If you're a healthy eater (or a vegetarian like myself), you might find your personal food budget strained by the pricier cost of trying to be proactive in maintaining good health via a healthy diet. However, as I was watching the Saturday version of NBC's The Today Show, I was fortunate enough to come across a piece by Consumer affairs expert and Health Director at Woman's Day Magazine, Amy Brightfield, who provided great advice (see video) on how to shop healthy and smart, saving money on your food bill in the process.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Summertime Is Time To Save Money On The Laundry
It’s officially summertime! And when I personally think of summer, I think of how we did things when I was a child. For instance, I think of how I learned to wash and dry clothes from my mother (my father was more of the outdoors maintenance person). Back in those days of limited resources, mom taught us kids how to get the most out of the necessity of having to spend the hardest of earned money to go wash clothes (for us, it meant a trip to the local laundromat to wash our family’s clothes). Part of my mother’s strategy was to use this time of year to save money by hanging clothes out to dry.
To this day, I still use many of her money-saving practices, along with some of my own tricks that I learned along the way. Taking note of the time of year, these are a few of those money-saving tricks that you can use in order to save on doing the laundry:
- Start by using only the warm water cycle (research shows that using 90% of the energy used by the washer is for heating the water used by the washing machine), which works just as well as hot water when washing clothes. Follow by rinsing in cold water. I know it seems counter-intuitive to wash clothes in anything less than hot water, especially whites, but using hot water is more damaging and costly in the long run, causing clothes’ colors to fade quicker and electric bills to rise (besides, you’re going to need to extra money to power the air-conditioner).
- Avoid buying clothes labeled, “dry cleaning only.” Needless to say, doing so can save you a great deal of money, especially if you are in a line of work which requires formal or semi-formal business attire. But for the daring, there are “dry cleaning kits,” which you can purchase at any discount retail store such as K-Mart , Target, and Wal-Mart. I have used these on a couple of occasions, and have had much success with them. For the truly daring, a search of the internet can yield many sites instructing individuals on how to dry clean articles of clothing themselves (write me and I can actually give you the process).
- Avoid washing so often. Unless one is very active, clothes worn for only few hours can be re-worn, especially jeans, which can be worn 2-3 times before washing (needless to say, this doesn’t apply to those loving in warmer climates, or clothes used in exercising).
- Wait until you have enough for a full load, but try to avoid overloading the washer. Overloading the washer doesn’t allow for the agitation process to clean clothes effectively, which could result in the need to rewash…which cost.
- When buying detergents, store brands are just as effective as named-brand detergents. Only in instances cases where you have a particularly delicate item, or one that you wish to preserve should you consider higher-priced brands with a particular function.
- Instead of using costly fabric softeners, try adding a small amount of vinegar to the wash (which reduces static cling and softens the clothes…thank you mom).
- Use this time of year to save money (again, thank you mom) and line-dry your clothes. I personally think naturally air-dried clothes smell so much better, not to mention more cost-effective (again, depending on the area you live in). If you must use a dryer, try to avoid letting the dryer cool between loads (to take advantage of the residual heat. Try to dry like-items together, such as products made of denim, and fold or hand clothes immediately after drying to avoid wrinkles (and the use of irons).
Admittedly, using these items won’t make you a millionaire, but the long-term savings will be put you on the path to taking note of how best to avoid needless spending, especially in these economically lean times.
Thanks mom!
Thursday, June 14, 2012
A Lesson of Caution: Avoiding Hidden Fees & Deceptive Banking Practices
From this evening's broadcast of NBC Nightly News (with Brian Williams), 06/14/2012:
While some banks are moving toward simpler, more consumer-friendly disclosures, others continue to hit customers with “hidden fees and deceptive practices,” according to a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trust analyzing the practices of the country's largest banks and credit unions.
For the complete story, please view the following videos from this evening's broadcast on the subject:
A final word on avoiding questionable banking practices, consumer groups offer these tips to keep more of your money in your account:
• Read all disclosure documents thoroughly.
• Monitor your bank statements closely.
• Sign up for email or text alerts so you know when your account balance is running low.
• Ask questions of the bank about the types of fees they charge and the terms and conditions of the account.
