Christmas Cable Management

Stop right there! Don't throw away all of that useful packaging! As my gift to you, I'm going to show you how to reuse those annoying twist ties that are included in virtually every toy you buy.

I have a two year old son. He's having a great Christmas. After I took a few gifts out of the original packaging I was left with a mess of twist ties and little plastic anchors.



These ties are used to keep items securely fastened while allowing a clear view and even a trial touch of the item inside. I wasn't originally a fan of these, though they are at least less annoying than bubble packaging. Now I save them whenever I get them. Why? I figured out that they are perfect for cable management solutions.



The first use I realized was that the ties are strong enough that you can wrap them around cables to keep them together and you don't even need to tie them after. Just wrap around a few wires until you run out of tie. The wire is fairly strong and somewhat stiff, though the gauge varies with each product.



Tonight I realized how useful the plastic anchors could be. They have holes in them for the wire ties to pass through and anchor points to wrap the wire around. They come in varying sizes so you could use different ones at different points to keep your cables orderly. As you can see, I've put the wire through backwards so that the cable I'm tying down sits between the anchor points, then I run the wire tie around the back and wrap it in a figure eight to lock it down. On most of these there's even an extra set of holes on the ends, you could use this to lock down another cable or you could drive a tack or screw through it to secure the anchor to a wall or desk.

The great thing about these is that they're free and they work very well. They hold nicely but they're easy to undo. You can reuse them, too. If you're a an environmentally conscious geek father like me these are a great solution to a couple of problems.

Moving? Get a PO Box

I recently moved. We were having problems with our neighbors, so we knew several months in advance that we were going to move. About 3 months before the move we decided to get a PO Box and forward our mail there. It was a great decision.

The last few times we’d moved we had mail go missing because the forwarding simply failed. The USPS is pretty good, I’m not knocking them, but sometimes things slip through the cracks. Previously, we had good relationships with our neighbors and so we’d end up getting the mail that wasn’t forwarded. We knew that wouldn’t be the case this time, so we setup as big of a buffer as possible.

What’s great about this approach is that you can redirect your mail before you move. This gives you a few months to see what doesn’t get redirected and to change the address on your accounts when you see they’re still set to the old address. I kept track of these accounts in a spreadsheet so that I’d know to change them again later. Then once you’re settled into the new place you can start changing the address on your accounts to mail you at your new home.

At the end you have a choice: You can keep the PO Box if you want. You can cancel the PO Box and file a change of address to your home. Or you can cancel with no change of address. If you do the latter then you’ll effectively cancel some of the junk mail you receive, but the danger of that is that you may miss some random piece of mail that you didn’t anticipate.

Debt Based Budgeting and Saving

This is an idea I've had floating around in my head for a while now. It should work for people who have credit card debt, but that debt only takes a portion of their budget each month. For this to succeed you will need to be able to budget your money without resorting to using separate accounts or using cash for certain purposes. Also, you'll need to have available credit, you won't be able to do this if your cards are over their limit.

Still reading? Good.

Here's the idea: Pay down your credit cards instead of putting money into savings or keeping it in your checking account, then use those cards for your purchases instead of debit/checks/cash.

This seems to go against most advice to only use credit when you have to. It can work to reduce your debt, or at least lower the interest you pay each month. Since credit card debt is likely your highest interest debt the more you can pay towards it the better. If you budget your expenditures, especially basics like food, and pay that money to your credit card as soon as you get your paycheck then you will lower your average daily balance, and possibly your period ending balance as well.

This uses the Average Daily Balance in your favor. To understand this let's look at an example. Say that I have $1000 in credit card debt at 10% yearly interest. My monthly interest rate will be 0.83%, and that will likely be calculated against the average daily balance on my card. If I pay nothing that month (let's not count any late fees) I would be charged $8.30 in interest. If I do pay something, but I wait until the last day of the billing cycle, my interest will barely change. For instance, if I pay $100 on the last day then my average balance is still $996.67 and my interest will be $8.27. Not much savings this month, it would help the next, though.

To calculate your average daily balance you need need to multiply what your balance was by how many days it was at that balance, then add it to every other balance over the period, and divide the final number by the days in the period. If I bought nothing on that $1000 balance card during a 30 day period, but I paid that same $100 on the 15th day of the period then my avg. daily balance would be calculated as such:

((1000 * 15) + (900 * 15)) / 30 = $950

With the earlier payment I would save almost 50 cents. Now that you see how it works, perhaps you can imagine what it would look like with bigger numbers. Unfortunately, that is about as easy as it gets to conceptualize because normal use will cause fluctuations in the balance that make calculating your average a chore. The important thing to walk away with is that the earlier you pay a credit card the less interest you will pay at the end of the period.

