Smart real estate investments

Posted by Tad Johnson - Apr 23rd, 2008 at 19:04

Thinking about buying your first home? Be careful where you buy. As we’ve already seen, future home price appreciation (and depreciation) will vary greatly depending on location. With gasoline prices rising and no relief in site, distance from the city center is becoming a crucial determinant for home prices.

For years, home size and features (like 1/4 acre yards) drove home prices. Suburban mansions popped up all over the country in cheap converted farmland. With an ever-expanding highway system and cheap gas, many thought this was a great deal.

Now that’s all changing. With environmental and economic factors pointing home buyers toward the city, suburbs are diminishing in value. But don’t take my word for it, read on below.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89803663

Home Prices Drop Most in Areas with Long Commute : NPR via kwout

Spending too much? Try cash

Posted by Tad Johnson - Apr 21st, 2008 at 21:04

First, a short story :

When I was a sophomore in high school, I wanted a CD burner very badly. This was back in the late nineties, and CDs were still a hot commodity (as the iPod was still just a glimmer in Steve’s eye). I went to BestBuy with some friends and found an open box burner for a [then reasonable] $130. I didn’t have a credit card, so I went to the ATM and pulled out seven crisp, $20 bills. I paid for the drive in cash and walked out a happy man.

Holding that much money ($140 was a lot of mowed yards) in cash makes you appreciate the amount–much more than a quick credit card transaction. I still spent it, but it made me really think hard about the purchase. And, it made me really value what I had bought (I made legal copies of all my store-bought CDs, naturally).

cash1.jpg

This is a personal finance hack that you can use at any age. If you’re having trouble tracing down where your money is going, try switching to cash for awhile. You get instant feedback on your spending as you watch your wallet shrink.

I’ve written before about the benefits of using credit cards, but that’s only after you’ve mastered the art of personal finance and budgeting. Going on a cash-only plan for a few weeks is the perfect crash course to get your finances back in shape.

Trouble at Yodlee? [updated]

Posted by Tad Johnson - Apr 20th, 2008 at 18:04

yodlee.JPGI’ve previously spoken highly of Yodlee’s Moneycenter service. It’s really great and works well. . . until it doesn’t. For reasons as of yet unknown, the Yodlee site has been down since Friday. I’m pretty certain that it’s really down and not some bizarre DNS wormhole (sorry, IT joke).

I work in the IT field, so I know how things can go wrong with computer systems. Even so, a 72 hour outage is pretty bad for any company who expects to be taken seriously. This also belies the trouble with trusting one site with all your financial accounts. (Though to be fair, I could just log in to my accounts individually. But really, who wants to do that?)

Let’s hope that by the time this gets published Yodlee has restored service and we can all go back to personal finance bliss.

[Update : As of 21:32 central time, the site is back online. Looks like they were just waiting to get called out by this pillar of financial blogdom]

5 tips for building a collaborative community

Posted by Tad Johnson - Apr 17th, 2008 at 15:04

I wrote the article below for an internal blog at work. Once I wrote it, I realized that it was pretty much applicable anywhere so I thought I’d try to get a little more press. I’m also posting it over at tadfad.com.

Collaboration is all the rage in Corporate America this year. With a globally dispersed workforce, much of this collaboration is taking place online. Web sites, wikis, blogs, forums, and even full collaboration suites are emerging on the scene.

Are you looking to tap into this collaborative energy? Want to form an online presence for your global team? Here are 5 tips that will help grow your collaborative community.

1. Get Personal. The web is often criticized for being too impersonal–but it need not be so. Most (all?) online collaboration tools have the ability to include small photos (sometimes called avatars) for users. Encourage everyone on the tool to add their own photo. We’re visual, personal creatures by nature so let’s make it personal! For example, there’s my photo. Doesn’t that feel more personal?

2. Respond. If you are trying to start a collaboration community online, you have the burden to check for updates frequently and respond as much as possible. This is especially critical during the first days/weeks as users are testing it out. If a colleague is going to take the time to pose a question or comment, you need to respond in kind. Yes, this is a time investment. Yes, it will pay off.

3. Reward/Recognize. Participating in collaboration communities is not a mandatory task. It’s not critical to our day-to-day jobs. Yet it has the potential to yield great results in improved efficiency and outcomes for businesses. The early adopters who are willing to stick their necks out and participate should be recognized and rewarded. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, and it can be done entirely within the online community, but some sort of recognition is key. As an example of free, easy recognition, Flickr.com (a photo sharing site) allows users to give each other virtual awards for outstanding photos.

4. Set some goals. Users will be encouraged to participate if they know why they’re participating. Set some goals for your collaborative community, making sure they’re time based, measurable, and significant. As an easy example, you could set the goal to reduce team emails by 20% through the use of an online collaboration community.

5. Show progress. Once you’ve set some goals above, track them and communicate progress. We all love trackers and metrics, so this should be second nature. Give your collaboration partners a sense of accomplishment by charting the groups successes (and/or failures).

Don’t be discouraged if your first attempt at collaboration is not wildly successful. As we all become more comfortable and aware of the opportunities of online communities we will work our way up the capability ladder. These tips will help you start that climb.

Save 17 cents per gallon

Posted by Tad Johnson - Apr 15th, 2008 at 22:04

You may have detected a theme as of late : gasoline is getting really expensive. On these pages, I’ve offered a silver lining to the escalating costs as well as some ideas to keep the costs down. Here’s another that fits into the latter category.

Get a credit card that offers at least a 5% rebate on gasoline purchases.

These come in a few shapes & sizes. Some are co-branded by a particular oil company (I carry a BP Visa card) while others are more generic (all the majors offer some flavor of gas rebate cards). Since gas is in many ways a fixed, recurring expense (assuming your driving patterns don’t vary too wildly) it makes sense to take advantage of these rebate offers. At $3.50/gallon, a 5% rebate is like saving 17 cents per gallon. Not bad!

As with any credit card rewards program, be sure that you don’t carry a balance month to month. These cards generally charge a higher interest rate to support their rebate offers, so a few months with a balance could easily wipe out a year’s worth of rebates.

http://www.rewardscards.com/gas-rebate-cards-ranked.asp

Gas Rebate Cards ranked via kwout

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