October 14th 2011
Need A Reminder? Using Alarms to Save Money
I don’t exactly have the best short term memory. I remember being a teenager living with my parents. They would ask me to do something, like, clean my room or take the dog for a walk. I would agree to do so, and almost immediately forget. It wasn’t a vindictive thing, where I would intentionally forget, I was often willing to do the thing they asked me to do. I just plain forgot. It would even apply to things that I would clearly want to do, like eat dinner. I would make myself something in the microwave, step away from it for a moment, and only realize an hour or two later that I had already made dinner and it was just cold again. This, unfortunately, has carried over into my adult life. I often get the feeling that I am forgetting something, whether it is while I am at the grocery store, or if I am just sitting at home.
In order to combat this, I’ve gotten used to making lists. I will write everything down that I need to know so that it doesn’t matter if I forget or not. I typic Full Article…
In a previous article, I made the case that usury laws are counter-productive. Usury laws, which cap interest rates for lenders, completely fail to serve their intended purpose of forcing banks to deliver affordable loans and instead result in the declining availability of loans for anyone whose credit history merits an interest rate above an arbitrary cap. While this is still true for regular interest rates, I would like to suggest one particular feature of our contemporary lending industry that could actually benefit from usury laws: Penalty rates.