Consumerist

tips

10 Great Finance Books

By cwalters 11.16.07

Trent at The Simple Dollar read a new finance book every week for a year, ranking them according to how original and useful they were, and now he’s compiled a list of his top ten picks. According to Trent, if you read these ten books (and maybe the ones coming in at #11 and #12), “You’ll have absorbed basically all the useful material in every book on the list.”

His top pick is “Your Money or Your Life,” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, a “big picture” book that looks at how and why you spend your money.

credit cards

Quickly Spot Restaurant Tip Fraud On Your Credit Card Statement

By cwalters 11.15.07

Punny Money has a neat, simple trick for protecting yourself from restaurant tip fraud, which is when a waiter will change the numbers on your credit card receipt in order to increase his tip. The best way to prevent it is to match all your monthly receipts to your statement, but you can use this simple checksum technique to scan a statement and quickly spot any suspicious transactions without referring to your receipts.

readers

Can't Watch Your Premium Cable Channels ? Ask For "CCV Hit"

By consumerist.com 11.15.07

Now you don’t need to get special tender loving escalation to enjoy the same solution as Charlie of Charter Decides To Care That Reader Can’t Watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares fame. Reader Mangopants had the same problem where he couldn’t watch a specific channel. He writes, “After 5 months, 60+ calls to Charter (not exaggerating) and 3 visits from technicians I finally got a supervisor visit this site and read this article and the related problem article – she sent a “CCV Hit” to my box – fixed the problem right up!” A little Googling shows it’s the reset code for premium channels and it’s not just for Charter, “CCV Hit” works for other with other cable companies and on other DVRs.

toddlers

10 Ways To Make Traveling With Children Tolerable

By cwalters 11.15.07

And by “tolerable” we just mean “nobody has to die this year.” Kiplinger offers 10 ways to prepare yourself for traveling with kids now that cough syrup is frowned upon. We think one of the best is “team boarding”—don’t pre-board an airplane, because all it really does is increase the time your children are stuck in their seats getting all bouncy. Instead, if you’ve got another adult with you, one of you should board early and get the luggage stowed, pillows arranged, etc., while the other stays in the airport for as long as possible trying to run the kids ragged enough that they’ll promptly fall asleep once they’re settled in.

traveling

Watch Out For Bedbugs When Traveling

By cwalters 11.13.07

The next time you’re in a hotel, whether it’s a cheap day-rate one for your sad little affair or a luxurious business suite that the company has unwittingly paid for, check to see whether the mattress has an “allergy free” cover on it—it’s a codeword for “bedbug-proof.” Also, if you see trained beagles roaming the hotel sniffing out mold, there’s a good chance the “mold” is another codeword for “bedbug.” Hotels are quietly doing their best to locate and exterminate the insects to protect themselves from particularly vengeful lawsuits—but since an infestation can occur anywhere (it has nothing to do with “cleanliness” or sanitation), it’s a tough battle to win.

outsourcing

How To Hire A Home Cleaning Service

By consumerist.com 11.13.07

Reader MecuryPDX left a detailed comment about how to hire a home cleaning service that was so good we thought it would make a great front-page article.

christmas

Watch Out For Fees With Gift Cards

By cwalters 11.12.07

Like candy canes and drunken family dinners, gift cards have become a Christmas staple. Bankrate has reviewed a wide number of them and published the results to help you pick the best one for your needs. To avoid fees, you should stick with “closed-loop” cards—that is, a card issued by a specific retailer for use only with that retailer. Almost all retailers now offer cards that don’t expire and don’t charge maintenance fees, with the notable exceptions of Macy’s and Bloomingdales, whose cards both expire two years after purchase. However, several retailers—CVS, for example—still charge “dormancy” fees on cards that have been inactive for anywhere from 6 to 24 months, so be sure to check the fine print to see how this is addressed.

black friday

10 Black Friday Secrets Stores Don't Want You To Know

By Ben Popken 11.12.07

Black Friday is coming. That’s the day after Thanksgiving when retailers start their Christmas shopping price drops. The basic idea is to whip consumers into a buying frenzy with a few deals and specials and limited inventories, and use the ensuing madness to also offload crappy products they couldn’t otherwise move. You can come out with a deal, but you gotta know the tricks. Mike Elgin has got 10 of them, we like: [More]

readers

How Do You Decide Which Stories To Run?

