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An Early Present (easy protection from ID theft)

If you lose your wallet, you’re in trouble. You have a whole bunch of cards (credit cards, but also library cards, work ID cards, and so on) that you need to cancel and replace. And with the looming spectres of ID theft and credit card fraud, the problems associated with losing your wallet can get really nasty, really quickly. What makes it even worse is that all of the phone numbers you need to call to put your accounts on hold are on the cards, in your wallet, which is now in the hands of some baddie. That is, unless you’re right at home with your credit card statements, you don’t know who to call to put a hold on your cards. That can make for a pretty lousy holiday if you lose your wallet en route to your Aunt Betty’s for Thanksgiving.

As an early holiday present, then, and to thank you for using PearBudget, we want to offer you a free account at Wallet Garden. Wallet Garden is a really simple web app (even simpler than PearBudget!) — you create an account (again, free), and you enter in the emergency contact numbers for the various cards in your wallet. Then, if you ever lose your wallet (or purse), you have an easy go-to place to find the numbers you need to call. Wallet Garden doesn’t store any sensitive information … just a few phone numbers.

Also, you get a few “easter eggs” as a part of your Wallet Garden account.

One is that you get a printable page that lists all of your cards and that has a step-by-step walkthrough that explains what to do in the event of a lost card (or wallet).

A second easter egg is that at the end of every day where you add a new card to your account, Wallet Garden will e-mail you a list of your cards, so you have a backup in your e-mail account. That way, if you can’t remember the Wallet Garden address, or if you can’t get online (but you can get to your e-mail), or if the Wallet Garden server happens to crash right when you need it, you’ve got all of your data backed up in your e-mail archives.

We hope you and your families have wonderful Thanksgivings. And we hope that none of you lose your wallets or purses. But setting up an account at Wallet Garden takes all of 10 seconds, and saving all of the cards from your wallet takes another minute or two. And it’s free. That’s the cheapest peace of mind you’ll find this year. We hope you take a minute now, to save yourself a few hours (and a few headaches) in the future. Go to walletgarden.com now to check it out.

The Lost Rule of Organizing


This post doesn’t have a lot to do with personal finance, although it’s tangentially related, and if you’re into personal finance, you’re probably into general life organization as well (or, at least, you aspire to having an organized life).

I’ve been meaning to post a link to this for almost a week now. Simple Notebook has a good, concise post up, highlighting The Lost Rule of Organizing: Know when to stop.

The photo here is the “after” photo of her kitchen’s utensil drawer. As she notes, she could have taken time to get every utensil sorted into a specific tray, or even just lined up nicely. But the crucial steps were to clean out the drawer enough so that she could get to everything she needs. Once she got to that point, she stopped.

Man vs. Debt has a good piece on selling stuff on eBay

Man vs. Debt has a good piece on how to sell stuff on eBay. The author of the piece (it’s a guest post) paid off $15,000 in 9 months (!). Holy cats (!!!!).

If you’re like me, and you think “I should really get with the selling-on-eBay-thing,” it’s a good post to read. Obviously, she had $15,000 worth of stuff that people wanted … I’m not sure I have a tenth of that. But, still. If I could score $1,500 and get rid of stuff that’s cluttering up the house? Double-win.

Anyway, I thought you’d enjoy it. Here’s the link again: How I paid off $15,000 in 9 months by selling my ‘Stuff’ on Ebay.

Recurring receipt announcement

If you have a recurring receipt (see your recurring receipts) set to run in PearBudget on the 1st of the month, could you please check your receipts page and delete any duplicate receipts?

Since today was Daylight Savings Time in the US, at 2:00 this morning, the clocks jumped back to 1:00. Every night at 1:00 am, our server runs a bit of code that finds all of the recurring receipts that are to be created that day, then creates a receipt for each of them, and then hibernates until the next time the clock hits 1:00 am. Last night, then, at 1:00 am, our server created the receipts for the recurring receipts that occur on the 1st of the month. Then, an hour later, the clocks turned back to 1:00, and the script woke up again, yawned, said “has it been a full day already? okay!” and created new receipts for each of those categories.

