The never-ending headache that is health insurance

This morning I saw my pain-in-the-ass vascular surgeon about the final surgery on a stubborn varicose vein. I won’t get too much into why he’s a pain because it has nothing to  do with money…well, I guess it does because if he hadn’t pretended that he did the procedure we decided on, it would have [...]

Business development: Networking groups?

This morning, I reconnected with a massage therapist I did some Thai training with back in 2005. She contacted me a week ago with info about a course and suggested we meet up for an exchange, but there was clearly an ulterior motive: she’s moving abroad in a few months and wants to sell her [...]

I couldn’t let $5 go to waste

The magic red spit machines at CVS dished out a bunch of $5-off-$15 purchase this past weekend that expired today. Even though the deals in the Manhattan stores are non-existent this week, I could not let free money go to waste and I had one left. So at 11pm tonight, I hustled out to use [...]

No, really, I’m not jealous

My brother, “Six Figures”, is buying his first home, and it closes on Friday. By waiting a year at the advice of me and the aunt who would have been my guarantor, he got a wide 4-story new-build row house with a private parking pen in central Baltimore instead of a narrow 3-story old one with [...]

Yet another successful rebate: Walgreens

I kind of avoided Walgreens because my first forays produced zip zero nada on the sales front – meaning that all of their monthly free-after-rebate products were sold out and never restocked. That was February and you know what? They still haven’t restocked one of the items. However, before I drew this conclusion, I bought [...]

Unmarried Couples Finance: Borrowing/Lending

Over at The Debt Chronicles, Sunflowers describes how she went about borrowing the money to pay off her consumer debt from her Significant Other — and how inferior it’s making her feel despite all her efforts to do right by him. About 5 years ago, I helped my debt-ridden sister (aka Bridezilla) through this exact [...]

Wow, another successful rebate!

It looked like a piece of junk mail – just a postcard, really – and had the look of those sneaky marketing ploys whereby you cash the check and are automatically enrolled in some overpriced program.  I reckon Rite Aid counts on people treating it like junk mail too. Well not me – I’m delighted with my [...]

Rebates make me nervous

Before yesterday, my only experience with rebates was for electronics through TigerDirect, Staples, and CompUSA. You know what? Every single one of them found an excuse to reject my rebate request (and I was diligent about dates, bar codes, receipts, etc). So for years, I’ve never let the offer of a rebate affect my buying [...]

My $400 Bonus from AIG

A month or so ago, I blogged about picking up 1000 shares of AIG @ $.517. It’s now trading at .93, which puts me a dime away from doubling my dough. However, it’s got to make it to ~$1.40 to make up for my piece of the $170 billion bailout pie – which works out to about [...]

My theory on the Starbucks business model

I’m not going to slam the coffee giant for charging too much for coffee – instead, I’m going to applaud them for their subtlety and craftiness…
I’ve always had this theory that their average-priced standard brew was a little eclectic on purpose (we don’t all like to grow hair on our chests every morning!) so that most [...]