• Consider linking your checking account to a savings account to cover potential overdrafts.
• Shop around. Compare banks and find one that charges the lowest or fewest fees.
• Provide yourself a cushion. This is easier said than done, but it can save a lot of heartache down the road.
• Know the difference between opting out and opting in. If you opt out of overdraft protection, you won't be able to use your debit card if you don't have enough money in your account. You may be embarrassed, but you won’t pay a fee.
While some banks are moving toward simpler, more consumer-friendly disclosures, others continue to hit customers with “hidden fees and deceptive practices,” according to a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trust analyzing the practices of the country's largest banks and credit unions.
For the complete story, please view the following videos from this evening's broadcast on the subject:
A final word on avoiding questionable banking practices, consumer groups offer these tips to keep more of your money in your account:
• Read all disclosure documents thoroughly.
• Monitor your bank statements closely.
• Sign up for email or text alerts so you know when your account balance is running low.
• Ask questions of the bank about the types of fees they charge and the terms and conditions of the account.
• Consider linking your checking account to a savings account to cover potential overdrafts.
• Shop around. Compare banks and find one that charges the lowest or fewest fees.
• Provide yourself a cushion. This is easier said than done, but it can save a lot of heartache down the road.
• Know the difference between opting out and opting in. If you opt out of overdraft protection, you won't be able to use your debit card if you don't have enough money in your account. You may be embarrassed, but you won’t pay a fee.
Debtors' Prison, 2.0
Writer’s Note: Thank you in advance for those of you who have opted to begin reading Beyond Dollars & Sense! This is the very first posting for my blog, which I will use to inform the public about relevant financial issues regarding personal savings, personal debt, and money saving tips in these trying economic times. It is my hope to post a new issue weekly, starting this week, so that others will benefit from the same advice I was fortunate enough to have received (and apply) to my own life.
For my very first posting on Beyond Dollar & Sense!, I thought that I would write about an issue that came to my attention late last year…one that I have a personal familiarity with.
Back in the early 1990s, I witnessed my mother stressing out as a local sheriff’s deputy back in Michigan arrived at her front door, threatening to take her to jail for failure to respond to a civil judgment levied against her. I also remembering her running around scrounging for every dollar she could get her hands on trying to avoid going to jail (for the first and only time) at the tender age of 50. I remembered thinking “Is this legal? There is no more debtors’ prison!”
Fast forward some 20 years later, to a new century, a new millennium…and the same reality of debt collection. Last year, The Wall Street Journal published an article last year entitled, “Welcome To Debtors’ Prison, 2011 Edition.” In the piece, the writer chronicled how, in some states, individuals who find themselves owing money on credit cards, automobile loans, or—in my mother’s case from the 90s—medical bills face the very real prospect of being jailed for debt payments. No, this isn’t the hyperbole of some anti-capitalist leftist…it’s a practice of reality.
Despite the fact that debtor’s prison in America—as a codified law—was outlawed by both the states and the federal government in the 1830’s, modern-day creditors in the form of “aggressive and centralized” collection agencies are taking advantage of existing laws by buying up unpaid debt, and leveraging the power of local courts to collect. And although a full third of U.S. states allow for the jailing of debtors who can’t (or won’t) pay their outstanding bills, six states in particular—Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, and Washington—are stand out as hotbeds of this practice. Before you start saying, “Good…people should pay their debts,” individuals in some of these cases are being jailed without having any idea that they were being sued to collect a debt (not that in these economic times, people are necessarily fixated on being sued for an outstanding bill…not when they are struggling to pay more immediate and more bills).
This does not mean that the practice is an arbitrary procedure. Arrest warrants are generally issued if a borrower defies a court order to repay a debt, or simply doesn't show up in court while a debt is being pursued by interested parties. And among the most frequent seekers of these warrants are retailers, credit-card issuers, landlords and debt collectors, according to court filings and interviews with judges and lawyers.
Driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt, and a growing collection industry that buys and aggressively pursues bad debts, collection agencies have been increasingly employing the use of warrants in order to leverage the power of local and state courts to jail debtors…all in an effort to increase profits. Though not every warrant in every case related to attempts to collect on personal debt results in an arrest and subsequent jailing, in jurisdictions where the state gives courts explicit sanction to do so, judges can (and do) jail individuals for periods up to and including “indefinite incarceration” for failure to pay as little as $100 in debt to a given company. Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives because simply put, there are no universal applied legal standards for the practice. Enforcement in most cases is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.
For example,
in McIntosh County, Okla., south of Tulsa, issued about 1,500 debt-related arrest warrants, up from about 800 a year before the crisis, according to a court clerk. More than 950 borrowers got similar warrants in Salt Lake City courts last year. Maricopa County, Ariz., officials issued 260 debt-related warrants in 2010.
According to Spokane, Washington attorney Michael Kinkley, “(The) law enforcement system has unwittingly become a tool of the debt collectors.” Kinkley, who has represented arrested debtors, added that, “debt collectors are abusing the system and intimidating people and law enforcement is going along with it." And with no national statistics being kept on the number of debtors across the country who are arrested for this particular reason, the practice remains largely unnoticed outside of legal circles. One consumer advocate, deputy director Robert Hobbs of the National Consumer Law Center has even gone on record with his “suspicion” that “the debt collection industry does not want the world to know these arrests are happening because the practice would be widely condemned.”
There could be something to Hobbs’ suspicions. According The Wall Street Journal article from last year, J. Brandon Black, president and chief executive of Encore Capital Group, Inc., the country’s largest publicly traded debt-buying firm by revenue,
last year began requiring law firms handling its cases to follow a "code of conduct" that includes this sentence: "Under no circumstances should a firm cause a consumer to be taken into custody involuntarily."
According to the article, “the San Diego company decided to stop threatening borrowers with jail because the practice made Encore look bad.”
The recent profit spikes of the three top collection purchasing companies in the U.S., responsible for the initiating the majority of debt-related warrants
Other anecdotal evidence adds credence to Hobbs’ suspicions. Last year,
Vanderburgh County, Ind., Superior Court Judge Robert Pigman asked Indiana's highest court to review the legality of debt-related warrants after law-enforcement officials complained they can't quickly access arrest orders for dangerous criminals because their computer system is clogged with debt cases.
In other areas across the country, some judges are issuing fewer debt-related arrest warrants because law-enforcement officials concerns such cases detract resources from more relevant offenses, such as pursuing violent offenders.
So what’s it like to be pursued by both companies and law-enforcement for the relatively minor offense of owing debt? Consider the following cases from part of the Minneapolis Star Tribune series, “In Jail for Being in Debt.”
As a sheriff's deputy dumped the contents of Joy Uhlmeyer's purse into a sealed bag, she begged to know why she had just been arrested while driving home to Richfield after an Easter visit with her elderly mother.
No one had an answer. Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth. Then, handcuffed in a squad car, she was taken to downtown Minneapolis for booking. Finally, after 16 hours in limbo, jail officials fingerprinted Uhlmeyer and explained her offense -- missing a court hearing over an unpaid debt. "They have no right to do this to me," said the 57-year-old patient care advocate, her voice as soft as a whisper. "Not for a stupid credit card."
As alluded to previously, the single biggest reason that collection companies/debt buyers are so successful in initiating these arrest warrants is because most debtors simply fail to appear in court during civil procedures—some 94% by one New York-based nonprofit’s estimates of residents in that area. That same nonprofit, found that some “71% of people sued were either not served with the required notice or served improperly,” and “of the suits brought by debt buyers, 35% were clearly meritless.”
So how can you—if you reside in a jurisdiction where such practices are a possibility—avoid being jailed for failure to pay off your personal debt? Here are some suggestions
Remember, bill collectors can legally seek warrants to arrest people who don't respond to legal action over debts.
• Carefully read documents from collectors. You may not recognize a creditor's name or the amount owed. Old debts often are sold to debt-buyer firms, which tack on interest and fees.
• If you get a summons and complaint, it means you are being sued and the case is going to court. A summons can be delivered by hand or by mail, and needn't be filed in court first.
• Respond promptly to a summons, admitting or denying the debt and disclosing requested information. Watch for court hearings. If you ignore such legal matters, the collector can win a judgment by default and seek a warrant for your arrest.
