Goldstar: Half-Off Local Events In 8 Major Cities
Feeling the recession, but still want to get out of the house? You might consider signing up for Goldstar, which helps you to “Go out more”. They offer half-price tickets on plays, concerts, sporting events, and museum exhibits.
So far, it includes events in these areas: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, D.C. Metro, New York, Boston, San Diego, and Las Vegas. Events are summarized into weekly e-mails, and there is also a social networking component where they collect a lot of individual reviews of each event.
For example, if you live in the SF Bay Area, you could ride an all-day Golden Gate Bay Cruise this weekend for $11, see the Giants play baseball tonight for just $5, watch professional beach volleyball for $5, or even watch bassist Charlie Haden at Yoshi’s Jazz Club for free.
They do tack on a service fee for each ticket, which varies but is at least disclosed relatively early. I saw from $2 to $6 per ticket. For each new friend you refer that joins Goldstar, you get $1 credit towards service fees.
Cheers Theme Song and Financial Realities
Television has given us a lot of relationships with characters who we can never meet. I remember characters from a lot of TV shows better than I am able to recall certain childhood friends and classmates and I am pretty sure that I still know the TV characters better than I have known a [...]Saving Money on Pet Costs: Frontline Plus Flea Medication
Now that we have two dogs, we’ve had to keep a closer eye on pet costs. One regular expense is flea medication, for which we have found Frontline Plus to work acceptably. If you buy it straight from the vet or in a retail pet store it can be around $15 per monthly dose.
In the past, we’ve found that the cheapest price has been on eBay, getting costs down to about $8 per dose for the exact same 6-pack product packaging. But a recent development amongst eBay sellers is to sell the bigger vials made for 89+ lb. dogs, and then have the consumer split the medication fluid into smaller doses themselves. Here’s an example of the cost breakdown for a small dog (under 22 lbs).
| Store | Cost (w/ shipping) | Cost per dose |
| 1800PetMeds.com (”retail”) | $83.99 for 6-pack | $14 |
| Amazon.com | $58 for 6-pack | $9.67 |
| eBay (sample listing) | $47 for 18 doses | $2.61 |
At less than $3 a dose, you can save over 80% off of retail. The absolute savings are only about $7-$11 per month, but it adds up quickly. Especially if you have multiple dogs, the ongoing savings could be hundreds of dollars per year.
Of course, you could also just buy the extra-large doses from Amazon.com for $61.49, which equates to $3.42 per small dog dose. However, the eBay auctions also include a glass vial and a marked syringe/dropper to easily measure out the correct doses. (Some also include latex gloves.) If you’re going to go through the extra trouble, you might as well go all the way!
More Accurate Dosing
Another potential benefit of essentially buying this stuff in bulk is that you can more accurately dose your dogs. By default, Merial categorizes dogs into four broad categories: 0-22 lbs, 23-44 lbs, 45-88 lbs, and 89-132 lbs. This corresponds to vial sizes of 0.67 ml, 1.34 ml, 2.68 ml, and 4.02 ml. I don’t know about you, but I see a pretty big gap between 45 and 88 pounds.
If you take the largest size for each category and divide by the vial size, you get 0.0305 ml per pound every time. So if you have a 25 lb. dog why give them double the dose of a 22 lb. dog? Just give them a bit more (0.76 ml) and you should be fine - and save even more money!
As with all these flea medications, you can do some trial and error to see what brand and dosage level works for your dog. You might need more or less than indicated. Either way, with this method you should still save a good chunk of money.
Free Wireless Internet Access at Barnes and Noble
Barnes & Noble bookstores and AT&T are now offering free wireless internet access to everyone. You can use this storefinder to see which ones have free Wi-Fi. Seems like they are now promoting their own e-Books as well through the service. Via Lifehacker.
You can still get 2 hours of free Wi-Fi every day from Starbucks if you register a gift card and use it once a month. Sometimes you just need a change of scenery to get the inspiration going again.
Is Crafting a Good Way To Make Money?
