Taiwan

Credit Card Spending: What’s your first bill in 2008 like?

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Today was the day that my first credit card bill landed on my doorstep with a small thud! Thankfully, for me, the thud was due to the included catalogue, NOT the size of the bill. But with the worsening economy in the US, home to the majority of my readers, the first credit card bills of 2008 couldn’t be coming at a worse time. So, as I peruse my light reading, I can’t help thinking of those for whom things are much worse:

So, how did I do? Let’s see. It seems that in December I spent nearly NT$14,738 on things that I can’t remember (I’ll have to look over the bill from December to see what went on!).

But WORSE, I only paid about $7,179 dollars of the outstanding balance off, meaning that I incurred an interest charge on the remainder – I haven’t done that in months. At 11.5% per annum, that’s about NT$174 (or nearly US$5.00).

The other charges are minimal (all currencies NT$32.5:US$1).

  1. The biggest is my regular insurance/investment product that charges about $2000 to my card every month. I should really blog about that product from Cigna but I can’t make up my mind if it’s a good thing or not.
  2. Then I added a $1000 amount for a regular membership of the local video store, as I was in the middle of watching the DVD series The Apprentice Series 4. Very enjoyable overall, though the final candidates didn’t surprise me at all. We still have a few hundred dollars outstanding so we can rent more movies.
  3. Of course, my mobile phone bill came in at $398 but that was for 2 months, not one. I hardly use it these days at all, even for incoming calls. It helps if I charge it and turn it on!
  4. We also went to Hola in Taipei which is a furnishings store near B&Q, where we were looking at the Roomba. Between these two stores, we bought a new shower curtain, and a few odds and ends: total $1233.

So why didn’t I pay off the bill in full? Well, it was for a stupid reason: I was trying to save a round number to open a new CD. I had planned to open one for NT$100,000 (about US$3,000), but that move cost me more than I’d have earned. I prefered to earn 2.4% per annum instead of paying off a bill that charged 11.5% per annum – how dumb is that: to spend $174 to save an extra $20? Not a smart move.

Have you ever made dumb moves with your credit cards? Let’s hear it here.

Panasonic, Prada and Perspectives: Change isn’t that hard, is it?

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Flower shopping: a whole new world view! 

Just yesterday, I went with Christine to a flower market in Taipei. This is something I normally hate doing, but this time something twigged: I may not appreciate the enjoyment and satisfaction she has from growing and keeping plants, but I could enjoy another aspect that I already knew about – taking photographs of the specimens. And the new power zoom of my Panasonic Lumix made it that much more fun.

Fashion affects us all

While I was thinking about this, another example sprang to mind: The Devil Wears Prada. Since this movie is set in the fashion world, most of the girls I knew reckoned that I wouldn’t or couldn’t possibly enjoy this movie. But they were wrong! And I was teased mercilessly for enjoying a ‘chick flick’ but I didn’t see it as a ‘chick flick’ at all. Far from it.

What was my secret? I had found something that I really enjoyed in the movie, the intrigue, the lead character called Miranda Priestly – played by Meryl Streep (one of my favorites since I first saw her in “Out of Africa”) – and the whole business of the fashion world. I also loved the idea that the fashion magazines were somehow connected to our daily lives, as Andy Sachs promptly found out, when lashed by Miranda’s tongue in the following diatribe:

Miranda Priestly: [Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit. Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?

Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y’know, it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y’know, I’m still learning about all this stuff.

Miranda Priestly: This… ‘stuff’? Oh… ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers.

Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

Shift your focus: Shift your future

That’s when it suddenly hit home to me, if I’m struggling to understand why something is interesting to other people, I just need to shift my focus to something that I am already familiar with, and perhaps, just perhaps I can make a connection with it that helps me to ‘get it’.

When I first started doing the finances, and handling the money, it was a very difficult time for me, as I had to learn new ideas and unlearn my former prejudices – thinking about, talking about, and taking action on finances weren’t things that came easy to me.

