Don't Buy Toothpaste, Food and Cosmetic At Dollar-Type Stores

What Not to Buy at Dollar Stores

Colgate-Palmolive company recently reported that counterfeit toothpaste has been found in some dollar-type stores in the U.S. The counterfeit toothpaste may contain diethylene glycol and may not contain fluoride at all. Diethylene Glycol is a hazardous chemical, which is also found in antifreez and Colgate-Palmolive does not use diethylene glycol in toothpaste anywhere in the world.

In the past, investigation revealed that many brand names products found in dollar-type stores were not the same as from a reputable chain store. In Canada, as far as I know, nothing has been reported like the U.S. but it does not hurt to take precautions to avoid counterfeit products. I ask you to avoid buying food products, cosmetic products and chemical products at dollar-type stores. These products may contain potentially harmful ingredients and may pose health risks.Saving a few dollars is not worth the risk.
First Published: June 17, 2007 ADawnJournal.com

PayPal Is One Of The Most Powerful Forces In E-commerce

What Is PayPal?

The way the world is at present marks a quite significant change from how things were even ten years ago. Here is a little exercise to do with Internet surfing habits. When you got on the ‘net, chances are that you used Google to find pages – but did you use it as exclusively as you do now? When you were looking for fast, detailed information on any one of a range of subjects, if you were on the Internet ten years ago you certainly didn’t use Wikipedia. It wasn’t invented, even in its most basic form, until the turn of the century. And as for financial transactions, it’s almost certain that you were using credit card details, because PayPal was in its absolute infancy.

The list goes on. Only programmers of a certain level of ability were setting up websites of any real intricacy, and maintaining them. The word “blog” would have led someone to look at you with barely concealed fear for your mental health – although LiveJournal did exist and Blogger.com was on its way. The very concept of “blogging”, though, was a very niche market and idea up until the middle of this decade – but is now at the fingertips of thousands upon thousands of people. All of the above concepts, and others, have become common currency only in recent years but, now they are in vogue, they are immensely powerful and shape a lot of our working life and everyday lifestyle.

Business is never slow to react to a trend. In all honesty, if you want to see what will be on everyone’s minds, desks and t-shirts two years from now, it is well worth looking at what the business community are doing now. This requires some amount of judgement on your behalf as well, of course – not least because large sections of the business community are busily ramming documents into shredders, crying and booking flights to countries that have no extradition policy. But if the business world decides thatsomething will be big, it is worth getting on board, because the likelihood is that it will play a big part in all of our lives in time to come. Of the above Internet concepts, one of the most powerful is PayPal.

There are few of us who have not sat in front of a monitor preparing to send payment for a service or an item and thought “Do I really want to send my card details over the Internet?”. It’s safe, ninety-nine point nine (recurring) times out of a hundred, but there is always that little jag of doubt. But for the entrepreneur who wants to sell online, the joy of PayPal is that people have far fewer qualms about using it. It is tried and tested, efficient and speedy, and it is becoming accepted by more and more companies. As time goes on this is set to increase, and the people who use PayPal now will be in a stronger position than the late adopters, as they will know how to run an account efficiently.

First Published: May 11, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com

Money Saving Tips

How to Save Money

Following these tips will put some extra money in your wallet right away. Not sure what to do with the money you will be saving? How about investing for the long run? If you are 30 and start investing $100 a month at 10% interest rate – you will have roughly $380,000 when you reach 65. I will discuss the following areas where you can save money. Let’s talk about cable today and I will discuss Lunch in the next posting.

Cable TV
Lunch
Phone
Internet
Magazine Subscriptions

Cable TV

If you can cut cable TV, you will be able to save at least $480 annually. I am assuming you pay $40 per month for cable subscription and multiply $40 by 12 months, which will give you $480 savings annually. $40 per month is very low assumption. Most of the cable subscribers pay $50 to $80 per month. So based on what you are paying, your actual savings will be more than $480 a year. Living without cable is not utterly unthinkable. Many people are doing it and so can you. If watching TV is something you can’t live without, spend $40 on an indoor antenna and you will still have channels like CBC, CTV, Global and PBS.