Now we need to apply this to budgeting and savings. The idea here is that if you have money budgeted then you should immediately pay that money to your credit card, lowering your balance immediately, then use that card to buy the things you've budgeted for. During the time between the payment and the purchase your balance will be lower, positively affecting your average.

This works great for groceries. We can continue to use our $1000 debt card to show this. Assume that you budget $50 for groceries each week and you're paid every other week. You use $100 of every paycheck on groceries, but you pay with debit each time. Your money isn't working for you. Instead, pay the $100 immediately to your card (above any normal payment you would make) and use the card for those purchases. Here's how it would look if you were paid on the 1st and 14th day of the period and you bought groceries on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th days:

((900 * 6) + (950 * 7) + (900 * 7) + (950 * 7) + (1000 * 3) ) / 30 = 933.33

Notice how even though our ending balance is the same as it was at the beginning of the month our average daily balance is far lower. In fact, it's actually lower than if we paid $100 on the 15th and never used the card. The interest for that period would be slightly less than if we made a substantial payment in the middle of the month. What happens if we combine the two and make a $200 payment on the 15th ($100 for each, the groceries and to pay down the debt)?

((900 * 6) + (950 * 7) + (800 * 7) + (850 * 7) + (900 * 3) ) / 30 = 876.67

By rolling your budget for monthly expenses into the money you pay upfront to credit cards you dramatically lower your average balance. Think about how much of a difference that could make if you applied it to your food budget (which is likely more than $50 per week, especially if you have a family), your gas budget, and anything else you can pay using your card. If your interest rate is higher then you get more benefit as well, and 10% is a fairly low rate. The other aspect that is hard to quantify is just how much you will save over future periods, because the interest charged this period will accumulate more interest every period until you pay it off.

It works for savings, too. Actually, it works better for savings. If what you are saving to buy can be purchased via credit then you should consider this method. Think about the difference in interest rates between your savings account and your credit cards. I can imagine that the difference is stark. I should note that the better savings accounts compound interest on a daily basis, which will generate more interest than the same rate compounded once a month. That isn't enough to overcome the difference between most savings and credit rates. So, financially you may be better served by paying off your debt instead of saving for purchases.

Even if your savings interest rate is fairly high and compounds daily you should save more money by paying off higher interest debt. In our previous examples we used a 10% interest credit card, which is on the low end, so let's go to the high end of savings and compare a 5% savings account (you can't get these right now, but it will prove the point). Using those accounts if you saved $50 per month, at the beginning of the period, towards a $300 TV you would double your return by paying off the credit card. I'm going to spare you the math, but my calculations showed a credit interest savings (money you don't owe in interest) of $8.84 and a savings interest return (money you earn in interest) of $4.32.

Obligatory warnings and clarifications: If you do this you must be careful about it. Monitor your spending carefully to be sure that you stay within, or at least reasonably close to, your budget. That may limit the usefulness of this plan, because if you are deep in credit card debt you may have issues with monitoring.

This should not replace your emergency fund. The last thing you want in case of an emergency is to run up tons of debt. You may run into problems with that debt down the road. If nothing else, cash is infinitely more useful in emergency situations.

The idea should be that you use this in place of saving to spend or use already budgeted money that you will spend during the course of the month. Don't use this to replace other savings such as retirement, emergency funds, or college funds. Obviously, if you're in debt you should think about discretionary spending carefully. I like to think that this makes such thought easy, because you don't have money burning a hole in your pocket, it's working for you to dwindle your debt.

Lastly, I'd like to apologize for the ugly equations. I tried to keep the math simple and clear. I realize that there are better ways to express the equations I included, but they would be less clear and probably more confusing.

That's it. I'd like to know what you think or if you've done something like this before. Let me know in the comments.

Personal Finance

Now is a great time to start a personal finance blog. If you know enough about it to advise others then you should. Over the next few years you're likely to have some success. I'm not going to do that, but it does weigh on my mind a lot so I will probably be writing about it.

Here's the story: I am the sole provider for my family of three. I make slightly less than average for my field and we have a slightly below average income for our area. We do have some debt in the form of school loans, a medical loan, and credit cards. We rent, but the area is expensive so our rent is higher than most of my family members' mortgages. Both of us have a car, but we owe nothing on them. My son is in day care twice a week so that my wife can attend school on those days.

