Tips on Getting a Good Balance Transfer Card

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If you possess a credit card with a huge amount of debts and could only devote small monthly payments to paying off the outstanding amounts, then you might want to try balance transfers credits cards to lessen your burden. A lot of people transfer their balances from one card to another and taking advantage of new and fresh offers. This is basically known as rate surfing or card jumping.

Getting a cheaper rate: reduce your interest payments!

Balance transfer credit cards can be very useful in reducing interest rates on bank loans and other loans. If your credit limit is high then you might just be able to complete your loan payment. Some credit cards even provide checks solely for this purpose, however, you need to be very cautious about this. There are some cards checks that can cost higher rates more than the card itself. It is advisable to carefully read the fine print first before anything else. Most credit cards are generous enough to allow you in making balance transfer. This is the best resort after undergoing intense shopping spree.

Choose your balance transfer card

There are two types of balance transfers that you could choose from. A lot of companies offer consumers a chance to male balance transfers for a 0% rate at a certain fixed period, which may run from6 to 9 months. The moment the card expires, the rate of the outstanding transferred balance will go back to the standard rate. This will come out to be naturally a higher rate. The best way to utilize the benefit of 0% transferred balance is to get a new one before the credit card expires. You can transfer your remaining balance to a new credit card and continue the benefit of having 0% interest rate.

Don’t apply for too many cards

Be sure that you won’t apply for numerous credit cards all at the same time as this may affect your credit rating. Another type of transaction balance offer is the fixed rate of money that can be transferred granting that it will remain on the card. This is quite a good option if you are paying a high interest rate. This will offer a rate of 5% that is much lower as compared to the standard interest rates. Which ever type you choose, it will be a great help in lifting your burden in paying your outstanding balances.

Check the Purchase Rates, too!

Consider also the purchase rates of the credit card. This kind of offer allows you to check certain rates that can be applied to your purchases. Credit cards that offers lows transfer balance rate most of time have higher rates of credit card expenditure. It is also advisable that you make your payments to lower rates at first. This means that you will be paying a little because of spending on your credit card.

Regardless of the type of the card balance transfer, each of them have their own offer that could be of great advantage which basically depends on the outstanding amount of your debts and the way you spend and pay your balances. Shopping around with a balance transfer card in hand could give you a lot of savings.

The DEAL – Would you buy an extra car parking space?

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I was emptying the mail at school today, when I picked up a flyer that had a picture of a car on the front. I scanned the Chinese, immediately noting that they were offering parking lots for sale in our building. So I began to wonder if it’s a good way or not to make a little extra cash.

The DEAL

Quite simply: one parking lot is available for approximately NT$550K. That would allow you to park one car there wherever the lot is located in the building.

The Opportunity

Once purchased, you would be able to rent out the lot to whoever you can find. If the lot is located on the B2 floor, you could probably rent it for NT$2000 per month. For the lot located on the B3 floor, you might manage to earn about NT$1700 per month.

The Costs

There are of course costs associated with this kind of purchase: transaction and other one off costs. When the deal goes through, you’ll face the challenge of finding customers, too. On a regular basis, you will need to pay NT$200 per month in building fees that are applicable to all car parks in the building. There aren’t any upfront taxes I’m aware of, other than the requirement to report your income.

How much can you earn?

Over one year, and assuming you cover the building fees, you’d likely earn about NT$18600 or so. This would amount to a gross return on investment of 3.38%. Additionally, you may be able to sell the car park at some future point in time, which might earn additional growth in the value of a carpark. If your client pays the building fees, then you could make an additional NT$2400 pa., earning 3.81%. You may also be able to purchase the lot at a slight discount of 5%, improving your ROV nicely to about 4.01%

What is the highest interest rate?

I’ve been searching for ages, and I’ve found that the highest interest rate you can get at the moment in Taiwan is approsimately 2.65% for a 12-month CD at the post office. There are occasional offers marginally better than this, but since the Post Office is govt. backed it’s likely that this is the best you can get.

So, if you bought it straight up, your gross margin would vary from the minimum of 0.75% to a more respectable 1.36% vs. the post office rate.

There are a number of assumptions in this scenario that would warrant further note.

