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#Post#: 22372--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Mac Date: August 29, 2013, 10:14 am
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good gawd
#Post#: 22395--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Mac Date: August 30, 2013, 12:28 pm
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Uh, isn't making poor decisions... stupidity... especially when
it's done all the time?
Why do these 'research' articles try paint a different picture.
and then to make this statement "Policymakers can take actions
to help, they say."
WTF, are you kidding me. I don't even begin to know where the
start on that one.
[glow=red,2,300]Poor people aren't stupid; bad decisions are
from being overwhelmed, study finds[/glow]
[quote]By Maggie Fox, Senior Health Writer, NBC News
Being poor affects your ability to think, a new study shows.
Those coping with severe financial stress don't have the mental
bandwidth to deal with all of life’s troubles, a team of
researchers reported Thursday.
They’ve done a series of tests that show when people are flush
with cash, they can stop worrying and make better decisions. But
having financial woes takes up so much attention, they often
make poor decisions.
“When you are very, very focused on what you don’t have enough
of, you do all you can do to get more of it, at the expense of
other stuff,” says Eldar Shafir of Princeton University, who
worked on the study published in the journal Science.
When people don't have enough money they're so focused on ways
to get more that they don't make good choices, a new study has
found.
Poorer people make bad decisions, such as using pawn shops to
raise cash, according to the study
The team’s been trying to figure out why people who are poor
seem to exist in a vicious cycle of poverty. Much of it seems to
boil down to what is taking up their attention, the
international team of researchers found.
"Imagine you're sitting in front of a computer, and it's just
incredibly slow," says Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan,
who worked on the study.
"But then you realize that it's working in the background to
play a huge video that's downloading. It's not that the computer
is slow, it's that it's doing something else, so it seems slow
to you. I think that's the heart of what we're trying to say."
More...
HTML http://inplainsight.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20247880-poor-people-arent-stupid-bad-decisions-are-from-being-overwhelmed-study-finds?lite[/quote]
#Post#: 22959--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Mac Date: September 27, 2013, 11:32 am
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and they keep coming.
Ways banks are trying to make money off the customer
Fees to talk to tellers
I am soooo glad I left banks.
HTML http://video.today.msnbc.msn.com/today/53121445
#Post#: 22961--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Chiprocks1 Date: September 27, 2013, 11:37 am
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Not completely out of the question. My bed mattress charges fees
for putting money there...alongside my latest copy of playboy.
;D
#Post#: 23806--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Mac Date: November 12, 2013, 11:28 am
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I haven't carried cash for years. I've got mad money, but I've
only had to tap that on the rare occasion. Money is dirty....
yuck
[glow=red,2,300]Cash-only business owners risk $100 billion
mistake[/glow]
[quote]As American consumers begin to embrace tap-and-pay
smartphone apps, relegating plastic to a deep recess in the
pocketbook or wallet, more than half of U.S. small business
owners continue to live in the past—forget mobile apps, they
don't take American Express, or anything other than cash.
For nearly 10 years Joe Coffee, a small chain of artisan coffee
shops in New York City, accepted only cash. Not only was it a
more profitable scheme—Joe's average sale was $2.75 and credit
card processing would eat up about 3 percent of each transaction
plus add a laundry list of fees—but being cash-only was part of
the company's ethos.
"We thought of ourselves as the little mom and pop place with
the owner behind the counter making coffee. Our signs were
hand-drawn, our small coffee was $1.63, we'd only take cash—all
those things went together," said Jonathan Rubinstein, Joe's
owner.
Six years in, Rubinstein began to notice a shift in customer
behavior. "We started reading our Yelp reviews—75 percent of the
negative comments about Joe were about us not taking credit
cards," he said. "We were losing a lot of sales in terms of
people not having cash and going to a competing coffee shop but
also people spending less money who wouldn't buy a $17 bag of
coffee [beans] or a $75 grinder."
Joe started accepting credit cards at its new outpost in 2011, a
shop near Columbia University, where customers—mostly
students—tend to pay with debit cards. The experiment went well
enough that as of mid-October, nine in 10 Joe Coffee locations
now take plastic. "Welcome to 1999," the company tweeted on Oct.