That's the setup. My issue with this is that we are living slightly beyond our means with the school related expenses. Now, that does not mean that my wife should stop going to school. School is an investment, so the debt we incur today will lead to prosperity tomorrow. Instead, it means that we should be frugal wherever we can in an effort to avoid unnecessary debt on top of what we already have, and what is needed to accomplish our goals. At the same time I want to avoid a significant hit to our quality of life and be sure that we can provide my son with a fun and loving childhood.

I plan to make a few posts about what I'm doing to set my finances straight and how it's going. I don't think this will hit the same level of output that my political blogging did leading up to the election, though. I hope to have a few unique ideas, and maybe share some experience that can help others. At the very least I may bug my wife less about it.

Idea: Your Credit Card is Your Room Key

Hotel chains such as Extended Stay America have limited check-in hours. They save money by eliminating the need for a third shift. This is a great idea because they pass on some of those savings to the customers. Unfortunately, this also means that a late arrival can leave you out in the cold.

I believe that these businesses could benefit from an automated check-in process that allows you to gain entry to the hotel and room using the same credit card you used to make the reservation. This would allow the hotel to continue to operate without a third shift clerk, yet a guest could still check-in.

The biggest problem that I see with this would be that problems often happen during check-in. Automated systems often require babysitters for when problems occur. The management would have to implement a way for customers to receive help for problems at check-in without undue burden on employees who don't work third shift, including management itself. It's a case where the biggest problem is managing customer expectations.

Idea: Replacement Caps for Wal-Mart's New Milk Containers

As you may know by now, Wal-Mart has started selling milk in a new type of container. This container causes problems when pouring the milk. I think that the problem could be solved by selling a reusable cap with a built in spout alongside the milk. The savings of the new container would eventually even out the cost of the cap, and both Wal-Mart and the vendor selling the cap could make money off of it.

I'd produce this myself, but I have no idea how to get started. I tried contacting the company that designed the new containers but they aren't easy to get in touch with. I thought it best to put the idea out here instead.

What McCain Should Do

If McCain wants to keep Obama from running away with this election he should make a very public spectacle of firing top campaign management. On the other side of this he should immediately begin running a campaign that makes almost no negative mention of Obama, and his focus should be on his own integrity and commitment to the United States. His current campaign makes him seem old, outdated, and the wrong choice.

DVR is a Game Changer, Someone Tell the Networks

When I started writing this I planned to write three or four consecutive posts about TV. I had a lot of thoughts about how TV could be better for DVRs, and I like to think that DVRs could be better for TV...

First, the problem: When a sports broadcast does not end on time the broadcaster often shifts the start time of later programs so they can be displayed in their entirety. This wreaks havoc for the DVR user, whose device relies upon the program scheduling to know when to run. Extra innings in a Sunday afternoon baseball game can cause prime time to shift, sometimes by over an hour.

I think that the networks are foolish to ignore the DVR market. I know they really dislike DVRs because they embody a change in demographics that scares advertisers. I think that this data can easily be tracked and the ad revenue will not cease for quite some time. In fact, if they work with DVR providers they may be able to collect more accurate information on the subject. I think that time shifting, particularly with the ease that a DVR offers, opens up the viewership to new demographics while the existing demographic stays the same. It also could change the value of off-peak time. Imagine running new content at 3 a.m. and telling viewers to set their Tivo, but I digress.

The important part here is to make sure that the intended viewer sees the show they want to watch. Even those who don't have a DVR may have time constraints that prevent them from watching the 9 o'clock time slot. There are more potential solutions when you consider the DVR, but even the average viewer could benefit from a few changes.

Give the event some insulation. Put a show after the event that can easily be canceled if the event goes into overtime.

Idea: Netfix Discount For Postal Workers

It seems like every few weeks I read a story about a postal worker being arrested for stealing Netflix envelopes, or a customer whose account is canceled due to unusual amounts of lost discs. If we know that some postal workers, who I believe are mostly honest and law abiding, can't resist nabbing a few of those bright red envelopes then why don't we do something about it besides to further criminalize them?

My solution would be to steeply discount the membership fees for postal workers. I thought about free, but that would only work if they could strike a deal with the USPS. That deal would likely violate some sort of law, so a nominal fee really is required.

The key word is nominal, though. If you want to remove the temptation of theft then you have to make staying honest the better deal. As the music industry laments, it's hard to compete with free. If postal workers paid half price it would be a good deal, and it would bring it well within the range of affordability. Anything higher than that price probably wouldn't change anything, so it isn't worth it.

There are numerous other advantages to this, some are less quantifiable than others. The first is a small PR campaign showing that you care about the people who provide your service, from end to end. It's a great token gesture for the people who provide you extremely cheap shipping and keep your business going. Another big advantage is that you'll be creating fans out of people who already work for you. Sometimes you need to boost a vendors morale to get the results you want. Imagine the reverence your mailers will receive when the Postal carrier using them is part of the club.