  • Could you rent the space out for 12 months EVERY month? It’s not likely, there are times the lot would be empty for sure, as you wait for your next client.
  • Rental units in this area of Tamsui are generally undersubscribed and there is a reasonable supply of spaces BUT several of the lots are above ground, and as property prices spiral, it’s likely those lots would be turned into apartment blocks which may or may not have open access parking.
  • The population in Zhuwei is certainly rising, and quickly, so this should also help property values in the medium to long term.
  • There isn’t a big office space market here yet, though, so finding a renter would likely mean that the renter is himself renting an apartment without a space. Many in our community do this already.
  • I’d certainly be happy to have another source of income from a parking lot; perhaps even two lots would help me reach a personal goal.
  • Mortgage such a lot might help improve returns on the purchase, but with mortgage rates nearly at 4%, it’s unlikely that you’d see much benefit. And rates are rising.

A final note: Taiwanese are happy to buy apartments and car parks for rental and rent them out at rates we would find worthwhile doing. For example, people buy a house @ NT$5 million and rent out the house for less than NT$15K per month. The amount wouldn’t even cover the mortgage if it was over 50% of the total. It’s a math that has ALWAYS puzzled me.

Would you do this deal? Let me what you think…

Server Needs: Consider carefully what you need, and why!

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It’s nearly a week since I started the move to clean up and reorganize my server. It was after yet another outage… and a huge spike in server usage. Take a look!

This wasn’t the first time that I had experienced such a spike, things had been pretty stable for a few months. But it was enough to prompt me to start reorganizing my sites: I manage/own over a dozen sites (some with no traffic, some with no income, some with no success!). I had to start by issuing this email to my clients!

server problems email

Step One: Moved this blog

So, I signed up for a BlueHost account and transferred this blog to their hosting. In fact, the whole transition was relatively effortless, bar one problem: when I moved my install I somehow imported the posts into the database in the wrong format: ie. I think it was UTF-8, not Latin1-Swedish) I’m still wondering if it’s a big problem or not. Most of my posts look fine, but then some posts are hideous.

utf-8 errors

Since it doesn’t affect every post, I’m still confused at how or why it’s occurring. The other slight niggle was that I lost my install of Affiliate-o-matic, including the important files for configuring the updated versions!

associate-o-matic

In fact, courtesy of this program, I’ve created nearly $900 dollars worth of affiliate sales of books since I started doing it a few years ago. That’s without much tinkering of the script, in fact you can check it out installed on my site ! It’s now working again!

Step Two: Cleaning Up!

Having had the original account for four years, a lot of crud had built up: old data not removed, old installs not cleaned up, old databases not used in years, … so I spent 7 days reorganizing everything. I finally rooted out all the old unused sub-domains, installs and refugee data. Each of the users was allocated a new FTP user account, their essential data was moved to the new location, old data was stored or removed. Finally, I rebooted the server.

Difficult decisions

I’ve reached a decision point though with regard to Dreamhost. As a regular Dreamhost user, I am impressed by the facilities offered, the relative simplicity and help that is offered. In fact, in terms of simplicity, it is light years ahead of BlueHost. But Dreamhost’s biggest issue has been their stability – some of that was my own fault, I guess. But for business reasons, stability is more important than depth of resources available: some of the recent downtime since last August has really begun to affect my own traffic, as well as my customers. So we figured it’s time to move to more stable resources (or at least the business-related sites). I’ll keep the other sites here because the hosting on Dreamhost is just fine. But when traffic or business demands change, it’s wise to find the appropriate solution rather than whine and complain about the problem.

If you are facing a problem with your hosting company, you SHOULD have an alternative plan up your sleeve. There’s no use paying a little money for hosting and expecting it be totally robust. Dreamhost do their best, and for the money, they really do provide value for money. But if you’re livelihood depends on your website(s), you really need something SOLID.

So, my hosting needs will split into three: one site for this blog, a stable host (for the business sites), and Dreamhost for all the nascent sites until we see how they develop! I’m hoping that I can keep the costs within my budget, but anything has got to be better than throwing nearly $60 a month at broken servers!

What are you using for hosting? How is their service? How much do you pay? What problems did you encounter?