23. "All of our stores (other than GCT) now take CREDIT CARDS!
Our Yelp ratings about to skyrocket #sorryittookustenyears," it
said, referring to Grand Central Terminal.
Time to wake up, smell coffee
If cash has an added cost for the consumer reaching into the
hundreds of billions annually—as one recent study found—the jury
is still out on the lost sales opportunity among cash-only
merchants. Sales from new customers may sustain the offsetting
of expenses incurred by card processing fees. Joe Coffee is
betting that by rejecting its cash-only ethos it's in line for a
snowballing sales channel in an age where cash is no longer
king. According to a report by Javelin Strategy & Research, 27
percent of all in-person point-of-sale purchases were made with
cash in 2011, while payments made with plastic cards—debit and
credit—comprised 66 percent, and that is expected to rise.
"It's the way of the future," said Rubinstein. "Even though I
was the one who came to this kicking and screaming for eight
years."
Rubinstein's initial reluctance mirrors that of a broad swath of
U.S. merchants. Fifty-five percent of the nation's 27 million
small businesses don't accept credit cards, according to Intuit,
the Silicon Valley software firm that develops financial and tax
prep solutions for small companies. By not accepting cards,
those 15 million businesses are missing out on $100 billion in
sales annually—roughly $7,000 per company a year in either new
sales or sales that go to competitors that do accept cards, said
Intuit.
"I don't understand the small businesses that don't take cards,"
said Jason Richelson, a former grocery and wine store owner in
Brooklyn who founded ShopKeep POS, a purveyor of cloud-based
point-of-sale software, in 2008. "In my opinion, as a grocery
and a wine store owner, if you don't take credit cards, you
suffer—you could be increasing your sales 20 percent and you're
going to make your customers happier."
Richelson points to another positive of accepting cards:
Customers spend more money with them. Across ShopKeep's
merchants—more than 7,000 brick and mortar shops around the
U.S.—the average spend per transaction is 120 percent higher
when customers pay with credit card compared to cash.
The merchants of menace, and margin
Given the benefits of plastic, why don't they take Amex? For
many small business owners, it's about solving a two-part math
problem: Are profit margins big enough to absorb the cost of the
credit card fees? And if they aren't, would the new business
that's brought in via credit cards make up the difference?
For companies like Peters' Bakery in San Jose, Calif., whose
best-selling products are 70-cent donuts and $2.65 slices of
burnt almond cake, the answer is no: "I get more business than I
really need right now," said owner Chuck Peters, who'd rather
not take the chance of losing any of his loyal customers by
raising prices.
Some well-established companies aren't seeing a customer demand
for plastic. "We try to stay old school as much as possible
because we have a formula that's worked—our restaurant has been
here in the same spot since the 1950s," said Kellie Cobern,
co-owner of the Peculiar Drive In, a burger and pork tenderloin
institution in Peculiar, Mo.
With an average lunch ticket price of $7, the drive-in doesn't
have many customers turning away because they can't pay with
credit or debit cards. "We keep our prices as low as possible to
try and help out our community," said Cobern, adding that
handwriting tickets, honoring regulars and accepting only cash
and checks add to the appeal of her company's culture. Business
is up 30 percent since she and her husband took it over from his
mother last year. "If we were to accept credit cards, we would
have to raise prices across the board to cover those fees,"
Cobern said.
Calculating the fees isn't easy. According to Jeff Shanahan,
president of payment technology firm CardConnect, there are
roughly 700 interchange levels that credit card companies use to
determine what they charge when a card is swiped. The fees
generally run 2 to 3 percent per swipe, but there are additional
costs that banks, credit card companies and merchant service
providers—the folks who are liaisons between the merchants and
the banks—tack on.
"Besides the fee on every card swipe—it's different depending on
the type of card being used—there is a yearly fee just to use
the [card processing] company," said the owner of a small yarn
shop 25 miles outside of San Francisco. "Then you can either buy
or rent the credit card machine, there are access fees based on
how many charges you have per company, and there's a license fee
that is only a small amount per month, but it adds up. They give
you free paper for the machine but you pay for postage, which is
more than the cost of buying paper at Costco."
