Here in the US we do have banks that will pay a higher rate on savings accounts, but they are online- only banks which means a person has to trust that when funds are needed said banks will release them. I've seen rates go as high as 5%, but that changes depending on what the Federal Reserve does.

Capitol One is typically known for their credit cards is one of the more popular ones as they have what are called "buckets". These buckets are their version of the envelope / budgeting system. People take X amount of dollars, then break up the pile by category. X amount goes towards groceries for the week or month. X amount goes towards household bills, ect... People use them to save for various things and so on.

Ally bank is another popular one, then there are companies like Discover. Discover is another credit card company that now has a full line of banking products.

The reason these banks offer higher savings rates is because they don't have the overhead like a brick and mortar bank. Most of these banks do not require a large sum of money until specific accounts are wanted. A regular savings account often don't have a minimum, but if a person wants a money market account, there may be a minimum. Then of course there are things like IRA accounts and CDs ( certificate of deposit) or shares which are the same thing but for whatever reason banks and credit unions call these things something different. Bank= CD Credit Union= Share They both serve the same purpose. If a person buys a CD or share, they [bank or credit union] lend that money out in the form of a loan to other people. As a 'reward' for keeping that money in the bank, they give the account owner a higher rate of return. A CD or share can have a maturity time of anywhere from 30 days up to 7 years.

My experience with online-only banks has been piss poor at best. Once upon a time we had a Discover credit card. That account was closed when I figured out that when I'd make a payment, they would sometimes take more than a week to apply my payment to my card which resulted in being forced to pay interest. The only thing I pay interest on these days is our mortgage, otherwise paying interest is a big "NOPE!" for me. This is unfortunate as there are things I like about Discover. They give a card holder the option to shut their card off which prevents fraud. They use the same technology on their debit cards, but again, what good does it do if they screw people over in other ways.

Since I have things I want to do and need money to get those things done, I'm just going to work with our regular bank and be strategic about it.

Instead of leaving our bill pay account in a regular savings account that earns a crappy .10%, we'll move it over to a money market account that earns .50%. Not a huge difference, but it is better than .10%. Once we get past paying the mountain of medical bills that have been piling up since the end of March, we can build what is called a CD ladder. Our bank requires a minimum of $500.00 to purchase a CD. We'll start with one that is good for 30 days, buy another that is good for 90 days, ect... so there is always a CD that is about to reach it's maturity date. I can't go too far up the later as once the CD level reaches around the 3 year mark, the amount of return tanks back down to the same amount as a 1 year CD. Why? Who knows.

As our savings accounts grow, the amount we get back will grow. I'll still continue to look for better options, but unless something falls in my lap in the next few weeks, moving cash to a money market account is the best option for the time being. I'm not playing around with CDs until all the medical crap is dealt with. I have no clue when that will be as from what I've been told, there has been arguing between doctors and our insurance company. Whatever bills trickle in, I pay them. That's a whole other rant in and of itself.

At the end of the day, a lot of it is BS. Banks like Chase, Bank of America and others make billions per fiscal quarter and yet their offer .01% on their "platinum' savings accounts. Chase bank and their ilk know what they can do with their .01%...

FTFY
Cards of US banks have always been enigmatic to me. On the one hand, in terms of finance and economy, it's one of the biggest countries in the world. Yet, there's still a need to ask if someone takes Something-Pay; meanwhile, all of cards issued in my country are contactless, and a lot of them support Apple Pay/Google Pay. A card toggle has been present in three out of four banking apps I have. The one that doesn't have that switch has some other quirks, such as asking me for my full credit card number via email when I need support (while every other bank is like, OMG! NEVER TELL THAT TO ANYONE). Yet... their support is always great, so the occasional 16-digit number being sent unencrypted doesn't bother me that much since they'll always be on the case if something happens...

What I also find weird is that in the US, there's no Diners Club card? I own one, and the payment processor (i.e. Visa, Mastercard, American Express) is Diners Club itself. When googling about the business and how it's doing in the States, I saw that the Diners Club offers their "Mastercard Diners Club card", which I found weird, because that card is accepted in stores that take Mastercard, while my DC card is accepted in stores that take DC...

Banking is so different in the States!

I haven't heard about a Diners Club credit card and what feels like forever. The following is from Dec 2022....



https://www.forbes.com/advisor/cred...ners-club-card/

I have no idea why consumers can't apply for a Diners Club card.

