Newsbites

Looking for financial and economics stats about Taiwan?

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I was surfing banking sites in Taiwan looking for a bank with a reasonable website that I could use, given my already limited Chinese proficiency.

I didn’t find a site yet that I can use, apart from Citibank. But I did find some statistical information courtesy of the Bank of Taiwan. Unfortunately, the website is only really functional in IE. You can find the latest stats on Bank of Taiwan’s website yourself, but you’ll need to download the files, and open them in Excel or a similar Office type program.

So I took the liberty of downloading them, and uploading them to Google Docs. I’ve also shared the documents so that you don’t need to download the stats.

I hope the bank don’t mind, but I think locking up the information inside an Excel document instead of a web page isn’t smart.

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Time for a change: 2 Blogs OUT who’s in?

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Well, it’s time for the regular update to the Top-20 Money Making Blogs List. And there are two candidates for removal.

Unfortunately, Tim Schroeder’s Emonitized which was recently added stop publishing just a few weeks later.  Blog focuses on affiliate marketing, blogging, and much more. He’s got a lot of great posts about this and I’ll hopefully be featuring much more on his blog. It’s still worth searching his archives, but I frequently have PageLoadErrors on his site.

The other site that is gracefully making an exit from this list is JohnCow. I must confess as a former regular reader of that blog… I have totally lost the conversation. I don’t know what JohnCow is on about most of the time, I no longer read his blog on a regular day, so I feel that this is not one I can recommend any longer. Worse, the blogging style has gone from one thing to another. I’m wondering if Jason has now sold or outsourced the entire blog to someone else. Traffic is still holding up there, though.

Any suggestions on who can replace these? I’ve got some good ones in my bookmarks, but I’d like some suggestions… So comment away!

Confession Time: What is my biggest failing when it comes to money?

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Ah! I have to share with you my biggest failing… it has to be ‘carelessness’… And I’ll share with you why I think so…

When I bought my little portable PC, the Aspire One in the UK, I was very careful to make sure that I had all the documentation for a tax refund. The ACER Aspire One was purchased in John Lewis in Welwyn Garden City for GBP299.00 of which I was entitled to a tax refund of approximately GBP20.00 (it’s not a lot, granted, but anything to reduce that credit card bill that is staring at me!).

Well, I lost the paper work, I also lost several other sets of paperwork, after carefully keeping them for three weeks on numerous flights and in lots of different places. Last weekend, I reminded myself that I had to go to the post office, and promptly didn’t go. After that, the paperwork just vanished without a trace. Of course, I could have just filed the paperwork in the UK, as I intended to do, but I procrastinated going to the post office, made all sorts of excuses, and finally I lost the paperwork.

Were this the first time, I would’ve been more forgiving of myself but it’s not? I’ve lost items and documents frequently, including…

  • 1. leaving my bag with money OUTSIDE all night;
  • 2. throwing my passport in the toilet;
  • 3. losing my bankbook(s) more than twice;
  • 4. losing my ATM cards more than three times;
  • 5. lost several wallets; and much more…

I’ve tried all manner of ways to compensate for my own carelessness, including making a much bigger effort to organize myself, file papers and documents properly, and keep money properly… but the systems usually breakdown when I don’t follow it properly for whatever moment of inattention I am prone to. It’s at that point that things go awry. I’m much better organized than before, but still the effort I put into organising my bag hasn’t been successful, so…

When you know your weaknesses, it’s best to work out ways to compensate for them before they become a problem, especially if you can’t fix them!

Have you a ‘financial weakness’? How does it affect your life? What did you learn about yourself because of it?

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