If you are doing lunch outside everyday, you are pouring money down the drain. Let's take a look at the cost of doing lunch outside (instead of packing lunch from home) daily. Work-day lunch usually costs from $8 to $12. Let’s assume your daily lunch costs you $10. I am using $10 to make our examples simple. If you eat out everyday, your cost would be as below:

Weekly Cost = $10 * 5 = $50

Monthly Cost = $50 * 4 = $200

Yearly Cost = $200 * 12 = $2,400

$2,400 annually is a lot of money. If you are in a 42 per cent tax bracket, you keep 58% of each additional dollar you earn. When you consider all the taxes and costs associated with earning that after-tax $2,400, saving $2,400 annually means actually saving of $4,000 in pre-tax savings. Let’s put it another way – if you can brown bag your lunch, think of it as you are giving yourself $4,000 raise annually.

Above example looks good but it may not be possible for you to cut eating out everyday. What you do in that case? Cut above number in half. It means instead of eating out 20 days a month, brown bag your lunch for 10 days and eat out the remaining 10 days. You still will be saving half of the amount you were spending before.

Save Money On Phone Bill

Depending on what type of plan you have, you can save money on your phone bill. Here is how to slash your home and cell phone bill.

Home Phone

If you have home phone with features you don’t use, it’s time to get back to basic service. You will be able to cut $10 to $20 dollars per month. Keep your eyes open for same type of service offered by other phone companies at a lower cost. Before you do the switch, call your existing phone company and chances are high that your existing phone company will match other companies’ offer to keep you.

Cell Phone

If you have a monthly plan, added features such as caller ID, voice mail, call forwarding etc can cost you extra bucks. If you don’t use your cell phone in the daytime, switch to Pay As You Go. I have unlimited evening and weekend Pay As You Go which costs me only $30 a month. If you don’t need unlimited evening and weekend plan, use Pay As You Go $20 a month plan. It costs only 1 cent per minute in the evening and weekend and will save you a lot of money. Pay As You Go already includes caller ID, voice mail etc and you don’t pay extra.

Internet Phone

If you have high speed internet, you can use it to have home phone service. This type of phone called VOIP (voice over internet protocol). Plans start at $10 per month  for basic service. You can have phone service with 10 to 15 features for a fraction of land line cost. You can save 35% to 60% on your phone bill with VOIP. Before you jump into VOIP, do you research first. VOIP has some disadvantages as well. One of them worth mentioning - it won’t work in the event of a power failure.

Save Money On Internet Subscription

The easiest way to save money on your internet service would be degrade your service to a lighter version. Most likely you will not even notice the lower speed and you will get used to it within a couple of days. How much you can save doing this? Let me give you an example.

Rogers EXTREME : Approximately $55 Monthly
Rogers Lite: Approximately $35 Monthly

As you can see, it’s a $20 recurring savings right away. This will only work if you are able to switch to a lighter version. I understand that for some of you switching to a lighter version may not be an option. How do you save in that case? Yes, still there are ways. You have to do a little homework. Do a Google search by putting Canada Internet Service or Internet Provider Canada etc. Research search results on first couple of pages and pick a non-brand name internet provider at a lower cost. Yes, you will be spending a few hours doing your research but it’s worth spending a few hours to save money every month.You don’t need to stick to brand names like Rogers and Bell. You can switch to small internet providers and you can get the same speed at much lower prices. Let me give you an example. I performed a Google search by putting Canada Internet Service. I got about 298,000,000 matches for this search. I only checked first two matching websites, Acanac and Canadian ISP, as they looked promising. You can keep researching until you find something suitable.

