Published Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 11:13 am
I know… the title sounds like a spam post. But it’s not. I’m not going to try to sell you anything. I’m simply encouraging you to get out of credit card debt… and now! I’m not in anyway a financial adviser and this is a technical blog so I am completely unqualified so I will pose this advice as a question. Why do so many people carry a running credit card balance when they don’t need to?
First of all, I love my CCs. They make purchases convenient and if you play your cards right you can get some great incentives (i.e. 3% cash back). But I fail to see the logic behind keeping a running balance. I’ve not had a running balance in years. I just decided one day… why? If I have savings that could cover the the current balance why not pay it off? By keeping a running CC balance you are basically borrowing money from the credit card companies at 15 – 20% annual interest. Then what are you doing with it? You are essentially loaning it to a bank, sometimes the same bank that loaned you the money in the first place, who pay you 1 – 2% interest. You are paying 13 – 19% just to shuffle money around on their books.
Some say they want to have money in savings in case of emergency. This logic fails me. If you were to use your savings to pay off your CC and then there is an emergency you can still use your CC. Whether you use your savings (and carried a CC balance) or use your CC in the emergency you’ll end up in the same place… in debt. Actually if you paid off your CC every month you would have an extra 13 – 19% in your savings. More if you use a cash back rewards card.
Unless you don’t have the money to cover the debt, in which case you should not have entered into it in the first place, I don’t see any reason to hold a balance. Pay off your CCs first. Ideally in an emergency you will have enough savings to cover it; if not use the CC. Am I missing something?
Categories: Scepticism
Tags: Frugality, Self Improvment
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Published Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Every Firefox extension is required to list which versions of Firefox it is compatible with. When a new Firefox version is released extension authors need to check their extensions for compatibility. For many extensions, including Xinha Here! the only thing that needs to be changed to update the compatibility list. It is very simple to do. I’ve updated Xinha Here!’s compatibility lists for Firefox 3.6 and and posted it to
my website. This version adds Firefox 3.6 compatibility… nothing else. I’ve also uploaded this version to the official
Firefox add-on website. For some reason, even though the change was insignificant, this new version needs to go through the addons.mozilla.org
add-on review process and be reviewed by a live person. Every time I submit a new version it takes an extremely long time for it to get reviewed even though the Xinha Here! extension is widely used. I find the whole process annoying and unproductive.
Categories: Projects
Tags: Firefox Extensions, Xinha Here!
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Published Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 5:00 pm
Wow, Hypercubed blog has gotten so boring! I have not written a manual blog post in over eight months and only 3 posts total in 2009. I guess sometimes life just gets in the way. My personal life has been quite dramatic over the last year and a half. Since this blog is not intended to be about my personal life I’ll leave it at that. Hopefully with this post I’ll get past the writers block that occurs after so many months of silence.
Categories: Blogging
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