• Debtors have some rights even if they owe money. For example, Minnesota law prevents collectors from obtaining judgments after six years.
• If you want professional advice, but can't afford a lawyer, ask the court clerk about volunteer attorneys who answer questions about collection cases.
Sources: National Consumer Law Center, Federal Trade Commission
Other useful advice to protect yourself?
• If you are either served court papers or contacted by a collector by phone or in writing, you must show up in court (in the first instance) or answer by certified mail return receipt requested (in the second instance.)
• You have 2 basic defenses: Either you know the debt is not yours, in which case you ask them to prove otherwise; or if it is yours and it's past the statute of limitations, you tell them that it's no longer legally enforceable in your state.
For my very first posting on Beyond Dollar & Sense!, I thought that I would write about an issue that came to my attention late last year…one that I have a personal familiarity with.
Back in the early 1990s, I witnessed my mother stressing out as a local sheriff’s deputy back in Michigan arrived at her front door, threatening to take her to jail for failure to respond to a civil judgment levied against her. I also remembering her running around scrounging for every dollar she could get her hands on trying to avoid going to jail (for the first and only time) at the tender age of 50. I remembered thinking “Is this legal? There is no more debtors’ prison!”
Fast forward some 20 years later, to a new century, a new millennium…and the same reality of debt collection. Last year, The Wall Street Journal published an article last year entitled, “Welcome To Debtors’ Prison, 2011 Edition.” In the piece, the writer chronicled how, in some states, individuals who find themselves owing money on credit cards, automobile loans, or—in my mother’s case from the 90s—medical bills face the very real prospect of being jailed for debt payments. No, this isn’t the hyperbole of some anti-capitalist leftist…it’s a practice of reality.
Despite the fact that debtor’s prison in America—as a codified law—was outlawed by both the states and the federal government in the 1830’s, modern-day creditors in the form of “aggressive and centralized” collection agencies are taking advantage of existing laws by buying up unpaid debt, and leveraging the power of local courts to collect. And although a full third of U.S. states allow for the jailing of debtors who can’t (or won’t) pay their outstanding bills, six states in particular—Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, and Washington—are stand out as hotbeds of this practice. Before you start saying, “Good…people should pay their debts,” individuals in some of these cases are being jailed without having any idea that they were being sued to collect a debt (not that in these economic times, people are necessarily fixated on being sued for an outstanding bill…not when they are struggling to pay more immediate and more bills).
This does not mean that the practice is an arbitrary procedure. Arrest warrants are generally issued if a borrower defies a court order to repay a debt, or simply doesn't show up in court while a debt is being pursued by interested parties. And among the most frequent seekers of these warrants are retailers, credit-card issuers, landlords and debt collectors, according to court filings and interviews with judges and lawyers.
Driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt, and a growing collection industry that buys and aggressively pursues bad debts, collection agencies have been increasingly employing the use of warrants in order to leverage the power of local and state courts to jail debtors…all in an effort to increase profits. Though not every warrant in every case related to attempts to collect on personal debt results in an arrest and subsequent jailing, in jurisdictions where the state gives courts explicit sanction to do so, judges can (and do) jail individuals for periods up to and including “indefinite incarceration” for failure to pay as little as $100 in debt to a given company. Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives because simply put, there are no universal applied legal standards for the practice. Enforcement in most cases is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.
For example,
in McIntosh County, Okla., south of Tulsa, issued about 1,500 debt-related arrest warrants, up from about 800 a year before the crisis, according to a court clerk. More than 950 borrowers got similar warrants in Salt Lake City courts last year. Maricopa County, Ariz., officials issued 260 debt-related warrants in 2010.
According to Spokane, Washington attorney Michael Kinkley, “(The) law enforcement system has unwittingly become a tool of the debt collectors.” Kinkley, who has represented arrested debtors, added that, “debt collectors are abusing the system and intimidating people and law enforcement is going along with it." And with no national statistics being kept on the number of debtors across the country who are arrested for this particular reason, the practice remains largely unnoticed outside of legal circles. One consumer advocate, deputy director Robert Hobbs of the National Consumer Law Center has even gone on record with his “suspicion” that “the debt collection industry does not want the world to know these arrests are happening because the practice would be widely condemned.”
