Saved Pennies How to save your money one step at a time

If you’re reading this, chances are good that you’ve already seen Jeff Paul’s infomercial detailing his shortcuts to internet millions. If you haven’t seen it, just imagine two girls in bikinis interviewing people who claim to have made millions with Jeff Paul’s system.

The truth

The truth of the matter is that Jeff Paul’s Shortcuts to Internet Millions is a scam, plain and simple. You really shouldn’t believe anything you hear from the infomercial because the information is factually incorrect. Jeff Paul’s scam is fairly simple. Once you pay $50 for your package and shipping, you will quickly realize that the pamphlets sent to you contain useless information. No, you don’t get 10 free self-running websites as promised, nor do you get any method of generating any income whatsoever. The girls in the infomercial lied to you. At this point, they attempt to upsell you. They say that if you really want their self-running website kits, you have to pay thousands of dollars upfront. Not only that, but they can charge up to several hundred dollars a month, every month, just to run your websites.

The natural question is if these websites actually work, and generate real revenue. The answer is not really. The chances of you ever being able to make a penny from any of the websites they give you are probably less than one in a thousand. If you think you can beat those odds, then you should really be in a casino.

One interesting thing about Jeff Paul’s scam is that if you decide to cancel, that’s too bad for you. It is impossible to cancel your plan. You will not be able to receive any response via email, phone, fax, or mail. THE ONLY WAY TO CANCEL THE PROGRAM IS TO CANCEL YOUR CREDIT CARD. Jeff Paul is a really classy guy, I’m sure.

Posted under Avoiding Fees, Avoiding Scams, Making Money

When I was walking into a Home Depot store today, I noticed a peculiar display towards the entrance. The item being displayed was a radiometer. Radiometers are very simple devices enclosed inside a glass sphere. When light is shown into the sphere, the device inside the sphere spins! To give you a better idea of what this device looks like, here is a picture:

Solar Radiometer

Home Depot’s basic argument was that buy placing these spheres in your home they could convert either sunlight or artificial light into kinetic energy (motion) instead of heat, therefore saving you money on your air condition. This claim made me raise my eyebrows a little bit, so I decided to investigate the matter further. I couldn’t find any websites to confirm or debunk Home Depot’s claims, so I decided to write this article.

First things first, radiometers are small, just slightly larger than the size of your palm. It’s very unlikely that something that small will be able to make a significant impact on the temperature inside your home, so you would have to buy a lot of them. More importantly, however, is that the radiometers on display squeaked! They sounded just like a squeaking bicycle wheel, which would be far too annoying to put into your home. So already, I’m going to give my immediate thumbs down radiometers.

Now it’s time to look into the issue of whether or not they can actually save you any real money. We can address this in two parts. The majority of light which comes into your home during daytime hours is through the windows. If you decide to place radiometers on your window sills, they may be able to reflect a small portion of sunlight out of your home. Unfortunately, this is not enough to make a significant difference. At any given time, the reflective area of a radiometer is only a couple square inches at most, whereas light coming into your window is many thousands of square inches! Therefore, a single radiometer is unlikely to absorb more than one tenth of one percent of the total amount of energy coming in through a single window. Therefore, it is impossible that radiometers could ever really save you money by reflecting and absorbing sunlight. If you have too much sunlight coming in through your windows, the best and most common thing people do is have white blinds and close them all the way. This reflects most of the sun’s energy, thus saving you money.

At night, typically the outside air is much cooler, so if you want your apartment or home to be cool, just open your windows. If you don’t have good insect screens, then you can simply open up your blinds. This will let light out of your home, and therefore let head out of your home. Again, the surface area of radiometers is so outrageously tiny that it shouldn’t even be considered as a viable way to reduce your air conditioning bill.

The last thing I wanted to address was the actual cost of the device. The cheapest one I could find on the internet was about 10 dollars, although they go as high as fifty dollars. I view these radiometers as interesting gift ideas to young children, or perhaps to physics teachers for class demonstrations. It’s important to remember that you could have one of these in your home for twenty years, and it still wouldn’t pay itself off because it can’t absorb or reflect very much energy.

In conclusion, keep your eye out for new, money saving technologies, but also be somewhat skeptical. Before going outside and spending your money on a device, the best thing you can do is a little research beforehand to make sure you’re making a wise investment. What really strikes me about this whole experience is that my local Home Depot was attempting to sell them as a viable energy saving device, when in fact, it is impossible for the devices to save any measurable amount of money. I usually put trust in large companies because I know they have many people who evaluate a product before selling it. An important lesson to be learned here is that just because a company is large doesn’t mean it’s always right, and certainly doesn’t mean the company is looking after you. Radiometers are just another expensive gimmick designed to take money out of your wallet.

Posted under Avoiding Scams, Saving Money

A common theme to this site is how to save a couple pennies here and there. Sometimes, the best way to save some pennies is to avoid wasting them in the first place. That’s why I’m going to write some articles focusing on a couple non-obvious internet and mail scams, and how they work. A couple years ago, I was even scammed out of thirty dollars online! Anyone is susceptible to internet scams, regardless of where you live, or what your level of education is.

A common scam is known as the lottery scam. Have you ever received an email or letter in the mail claiming you’ve just won a lottery you’ve never entered? Guess what, it’s a scam! Often, these ‘lotteries’ are from foreign addresses, which should be sending up a red flag indicating something is wrong. Because the emails and letters promise to send you money in the form of a check, it’s hard to imagine how these scams could cost you any money.

Here’s how it works:

• The fake lottery sends you a check, but also demand a small fee for taxes or other bogus fees.
• After you cash or deposit the check into your bank, the check will appear to have cleared. The bank will release the funds to you.
• You happily send off the small required tax or processing fees to the fake lottery company.
• Up to a couple weeks later, your bank will figure out that the check was, in fact, fake.
• The bank will immediately take out the appropriate funds from your bank. If you don’t have enough money in your account, your account will be overdrawn, resulting in large fees.
• Your bank may also charge you fees for depositing a fake check

In summary, if you receive a check from a lottery you never entered, chances are overwhelming that it is scam. One thing to keep in mind is that internet scammers are getting more and more sophisticated. They make their livings scamming innocent victims, and to do it more effectively, they have fax machines, telephone numbers, and mailboxes. Don’t be fooled by internet lottery scams. These scams may appear to be legitimate, but they can cost you thousands of dollars and cause you lots of disappointment

Posted under Avoiding Fees, Avoiding Scams, Hidden Fees, Saving Money