Monetary policy in the US is...loose-y, goose-y at best. Finance isn't taught in school so what we've ended up with is a majority of the population that don't understand fiance, at all. If you tell a person to read the fine print whether it is for a credit card, student loan, car loan, mortgage, ect... they're more likely to give a attitude and a speech about not telling them what to do instead of seeing it as a means of somebody watching their back. The devil is always in the details and those details in the US always come in the fine print that is always almost impossible to read.

Example of how loose monetary policy is: A person that makes $30,000.00 a year can get a loan for a $40,000.00 car. For those that know better, it is well known that things with wheels and motors lose 10% of their value when driven off the sales lot. They also know that total living expenses ( fixed expenses and variable expenses such as groceries) should never be more than 50% of a person's income.

That same person that makes $30,000.00 and purchases that $40,000.00 car typically are taking out a car loan for over 5 years to get the payments down. They're also paying anywhere from 20-30% interest. What a deal, NOT! They're under water even before they drive said car off of the sales lot.

I had somebody try to pull the wool over my eyes yesterday.

One of the things I need money for is to replace windows. I refuse to take out a loan or put the windows on a credit card. This simple point will come up later. I want to replace windows of each room over time for a total of 13 windows. Most of my windows won't stay open, while they they do have double panes, the windows in my office are foggy because the seal for the 2 panes has been broken with time, and so on.

When I called to make the appointment to have somebody come out to give me some numbers, I told them I would not take out a loan to have their work done. It is a pay as we go project. I called on Friday, my appointment was yesterday.

The sales person showed up on time. The conversation started with being told "I don't care if you buy windows or not." This set the tone for the conversation that followed. I won't get into the details except to say that for 2 windows that are not large by any means, they wanted almost $6,500.00. In order to get $400.00 off, I would have had to sign a contract for at least 4 windows. $400.00 off of roughly $13,000 doesn't mean much. The story gets worse from here.

By this point I told the sales person no and she left. Because I was left with the feeling that this person wasn't being upfront with me, I decided to look into things a bit further after sales person left. Whether this failure to mention the following details was intentional or not, I don't know.

I found out later that in order to get the "$400.00 special" I would have had to finance the replacement windows through said window company. If I didn't pay the balance in full after a year, they would start charging me interest. This window company uses a company called GreenSky to do their financing. GreenSky gives kickbacks to companies that use their product. Depending on a buyers credit "worthiness", GreenSky charges 6.99- 24.99 % interest. I said above that the devil is in the details. I had to hunt for these details and they were written in very small text.


Later in the day, my plumber showed up. We're having issues with the new toilet he installed about a month or so ago. Anyway. I told him what happened with the replacement window people. He then gave me the name and number of a contractor that did the windows at his house for a fraction of the cost and twice the work. According to my plumber, he lives in a old house with big windows with fancy trim to go around the windows. They not only replaced the windows, they also did all the finish work for roughly the same amount of money as the window company wanted for 2 of their windows with no trim work.

I don't mean to write a novel for replies, but this is the BS that goes on. All of this should be taught in at least high school. If schools can't figure it out, parents can teach their kids about money at home. All they need to do is keep the conversation age appropriate. Nobody is going to try to explain how credit card interest works to a 3-year old. A 3-year old can certainly start learning about simple things like how much is a penny worth.

One thing I'm still struggling with is trying to understand the tax law and terminology (not the fine print – the whole darn thing!). I get around other financial and economy stuff just fine, but this simply feels like it's mumbo jumbo on purpose. So I definitely agree with having to educate this topic from the early ages.

Yuck, I think I messed up something important because I misunderstood like one sentence. Whoops. I've contacted the person, I'll see what they say in the coming days and find out if its fixable. Big lame for sure but that's Mondays for you.

Ex-landlord has emailed me asking for my new address, apparently it was part of my tenancy agreement to give her my new address. Seems dodgy. Not sure what to do. Apparently she might not have to give my deposit back if I don't give her the address, but* honestly I feel like she won't give it back anyway.

Barnes & Noble audiobook subscription: $14.99 a month

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/h/bn-audiobooks



$8.99 for a paperback of Jurassic Park

$44.00 for the audiobook version



This does not math. I cancelled my audiobook subscription.

It's officially spider season, and the creepy crawlies are at it again, coming out of their hidey-holes and/or creeping inside from wherever they can sneak in.

At least five spiders just this weekend, most of them in either my room or in the hallway outside.

