blu-ray players
13. A pile of TVs (with no special attached hardware)
14. TiVo
15. iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad

…then they could get it working on desktop Linux without much trouble. They choose not to, and I’d appreciate it if they’d stop pretending it is an insurmountable software limitation.

So instead of running it natively, I have to run Linux, which runs VirtualBox, which runs Windows XP, which plays my Netflix videos. Frustrating.

Second, Netflix frequently crashes. On my desktop (Linux) and laptop (Windows 7), Netflix dies part way through shows all the time. It happens even more frequently when I pause a show. To make it worse, when the page is refreshed to bring it back to life, it often forgets where I was at in my show.

So I complained. It didn’t solve any of the problems, but it felt good to vent to the company and maybe hopefully raise a tiny bit of awareness that Linux people are frustrated at the lack of support, and that I’m annoyed that my videos crash all the time.

A few days later, I got an email apologizing for my troubles watching instantly. The interesting part of the email was a link that provided a 3% statement credit on my next bill. While I appreciate the gesture, I can’t help but thinking to myself: Really? 3%? As I said, I watch a lot of TV, so I suppose it makes sense that my patronage is only worth 25 cents to them, but a credit of 25 cents just seems.. well.. tacky? rude? pointless? a backhanded apology?

Anyways, if you have a problem with Netflix, maybe it is worth 10 minutes of your time to call and complain. Who knows, you might get a 3% credit, too!

My family has health insurance, but we opted out of prescription coverage because a) it is expensive, and b) we don’t have any prescriptions that we take daily. We figured we’d come out ahead by paying the full price for prescriptions when we rarely need them.

So far this has worked out fine, but I’ve had two prescriptions I’ve needed filled in the past couple months. Being without prescription coverage for the first time in my life, I decided to give one of those prescription discount cards a try. I looked around and chose YourRxCard. It is free, you can print it instantly without filling out a form, and it is accepted by all the major pharmacies (Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, etc.). But the big question is: does it actually save you any money?

I quickly printed out the card (took maybe 30 seconds) and took it and the prescription to Walgreens. I felt very awkward handing it to the pharmacist, but she took it and entered the details into the computer without giving me any hassle. There was a line so I didn’t want to bother the pharmacist to ask how much the card was saving me, so when I got home I called another Walgreens to check the price of the prescription without insurance. The results? $0.00 savings. Bummer.

Today I got a different prescription filled. It cost around $138 at Costco without insurance, but only $60.49 at Walgreens (always shop around for pricing when buying anything expensive!). I verified my discount card was still in the system. When I picked up my prescription, I was happy to find out I was only being charged $45.79 – a savings of over 24%! The prescription paperwork even said “Your Insurance Saved You: $14.70″, confirming that I did in fact get a discount just for printing a piece of paper off of the internet.

Bottom line: Is it worth the hassle to print a discount card if you don’t have prescription coverage? Absolutely! Check it out at YourRxCard.com.

Disclosure: This is not a paid posting. I was not compensated for posting this, and I don’t receive any money, discounts, or other benefits if you use YourRxCard. I just liked it and wanted to share.

So I’m sure you are all aware of Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange (C.L.U.E.), right? What?! You’ve never heard of it? Okay, me neither until today, but I’ll save you some time and give you the highlights of what I’ve learned.

C.L.U.E. is sort of like your credit report, but instead of tracking your credit cards, they track your personal auto and property claims. So what does this mean exactly? Well let me share the details of my personal auto C.L.U.E. report:

1. $60 for windshield repair after I caught a rock on the highway.
2. Another $60 for windshield repair for another rock.
3. $1,142 to fix someones bumper after my wife accidentally backed into their car. Even though I wasn’t driving the car, the accident goes on my report because the policy was in my name.
4. This is the one that makes my blood boil: $7,979 for “BODILY INJURY” and $1,125 for “PHYSICAL/PROPERTY DAMAGE”. About 2 years ago I was stuck in traffic. A van drifted into my lane and their side mirror scraped from the back of my car to the front, and took off my side mirror. I was found at fault even though they hit me because the cop was mad that I didn’t merge earlier (her words, not mine). We were going maybe 2 MPH and nobody was hurt. Their van wasn’t damaged (heck, the only part that touched my car was their side mirror). But because the people in the van were scummy thieves, I’m stuck with $9,104 in damage on my C.L.U.E. report.

