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An Emergency Fund in Action: Our $500 Weekend

An Emergency Fund in Action: Our $500 Weekend
Direct your browser to just about any personal finance blog, and you’ll be able to find at least one post about emergency funds: why you should have one, how to build it, when you should start, and exactly how much (or how little) you should sock away. What I don’t see a lot of is emergency funds being used for, you know, emergencies. (A planned car purchase is not an emergency.) Maybe they don’t have many emergencies, or perhaps personal finance bloggers aren’t willing to admit it when their warranties expire. Whatever. Here’s some real life for you.Since the day we bought this house, the to-do list has included replacement of the basement door. It’s warped and in sad shape. The jam is a little rotten, and it lets in water during really heavy rain. Still, it opens and closes and behaves in a sufficiently door-like manner that we weren’t all THAT worried about it, until today. Today, that basement door went from a “to-do” to a “to-do now“. You see, Friday night, Boo (the resident cat and benevolent overlord) caught a mouse.For Boo, this isn’t a particularly unusual act. She’s a retired member of a hardware store extermination team, and it probably felt pretty good to shake the dust off the old stalk-n-pounce skills. She is a master mouser. For us, this isn’t so good. Nobody wants mice in their house. It’s just… oooky. *shivers*Dani did some research, and we poked around our basement, and decided that the first important step was to either fix or replace the back door to eliminate the wide gap at the bottom (and the ham-handed repairs of the previous owner). If you have mice, it seems, the first step to eliminating them is to cut off their points of entry. If you have any sort of holes in your house, it’s recommended that you stuff them with steel wool — apparently, mice don’t like the texture, so they won’t chew through it. Mice can enter the house through any hole larger than a US dime — like the yawning gap under our basement door.

Protect yourself against identity theft09Apr08

Protect yourself against identity theft09Apr08
Identity theft is when someone uses, without permission, your personal information in order to commit any frauds or crimes. Identity theft is a felony that is becoming more and more common. That is because some of us are not very careful with personal information, making the job easier for those trying to steel our identity. We should always be careful with information like Social Security number, credit card number, birth date, employment information, driver’s license number, etc., because if they enter into the wrong hands the consequences can be very serious. People that have experienced identity theft spend months trying to repair what others have damaged, and in the meantime they cannot get a loan or lose a job opportunity or, sometimes, they can get arrested for something they didn’t do.

7/3/08

I want to be a doctor, but let me steal your credit card first


Apparently, two guys in east haven’t developed enough common sense to know that these days, if you steal a credit card and attempt to use it you’re probably going to get caught. They attempted to buy an Xbox at Wal-Mart with it, but that part isn’t anywhere near as interesting as how they attempted to get away with it.

The story goes something like this: I might have been the guy in the surveillance tape, Alexander Brothers, criminal #1 told police. Might have been? Either you went to Wal-Mart or not; either you bought an Xbox or not. Then he told the pitiful story about being at a party and a friend asking him to go to the store and buy an Xbox, handing over a credit card to use. Since when do people decide they need a game system in the middle of a party? He admitted it wasn’t true, I guess his conscience got to him, or maybe just the fact that the story wasn’t even that believable.

What makes this awful attempt at theft pretty funny is that Brothers is a premed major, and his partner in crime, Kevin Connolly, is an engineer. Have fun applying to graduate schools guys, seeing as the university could have the ability to rescind your campus privileges. I wouldn’t want my doctor to be guilty of credit card fraud.
Posted by elle_famous at 10:29

1 comments:

flash said...

Thanks for this info; this issue has been bugging me like crazy for the last couple of days :)

Term papers

November 10, 2009 9:30 PM

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