According to the National Retail Federation, merchants pay about
$30 billion each year for debit and credit card purchases, most
of which goes to the banks issuing the cards. "It always relates
back to the fees," said Shanahan. "You have to give up about 3
percent. If your margins are 4 to 5 percent, that's a pretty
large portion of your profits."
The cost of remaining cash-only
Despite these costs, "as everyone becomes a lot more familiar
with doing things on their phones, if the next store over
offering the same set of products accepts electronic payments,
then you'll be losing business," said Bhaskar Chakravorti,
senior associate dean for international business and finance at
Tufts' Fletcher School and co-author of a recent study, "The
Cost of Cash in the United States."
New payment technologies like Square, Intuit's GoPayment and
PayPal Here—card readers and software that integrate with
smartphones and tablets—make the switch to accepting electronic
payments easier by eliminating most of the fees. Merchants pay
one of two rates, either a per-swipe fee (2.75 percent for
Square) or a monthly fee ($275 for Square). Joe Coffee's
Rubinstein says he saves 30 percent by using Square over the
traditional credit card system he started with. To offset
Square's fees, he said, "we have to make 1 percent more [in
sales]." So far, at the shops where credit card processing is
new, "the last three weeks have been among the best weeks [in
terms of sales] in history."
Until a significant percentage of their customers demand to pay
via mobile or credit cards, an acceptable substitute for many
small companies is proximity to an ATM. For customers who arrive
without cash, the staff at the Peculiar Drive In will start
cooking their orders while they cross the street to take out
money.
Scott Alderman, owner and captain of tour boat company Rusty
Anchor in Mount Dora, Fla., will allow his customers without
cash to take one of his two-hour tours and hit the ATM a few
blocks away after the boat ride if time is tight. "I haven't
lost more than one or two customers a year because I don't
accept cards," said Alderman, whose pontoon rides, located 20
miles northwest of Orlando, attract tourists looking for day
trips.
Some companies just aren't interested messing with the familiar
flow of their cash-only system. For the one remaining cash-only
Joe Coffee store in Grand Central Terminal, Rubinstein isn't yet
looking to add credit card readers.
"It's our fastest shop—we do about 250 transactions an hour
there and we have it down to a science," he said. "Most customer
are regulars; they're holding their $2.25 in their right hand
and loyalty punch cards in their left. If we try credit cards in
there and it adds four seconds to the transaction, it will
dramatically change our sales." And not for the better, he said.
[/quote]
#Post#: 23807--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Chiprocks1 Date: November 12, 2013, 12:01 pm
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I hate Credits Cards. It it sooooooo much easier to buy things
when you have plastic in hand. You don't mentally keep track of
what you are spending in a given month. Sure, you can keep a
running tab in your head, or even write it down. But when that
statement comes in the mail, it's a punch to the gut when you
see just HOW much you really did spend in a given month.
#Post#: 23812--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Mac Date: November 12, 2013, 2:20 pm
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Word....
Still wrestling with that b itch.
#Post#: 24077--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Chiprocks1 Date: November 26, 2013, 12:22 pm
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[center]Banks Ready to Charge to Hold Your Money?
HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lk3sL4xF4g
F*ck this sh*t! If this happens, there will be so many people
(myself included) pulling money out that it would cause an
economic meltdown for all Banks.
#Post#: 24083--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Mac Date: November 26, 2013, 10:55 pm
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Wow... I knew banks are continually looking out for themselves
and will continue to screw their customers... Without a kiss.
They will not stop.
I had to leave and it was by far, one of the best financial
moves I made.
#Post#: 24084--------------------------------------------------
Re: All Things Money
By: Chiprocks1 Date: November 26, 2013, 10:56 pm
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[quote author=Mac link=topic=982.msg24083#msg24083
date=1385528111]
I had to leave and it was by far, one of the best financial
moves I made.
[/quote]
Explain, Sir!
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