How Things Change

In fact, it would be impossible for me to imagine then that I could be writing a finance column about money, investing, loans, credit cards, blogging and technology (to name a few of my themes!). But somewhere between the date I got married in June 1995 and when we bought the house in 1999, a transition took place in my brain that allowed me to grasp ideas and information that had been ‘foreign’ to me for a long time.

Have you had a similar experience? Share with us.  Ever had to tackle something that you had a distaste for? What happened?

E-commerce: Why are some sites so unfriendly to customers?

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Cindy, one of my colleagues at my school, has been helping us make some banners for announcements for our upcoming events and Chinese New Year Holiday. She highly recommended the software called 非常好色6是DIY美工創作的必備幫手 which translates roughly as “Very Colorful 6 is a DIY art and creative tool that is a necessary help”. The tool can be used to create pages like the ones in the image below.

magicpower

In fact, she used the software to create the following Chinese New Year notice, that we are placing on our school website and handing out to students.

new year notice

In fact, she designed the funky notice. Then she exported the document using a PDF print driver called PDFCreator 0.95 (I think). The real problem came when we tried to order the software through the Interweb. I was quite surprised that the publisher called NewSoft which had an international website could run such a weird system. Rather than retype everything, here’s the email I fired off to the publisher.

Dear NewSoft…

I recently had a frustrating experience trying to buy Chinese language software from your company… Your Website for Taiwan is terrible…

1. it doesn’t work with Firefox? And that’s really not very professional…

2. when I opened it in IE7, I successfully managed to order, but the software CLOSED my browser, tried to popup a new window without my permission, and caused me to wonder why I bothered trying to order
anything from your site.

3. then when I accessed your website again, I was told that my browser (IE7) was out of date, and to download new crap onto my system… If you want customers to come into your store, do you really ask them to change their shoes and coat first… ?

I’m sorry but your e-commerce site is really awful, and I’ve done a lot of shopping online in the past: It’s not friendly to non-IE7 browsers (let’s not mention Linux!), isn’t friendly to people who can’t read Chinese fluently yet (and the buy button is so ridiculously small), and then crashed my browser, and left me wondering whether or not I had successfully completed the order.

Overall, it created unnecessary demands on e-commerce users… I wonder how many customers would bother to even try the second time, or the third time…. Like I did. Or how many would even bother to write this email… Perhaps I’ll just post it on my blog tonight…

Best Wishes
Kenneth

Unfortunately, in Taiwan there is a huge assumption for local websites that IE6 or IE7 is the ONLY browser in use. It’s like most companies are unaware of the need to develop websites that have core functionality that is accessible for non-IE6/7 browsers or systems. A kind gentleman called Frank that responded promptly to my email admitted as much. But he didn’t care to explain the sense of that.

Is your site browser friendly or browser neutral? Have you checked? With mobile blogging and e-commerce likely to become a big phenomenon, designing websites that are cross browser compatible is a necessity if you wish to be taken seriously in the e-commerce world. And Apple which uses Safari and Firefox as browsers is also growing its PC market share above 5% of late. Linux installs are also growing. Opera is also multi-platform as a browser, and is very standards-compliant. At the very least, functionality should degrade in a way that is not obvious to visitors.

But in the website I used, even the dropdown menus didn’t work in IE7 as well as Firefox. It just seems that if a company is serious about online business, the website needs to respect as many choices as possible, it needs to be properly tested, and it needs to be maintained. You can’t just build your website and forget about it.

error in javascript

There were other usability issues including the a javascript error, and popups to documents that can be printed out, but which may crash your browser.

So, do test your e-commerce website as much as you can before, during and after the launch. Keep it uptodate and make it as user friendly as possible. Otherwise customers will experience errors and simply close the browser, click away or enter a URL of one of your competitors, instead. All of these result in lost sales.