Well, my income taxes are done for another year. I finished it all last night, filed electronically using TaxCut and every penny is spent. As usual I was disappointed with the amount of return considering I pay taxes from two jobs and a military pension. I can’t seem to catch a break.
Something is better than nothing and at least I feel like I’m getting a little gift around this time each year. Fortunately we will be able to take care of a couple of things that we have been putting off for awhile. If you are like me, the economy has taken a bite out of your resources. Pay cuts and lack of cost of living raises have hit hard. The price of everything we need continues to go up and services become more expensive with less and less benefit. Maybe I’ll look for a third job so I can go out to eat once in awhile or go to a movie.
I’m sure you are in the same boat and I feel for you. However, if you do manage to get a small (or large) refund, make sure you take care of your needs before your wants. One thing you NEED to do is start preparing for continued economic struggles. So part paying yourself a little each week in the form of savings and then take care of the necessities.
Once you have all that taken care of go to the links on the right of this post and check out some of my shopping sites. There are all kinds of electronics, furniture, carpets, health items and others that you may find useful. If you don’t see what you want immediately, use the Google search bar at the top right of the page to look for other sources.
OK!! Since I have some time before the refund is in the bank, I’m going to start organizing my folders and files for next years income taxes. Good luck with your taxes this year, for most of us there aren’t many changes. I checked the top ten software products including Turbo Tax, H&R Block, TaxSlayer and narrowed it down to TaxCut just like last year. It was based on ease of use, information provided, import of last years information and of course price. There the research is done for you. Good Luck!!
Within the last week, I received a notification from Google that visitors had reported one of my sites, www.email.tellmeaboutthat.com, was a phishing site. Google contacted me because I have Google ads on all 94 of my sites. That same day, I received a notification from my hosting provider, Host Gator, that they had detected malicious script in that same site. Host Gator’s security team took care of it for me and I went in and cleaned up the mess that the hacker had left behind.
Host Gator recommended that I change my cPanel and FTP passwords to prevent further attacks. Here’s the thing, I used a password generator that helps you create passwords that are difficult to break the code on. I say difficult because, obviously, someone was able to get in and mess with my site script. The password that I used had nothing to do with anything in my personal life. It was not made up of names of people in my life, their birth dates, anniversaries, pets names, my favorite car or anything like that. In fact it was an arbitrary set of words, numbers and symbols that I made up, in anger, after the last time I got hacked. The password generator gave me a “very strong” rating, the highest rating you can get on that particular software.
Why am I telling you this? Because I love you guys and want you to know that no matter how strong or impossible to break you think your last name and birth year password is, someone can figure it out. I learned that the bad guys use encryption software that can scan your ID’s and passwords and figure them out. This applies to your online banking, social sites such as Twitter and Face book, email access and work computers. So if you use the same password for everything, or you use passwords based on people, dates and events in your life, then change them.
This isn’t just about hackers changing web pages and causing havoc for site owners such as myself, but everything you do on line. Here are some tips from Host Gator for setting passwords:
A strong password is a password that meets the following guidelines:
- Be seven or fourteen characters long, due to the way in which encryption works. For obvious reasons, fourteen characters are preferable.
- Contain both uppercase and lowercase letters.
- Contain numbers.
- Contain symbols, such as ` ! ” ? $ ? % ^ & * ( ) _ – + = { [ } ] : ; @ ‘ ~ # | \ < , > . ? /
- Contain a symbol in the second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth position (due to the way in which encryption works).
- Not resemble any of your previous passwords.
- Not be your name, your friend’s or family member’s name, or your login.
- Not be a dictionary word or common name
Even if you do all of the above, a determined hacker can still get in, but if you occasionally change the password you’ll make it more difficult. Identity theft is at an all time high, so protect what is yours.
By the way, I do not allow any type of phishing from my sites nor do my sites collect cookies. I’m not interested in collecting your personal information. I only want to entertain and enlighten you.
Don’t forget to go to the links on the right and finish you Christmas shopping.
I think I have some problems with the way things work against the consumer around here. For instance; shouldn’t I have to “opt-in” to something before being given the option to “opt-out”. Isn’t that somehow back-wards? Take the “opt-out” phone list for example; if you don’t want companies, you have no interest in, calling you, then you have to sign up for the governments Do-Not-Call list at http://www.donotcall.gov/. That’s good for two years. I guess every sleazy business has the right to annoy us because we may not know that we need their products/services.
If you don’t want to receive all those “unsolicited” credit card offers in the mail, then you have to go to http://www.optoutprescreen.com/ and “opt-out”. Now if they are “unsolicited”, meaning I didn’t ask for them, then why do I have to tell somebody I don’t want them?
Now, do you know anybody who actually likes junk mail? Then why do they have a site at https://www.dmachoice.org/dma/member/regist.action, to “opt-out” of receiving piles of junk mail everyday?
Isn’t there a green movement to save the trees? A good way to do it would be to let everyone know, via TV commercials, that if they want to receive junk mail, credit card offers or untimely calls from weird businesses, then they should call a number and “opt-in”.
Another thing I have a problem with is “unsolicited” emails also referred to as “spam”. Why do I receive email everyday which give me an opportunity to “unsubscribe” to something I never “subscribed” to in the first place. There is a site at www.ftc.gov where you can report spam. You used to be able to send them the emails you considered “spam” and then they would investigate. The last time I did, I received an email telling me that their server had detected that spam had been sent from my account. Not wanting the cops at my door I gave up and now just delete the offending email.
If you are like me, you probably think that some things are working against us as consumers. Maybe the government should take another look at who they are supposed to be protecting when writing consumer protection laws.