Whenever I see an article on ways to make additional money, crafting and selling the items on Etsy.com or at local craft fairs is always included. But is crafting really a good way to make money? I became interested in this question when I visited the home of an acquaintance. Crafting supplies were spread over most [...]EPA Changes MPG Ratings Last-Minute For Cash For Clunkers
In my post Does My Car Qualify For Cash for Clunkers?, one of the major requirements was that the car must have a combined fuel economy of 18 mpg or less, according to FuelEconomy.gov. Many people have been complaining that their old car gets nowhere near the mileage that the website says they do, but at least there was a definitive source.
But wait. Due to some government wackiness, last week the EPA changed the ratings on nearly a hundred models of cars so that they no longer qualify. For example, some versions of the 1988 Toyota 4Runner SUV now have combined MPG ratings of over 19. The buzz about Cash for Clunkers has been going on for months, so people have been getting ready to trade-in their old vehicles. In fact, the bill runs retroactive to July 1st, so many are already driving their new vehicles!
From this CNN Money article:
Even though the program’s basic requirements have been known since it was created by Congress earlier this year, Cash for Clunkers didn’t become official until Friday. So as part of the official launch, the EPA conducted “quality assurance and quality control effort regarding fuel economy calculations on more than 30,000 vehicle model types spanning the past 25 years,” according to an e-mail sent by EPA spokesman Dale Kemery.
As a result, 86 car models became newly eligible for the program. However, 78 models became ineligible, EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourne said in a statement released Tuesday night.
In other words, if you were close before, check your mileage numbers again. Your car may now qualify even though you didn’t before, or it may no longer qualify at all.
New Work Realities
Although our economy seems to be turning a corner — home sales have continued to improve for a full three months and, as I write this, the DJIA remains over 9,000 for the second day — unemployment remains very high and layoffs continue. As one friend recently told me, she was very tired from [...]Rental Property vs. REZ Residential Index ETF
Many people see owning a rental property as a ticket to prosperity. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply own an interest in a rental property, but not have any of the accompanying hassles? I’m far from an expert in this field, but let’s take a look at an REIT that invest in residential real estate.
What is an REIT?
REIT stands for Real Estate Investment Trust. From the National Association of REITs website:
A REIT is a company that owns, and in most cases, operates income-producing real estate such as apartments, shopping centers, offices, hotels and warehouses. Some REITs also engage in financing real estate. The shares of many REITs are freely traded, usually on a major stock exchange.
To qualify as a REIT, a company must distribute at least 90 percent of its taxable income to its shareholders annually. A company that qualifies as a REIT is permitted to deduct dividends paid to its shareholders from its corporate taxable income. As a result, most REITs remit at least 100 percent of their taxable income to their shareholders and therefore owe no corporate tax.
Since all the REIT income usually “passes through” straight to the shareholders, you are getting relatively direct exposure to real estate. You’re not investing in raw materials, a homebuilder, or some other derivative.
REZ Residential ETF
The iShares FTSE NAREIT Residential Plus Capped Index Fund (ticker REZ) is an ETF that tracks the FTSE NAREIT All Residential Capped Index. Here is the breakdown by industry breakdown and also the top 10 holdings.
As you can see, this is not the same as owning a single-family house, or even a bunch of single family houses. The fund holds interests in apartment complexes, healthcare facilities such as seniors housing communities and skilled nursing facilities, and also self-storage companies. For example, you can search online through the apartment complexes owned by Equity Apartments.
The annual expense ratio for REZ is 0.48%, which is on top of the built-in costs spent by each individual REIT. iShares also has ETFs focused on the different sectors such as Retail (retail stores, shopping malls) and Office/Industrial (office and industrial buildings).
ETF Advantages
One obvious advantage of owning an ETF instead of a single rental property is simplicity. You don’t have to spend time and effort dealing with finding tenants, maintenance issues, or problems with local government. You don’t have to search for properties to buy, negotiate prices, or obtain financing. You also don’t have to ever worry about keeping up cashflow, as there are no mortgage payment due each month.
Then there’s liquidity. If you need to sell, REZ has decent share volume so you can just type in a sell order and you’re done. You pretty much know the market price at all times.