Postal workers are a natural customer for Netflix. For them, returning a movie is as easy as going to work. I think that a discount like this could be a win for both organizations.

Shades of Spam

Why don't the major email services have a way to separate email they know is spam from email they think is spam? If they did this then false positives would be less troublesome, and they could even tweak their filters to capture a few things the currently slip through. I know that this is possible and some people already do this sort of thing, but why don't the big three (Google, Microsoft*, and Yahoo) do this?

Imagine if Google had a "possible spam" tag where items that scored within a certain range in their spam filters would go. Then you could tweak whether you wanted these items to go to your inbox or your spam box, and they would be easy to filter through in either one. Or, maybe if Yahoo showed the percentage of which they were convinced that the email was spam. The default view in the spam folder could be sorted by this field, ascending, so that the least spammy emails would float to the top.

Since no spam filter is perfect, you have to choose between more spam in the inbox or more false positives in the spam folder. I'd rather have some control over the threshold for this, it'd make me more confident that I don't have to sort through the stuff that I know is spam just to get to verify that nothing of value got lost in its midst.

* I haven't used Microsoft's offering since shortly after they bought Hotmail. To my knowledge this post applies to them as well, though.

Implement Fair and Equal Holidays

I don't know why I never posted this one. Interestingly, since I wrote this my company has reinstated Comp Time for the few employees that can take advantage of it. It wasn't the easiest task, but I had to do all of the programming to make that happen. I still think that workers would be better served by making a fair holiday schedule, or perhaps unlimited vacation like Netflix does. Originally this post was going to make a point about increasing productivity. I'm not going to make that point, but the concept of fair holidays seems reasonably argued...

The current corporate culture regarding employee holidays, in the U.S., is wrong and largely discriminatory. The prevailing thinking regarding holidays has not caught up with the progressive, inclusive, worker-oriented thinking of the modern office. The good news is that it can be changed. Read on to find out why and how.

What's wrong? I'm fine with the federal holidays.

I think that it can be safely assumed that everyone, shy of management, is a fan of paid holidays. The key word of that statement, though, is everyone. The current system of holidays that most companies employ is to give employees a popular set of federal holidays off as well as a few religious holidays.

Unfortunately, federal holidays don't hold the same value to every citizen, nor do religious holidays. Often one religions holiday schedule is fairly divergent to the next. Some religions have many important holidays that employees would like to spend with their family. Some holidays require the devout to observe a practice that conflicts with their ability to attend work or function in full capacity.

Can't they just take vacation? What about Comp Days?

Vacation is often the solution employees are forced to implement. How is that fair to them, though? That creates an inequality based on religion. Someone of a faith that aligns well with federal holidays and any others that the company chooses effectively gets all of their holidays paid as well as any vacation time. This means that they can vacation as they please and still spend important holidays with their friends and family. Workers who are forced to take paid holidays that do not match their religion must use vacation to compensate, which lessens their effective vacation time and limits their schedule.

Another solution has been to use compensatory, or "comp," time, to allow workers to pick which holidays they adhere to. There are a few problems with this, some new and some old.

To start with the old, we can look at the "closed office" phenomenon. Basically, each of these company holidays also designate a day when the offices of the company are closed, retail aside. This means that on these holidays everyone is expected to be away from the office. There are limited facilities on these days. The secretary won't be in, the HVAC may be off, and the doors may be locked. These things provide a challenge to an employee who wishes to work on these days. This likely leads to that person feeling that this is unwanted behavior, and often it is, which can make them choose not to work those days instead of going against the status quo.

The newer problem is that straight hour for hour compensatory time is, for most workers, illegal. It's difficult to properly implement. There's undue effort required of the company's HR department to track it. Worst of all, it still doesn't allow the required flexibility. At best you can offer this to any employees who fit into the narrow category of straight overtime pay. If you're feeling especially generous you can give this benefit to employees who are salaried, but at that point you're actually going well beyond your responsibilities and you still have the headache of tracking all of this.

For example, last Thursday marked the beginning of the Jewish holiday, Rosh HaShana, and the Muslim holiday, Ramadan. While I must admit to a lack of knowledge regarding Ramadan, I know enough about Rosh HaShana to say that most practicing Jewish people took the 13th and 14th off.

I work with a few of these people. I didn't ask what they did but we can assume that they either worked on Labor Day and Independence Day, the last two company holidays before these, or they took vacation time.