In other words, PearBudget accidentally created TWO receipts for each recurring receipt in the system for November 1st. If you have a recurring receipt for the first of the month (again: pearbudget.com/recurring_receipts), you’ll want to make sure that you delete the duplicated receipts (you can delete each duplicate with the click of a button at pearbudget.com/receipts).

Again, please check your receipts for November, and make sure you don’t have any duplicates. I’m terribly sorry for the hassle this creates.

If you have any questions, as always, we’re an e-mail away: charlie at pearbudget dot com. And, again, I’m sorry for any confusion or frustration this has generated. We’re changing the time the script runs, so this shouldn’t be a problem in the future. Thanks for your understanding.

Quote from Elise Boulding

“Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.”

Elise Boulding (via minimalmac)

Quote from Trent

“Our lives are like a river. They flow through the channel of assumptions and priorities that we set for them. If we begin to alter those assumptions and priorities a little, sometimes the river will fight that change in flow, but most of the time, it’ll happily shift course and find that this new path is even more serene than the old one.”

Trent

Quote from Schaefer

“The shopping mall has become our temple, the credit card our burnt offering … yet, the sacrifice is never sufficient for salvation.”

Schaefer, at The Art of Manliness

Excellent post on supporting local businesses

Trent has an excellent post on “the local store premium,” the amount over the “box-store-minimum” that it costs to support local businesses.

His post really spoke to me, as I’ve seen the town I grew up in (Arlington, VA) go through an absolutely incredible (note: read “incredible” as “hard to believe,” not “good”) shift away from local, indie shops to homogenized chains. Within walking distance from my parents’ house were several really cool thrift stores, an indie coffee house (The Sugar Shack), a really cool indie CD store (GO!), some bookstores, and other great, local places. The only national chain I can remember was a Sears. I’m sure there were a few others, but, really, national chains were not the norm. Today, though, within walking distance are two different Starbucks, a Barnes & Noble, a Crate & Barrel, a Cheesecake Factory, a Whole Foods, an Apple store, a Ben & Jerry’s, and a variety of other national chains. There are still some local stores, and even some new ones popping up. But the feel of the neighborhood has changed. It no longer feels like “Clarendon” … it just feels like “Suburban Planned ‘Community’ #58174.” I still love it, but the characteristics that make it special are slowly chipping away.

I know nostalgia’s cheap entertainment, and it’s easy to paint the past with a rose-colored wash. But it’s also important to recognize, like one of the commenter’s at Trent’s article noted: “you get to decide what kind of a neighbourhood you want.” You can read Trent’s piece here: The “Local Store Premium” – How Much Is It Worth to You?.

Love, love, love hearing from you all

Love, love, love hearing from you all:

“I want to say how much I love pearbudget.com and the go cards! I’ve been able to easily keep track of and KEEP a budget! I’ve paid off 3 credit cards in the four months I’ve been using it. Thank you for providing a simple budgeting website!”

— Carrie, from Winter Park, FL

Update: Bug’s fixed

Update: Bug’s fixed. I still recommend Firefox, though.

A few users have reported a curious bug. We’re looking into it.

For some reason, users on Internet Explorer 8 are finding that when they go to the PearBudget Review page, the browser doesn’t like it and closes the window on them. That’s all I’ve been able to discern so far, but we’re trying to figure out what’s going on with it. As far as I know, we haven’t changed the code for the Review page in the last week, so I’m guessing that some update to Internet Explorer over the weekend broke it. We’ll figure it out, though.

In the meantime, I haven’t heard of any issues from Firefox, Safari, or Chrome users. So if you’re having any issues with your account, you might check one of them out. Honestly, I’d encourage you to switch over from IE even if you aren’t having isues with it. Firefox is faster, more secure, and more customizable. And everything looks prettier. Download Firefox for free here.

I’ll update this post once we have some info on the IE8 problem.

Update: Bug’s fixed. I still recommend Firefox, though.