Which One Is Better?
Here’s the tough question. Which will have the better return? With a single property, you are looking at monthly cashflow and property appreciation (plus possible tax benefits). With the ETF, you have your quarterly dividends and share price appreciation.
REZ currently has a current distribution rate of 5.11% based on its last quarterly dividend of 0.3003 cents per share, while the dividend yield listed on Yahoo! is 8.84% based on TTM (sum of all dividends paid out in the trailing twelve month period). According to the iShares page the Price/Earning ratio was 33 and the Price/Book ratio was 1.73 as 6/30/09.
The trailing 1-year total return of REZ is -39.64% according to Morningstar. (Too new for older numbers.) However, depending on how much your rental house was leveraged, many private investors could have done much worse. If you put $10,000 down on a $100,000 house and the house dropped just 5% in value, you would have essentially lost 50% of your $10,000 as well. I’m not sure what the total leverage of the REITs in this ETF are.
Also, we have to go back to the fact that this REIT doesn’t hold a bunch of detached single-family houses. Healthcare facilities seem like they would be a good source of income in a growing field. However, they could also be susceptible to political changes in Medicare rules.
I think its safe to say that any individual property could do worse or better than REZ. Perhaps a better question is how much you value diversification. Instead of putting your money into one property in one area, with an ETF you are instead owning a slice of thousands of different properties across the country. If you have high confidence in your abilities to select and manage a single property, that might be the better way to go.
Jamba Juice Buy One Get One Free Coupon
Jamba Juice just sent me this buy 1 get 1 free coupon. Expires 8/9. Good for those overheating states right now! Yes, it is overpriced fruit.
Steal This Book
How do you read a book that you can’t buy in bookstores or find in libraries… because people keep stealing them since the title is Steal This Book? Even used copies are selling for double the retail list price. By reading a ripped off copy on the internet, of course. 
Written by activist Abbie Hoffman in 1970, Steal This Book is basically a counter-culture guidebook to that era, and is self-described as a “manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika.” It promotes its own view of morality, which is that it is okay to steal from everyone from the government to business owners like grocery stores, but not other Yippie activists. The “Survive!” section is basically a “How to see the US on zero dollars a day” travel book.
Whether the ways it describes to rip-off shit are legal or illegal is irrelevant. The dictionary of law is written by the bosses of order. Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.
Wow, Sproul Plaza flashbacks. The topic covered are very wide-ranging, although many are now out-dated. I’ll “steal” the description at Wikipedia:
The book includes advice on such topics as growing marijuana, starting a pirate radio station, living in a commune, stealing food, shoplifting, stealing credit cards, preparing a legal defense, making pipe bombs, and obtaining a free buffalo from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Most people will probably be offended by a lot of the content, but I basically viewed it as a mix of history, entertainment, and knowledge. There are even congee recipes from National Liberation Front fighters. I’m also the type of guy who likes to know how all the scams work. Samples:
Free postage: “When mailing to the same city, address the envelope or package to yourself and put the name of the person you are sending it to where the return address generally goes. Mail it without postage and it will be “returned” to the sender.”
Free food: “In restaurants where you pay at the door just before leaving, there are a number of free-loading tricks that can be utilized. After you’ve eaten a full meal and gotten the check, go into the restroom. When you come out go to the counter or another section of the restaurant and order coffee and pie. Now you have two bills. Simply pay the cheaper one when you leave the place.”
Panhandling: “A good prop is a charity canister. You can get them by going to the offices of a mainstream charity and signing up as a collector. Don’t feel bad about ripping them off. Charities are the biggest swindle around. 80% or more of the funds raised by honky charities go to the organization itself. New fancy cars for the Red Cross, inflated salaries for the executives of the Cancer Fund, tax write-offs for Jerry Lewis. You get the picture.”
Never even thought about this: You can get $150 to $600 in advance by willing your body to a University medical school. They have you sign a lot of papers and put a tattoo on your foot. You can get the tattoo removed and sell your body to the folks across the street.
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