OVer the years I've developed spider-sense. I can see those those creepy crawlies out of the corner of my eye if they as much as move a tiny little leg into my field of vision, even if I'm busy doing something else. Probably a lingering side effect from spider phobia when I was a kid (I still don't like them, and don't want them in my room, but I'm not afraid of them any longer - unless we're talking venomous/dangerous/bitey ones, or way too big to handle)...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh. Too much nag at work, my legs hurt all the way from soles to hips, my shoulders hurt from dragging two giant shopping bags home. And a slight headache coming on (barely slept last night).

Tired, brain isn't braining, these feet aren't made for walking, and all I want to do is to relax for a week, but I've got one day of relaxing and then it's a little bit nag, a bit more nag, and an entire weekend of nag

Hard drive failure.. sucks when the data is gone.

Had to walk home in some of the worst shoes for walking long distances. They're fine for shorter distances (and can handle bad weather, which is most of the reason I wore them today), but are absolute crap for one an a half hour on alphalt... My legs hurt al the way from the soles of my feet to my hips, plus my back wasn't too happy when i started walking, and was in an even worse mood when I got home. As if that wasn't enough, I've already been on my feet for quite a lot of 8 hours today before this. Doesn't help that I'm somewhat sleep-deprived (too few hours between shifts).

Don't think I'll be walking home tomorrow (certainly not in those shoes...)

This is for those that use Amazon's Ring or Alexa. I've taken a lot of crap over the years for not having this junk around my house and here's why...



https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoni...d-on-customers/

Since the Federal Trade Commission is based in the US, I don't know if there are similar lawsuits happening in other places around the world.

Just after I woke up, I saw something small and dark scuttle over my bed and down to the floor. Lost sight of it in the darkness, and by the time I managed to turn on the light, that little ninja was *poof* gone.

So now I'm 99% sure there's a mid-sized spider somewhere in my room, and I don't know where, which means I'm going to be a little bit on the edge until I catch that little bastard.

@simmer22 This means that it's time to burn down your house and move somewhere else.

The washing machine now vibrates violently enough that it moves across the room. Supposedly it does that cos we didn't place it on the box thing properly when we moved in. Except that was nearly 4 years ago and this only really started like 6 months ago and has only gotten worse. It had better not be dying

^ Still haven't seen the little critter, so either I imagined it, or that thing is still in hiding.
(at least I don't live in Australia or anywhere else where spiders are actually dangerous - here they're mainly just icky).

Day of meetings today, and even more tomorrow. *Sigh*.

A misprint in a check's routing number led to mass confusion and I was like "This can't be happening!"

Too many meetings and work courses this week, and apparently there's more next week (my head is full now, please stop!!!)

(Only positive today was cake, but I think I ate too much....)

This is a rant, but a rant that has a happy ending.

There is something to be said about animal shelters that make it impossible to adopt from. I understand why they have the processes they do, but at the same time, when they refuse to do their job, it's really annoying. I'll circle back to this later.

Backstory: I've been wanting to get another critter. All the animals we have are fine, but I've missed having a guinea pig in the house since we lost the last of ours a couple of years ago. At first I thought about getting a mouse, a rat or even a gerbil, but I wasn't feeling it. My issue with getting a rat wasn't the fact that rats come with a stigma. When somebody says rat, most people think of sewer rats which are not the same thing. It was more about trying to find a appropriate cage for one which I wasn't able to find locally. I would have had to order one which I wasn't willing to do.

This afternoon Dingus and I went to get Sterling some more blankets. I spent the past week looking high and low for decently priced, small, fleece blankets. I couldn't find any and the only place that had what I was looking for was Amazon. I'm not giving them any money, then the idea came to me to go to the fabric store. There is plenty of fabric to pick from there, I wouldn't have to worry about whether my order would show up or not, ect... so I bought 6 yards of fabric which I had cut into 1 yard pieces. That way I can swap out her blankets every other day and she'll always have clean ones.

Since there is a PetSmart next to the fabric store, we decided to go walk around. Trying to find chinchilla toys has been a issue as of late, but we've been looking anyway. Trying to find the dog food we buy has been another problem. Anyway...

Upon going into the store, we saw that they had animals for adoption. Initially I thought they were cats; nope... they had 4 guinea pigs for adoption. I figured the process would be similar to how I've gotten animals from PetSmart in the past. I totally wrong about that. There was a $30.00 adoption fee which I was fine with, but it was the other stuff that I wasn't okay with starting with the fact that the pigs they had for adoption have been at the store ready for adoption since Feb / March. People have been inquiring about these animals for months, but the shelter that PetSmart uses in my area refuses to return phone calls. WTF!

