I thought those went the way of the dinosaurs with the birth of the internet and the new way to do pyramid schemes, but apparently that is not so.

A couple months back I got a bulky letter in the mail, addressed directly to ME, with my current married name.  I opened it, and what do I find?  One of those stupid pyramid chain letters, only this one “claims” because they use a certain phrase in it, that it is now perfectly legal, and there are only like six peoples’ names on the list for you to send money to.

Of course if you want to participate, you have to cough up the money to buy a mailing list.  Then cough up more money for all of the envelopes you will need, not to mention the costs for copying ten thousand copies of the letter, and then even more money to buy stamps to mail them all out!

I got another one of these Thursday!

I can’t believe people still try these things.  I guess the hope is that if they send it out to enough people, if a small fraction of those people participate, at the very least that person may get their investment back, but hopefully more.

Bah!  I am in the bunch of people who just throw those stupid things away and curse the company that sold my address to these idiots.  You have wasted your $1-$1.50 on me, people.  Because I really don’t think my trash can is going to send you or any of the other people on your list a dollar.

My daughter is only three years old right now, and I hope that one day she will be able to go to college.  But I can’t even imagine what it is going to cost us by the time she is old enough to attend.  It’s already a whole lot more expensive now than it was 15 years ago… Fast forward another 15 years? Heck we’ll probably have to be millionaires to be able to send her anywhere decent unless she gets a full ride scholarship!

Fortunately at this point in time, and hopefully in the distant future as well, there will be other options to find the cheapest college text books around so that we can save money.  Goodness knows that tuition is going to be hard enough to cover, so any way we can save money on the books is going to be a godsend.

I am kind of on the fence about this, mainly because I have very little product to sell. Right now if I were to set up a shop on Etsy, I think it is .20 per listing (for 4 months?) and something like 3.5% of the sale – if it sells. I think I figured, just based on the listing price alone, to get my money’s worth at Art Fire, I would have to list at least 35 items. Obviously this does not take into consideration the fees that are charged at Etsy, but considering I have only had two sales of my current product at my ecommerce store, I am just basing my comparison on the same lack of sales (what great confidence I have, eh?).

So for now, since I do not even have an Etsy store yet, and don’t yet have enough product to list 35 items at Art Fire to make it worth the $7, I will be carefully watching their site to observe the number of accounts remaining… if it starts to drop like wildfire I may just buck up and pay the $7 to reserve myself a spot at that price, as it is certainly better than being left in the cold and having to pay $20 a month later on if I miss the boat. But for now I will just bide my time and try to build up some inventory.

(please note this is not a sponsored post – I just wanted to pass the info along to any crafty blogger looking for another place to sell their wares)

How about instead, they make it a two-part deal – help the banks, and help the homeowners.  Both the homeowners who are facing foreclosure, and those who are hanging on by a thread – those who don’t have ARM’s, and are able to make their payments, but whose loan to value is upside down, making it impossible to sell without losing money, or to refinance to take advantage of the lower rates.

It would work like this – for the banks, they would be able to participate IF they agreed to help their customers in the above situations.  They would write off any difference in loan to value if it is upside down, up to a certain dollar amount so they aren’t losing too much – say, $100K.  And at the same time, would arrange to refinance that customer’s mortgage to the current low rates.  In return, if they help every single one of their customers in this fashion who are at risk, then the government does the bailout for 50-75% of that bank’s mortgages that have already failed and foreclosed.   The banks will still lose in the write offs on the existing loans, but they also stand to retain the customers they helped, since those customers will now be able to pay their mortgages instead of potentially foreclosing.

Also, if the customers are paying a lower interest rate on their mortgages, this will put more money back in their own pockets to spend on other things, which is part of the crunch everyone is facing now – they have to cut back on spending just to make their bills.

In a way this could also help those who rent.  Because even though you may be renting your home – the homeowner, the landlord, could be facing that very same issue, and where would that leave you if the landlord foreclosed?

Frankly, if the government wants to get the economy back on its feet, it needs to help those who do the spending – the people.  They already tried with the checks we got in late spring and summer, but come on – that is small potatoes compared to what is going on now.  If people are able to afford their mortgages, they’ll most likely stay in their homes, and continue to pay their more reasonable mortgages, and maybe even start spending a little more than what they may be doing now without the looming threat of foreclosure hanging over them.  Paid mortgages means the banks would not have so many foreclosures on their hands,  and the cutback in foreclosures will only help to boost the real estate market again, or at least stabilize it so home values aren’t hemorrhaging anymore.

Of course this all looks nice in theory, so who knows if it would really work in the real world.  But I don’t think it should just be the banks who are getting this reprieve.  If they hadn’t offered those shady ARM’s to every John, Dick and Harry who lined up for them – or dangled that carrot in front of those people (that is what was done to us, and we were in a pickle at the time, so we jumped on that ship) who were desperate and didn’t know any better, the financial market wouldn’t be in the position that it is in right now.

See, I don’t even blame either of the political parties for this one.  This falls squarely on the shoulders of the banks.  They dug their own graves.

It’s jacked up because he was simply keeping up with traffic.  In our state, the speed limit is supposed to be 
“reasonable and prudent”. In other words, stick to the speed limit whenever possible, but if it is unsafe to maintain AT the speed limit, then going a little over would usually be overlooked.

For instance, on the freeway we were on, the limit is 65mph.  If there isn’t a back up of traffic, it is rare to see anyone stick to that limit.  I would say the average is more like 75mph.  We were clocked at 80.  AND being passed by others.

So yeah, we think the officer was probably singing “eeny-meeny-miney-mo” in his mind when he tagged us. 

The fine is $172, or $165 for defensive driving school.  Either way we’re coughing up quite a bit of dough.

Dang it.  >.<

I haven’t really added anything recent since, oh, June I think.  Most of that is because while I thought I had a pretty decent idea with my “summer drink” series, I only received minimal feed back on the few things I did put together, and absolutely zero nibbles in sales.  That kind of does a lot to squash any of my own enthusiasm for adding additional pieces to the series.

In addition to the fact that I haven’t had the money to get some more supplies for some new ideas I’ve had rolling around in my head, I need to do some sales in order to cover that expense.

A couple of things I will note before I start that tomorrow, though:

1) I am not set up to do international sales.  I might consider selling to people in Canada, but my store isn’t set up for those either, I don’t think, at least not yet.  So if you’re international, sorry.  I’m just not prepared to do international sales right now.

2) Paypal is the payment option right now.  I believe it is set up so that you can either use your Paypal account, or when it takes you to Paypal’s site, you can enter your credit card (securely, of course) and not have to sign into PayPal completely.  However, if you chose to use your Paypal account, please make sure that your account is completely confirmed.  Otherwise it will NOT let you use your account, it will deny the transaction.   Confirmed accounts only via that method!  Otherwise, just a credit card will be fine.

That’s about it I think.  Feel free to hop over to my site and take a look at what I have in the meantime.  I think for now I am going to fiddle around with making some little thumbnails in preparation for the featurette tomorrow.