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The new fee-free cards tend to fall in four broad categories based on the goodies they offer: cash refunds, co-branded cards like the Disney Visa, frequent-flier mile cards that earn fewer miles than similar cards that charge an annual fee, and travel and merchandise cards.
Several auto makers, including Toyota, are offering extra discounts to military personnel and their immediate families. There's a $500 military discount on Toyota Camry sedans and Highlander sport utility wagons. GM gives military people another $500 off a Chevy Cavalier compact car or S-10 pickup. Ford has military discounts up to $750. Some car makers, particularly the Detroit Big Three, offer discounts to "suppliers," a community that can be broadly defined. Check your family tree. Does any member of your family work for a car company or a dealership? You might be able to piggyback on discounts that person has by virtue of their employment. These "friends and family" programs tend to change. To look for rebates directed at certain groups, search the Web sites of the car makers and some of the major car-shopping sites, including Edmunds.com, Cars.com, Carsdirect.com, Autobytel.com and KBB.com, to name just a few. Look for a link to "rebates" or "rebates and incentives." To hunt for discounts offered in different regions of the country, try using different zip codes or using a search engine to locate Web sites of dealers in different cities. [It can realy pay to look in different cities.] To offer a hypothetical example: If Dallas is a super-competitive market for half-ton pickups where every shopper is in play, but people in Omaha will buy Chevrolets even if Ford agrees to sell F-150s at half price, why should Ford bother offering huge discounts in Omaha?
Bush's three-year track record for real non-defense discretionary spending in inflation-adjusted terms shows a cumulative 20.8% increase, exceeding the first three years of Bush I (up 11.6%) and the full four-year terms of Jimmy Carter (up 13.8%), Ronald Reagan (down 13.5% in the first term and down 3.2% in the second), Bill Clinton (down 0.7% and up 8.2%), according to de Rugy. While Bush may have inherited a Congress already on a spending tear, the fact is `Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill during his time in office,' de Rugy says. That compares with 22 vetoes by Reagan in his first three years in office.
Some risks banks look for: (1) If you've recently taken out a number of loans or have applied for several new credit cards, banks worry about your potential to run up lots of debt quickly. (2) Falling behind on insurance premiums or other bills can also hurt you with your bank. (3) Lenders don't like it when you max out all your credit cards. Lenders are using the trigger tools to do more than just the traditional review of risk factors. They are also literally watching their customers shop. Experian is selling banks a daily peek at current customers' credit reports. That way, banks can see if customers are looking to refinance their mortgage with a rival. Bank One is using triggers to identify home-equity-loan holders who are shopping around. If they discover another lender has pulled a credit report on a customer - a sign the customer is looking for a new loan - Bank One can swoop in and make its own cut-rate offer to keep the customer from bolting. While applying for lots of loans and credit cards can lower one's credit score, banks can't damage your report simply by checking it.
For those living in manufactured housing or single-detached homes (56% of the total), the median amount of space per unit comes to 1,400 square feet - nearly 40% more living space than for the average resident of Japan. Some 65% of poor households own washing machines, 56% dryers and 73% microwave ovens. A full 78% have air conditioning in their homes and a third boast a dishwasher. [How do the poor afford such items?] The answer lies in turnover. A huge share of folks below the poverty line in any given year earned enough in prior years to afford cars, homes and dishwashers. This year may even be the last time they ever suffer such statistical impoverishment.
Graveyard-shift workers make five times as many serious mistakes and are 20% more likely to suffer severe accidents, Circadian found. Those on the overnight shift also have a significantly higher incidence of costly diseases and disorders, costing employers billions. Obesity and diabetes rates are higher among overnight-shift workers, according to Circadian. All-night workers tend to have heart disorders at rates 40% higher than those of workers on dayside shifts. Social costs are also high. This disruption in life's routines might be why divorce rates are as high as 60% among all-night workers, and why they have 150% more stress-related gastrointestinal disorders. Health-care coverage adds a further $28.8 billion to the corporate bill, according to Circadian. Then there's the high turnover rate for night-shift employees, as high as 300% annually in some industries. This tacks on an additional $39.1 million in costs.
The lowest class, meanwhile, earned its smallest share, 3.5%. The middle section is slipping too. Middle-income households, which in 2001 earned between $33,315 and $53,000, earn 14.6% of American income every year. That's another 35-year low. This slump is spreading to the better-off, who are starting to act more like the less-well-off. Some of the events and trends that are working together to create a middle-class slide: the export of technical jobs and the continued unemployment of many American tech workers; the squeeze on state economies that will result in higher state taxes, fewer state services, and higher-priced state educations; the triple threat of high healthcare costs, high debt burdens, and continued weak stock prices and battered portfolios. As a result, even the upper-middle class is starting to downscale spending habits and life style. What, besides handwringing, can a squeezed middle-class person do? Shop down and invest like everybody else is shopping down, suggests Fidelity Investments president Charlie Hess. "We are talking to our investor clients about the many plays that might result from the search for cheaper upscale and cheaper downscale." You can live well and spend less by nailing down a 15-year mortgage instead of a 30-year mortgage while rates are low; by buying used cars instead of new, and by looking for freshman-year college [community college] bargains.