As I was talking to the store manager about these little darlings, I tried from every angle to get him to allow us to adopt one and he wasn't having it. It wasn't the manager that was the problem, it is the shelter and their rules which don't make sense. If they have people that pass their 'test' as it were and are willing to give these pigs a good home, there is no reason not to return a phone call. I could go off about this, but I'm not going to. People can be real a-holes. From what I could tell, these guinea pigs are being well taken care, but they'd be much happier in a loving home.

Since we couldn't adopt a pig because assholes, we bought one. We've named him Cole; a play on coal to go with Sterling as she was named Sterling because of the color of her coat. Cole is roughly 2 months old and is mostly black. He has a tan spot with a hint of white. He's really cute and since he is so young, I'm hoping that I won't have a issue with bladder stones which is a serious problem for guinea pigs, chinchillas, rats, ect... By keeping things like alfalfa out his diet, we should be okay. Unless something happens, Cole will be going to the vet next week for a physical and to be checked out. Aside from being nervous, he's been fine.

The cage we got him is huge for a 2 month old guinea pig. It is 4 feet long, almost 2 feet deep. Lengthwise it can extended to 7 feet long. The cage is really meant for a rabbit, but I can't think of a reason to ever have the cage extended the full 7 feet. It isn't hard or difficult to 'exercise' a guinea pig. They don't bounce around like a chinchilla, ferret and other kinds of critters. Their backs are not meant for that and they're not as nimble. They're perfectly happy to run around on a large blanket with stuff to chew on.

Covid 19. Having it at summer time really sucks. I guess I could say having it at any time really sucks. Haven't felt like shit in a long time and this is new level.

I hope you feel better soon, @Nemiga ! I had it last summer- ugh!

Thank you I really hope so it will clear up soon

Ughhhh. This house has a flea problem ever since we moved in. It's been over a month and every time we think they're finally gone... nope! The dog has been prescribed all kinds of things, we have spray for the house - including one from the vet that "stops flea infestation for upto a year" etc. I hate to imagine what the previous owners dogs looked like, because our poor old boy is so irritated he's lost most of the fur on his legs/butt and has seriously scratched up his stomach really bad that he's been leaving smears of blood everywhere he lies down. We only sprayed the house yesterday, and today I find one in my bed jumping round and mocking me.

We could spend even more money on getting the whole house fumigated, but (1) no money and (2) nowhere to go while the house is being treated.

This house is just a black hole for money it seems


Oh and also the nearly-deaf woman next door who has her TV on full volume has recently discovered opera. She also seems to have the sleeping patterns of a fruit bat.

Annoyed at this lady that I recently met. She's been breathing down my neck about applying for jobs faster and more regularly. Which makes sense normally, but I already told her I have several responsibilities right now that I need to be prioriting over the job search. Like if I didnt really have to be doing these things I totally would be spending more time carefully researching and preparing applications, but I like 6 more weeks of this stuff to get through first. So like chill lady. Anyway, I'm like her kids age so I guess she's just worried or whatever. But still, she needs to chill and sound less like a disappointed parent becasue even my parents arent that disappointed in me because we all know I made the right choice in quitting.

Ugh, it happened to me when I still had cats, it turns out that fleas have become resistant to a lot of the treatments that are widely available. I had already stopped using Frontline many years before as it became useless, so I was using Stronghold spot-on, but the fleas evolved and we had a summer from hell. Eventially cleared up when we started using Advocate (might be called Advantage now?), the cattery recommended it as they were seeing an increase in boarders with infestations! Took a few weeks I remember for the whole house to be clear, as the spot-ons work by rendering each flea that bites the animal sterile. So you might still have fleas living and dying on furniture, and biting your pet, but as soon as they feed that's it for them, so wait it out!

I went to this other town that used to have a massive (by this country's standards) shopping centre. Well, I mean it's still there but its basically a ghost town now. Like there's still a bunch of people there but there's like only 2 streets worth of shops left and even then they're all the usual chains and anything that was local or specialist or whatever is gone now. I havent been there in a few years since it's kind of out of my way for day to day stuff, but like it's really a let down to see something like that considering it's in a busy and popular area thats easy to access and also isn't in the middle of nowhere. Supposedly its going to be redevloped into a bunch of tall flats with the shops on the ground floor though clearly its taking awhile since the project got the go ahead like back in 2015? They should get to it, dragging it out isn't doing anyone any favours.