Minimum Repayments: That’s EXACTLY how much? How long?

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Once a month my credit card statement drops on the mat, and I get a chance to peruse my spending that previous month. Actually, this month’s spending was quite minimal and mostly anticipated.

(All Currencies: NTD).

First, we had a nice meal at the beginning of our annual break. That came in at $1518 for two, including a buffet, a nicely prepared main course, and 10% service charge. The restaurant is called Dante’s and is located inside the campus of Taipei National University of the Arts! They serve Italian, French and American style cooking with fresh local and imported ingredients. On Saturdays, they are SUPER busy, and the staff need a bit of politeness training… but we go for the food anyway! We’ll go there if you visit me in Tamsui!

Second item on the list was an odd one: a 2-year domain purchase of my business site in Chinese. This was provided by UnicodeDN and cost me the grand sum of $1314. I’m now thinking of adding another with another variation of our company name.

Third is our regular payment: a combined life insurance and investment product from Cigna. I counselled my wife NOT to buy this, but she didn’t buy it for the obvious reasons. She felt that she was helping her sister go through a rough patch! And indeed her sister has done fabulously and gone on to become a local financial adviser, having passed some tough exams (and that’s one thing Taiwanese are good at: setting exams!). We are definitely not making a lot of money out of this one, as in general, such products don’t offer good value: there are just too many ways to take commissions, including a standard commission, unit transfer fees, I’m sure there’s a currency commission, and, most certainly, there is a credit card fee, of course! In fact, once you consider all of this, I’m surprised that we don’t OWE Cigna money for this product.

Fourth and Fifth payments are for two nights in different hotels while we had a three-day trip to some of the mountains around Lala Mountain in Taoyuen County. I’ve included a You-Tube video for you to get some idea what the area is like. Though the first night we stayed at a hotel near the Yi-lan, in a tourist zone area. Quite pleasant on the East Coast overall, I have to say. Then we drove up to the LaLa Mountain area where we stayed at another hotel called MingChih National Forestry Resort. Neither of these was particularly cheap. But getting a chance to stay there was wonderful, and we were lucky to get a vacancy on the spot. We had a little cabin with NO airconditioning… it was VERY cool outside, in fact about 21C, compared to down on the plains where the temperature and humidity were much higher. Total cost: $6170 for both nights.

There were no penalties or interest charges to pay off this month, either. That left us with the grand total of $11,002 to pay on our credit card, or we could pay the minimum balance of $1100. We also earned 551 bonus points to add to our total. Naturally, we paid it off entirely. A quick look at the calculator below showed us why: we saved about $606 doing this, and it would have been paid off in a year exactly.

repay

How was your August Credit Card spending? Did you spend wisely or blow your budget? Did you pay it off at once or slowly? Use the calculator to find out how much you would spend. Don’t worry, you can simply ignore the British Pound sign and assume dollars or euros.

Wordpress Classes: Lesson 6 – Your First Post.

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I was just reminded about Friends when Joey takes guitar lessons from Rachel. This is episode 11 in Series 5 The One With Lots of Resolutions.

When Phoebe finds out that Joey knows the real names of the chords, she flips out saying:

Phoebe: G-sharp? Have you been studying the real names of the chords? (Joey doesn’t answer.) Have you? (He looks away in shame.) Oh my God!

Joey: What?! I didn’t touch a guitar!

Phoebe: No, but you’re questioning my method!

Joey: No, I’m not questioning it, I’m saying it’s stupid!

Well, I’m sure my readers MUST have been practising on their own! Right? I promise I am not making any names up! I’m using the real names! Onwards and upwards. It’s time to do the first post! Yeah!

Actually, the hard part about the first post is deciding WHAT to write. I’m going to assume you already have something to post! So here goes!

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Login to WordPress as usual. Then navigate on the top bar to ‘Write’ – it’s highlighted in white in the picture above. Click. After a few seconds, you’ll see the ‘write’ page open.

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It looks pretty much like this. Let’s dive in.

To write your first post, you write the the name of your post in the ‘Title’ Area, and enter the content in the second box down (the big one!). You’ll see some very obvious tools to help you do your basic editing.

Basic Tools
The ‘B’ is BOLD, the ‘I’ is Italic, and the strikethrough, looks like abc. You can also see two kinds of bullets. Then you’ll see three kinds of indents (left, center, right). Next you’ll see the two undo/redo buttons. If you make a mistake, then hit ‘undo’. If you undo something you need, hit ‘redo’. Try it as you type.

Additional Tools (You can skip this section, if you need to)
The next is the image upload tool (We’ll leave that one today). Then there’s the ‘more’ button, ‘spell check’ and ‘help’. The ‘more button’ is simply to insert a click more button on the front page. It allows you to highlight a section, then readers will see ‘more’ on the front page. If they want to read more, they need to click it.

Saving and Publishing
We’re almost done for Part one of ‘posting’. But you’ll see three buttons below the box, called ‘Save and Continue’, ‘Save’ and ‘Publish’.

  1. ‘Save and Continue’ is for when you are in the middle of a post and, for whatever reason, you decide to save it (for safety?) so you can continue writing in a few minutes. Hit it and the screen will refresh in a few seconds, with the data displayed for you.
  2. ‘Save’ is for when you are done writing for now, but you are not ready to post. (For now, though, let’s not use that option!).
  3. ‘Publish’ is when you need to publish it so others can see what you wrote!

Once you hit ‘Save and Continue’, you should see a Preview button appear on the top right. If you click that, you’ll be able to see what the post will look like when it’s published.

preview

See it’s painless! You just wrote your first post. Well done! Of course, I’ve not dealt with some important issues in this posting, such as categories, images, or some of the other options on the right and bottom of the screens. I’ll leave that for later lessons. But, for now, your homework is to post two post and send me screenshots so I can show off my ‘students work’!

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If you are enjoying this series or find them useful, please do comment in the posts. Let me know what you need for future lessons. I’m planning on a series of 30 lessons, I just hope that readers find them useful!

Mortgage & Credit Crunch: Newsroom Stories

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Given the recent rising interest rates worldwide, the problems in the US housing market (falling prices, rising repossessions), and the problems in many of the housing loans market ( can anyone say “1980’s S&L”?), The NewsRoom has put together a collection of videos for you to watch. Should put in some perspective for you as Friday approaches. Love to hear your comments.