There could be something to Hobbs’ suspicions. According The Wall Street Journal article from last year, J. Brandon Black, president and chief executive of Encore Capital Group, Inc., the country’s largest publicly traded debt-buying firm by revenue,
last year began requiring law firms handling its cases to follow a "code of conduct" that includes this sentence: "Under no circumstances should a firm cause a consumer to be taken into custody involuntarily."
According to the article, “the San Diego company decided to stop threatening borrowers with jail because the practice made Encore look bad.”
The recent profit spikes of the three top collection purchasing companies in the U.S., responsible for the initiating the majority of debt-related warrants
Other anecdotal evidence adds credence to Hobbs’ suspicions. Last year,
Vanderburgh County, Ind., Superior Court Judge Robert Pigman asked Indiana's highest court to review the legality of debt-related warrants after law-enforcement officials complained they can't quickly access arrest orders for dangerous criminals because their computer system is clogged with debt cases.
In other areas across the country, some judges are issuing fewer debt-related arrest warrants because law-enforcement officials concerns such cases detract resources from more relevant offenses, such as pursuing violent offenders.
So what’s it like to be pursued by both companies and law-enforcement for the relatively minor offense of owing debt? Consider the following cases from part of the Minneapolis Star Tribune series, “In Jail for Being in Debt.”
As a sheriff's deputy dumped the contents of Joy Uhlmeyer's purse into a sealed bag, she begged to know why she had just been arrested while driving home to Richfield after an Easter visit with her elderly mother.
No one had an answer. Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth. Then, handcuffed in a squad car, she was taken to downtown Minneapolis for booking. Finally, after 16 hours in limbo, jail officials fingerprinted Uhlmeyer and explained her offense -- missing a court hearing over an unpaid debt. "They have no right to do this to me," said the 57-year-old patient care advocate, her voice as soft as a whisper. "Not for a stupid credit card."
Uhlmeyer’s case is an extreme one, but other individuals have had as equally trying an experience as hers.
Deborah Poplawski was feeding a parking meter in downtown Minneapolis when city police pulled up, arrested her and took her off to jail. She was forced to change into jail-issue underwear and an orange uniform and sleep in a room with a dozen women, one of whom offered her drugs. She spent 25 hours in jail. ("Unpaid debt? You could go to jail")
As alluded to previously, the single biggest reason that collection companies/debt buyers are so successful in initiating these arrest warrants is because most debtors simply fail to appear in court during civil procedures—some 94% by one New York-based nonprofit’s estimates of residents in that area. That same nonprofit, found that some “71% of people sued were either not served with the required notice or served improperly,” and “of the suits brought by debt buyers, 35% were clearly meritless.”
So how can you—if you reside in a jurisdiction where such practices are a possibility—avoid being jailed for failure to pay off your personal debt? Here are some suggestions
Remember, bill collectors can legally seek warrants to arrest people who don't respond to legal action over debts.
• Carefully read documents from collectors. You may not recognize a creditor's name or the amount owed. Old debts often are sold to debt-buyer firms, which tack on interest and fees.
• If you get a summons and complaint, it means you are being sued and the case is going to court. A summons can be delivered by hand or by mail, and needn't be filed in court first.
• Respond promptly to a summons, admitting or denying the debt and disclosing requested information. Watch for court hearings. If you ignore such legal matters, the collector can win a judgment by default and seek a warrant for your arrest.
• Debtors have some rights even if they owe money. For example, Minnesota law prevents collectors from obtaining judgments after six years.
• If you want professional advice, but can't afford a lawyer, ask the court clerk about volunteer attorneys who answer questions about collection cases.
Sources: National Consumer Law Center, Federal Trade Commission
Other useful advice to protect yourself?
• If you are either served court papers or contacted by a collector by phone or in writing, you must show up in court (in the first instance) or answer by certified mail return receipt requested (in the second instance.)
• You have 2 basic defenses: Either you know the debt is not yours, in which case you ask them to prove otherwise; or if it is yours and it's past the statute of limitations, you tell them that it's no longer legally enforceable in your state.
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