Expenses

Working hard? Take a break or just a change of office space!

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The InvestorBlogger would love a change of pace, and a change of space! And if he didn’t have his own place of business, the life of an itinerant blogger might be just thing. Just imagine the places he could go… perhaps even taking a Caribbean cruise on the Queen Mary 2.

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Of course, the trick with a cruise has to be that you don’t get stuck on board the ship for too long. You need a chance to hop off and on, so an island cruise is perhaps best for this: you get the chance to visit different places, and can return to your own luxury hotel on the ocean.

Oh, and indeed it is a luxury: copious amounts of space (for a ship), hotel-standard suites and rooms (no hammocks here!), lots of recreational activities, restaurants, movies, exercise, and so on.

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This may not be cheap, but you’ll likely fine a cruise to suit your own pocket as Holiday Hypermarket offers a variety of cruises, ships, room and flights, and so on. Just make sure your room has a data socket for access to the Internet! Then you’ll be able to make all your readers envious of your life style!

So, on a cruise, here’s my itinerary (with suggested activities for bloggers) for those sailing from New York:

Day -3 You fly to New York , check into your hotel. Blog about your flight!

Day -2 You tour New York , do all the touristy things… and check out the places where InvestorBloggers dream about: the NYSE, Wall Street, and the other financial attractions! You take photos of these great places and write them up in your blog! Try to ‘bump’ into some of the people who work there, and interview one or two them for a podcast!

Day -1 It’s SHOPPING ! You get stuff for the Caribbean trip and learn how to spell it properly for your blog postings! Clue: it’s NOT Carribean as I thought!

Day 0 You get to the ship and embark, taking as many pictures, videos and recordings as you can! The Queen Mary 2 is a fantastic ship… You can simply put the best ones on your blog, add video to YouTube, and post the stuff. You won’t need to write much. The ship departs at 7:00 pm. It’s probably getting dark, get ready from some wonderful scenic shots of the city.

Days 1-2 You are on the ocean , relaxing and making good use of all the recreational activities. Of course, you manage to do some real postings!… Remind people that your blog isn’t ALL play, and NO work!

Day 3 Your arrival in the British Virgin Islands where you will come across your first Caribbean experiences of the sands, seas and atmosphere! Tortola welcomes you! At night, you post pictures and share how you achieved your dream vacation!

Day 4 lands you on St. Kitts where you’ll see the colonial old town, fortress and markets! Perhaps a little light blogging and email before bedtime!

Day 5 is on to Bridgetown, Barbados . In Barbados, you get time to stay overnight and enjoy the real Caribbean lifestyle. Perhaps it’s time for some lively blogging and photos about how the other half really live! Show your readers, too. They’ll believe you are the other half!

Day 6 will show you how the local people on St. Lucia run their markets as you shop for antiques, souvenirs, and whatever else takes your fancy! Markets are a wonderful place to shop, and you require your wits… it’s so different to the sterile stores of North America! You can blog about how the locals trade and do business! Sprinkle the post liberally with shots of the markets, people and products.

Day 7 In St. Thomas , you’ll be able to experience quaint streets lined by duty-free boutiques. What are those taxes for after all? Blog about how taxes are used to rob the rich, pay for services, or redistribute wealth! Whatever angle takes your fancy! But do make your readers envious as you purchase perfumes, wines and all manner of goods duty free!

Days 8-9 see you on the high seas , but you ain’t no pirate! Still time for a little swashbuckling on your blog! You’ve got time to reflect on your time as you begin the trip home.

Day 10 it’s back to New York . Time to attend to some banking, investing, bookstores, good restaurants, and theater. Then off home. No time to blog much except at the airport, as you wait for your flight back to Taiwan.

So, there you go, the flights, the cruise, the itinerary and a blogging schedule… What else do you need? Why are you still reading this? Go, now, go…

Thanks for lettting me cruise the blogosphere with you from HolidayHypermarket.co.uk.

LCD TV vs. Credit Card Debt – Is it really worth 12 years?

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Business Week Magazine recently featured a story in which it claimsCredit-Card Balances Are Ballooning:

Consumers are turning to their credit cards to keep shopping now that most households can’t use their home equity as a virtual ATM. Solid hiring and wage gains have let people rack up larger debt balances with few problems. Now relying on plastic could place more stress on consumer finances, which ultimately could lead to a pullback in spending.

Well, it looks like consumers are continuing to fund their lifestyles by borrowing more on credit than before. However, with interest rates on credit cards going up to 20% or more, this is surely foolhardy spending on many non-essential items.

As I posted on my blog a few days ago, it can take quite a while longer than you would expect to pay back even small sized loans. So I dug a little further, and was horrified with what I found.

Example: let’s assume that a borrower has $1000 outstanding on credit cards (whether it’s recent or not… it doesn’t matter). Now let’s also assume that a credit card interest rate of 17% is being charged, and that the borrower is paying the minimum every month of 2.5% of the total outstanding amount. I was horrified that it will take you from 61 months to, according to BankRate’s own calculator…

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It will take you 144 months to be rid of your debt.
In that time, you will pay $979.14 in interest.

aquosOk, let’s put it another, that Sharp Aquos LC32D62U 32″ 1080p LCD HDTV currently retailing for about $998.88 could take more than 12 YEARS to pay off, and in that time, you could use the interest payments on the TV to buy another one!

In fact, that is approximately double the length of the expected life of the LCD you bought anyway! So basically, after 7 years, you still have the debt and your TV is bust!

Now, fine. You may be saying to yourself: well, I’ll have enjoyed the TV for a period of 7 years, and anyway $1,000 won’t be worth that much in 7 years time. And you’d be right…

I wonder, though, if you bought that TV and things would probably be fine. But it’s all the other things that might accompany such spending that would begin to cast doubt on using credit card debt at 17.5% to find your entertainment lifestyle: the new HD DVD player, surround sound system, bigger chairs, digital cable TV with extra channels (sports, movies, and all the frills), … If you began to add any or all of these to the same credit card, then you’d be finding that 144 months a long time!

651px-Amstrad PCW512I wish I could say that I was Moses on the Mount when talking about these kinds of things… It’d be much easier, but I have to confess that I did indeed buy a PC (one that I hardly ever used) on a credit card, justified all the expenses (and there were a lot), paid a lot of credit card interest over the year that I owned it, and eventually sold it at a loss (of course, it’s really devalued after about a year!) to my friend.

You can do the math yourself on how much interest I paid on that machine! If I remember, it was an Amstrad PC8256 running on the CP/M system.

Have you ever done anything silly with credit card debt? If so, do let me know.

Credit cards: have you checked your wallet or purse lately?

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Well, have you? Have you noticed how you are spending your money on your credit card? Have you seen your rates go up? Your bonus points erased? … Perhaps it is time to look for a new credit card.

In a busy market with lots of competing offers, CreditNet offers visitors a way to sort the wheat from the chaff. You can choose credit cards that have Bonus Points, Smart Card features, no annual fee (my favorite), 0% or, if you haven’t good such a great credit record, even credit cards bad credit. There are even sections for UK and Canadian visitors (finally recognition, that not ALL traffic is U.S. based!)

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I particularly liked the search tool which speeds up the search process delightfully. In fact, I entered several criteria to see what came up, and found 11 offers for someone with OK credit ratings, 0% interest for 12 months.

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Play around with it, and do check out the actual offers and credit card agreements just in case the offers change. And they can.

Information and links provided by CreditNet.