After eliminating all other possibilities, the one remaining-no matter how unlikely-must be the truth.
I just received a letter from Chase telling me that my checking account will have a new $10 monthly Service Fee if I don’t meet one of their requirements:
I got switched to Chase after Wamu got taken over by them and the big thing with Wamu was FREE CHECKING. I don’t use this account much anymore, so I’ll probably be closing it.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!
4 years after first trying the Manhattan at Derek’s holiday party and creating my Facebook picture that lasted for years, I guess it was time to me to give it a try again given my new fondness for alcohol.
First I’d like to thank Derek and Shanna for hosting an awesome party again!
Ryan made me another one to see if I would like it now. It was not as horribly disgusting as my first experience, but it was still pretty gross and hard to go down. I tried to down it like a shot, but it just couldn’t make myself to do it. I did managed to finish the drink after 10-15mins.
Then Derek convinced me to try red bull + vodka, his drink of choice for the night. I dislike red bull in general, but he told me the vodka makes it taste better. Oh what a lie that was. What it made it taste like was cough syrup. I didn’t bother finishing it.
Despite having some really bad tasting alcohol, I did have some really delicious icewine as well as some Moscato (which I mistakenly called it mosquito throughout the night).
So yesterday my sister sends me a link to Williams Sonoma. Guess what happened over the course of the next 24 hours.
Yep, William Sonoma Google ads plastered everywhere I go.
Just completed my refinance with RMCVanguard, at least I think the refinance is completed since I signed all the documents via a notary agent and that Bank of America sent me a “Mortgage Payoff Processed” email. Went through some hurdles, but ultimately completed it in the end.
I had refinanced once in between from 6.625% to 5.125% (30 year fixed) with a different mortgage company I wouldn’t recommend. They were slow to respond to my emails and it took several calls to get through to them.
I’ve been monitoring the mortgage rates and my dad was trying to convince me to switch to a 15 year mortgage which was around 3.75% at that time. I did some calculation and 15 years at 3.75% would make my monthly personal spending extremely slim. I’ve gotten way too used to buying things whenever I want without having to worry about the price. Haha. It’s probably why people keep telling me it’s hard to figure out what present to get me. If I ever want anything, I would’ve purchased it already. ;p
I spoke with Jesse about this awhile back and he said he was in a similar situation and was thinking of refinancing. 15 years made his monthly payment too high, but he was considering 20 years. Interesting thought and after I did my own calculations, 20 years would work out great for me too. So I began to monitor mortgage rates for 20 years.
I guess it was providence when RMCVanguard emailed asking if I was looking into refinancing. RMCVanguard was who I originally used when I first purchased my house. They were quick, easy, and professional. I asked him for rates for 20 year mortgage and he came back with 4.375%. I didn’t get a chance to reply until a few weeks later and told him I would want to wait till it hit 4.00% before refinancing. Within those few weeks, the mortgage rate apparently dropped to 4.00% and we got the ball rolling.
Most of the process was smooth, besides the appraisal. The guy who did my appraisal short changed me in square footage by almost 200sqft, and the appraised value put me at less than 5% ownership of the house. Because I owned less than 15% of the house, they could not give me the 4.00% rate, but was willing to give me a 4.125% instead. I objected to the appraisal and gave my previous 2 appraisals (one which was done previously by another appraiser sent by RMCVanguard). Apparently mortgage companies aren’t allowed to contact the appraisers directly, but instead have to go through some intermediary agent due to new mortgage legislation after the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.
After a couple times back and forth where I claim the appraisal is wrong and the appraiser claiming he made no mistake, the appraiser finally admitted he made a mistake, but wasn’t willing to change the appraised value. I’m like super pissed and sent off an email to the attorney general. Not sure if that had anything to do with it, but a few days later, I got another email from my mortgage broker informing me that the appraiser has submitted a new appraisal with an updated value. However it was still below 10%, so I still didn’t qualify for the 4.00% rate. At this time, I saw that mortgage rates had began to climb and decided to go with 4.125% and our refinance continue.
After that, things were pretty straight forward.
Side note, if you have a complaint regarding real estate services/agents, apparently you should submit them to DOL. Here’s the reply I got back from the Attorney General – Consumer Protection Division:
Our office has received your correspondence.
We have reviewed your complaint and determined that we are not the appropriate agency to assist you. We will retain a copy of your complaint in our public records. We have forwarded a copy of your complaint to:
Dept of Licensing – Real Estate Appraisers PO Box 9048 Olympia, WA 98507-9048 www.dol.wa.gov
(360) 902-3600We recommend that you contact them directly if you have any additional information to add to your file.
Although we are unable to assist you with this matter, we appreciate you contacting our office.
Recently I’ve been hearing on the radio ads suggesting listeners to be unique/special and instead of giving a plain old boring gift this year, to donate in the name of the gift recipient. Personally I think it’s one of the worse presents ever. If you’re going to donate, donate because you want to. Don’t donate because you feel like you’re doing the recipient something special.
With my recent donation to Child’s Play (participate and you can win cool prizes from Ars Technica), it got me thinking about tax write-offs.
I brought this up over dinner and asked who gets to actually write it off? Assume Robert donated $100 to charity in John’s name. Technically that donation is tax deductible, but who gets to write it off their income while filing for taxes? Robert because it was really his donation? or John because Robert donated in John’s name?
Chad brought up an interesting point and that is that technically if John was to write it off, he would have to claim he received $100 from John (as income) and donated it (as tax-deductible expense), making it a net zero change. $100 probably isn’t enough that you need to report it, but let’s assume someone donated $10,000 in your name. Now not only is it a horrible present, but you probably have to report it on your tax return given the amount. In other words, you were given work to do as your gift.
As always, it’s Christmas time and it’s the time to help out the less fortunate. You should definitely check out the The Humble Indie Bundle #2 where you can donate any amount and get 5 free PC games!
So with the heavy rainstorms we’ve been getting these pass few days, I’ve been having quite a few brown outs. Everything’s fine though since my computers are all backed by UPSes. However I do noticed that my HTPC always seems to hibernate whenever these brown outs occur. I checked the battery and it was at 99-100%. So I went into the power settings and noticed that the critical battery level action was set to hibernate and the critical battery level was set to 98%. I tried changing it to 10%, but the setting would revert back to 98% immediately after trying to apply changes.
I did a search and found the following 2 threads:
I tried to do what a few suggested such as changing my group policy for reserve battery notification, changing my permissions settings for power schemes in the registry, and a few others, but they all failed to work. The only thing that worked was running the powercfg.exe tool.
powercfg.exe -setdcvalueindex 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c e73a048d-bf27-4f12-9731-8b2076e8891f 9a66d8d7-4ff7-4ef9-b5a2-5a326ca2a469 20
The 2 things you need to change are 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c (power scheme GUID) and 20 (what percentage to set it to). To locate your power scheme GUIDs, open registry editor (regedit.exe) and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\User\PowerSchemes. The keys (i.e. folders) underneath that location are your GUIDs. I believe the GUID above is for the High Performance power scheme.
Here’s the command to set the Balanced power scheme to have a critical battery level of 10%:
powercfg.exe -setdcvalueindex 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e e73a048d-bf27-4f12-9731-8b2076e8891f 9a66d8d7-4ff7-4ef9-b5a2-5a326ca2a469 10