Credit Companies Want You To Fail!
Written by Zealus on April 20, 2009 – 11:07 am -
Last week I got two letters - one from GE Bank (that provides credit services for Lord & Taylor) and one from Chase. Both were somewhat apologetic and notified me of the credit line cut. In fact, they cut it so much that the credit limit is barely above the balance on the card.
Now, I don’t claim to have a credit score of 900, but it was a decent enough score, especially for a current economy. With lines cut like these, my credit score will undoubtedly plunge - because the integral part of it is an available credit to total credit ratio. As you can see, with a simple move two credit providers have just destroyed about 75 to 100 points of my credit score.
What does it mean in a long run? Well, I expect some more credit cards to do the same (although I don’t have that many anyway). That should bring my credit score down even more. Inevitably, some of the credit lines will get so close to the balance that cards get accidentally overdrawn. That pushes the score even further down. In a two to three months I expect my credit score to nosedive by no less then 150 points, with even more diving in the following months. There’s almost nothing I can do to prevent that. Obviously, if I was capable of paying off all the balances - I would have done that a long time ago, but I would still need some credit for operations anyway.
So what these credit companies are looking at is in approximately 3 to 4 months driving my credit score down so much that I would stop caring about it. Then, an interesting thing happens - once you stop caring about your credit score, you realize that you can just stop paying credit cards, free up a lot of cash, stop answering calls from credit card companies for about half a year (imagine all the cash you can save by then), wait until your debt is sold to a collection agency, wait out a little longer and then make a deal on paying off just a fraction of the initial debt.
Once you’re done settling (even before you’ve paid off your balance) - your credit score will start to raise, in about a year you’re back to the previous numbers without the debt and with whole lot of cash. Credit company looses, you win.
Now tell me - what’s the rationale behind the initial action of the credit company to cut the credit line of an individual (or a business) that makes all the payments on time and always pays significantly more then a minimum payment? Does it all make sense? From my point of view - it doesn’t.
Tags: business, credit, credit cardsYou might also be interested in reading this:
Posted in business | 2 Comments »
Self-Improvement For Small Business Owner - Part II
Written by Zealus on April 15, 2009 – 1:14 pm -This is part II of the series (read Part I of Self-Improvement for Small Business Owner).
When you talk or read that goal management is good - you are not making any real progress. Even more so - the more you talk, the more you waste your time. So if you really want to start going - here’s a first step at organizing your goals.
Remember how I talked about dividing your goals into three categories? Hope you do, because, being a geek I have done half of the work for lazy you. The following link will open a Google Document in a new window (you can click on the picture as well for the same effect):
This colored thingy is already broken down into 9 color-coded areas. Once you write your goals in each of the areas, you should start associating your goals with these colors. Now, I am not saying you should use these colors to brain wash yourself, however, if you feel certain colors would represent your goal/priorities better - feel free to copy this chart into Excel or Calc and change them around. The idea is to have three colors for each priority and distinguish between a long and short term by intensity (saturation, if you will) of the same color.
Why? Good question. Ideally, your short term goals must lead you to achieving your long term goals. So by coding short-term goals in the same color as your long terms you implicitly suggesting to yourself that that’s why you are doing this. As an example, take running 10K distance (that’s one of my long term goals for now). I know that I can’t just get up and run 10K, because somewhere around 3 - 4K distance I break down. So I set a short term goal to get an extra 5 minutes to run every week. During my workout yesterday I had a 30 minute run instead of 25 as of last week and I have successfully broken my dreaded 4K barrier. Maybe I stick to 30 minutes for the next week or maybe I will increase it to 35. In any case - running an extra 5 minutes makes a perfect deep-blue colored short term goal, at the same time reminding me that colored in sky blue goal of running a 10K run is getting closer every time I achieve my “+5 min run”.
Aside from that there is one more use for this matrix, which I will talk about in the next part of the series. Stay tuned.
Tags: entrepreneur, goals, self-improvement, time managementYou might also be interested in reading this:
Posted in business, personal | No Comments »
Hotmail Awakens With POP3 and SMTP
Written by Zealus on April 14, 2009 – 1:06 am -It’s only been a quarter into year 2009 when Microsoft had awakened to realities of the simple things on the web. Like e-mail.
As of March 12, 2009, POP3 access is now available to Hotmail users WORLDWIDE.
When you set up Hotmail in the e-mail program on your PC or mobile device, you may be asked for the following information:
POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes
As you can see, in about 10 - 15 years Microsoft will add IMAP support. Stay tuned.
On the other hand, if you simply check Google, you will see that:
@aol.com and @aim.com (those poor souls who got themselves an AIM instant messenger) total around 350 million results
@live.com yields about 281 million results
@hotmail.com - 325 million results
which totals around 600 million
@yahoo.com - 1.48 billion resuls (first place so far)
@gmail.com and @googlemail.com in total produce well below 200 million results.
Or in other words, second largest e-mail provider has just realized that people may want to check their e-mails outside of the flashy advertising interface. Personally I have abandoned Hotmail a long time ago because the loading times were awful (compared to any other web mail back then) and all the advertisements were so in-your-face that I barely saw actual messages. Of course, Firefox was in early alpha (if that), there was no AdBlock plugin and Hotmail simply refused to work in any other browser except Internet Explorer. Add to this the fact that my Hotmail ID was even more popular target for spam then one with Yahoo and spam blocking options were largely non-existant… well, let’s just say I have logged into Hotmail today for the first time in three years. The ID was still alive primarily because of a few services that were tied into it, like MSN messenger, Webmaster Tools and MSDN subscriptions.
Of course, you may want to argue (at least those of you who paid attention during Outlook initial startup) that Microsoft had long availed checking Hotmail/Live.com e-mails from Outlook and Outlook Express. Guess what? I only been using Outlook since 2007, I have been using a lot of other e-mail clients before. Even more so now, I use Outlook from home and Thunderbird on the go. And all my work-related messages are copied into Google account (both received AND SENT!). All this have been done using IMAP/SMTP. Which Microsoft, probably, hadn’t researched yet in their version of Civilization game they’re playing. Which is, honestly, surprising, given the advances the company makes with operating systems and developer tools.
Staying tuned for company’s response, there were a lot of requests for IMAP as far as I know…
No tag for this post.