Save Money On Magazine Subscriptions

Are you a magazine junkie? If you are, probably you are spending $30 to $50 on magazines every month. If you are buying magazines at newsstands, you can be spending even more. Stop buying magazines here and there. If you are subscribing to a few of them annually, take a good look at all of them and keep only one. You choose which one you want to keep. A smart way to read magazine instead of buying would be to read online. You will not find recent articles online buy if you wait a few days, it will be available for free.

This is my last post in Money Saving Tips series. After reading all tips, decide which ones you can do and start doing it. If you absolutely can not do some tips (let's say Tip 1 or Tip 3), that's OK. No worries. Just follow only those which you can. I will be writing about tips like these often. 

First Published: July 2007. ADawnJournal.com

Here Is An Example of Tax Refund Scam Text

Income Tax Return Scam

Hard-working Canadians are now rushing to file their tax returns. Also, scammers are working hard to scam more people and extract more money in unique ways. A common form of scam this time of year takes the form of a phone, text, or email scam asking people to pay owed taxes or collect a tax refund.

Today I have the opportunity to present a screenshot of a real scam text that was received via phone. Scammers send this type of text or email asking to collect or pay money to the CRA or tax agency. These texts or emails look so real that some people actually fall for it and lose money. Basically, if you follow the instructions on these texts or emails your banking information will be exposed to the con artists and they will be able to empty out your bank accounts.

Government tax agencies like CRA or others do not send texts, emails, or call asking for money. Their method of communication is postal mail or notifying your accountants (if you chose that option). The other ways you can check your tax balances is by logging onto the government tax website or calling the tax agencies directly.

Vigilance and common sense are your best defence. If you believe you have been a victim of a scam, contact your local police authority or central anti-fraud authority such as The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC).

What is an Entrepreneur?

Different Types Of Entrepreneur

The job of an entrepreneur is to make money. It is that pure and simple. However, as you may be noticing in the midst of the stretched financial times under which we are living, it is not actually simple to make money in this day and age unless you are acutely aware of where an opportunity exists, how to create an opportunity, or possessed of a quick brain. Money does not grow on trees, as the saying goes, and there is just no way that you can guarantee the success of a money-making plan. If there was a foolproof way to lay down a small amount of cash and walk away with a larger amount, we’d all be doing it.

Prior knowledge of a market definitely helps. It allows a potential entrepreneur to recognize where there is a gap in a market. Without this ability, there is often a danger of trying to make money in a saturated market, where there is a queue of people pushing and shoving to make their mark. Being the best in that particular market may deliver the results you were looking for, but then again it may not. And being in the middle of the pack will lead to, at best, disappointing results.

Some entrepreneurs style themselves as being in the “ideas market”. In other words, they have creativity that allows them to formulate solutions to existing or potential problems, or ideas for a product that will become highly-prized as a consumer item. This seems to be an innate skill. There is no apparent way of teaching creativity – it is instinctive and natural. You can be taught to recognize opportunity, but creating an opportunity is something that is the preserve of a lucky few, percentage-wise.

Both of the above are kinds of entrepreneur, albeit different types. The first type is an opportunist. In the current market, only a very skilled opportunist can be confident of riding out the storm, as a contraction in a market dictates that the level of opportunity will be reduced, competition between candidateswill be greater, and the people who are quicker to spot the opportunities will be the ones who hit the jackpot. Competing with such individuals is a thankless task for anyone. But they are good at what they do and should be congratulated.

The second kind is an innovator. The opportunities for an innovator to strike it rich are likely to depend on what area of innovation they specialize in. Although there is no recession-proof market (while supply-and-demand markets fare worse than necessities, there is some sign that people will still seek to make savings on the latter), someone who dreams up a solution to a need will be on safer ground than someone who conceptualizes and produces an item that is coveted a great deal, but judged to be beyond the spending power of too many people. So in the present day, it may well be that the best thing to be is a problem-solver.:

First Published: Apr 18, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com