This is just a quick tip… If you ever find that you need to transfer money to someone and wonder what it would cost to do it via PayPal then you definitely need to check out the PayPal Fee Calculator.

Two very useful things I can come up with for this site are:

1. You want to send money to a foreign country, but you aren’t sure what all of the fees are going to be.
2. You want to sell something on EBay and would like to set pricing based on how much you will receive after PayPal fees.

Enjoy!

You know, people always talk about a million as if they actually know what it would look like if they were actually staring at one million things. But for most of us, we’ve never actually seen a million of anything!

So, I decided to take a look at one million, and to do so I created a document that has one million periods in it. It’s attached here.

The file is a 976kb download, and if you open it in Word it takes 254 pages in single spaced format.
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I routinely get Best Buy coupons sent to me and since these are valid for the next few days I figured I’d post them in case anyone could use em.

Essentially it’s 12% off just about anything as long as you sign up for the free membership, or 10% off if you don’t.

So if you’re about to go get a new digital camera or camcorder to photograph the Fourth of July festivities print these out and take them with you when you go! Hope they are of use to someone…
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The attached recording demonstrates one method of negotiating lower rates with Sprint PCS - even while you are under a contract. I’ve heard anecdotal stories from others that similar tactics work with the other major US cellular carriers as well as cable providers, but I’m not aware of anyone else having actually recorded and supplied a methodology.

The reason for my call is obvious if you listen, but basically we were paying around $135 per month on average for two phones and we aren’t even heavy users. I saw lower cost rates online that include even more, so I called just to get my rates reduced.

There are a few general things to note and listen for during this recording (which has been slightly edited from the original to remove personal details and blank space). Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes it can be difficult to decide whether or not to go ahead and book that air travel. Prices could go down, or they could go up, so what’s a boy to do? Well here are two sites to help you solve this dilemma.

When you are in the early planning stages, pop on over to Farecast and tell them your destination. Within seconds you’ll get a prediction as to whether the prices are expected to rise or fall for that particular route and you can make your decision accordingly.
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In the recent past I’ve done a lot of harping on the security woes of financial institutions (see here, here, and here) so when I saw this announcement I was both extremely happy and a little disappointed at the same time.

PayPal is about to issue SecureID cards to all business clients in order to provide further account security. Now this is what I’m always talking about when I speak of defense in depth! PayPal will combine layers of security, in this case something I have (SecureID password generator), with something I know (my username/password combo) to ensure it’s actually me accessing the site.
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In olden times, that is to say pre-Internet, a businessman’s dream was to one day grow up to lead a company as President or CEO into a new era of growth and profitability. Well, not any more. Now, the dream is simply to become the CEO so that you can have an enormous, unchecked compensation package.

A new study jointly issued by professors at Harvard, Yale and INSEAD demonstrates that CEOs with the most outrageous compensation packages, relative to the other company executives, are associated with companies that under-perform.
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Today the New York Stock Exchange had a record setting day… in a very bad way. Without warning and in a period spanning just one minute, the market lost a combined $60 Billion in just the top 30 blue chip companies. That’s with a “B” folks.

The Associated Press said the following:

Stocks Have Worst Day Since 9/11 Attacks: Dow Down 416, Nasdaq Drop 97 on Global Market Plunge

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks had their worst day of trading since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Tuesday, hurtling the Dow Jones industrials down more than 400 points on a worldwide tide of concern that the U.S. and Chinese economies are stumbling and that share prices have become overinflated.
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In the past I’ve sent you off to compare your salary with Michael Jordan and Oprah, but now how about using this little site to see how you stack up against the entire population of the planet!

The Global Rich List site will show you how you compare to the rest of the world based on your annual salary. While this is not nearly as important a measurement of your wealth as your net worth, it’ll have to do for now!
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Virtually every retailer now days offers “price match guarantees” and purchase protection after the sale in case you find a lower price within 30 days. But when was the last time you actually kept an eye out on the prices for something after you bought it?

Yeah, that’s what I thought… and the retailers are counting on people making the purchase and never looking back. Well now there is a great little service called Price Protectr that allows you to specify the Web site of the item you purchased as well as the date and price, and it will watch that product for 30 days and notify you via e-mail if it finds a lower price.
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In the past I’ve blogged about sites which allow you to get an idea of what your home is worth, and a site called Redfin.com which is awesome… but only for people in San Francisco. Well, now we’ve got a site that covers the entire US which integrates the full MLS with Google Maps.
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This is an interesting application of Google Maps and mashup technology, which is basically the concept of taking information from multiple sources and blending them together.

So, here they are:
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