Saving Money

I've followed the lead of Jaime in regards to money monthly. Recently the cable/phone/internet access as our weekend place went from the 12 month rate of ~120/mo to ~170/mo. Given we do not use this daily this was over the top.

Dropped internet from the cable company and am replacing with a DSL line from AT&T: saving $25/mo. Yes, it's 5Mb -> 768Kb but as I mentioned we do not use this often.

Dropped the all you can eat phone from the cable company and replace with a bare-bones dial up line: saving $22/mo. Yes, back to per minute charges but we just *don't* use this line much. I tried gizmo5 with an older cisco voip box but that does not work with fax lines unfortunately. Perhaps I'll setup a line-2 on our phones for outgoing.

Dropped the advanced cable with the box to basic cable. Dropping another ~$25/mo. Given we don't watch too much TV. I'd switch to over the air, but we really are remote and not much will show up.

And to top it off I don't have to deal as much with the cable company customer support - that alone is worth it. AT&T can't suck as much as this particular cable company support.

Course as luck would have it, I tried to save money last month with them and they offered to go from $170 -> $150/mo which was still too much. Explained that was not enough given our weekend usage and that I would absolutely be dropping. Told there was not anything they could do for me. When I called to drop the phone/internet services was told they could get me to a 12/month $99/mo deal - course too little/too late

Bit of a pita, but saving ~$80/mo or so for is worth it

Is it ok to hate the UK Government?

I started back in October with UK VOD (Project Kangaroo) back in October. As I stated in that post the company had been referred to the UK Competition Commission due to fears about the ownership structure.

This week we found out the output of the findings which were not favorable to us.

I am not in a position to discuss details about what this means in public, I'll have to be somewhat silent.

What I can say is that it is disappointing, yet not at all upset that I tried to make a go of it.

quicken not in the uk?

Was trying to figure out how I'd start to sort out my UK finances as I start to build them up.

We've been using Quicken for the PC for ~15 years or so in the states, started with a dos version and have kept upgrading over the years*. History going back that far. Have some gripes but it does work and keeps track of multiple banks, credit cards, investment accounts, etc - mostly automatically.

So I figured I'd just pick up quicken for my mac and start using it here. Alas... it is not supported for UK accounts. Seems they discontinued the product ~4 years or so ago. Use MS Money perhaps, well that would be frustrating, but possible. Except that too, while still sold here, was last updated in the 2005 version and folks tell me it's getting dated.

Seems odd to me, I've recently started using mint.com in the US for tracking my $ accounts and it works pretty well. Probably well enough that we would not need quicken were it not for the 15 years of history.

Has to be a reason folks have dropped out of the market, but it isn't that small of a market? How hard could it be to keep software up to date? Am I missing something?

* my main gripe with the US quicken is that there is still no apparent way of going from PC --> Mac without the data getting all messed up. The last time I tried my accounts went haywire to the tune of multiple million dollars, which given the inputs was mathematically impossible. Annoying to have parallels installed just for quicken, but so be it, it works.

Best of luck #44

Today we watch one of the more impressive things of the US system with the changing of the president. The 20th amendment states the time, the constitution provides the words. Lots of things have changed in the 222 odd years since the creation of the constitution, for such a 'simple' document it has held up amazingly well.

I never bought the whole 'King George' argument that the conspiracy theorists had about Bush 43 canceling the election, then canceling the inauguration. He was a lot of things to many but I never got the feeling he disrespected the process nor the fundamental rules.

One could argue that he never should have been president the first time as he did not win a majority of votes - but the US federal system is not a true democracy. He won the states. We could change the rules on this, no one has even suggested it seriously.

One could argue that his executive orders were not legal, but all presidents use them. Congress has the power to overrule, either directly or through political means: change that order or we withhold funding for X. But on that count, sadly we've got a congress that has lost it's backbone over the last 30 odd years.

Anyone want to buy a house

We've taken the next step in our journey to the UK, this week we put our house on the market. While we do not want to move until the school year is over we needed to get the house on the market now for the spring selling period.

Will see how good the housing market in the general NYC/CT area is soon I guess. Hopefully we will not have a huge issue selling later this spring.

Football

Went to my first football match this weekend. And no, this is not US football but the international definition of the term.

Went to see a Manchester United game against Chelsea - manutd won the match 3 to 0. Given manutd is one of the most widely known teams in the world, it seemed safe to see them if I was going to see any match.

I'm not an expert in the game, though it was fun to watch the crowd if nothing else.

No idea if I'll get into the game but the general rule still holds that going to see professional sporting events is a good time. Been to a number of great stadiums over the years (and no - the old Shea was not one of them), though not sure I'd want to see Green Bay play at Lambeau field in the middle of December.

How times have changed

This last Saturday I went to Longitude 0°, Latitude 51° 28' 38'' N. Otherwise known as the Greenwich Observatory - the home of the original GMT.

With all of the technology we have today we forget just how much math goes into the world around us. That math is further driven by time (or is it time is driven by the math, ah what ever - chicken and egg).

But to see the time galleries and to understand that for a very long time sailors at sea had no way of telling time reliably. Without a proper time reference you can not figure out your longitude/latitude. Without those you are kinda lost. They still have a giant ball at the top of the building which falls at 1pm GMT daily, on the off chance you want to set a cheap watch.

Granted, that time is set by some 100 atomic clocks around the world working on UTC and is not a pair of clocks in this building. Navigation has gotten a lot easier with GPS devices.

Course, those satnav systems apparently use a definition of 0° that is a few meters off the line on the ground in Greenwich, but who's counting ...