Barcelona, Someday

September 18, 2008

A traipse around Europe is one thing I’ll never stop hankering for. It’s no go right now with my budget and a second child on the way, but it pays to dream big and tall. Someday, the hub and I are going to wander around Europe and when we do, we’ll stop by all the major cities, all the crumbling ruins, all the places where the past and the present are melding. Naturally, Barcelona would be one of our stops. Barcelona is the stuff of legends, the city that dreams are made of. Founded a good 400 years before Rome, the city has been an important hub of culture, history, politics, and architecture from the time of the Crown of Aragon and well onto the present. Who cares that we can’t speak Spanish? We can mime. Acting out what we need might be frustrating but if we’re acting out and getting frustrated in Barcelona, who’s splitting hairs?

 

If our present earning capacity is any indicator of things to come, though, the hub and I would have to trawl for scrounge for cheap hotels. Europe isn’t cheap, and the peso to Euro conversion makes it even less so. Accommodations ought not to be a problem, though. In a metropolis as huge as Barcelona, I’m dead sure we can find affordable Barcelona hotels on every block.

 

So bring on the world map and all the grand travel plans. A’traipsing around Europe we’ll go someday. 

Lolo, Meet the 21st Century

September 16, 2008

The one thing that depresses me about growing a year older each year is the knowledge that someday, all those years and lines would take their toll on my motor coordination. In time, I’d end up like most octagenarians - moving ever so slowly and entrusting life and limbs to the doings of my cane.

I worry about my grandparents, I do. They stumble around with the motor coordination of a two-year-old. If I had my way, I’ll rig their house and I’ll rig them, too, so that they can have a 24-hour Medical Alert hotline of sorts right at their fingertips. If anything ever happens to them, they won’t have to scream themselves hoarse for help. There’s little that an old person’s screaming could do, after all. When you’re as old as my gramps, for example, you’d be lucky if you can actually get some decent screaming done.

So yeah, if I had my way, the money, and the technology, constant Medical Alert it is. I’ll rig my grandfolks’ house. I’ll have a fall alert detector put up so that if one of them falls and can’t push a button, much more scream for help, someone else would be alerted. A GPS tracking bracelet with 2-way speakerphone won’t be a bad idea, either. Should my lolo ever feel the need to pull a Forrest Gump, we won’t have to go scouring for him the whole city over. We can track him like ‘em CSI people do! How cool is that?

Lolo, meet technology.

Out-trumping the Trump with the Forex

You will laugh but the character I liked the most in the book Rocket Boys had never been any of those gangly, pimply, rocket-obsessed teenagers or those conflicted and conflicting men in that little mining town. It was the mother of the main boy who, while being a full-time housewife, saved enough from her husband’s paycheck to play the stock market and make more than enough to buy not just one but two vacation homes!

That woman, she never had formal training in the finer points of stock trading. But she was shrewd and had a sound sense of humor. She placed her money on a product she was sure would always sell - band-aids. She paid attention to the items her growing boys seemed to run like water through and invested in these, too. After all, with at least a million other mothers in the U.S with growing boys of their own, how could these products not sell?

If that woman was able to parlay what little was left of the grocery money into a small fortune through this ingenious little investing tactic, think of what she could have done with her meager capital if she had as nifty a tool as the Forex at her disposal. With today’s technology - specifically, a guide to online forex currency trading - and her instinctive business savvy, she could have easily out-trumped The Trump. She could have easily invested in foreign currency right from her home and played the market like it’s nobody’s business.

What about you? Would you consider playing the market, too, if it entailed only a capital of, say, five Gs and a few hours before the computer?

Six Plastics Later

September 15, 2008

Who thinks about plastic management?

Surprisingly, I do. Then again, I have every reason to. I’ve six credit cards to my name. I have never used three of them, and so I wonder - quite belatedly at this point, really - how I got suckerpunched into signing up for this colorful cycle of plastic and debt collection. The only rationalization I could come up with (and it’s one that won’t hold much water at that) is that it was difficult not to go plastic-mad. Credit card companies make it all too easy to get a plastic. One phonecall and a yes are all it took to send the card skedaddling to where I was. I didn’t even have to provide any information; they already had it in their database!

Looking back, I wish I’d taken the time to do research before taking custody of these cards. They’re cute, yes, but like little babies and gremlins, they bite the hand that feeds them. Had I bothered doing my research, I would have learned that some credit card companies offer lower interest rates than others, others allow credit transfers at almost zero interest, and a few provide debt relief to those who want their plastic cut because the monthly dues are making them bleed.

Apply Credit Card smarts, that’s what sites like Extra Credit Cards urges the plastic-toting public to do. Through tips and a comparison of the different business card offers up for grabs today, the guide to online credit card offers drives home the point that when one has to make monthly payments for regular use of a piece of plastic, there’s no other way but to be intelligent about it. Whether floating or fixed, annual percentage rates could break you. So yeah. Who thinks about plastic management? These days, I do.