By consumerist.com 11.8.07

Like your high school guidance counselor, our door is always open. Drop your gripes, story tips, musings, rantings, or fabulous ideas in the box at tips@consumerist.com. Unlike your counselor, we will help you get into college. The college of good consumerism.

discount brokerages

Call For Advice: Reader Wants Discount Brokerage Recommendations

By cwalters 11.8.07

Onoodles writes, “I’ve managed to put away 20k into a Roth IRA. I started it directly through one mutual fund and now I’m looking to move it to a discount brokerage firm to diversify. So my question is, which one is the best?!” For a general overview and comparison of leading brokerages, we suggest looking into SmartMoney’s 2007 Broker Survey from a few months ago. And note that by going with a discount brokerage firm, you’ll likely be trading better customer service, research tools, and trading tools for cheaper fees.

christmas

Use A Spreadsheet To Plan Your Gifts

By cwalters 11.7.07

This professor of finance proposes you take all the fun out of wildly overspending on last-minute gifts for friends and family, and replace it with the measured, predictable joy of a spreadsheet. However, if you follow his advice, the odds will be much better that you’ll end the year with healthier checking and credit card accounts.

retail

28 Confessions Of A GameStop Shift Supervisor

By Meg Marco 11.6.07

20 Sites Where You Can Find Deals

By cwalters 11.6.07

Maybe you’re one of those people who will manage to actually follow through with the whole “home-made, simpler gift giving” concept this season. For the rest of you who don’t want to sit around making dolls and paper-mache serving dishes over the next six weeks, Kiplinger’s has a list of 20 sites to help you score the best prices on your holiday shopping this year.

saving

How To Avoid Boredom While Turning Your Finances Around

By Meg Marco 11.1.07

The worst part of cutting your expenses is also the worst part of going on a diet. Boredom. Not being able to do exactly what you want, when you want to do it is boring. “Grown up,” but boring.

money

6 Financial Demons And How To Exorcise Them

By cwalters 11.1.07

If you keep trying to save money and failing, there’s a good chance you’re possessed… by “financial demons,” says Kiplinger. Here’s a list of six common ones and how to exorcise them, before your credit rating goes all Linda Blair on you.

tips

SmartMoney's 5 Strategies For When Regular Customer Service Fails

By cwalters 10.30.07

At the risk of turning into an echo chamber, we want to point out that SmartMoney has a good list of five ways to escalate your customer service issue when the normal CSR route fails. Sure, we’re all about the executive email bomb here at Consumerist, but there are other viable paths you should consider as well—like turning to your local government, and not just for local businesses: “A problem with your communications provider, for example, may be resolved with a complaint to a common, but little-known town board — the cable access committee, which acts as a liaison between the government and the cable suppliers for that area. “

sales

By cwalters 10.30.07

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Amazon will supposedly sell a unspecified but large number of Wii game consoles on Wednesday, October 31st at 10 am PDT (1 pm EDT). [NintendoWiiFanboy]

readers

The Ultimate Consumerist Guide To Fighting Back (Revised Edition)

By cwalters 10.30.07 — Updated: 8.14.13

[protected-iframe id="14eedff4c1ed081d42f5a75be4931995-40783744-40309798" info="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.php?u=http://digg.com/business_finance/The_Ultimate_Consumerist_Guide_To_Fighting_Back_2" width="55" height="82" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"] We’ve posted recently about how to fight back when a business screws you over, and we’ve posted a lot of executive contact info over the years. Now we’re packaging the two together into one big mega-post of usefulness: a one-stop-stop for figuring out what you need to do to start a customer complaint, or how to escalate a stalled one so that it can be resolved.

Welcome to the Consumerist Archives

tips