Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Steven Curtis Chapman family in the immense tragedy. As a father of a 4 year old I cannot imagine what they are going through. The work he and his wife does in the community through their foundation yields amazing results and we know that God will bring good from this pain.

Please take a moment in your day today and keep them in your prayers.

[Source]

Dear All Ya’ll

I have been a music lover all my life. I started playing piano when I was 6 and have not looked back since. I love all aspects of music and haven’t met a genre I can’t at least appreciate. I am not a huge country fan but living in Nashville it is kind of hard not to keep up.

I have a beef with the 3 of you and I need to ask you to stop this immediately.

You are fooling nobody with your Guitar “playing”.

Yes I said it. I know that you are holding that big nice Taylor or Takamine and the sound guy doesn’t even have you turned on. We all know that you hit about once or twice a song and you look like an idiot just holding it up there. You are all great singers and songwriters… well at least Alan is… and you need to leave the real guitar playing up to your very capable backing band. You all look like goofs up there just holding the things and not even attempting to play them.

So the gig is up! Stop with the guitar hold’n.

Leave the guitar playing up to real guitar players like Brad Paisley and Keith Urban… At least they actually know how to play!

Sincerely,

J.J. Merrick

edit: At least Garth on the ACMA’s didn’t plug his guitar in. That way they didn’t have to worry about strapping a wireless pack to him.. saves time and money!

I have started to do a segment on fridays called “Financial Fridays” where I will write about something having to do with personal or business finance. I have always been intrigued with money and making it work so this is a natural progression for this blog. If you have questions you want to submit just click the contact me link above.

The guy over at FreeMoneyFinance posted this question from one of his readers and asked for comments. I decided to answer it here for my Financial Fridays post.

my husband passed away dec 2007 i’ve just gotten 500k from life insurance the insurance agent wants to invest all of it and give me an allowance a month. I’m 40 two children who have their own 85k each when they hit maturity. I owe 230k on my house I have a job and ss for the kids untill they are 18 ( 9 & 11 now) I want to pay off my mortgage invest 150k for retirement and have the balance for emergency also smaller investments. I feel like he’s pushing me he also wants control of the childrens UTMA accounts once I have guardianship. What sounds right. I’m picking up the check today.

OK first things first… Never EVER take financial advice from an insurance salesmen. They are SALESMEN and are not looking out for your best interest. He wants to sell you products that are going to have horrible rates of return and anyone getting a commission on the advice they are giving you are not a true advisor.

Second thing is that you just went through a fairly tough emotional crisis in the losing of your husband I don’t care how sudden or not it is still hard. You need to put the money into a money market account and sit on it for 6 months. This will allow you to get your head on straight and figure out where you need to go next.

After that I would go ahead and write a check to pay off your house. You will be debt free at this point and then I would put about $15k in a money market as an emergency fund and then the remaining $255k in an investment account. I would suggest good growth stock mutual funds that have a 5 year or more track record and yield 10% or more on average. This will give you a good income of about 30k a year and with no house payment and your own income it will give you steady money for the future.

Oh and did I mention NEVER TAKE ADVISE FROM A SALESMAN!?!?!?!

Did I make myself clear? :-)

Ever wondered what Gawker’s office look like?

Now we know!

Can you spy Blakeley?

So I had lunch with a friend of mine the other day and he told me that he was doing Credit Counseling. I knew he had a job, was single and didn’t ever talk about being in financial stress so I asked him ‘why?’. He told me that he just wanted to to have 1 payment and not have to worry about it.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! I replied

He told me “yeah I should have asked you earlier”

He went on to tell me that the company he used hadn’t been making his payments on time (imagine that!) and that one of this credit card companies had jacked his rate up to 22% from 8%!

I told him to cancel that right away and he told me he already had and was able to talk to the Credit Card company and that they were able to revert him back to 8% (I was floored).

The thing about these debt consolidation/credit counseling services is that they do not treat the problem, only the symptoms. He got in to debt because he was laid off and out of work for 6 months. He had like $10k in credit card debt plus student loans and a car.

I told him his problem was not that he had to make so many payments, it was that he had the credit cards in the first place. I am a firm believer that they will get you nowhere and are too easy to pull from in an emergency. He was off work and I asked him that if he didn’t have the credit cards would he have been unemployed for so long and he admitted “No, I probably would have gotten a job doing SOMETHING”. Yeah he sat on his butt for a few months because he had a cushion. If the cushion wasn’t there his butt would have started hurting and he would have gotten a job a Starbucks or Wal-mart or Krogers doing SOMETHING.

My point is that yes you need emergency funds because things happen… but it needs to be cash and it needs to hurt when you use it. If he had spent 10k in CASH that he had in a savings account I guarentee you it would have hurt WAY MORE then 10k in credit card debt and he would have worked harder to get a J-O-B.

John Chow is giving away a really awesome looking 2 Gig USB Pen. To sign up for the contest all you have to do is leave a comment. It’s the easiest contest EVER!

Ben Forta just announced that our beloved MXNA has been resurrected as Adobe Feeds. The needed name change also comes with new servers and some code fix to solve some of the growing pains it was having managing thousands of blog feeds.

So go change your RSS readers now!

I have started to do a segment on fridays called “Financial Fridays” where I will write about something having to do with personal or business finance. I have always been intrigued with money and making it work so this is a natural progression for this blog. If you have questions you want to submit just click the contact me link above.

In talking with friends and co-workers I have been asked a few questions about the Economic Stimulus Package money that American tax payers are suppose to receive over the next couple of months. Here are a couple that I thought I would highlight:

I just graduated College in December and my father claimed me as a dependent in 2007. This is the last year he will be doing it but is there anyway for me to get a check?

The money that we are all receiving is actually an advance of a tax credit that we all will receive on our 2008 tax return. Since the IRS can’t look into the future to know they are going on the information for 2007 for your advance. Since life situations change often in a year you might be eligible on your 2008 return to claim any or more then what you are receiving.

So to answer your question if you are Single and filing on your own for 2008 you can claim a $300 credit on your 2008 taxes. Also if you have a child in 2008 you can claim the extra amount you would have received. There will be a second chance worksheet that will help you determine that in 2009 when you do your 2008 taxes.

So when are we getting them!?

The direct deposits are already starting to go out and here is the chart from the IRS.gov website.

Got a question you want me to answer for Financial Fridays just hit the contact me link in the top menu.

Techcrunch seems to think so…

Hmm, Seems like web 2.0’s “Gem” of a framework may not be all that the zealots what you to think it is.

[Via TechnologyThree]

We have been using what we called “Scrum” for a couple of years now and I am curious as to how other organizations implement it. For us it is basically a daily staff meeting that lasts 10 minutes and you say what you did the previous 24 hours and what you are doing in the next 24 hours. We then move resources as the daily needs progress.

So my question is “What does scrum look like you to?” How do you do it? What do you use? Are you all in an office or do you have remote workers that you have to deal with.

Comment below…