The changes were necessary because of a revolution in shopping habits, said Marshal Cohen, senior retail analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm. Now, more men pick out their own clothing. Just three years ago, NPD's polls showed that women shopped for 76% of men. Now, women buy for less than half of them. And men have a different shopping style. "Men don't need to see 40 different pairs of black pants, the way women like to see," Mr. Cohen said. `'They want to see three pairs of black pairs, have some clerk tell him what to wear with them, and move on. The stores simply don't need the floor space anymore." In the dismal atmosphere that shrouds the clothing business these days, men's wear is usually regarded as the worst performer. C. Britt Beemer, chairman of America's Research Group, which polls shoppers, said the desire to shop for men's clothes had continued to drop: it reported a decline of 8 to 11% in shopping for men's wear in the first six months this year, compared with the corresponding period last year. And in all of 2002, customers shopped for men's clothes 4 to 9% less than they did in 2001. The numbers vary by region: the falloff is higher in the Northeast. The agony of shopping isn't the only problem for men's-wear retailers. Men are also saying they don't need any more clothes, said Mr. Beemer, whose grouphas interviewed 4,000 shoppers since the beginning of the year. "Men are getting more into home d‚cor and definitely getting into buying outdoor furniture and grills," he said. Just the Facts Basil Wrap Shoppers confronted with the "paper or plastic" question in the supermarket checkout may soon also need to decide whether they want their perishables in plain or basil wrapping. The basil is the same popular herb used to flavor foods. But in this case, the basil is incorporated into the plastic wrapping to preserve foods. The extracts methyl chavicol and linalool ooze out of the wrapping and slow the growth of eight types of lethal bacteria including E. coli and listeria. Experiments showed the wrapping extends the shelf life of cheese and most likely of meats, fish, baked goods, fruits and vegetables. (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 5-21) Quick Facts, Stats & Opinions Got a low mortgage rate? You should thank the Japanese, who think 4.8% is a high rate and who consequently financed almost $50 billion in U.S. mortgages this year through May, according to the Treasury Department. Japanese investment in Fannie Mae bonds and other U.S. "agency" issues, which are mostly mortgages, surged 12% in this year's first five months compared with the five-month period in 2002. (Jay Hancock, Baltimore Sun 7-27) When you die, most states allow anything left in an IRA account to go to the heirs you've named on your IRA beneficiary form. If you haven't filled out an IRA beneficiary form, or if you simply name your estate as your beneficiary, [and if you die owing Medicare for nursing home care] the state Medicaid department could wind up with those assets instead. (Kelly Greene, WSJ 7-20) Quaker Instant Oatmeal peaches & cream contains dehydrated apple and artificial peach flavor, but no peaches. Pepsi's Fruit Works strawberry melon drink contains pear juice - but no strawberries or melons. Smucker's makes a brand of spread called Simply 100% Fruit. But the strawberry version contains just 30% strawberries - the rest is fruit syrup and juices. (Tara Parker-Pope, WSJ 7-15) American teens spent $170 billion in 2002 on products for themselves or their households, up from $155 billion in 2000, according to a survey conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited. (Martha Irvine, AP via Wash Post 7-5) Tech Tips & News Hot Searches Most of the big search engines now have sections that rank their most popular searches - in effect, the trends of the Internet. All these sites are growing in popularity - a trend, as it were. There's Google Zeitgeist, JeevesIQ and buzz.yahoo.com. The best, though, is 50.Lycos.com, because besides all the usual number-crunching, it has Aaron Schatz, who provides insightful trend background. Keeping up with the hottest Weblog personal Web pages, for instance, is easy via Daypop or Technorati, which blog bluff Harvey Kirkpatrick says are the best of the growing number of sites devoted to ranking the growing number of blogs. (Lee Gomes, WSJ 7-28) Ghosts in the Machine Almost every computer I know of is haunted to some degree by this ghost. Today I'll introduce you to this ghost and tell you how to avoid it. Fragments of old programs that you have incorrectly deleted live long after the program is gone. The fragments are ghostly remainders that can create haunting problems. To understand how that can be, we need to talk about what happens when you install a program. The installation CD creates folders for the new program. If you browse through your hard disk, you'll almost certaintly find folders with names such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and Norton Utilities. The folder is the destination for most of the hundreds, even thousands, of separate files that make up the program. But it isn't home for all of them. Some files go into various other folders. They're so scattered that it's impossible to find and delete them. And more than that is going on during the installation. Windows has a huge and important file called the Registry. Like a town hall registry that lists births, deaths and marriages and records land deeds, this registry keeps track of almost everything that inhabits your computer. When a program is installed, it can make dozens of changes to the Registry, telling the computer where to find the program. The Registry also keeps track of which files the program opens. For instance, when you create a document with Microsoft Word, the file likely will have a name such as story.doc. The DOC part of the file name is called the file extension. Once you install Microsoft Word, the Registry tells Windows to automatically use Word when you double- click on a file with the DOC extension. If the program that opens the file has been deleted incorrectly, Windows gets confused. Take my word, you do not want Windows to get confused. When you remove a program by deleting the file, you've left troublesome files behind. But when you remove a program correctly, an amazing amount of work is done inside the computer to make things right. Registry entries are changed or deleted, files from perhaps 10 or more folders are removed or changed. Not a single ghost of the program remains. The right way to remove a program is to click open the Windows Control Panel, double-click the Add/Remove Programs icon, and select the program to remove. Then Windows will do all the work. There will be times when the program you want to remove isn't on the Add/Remove Programs list. The next best way to remove a program is through a feature most programs call "uninstall." A well-engineered program should include the uninstall feature. If it does, the ability to uninstall should show as an option when you reach the program through the Windows Start button. The very worst way to remove a program is to simply browse through the folders on your hard disk, find the one labeled with the program's name, and remove it. That leaves ghosts behind. Registry entries aren't changed. And, since not all files for the program are removed, they can play havoc with your computer. First, if your computer is working fine, do nothing at all. Be thankful you have a ghost-free computer. But if the ghosts you've created still haunt you, there are options. The easiest one costs money. Norton makes a program called SystemWorks that is a good ghost-buster. It hunts down problems like this and fixes them. The only other real cure is to reformat the hard disk and start from scratch. (Bill Husted, Atlanta Journal-Constitution 7-20) Home Page Previous Factoids Too Top Sites
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