I had been a customer of HSBC for a few years in HongKong, then in Taiwan when I transferred my account to Taipei. I thought “Great!” Finally a bank in Taiwan that understands international clients, a bank that has good service, a bank that excels in providing good products. Was I wrong? YES on 2 out of 3… Read More »
I’ve found that a credit card can be a very good budgeting tool. I was always afraid of credit and seeing the amount of debt a lot of people have nearly convinced me that the cards weren’t financially healthy. But then my mortgage company offered me a card with 1% cash back applied to my mortgage principal. It… Read More »
Jim at Bargaineering just asked how much people carry on their wallet… and it got me thinking. I typically don’t carry that much … really. At the beginning of the month, I usually withdraw a nominal NT$5000 (about US$165) to last me as long as I can. It covers coffee money, snacks and outside purchases, the occasional book… Read More »
A recent report in Taiwan underlined how often personal and private information is often traded for less than $10 per name. In another recent story from the New York Times, a very successful businessman was systematically defrauded of $100,000 over a long period of time. Identity theft is a serious and growing crime that inflicts serious damage on… Read More »
I know this is likely an old feature in Google, but it’s one I happened on by chance when I was researching GBP:US$ currency levels. As an aside, I noted that just a few weeks ago, the GBP was getting nearly 2 dollars, but the currency has weakened (or weak-kneed) by nearly 10% in just a shortime! It’s… Read More »
Don’t you ever wish you had taken your own medicine? I blogged all about how to keep a track of my expenses. Usually, that’s not a big deal but so I don’t use anything except my memory to recall the two or three transactions. Hah! I should have done. This time I had 18 transactions to keep records… Read More »
Keeping a track of expenses is truly a nightmare especially when you’re on vacation. You have all those little bits of paper, phone numbers, receipts, credit card receipts, cash, foreign coins, etc., etc. Soon you end up with a wallet that looks similar to this. If you’re anything like me, being organized is a real challenge. I do… Read More »
After our little trip this week, we got back to a pile of email and bills all that required attention. This included the regular credit card bill from our bank. Well, it’s good news/bad news time! The good news I didn’t pay any additional charges on my card apart from the statements as my card was paid off… Read More »
Today we received our first electricity bill of the summer! And we got a shock! It was much….. SMALLER … than we had expected originally. We saved about NT$1700 on our bills vs. the same period last year… And we really didn’t do that much yet. But if we focus, we could save about 15%~20% of our annual… Read More »