So aside from making me hate mankind, why are these items important? Whether you are aware of it or not (and most people aren’t), all auto insurance companies pull your C.L.U.E. report before giving you insurance. This report plays a huge part in how much you are going to pay for insurance.

But these companies are keeping track of more than your auto claims. The personal property report keeps tabs on claims against your home or apartment insurance property policies.

But wait, there’s more! Curious how much it will cost you to fix your bumper after an unreported fender bender? In most states, simply asking about a claim is enough to get a negative mark on your report. There have been reports of people having their home insurance policies canceled after calling to inquire about the cost of fixing water damage, even though they didn’t actually report water damage or file a claim.

There are also reports of people paying outrageous rates for their insurance policies because of mistakes on their reports.

So what can you do about it? Luckily, federal law lets you get a free report every year. It takes about 5 minutes and you’ll need to be able to answer the same sorts of questions you’d answer when getting your credit report (like what streets you’ve lived on). If something is wrong, you can dispute it and possibly get a lower insurance rate. If you live in a consumer-friendly state (like California) you can sometimes even get valid information taken off if it violates reporting laws.

So request your free report today and see what it says. It might surprise you.

If you haven’t used SmartyPig before and are comfortable with online savings accounts (like ING Direct), I highly recommend checking it out.

SmartyPig is an online savings account that currently pays 2.01% APY. That rate isn’t much different from most of the other online (well, nearly double ING Direct’s at the moment), but how the account works is drastically different.

To demonstrate how it works, lets say I want to save $2000 by November 1st to help with holiday expenses like airfare and Christmas gifts. Instead of just dumping money into a savings account every now and then and hoping I reach the goal, I can use SmartyPig. I tell SmartyPig how much I have saved already (let’s say $500), how much I want to save ($2000), when I need it by (November 1st), and how often I want to deposit more money to the account (let’s say once a month on the 1st). I can then click a button and SmartyPig informs me that at the current APY, I need to deposit $185.27 per month to reach my goal. If I want I can adjust that amount up or down, although if I adjust it down then I probably won’t reach my goal in time.

Once the goal is setup, SmartyPig automatically transfers my scheduled deposit out of my checking or savings account at another bank and deposits it into my goal account. I can easily see how close I am to my goal in both dollar amount and percentage. If I want, I can even put a widget on Facebook or my website showing how close I am to my goal.

I can also tell SmartyPig that I want to accept contributions for my goal. This makes it easy for mom or dad to chip in a few bucks to help me fly home for the holidays.

So those features are neat, but not really earth-shatteringly amazing. So what makes SmartyPig so awesome? You can withdraw money from your goal at any time, but if you wait until you reach the goal then you can utilize the SmartyPig cash boost!

Let’s go back to the holiday expenses example. It is November 1st and we have $2000 in our SmartyPig savings account. Time to cash out. We already started doing some Christmas shopping, so we can transfer $1000 to our checking account to help pay for that stuff. We need a hotel, so we can request a $250 Travelocity gift card and they’ll send us a $275 gift card. We need to buy some tools for dad, so we request a $250 Home Depot gift card and they’ll send us a $257.50 gift card. Some clothes from Macy’s would be nice, so we request $200 from them and get $224. The wife wants some jewelery so we request a $300 Jared gift card and get a $321 gift card.

If you’ve been keeping track, our account only had $2000 in it but we got $2077.50 in cash and gift cards. That is because SmartyPig gives your money a boost when you cash out your reward in the form of gift cards. You can find a list of their “best-in-class” retailers here. Sure, the average 2% to 6% doesn’t sound like much, but in this example we get $77.50 for free just for shopping at places we were already planning on shopping at! And if you don’t want to spend your money at one of their retailers, you can withdraw your money to a prepaid debit card or to your bank account.

How can they afford that? Volume. SmartyPig purchases gift cards in bulk at a discount from the retailer. The size of the discount varies based on the retailer. If they get a 10% discount then they might give you an 8% boost and pocket the 2% difference. The retailer is happy because you are forced to spend that money at their store, SmartyPig is happy because they just made 2% of the gift card face value, and you are happy because you just got 8% more than you ordered. Everyone wins. Note: Percentages are for example only, I have no idea what the actual amounts are…

Check it out at SmartyPig.com!