Investing and Personal Finance
From the category archives:
I recently wrote about my experience buying an iPhone from Rogers. To summarize: when I called, I had only planned on trying to get the $35 activation fee waived. I was fairly confident I’d be able to accomplish this since I’d read online that it was fairly common for [...]
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There have been a number of signs that have gone up in my area that promise “EARN CEO INCOME FROM HOME”. On the face of it, this is clearly a scam. The way to make CEO income is to become a CEO. There is NO WAY anyone will sell you a program that easily let’s [...]
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I’ve travelled in developing countries such as Thailand, and one of the interesting things is that they won’t protect you from yourself. You might be climbing up a mountain and where in the West there’d be a massive fence to prevent anyone from falling over the edge, in a developing country there’s a single chain [...]
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This post is part of our scam category. With scams the best defense is often to discuss them and let people who haven’t run into them know how they work. Unfortunately, talking about scams can seem like a “how to” for scam artists, which IS NOT my intention here. I always love reading about scams [...]
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The Canadian Capitalist recently highlighted two terrific Vanity Fair articles about Bernie Madoff. For those who weren’t watching CNN or reading papers in December 2008, Mr. Madoff operated an “asset management business” (hedge fund) that was actually the largest ponzi scheme of all time. He took massive amounts of money from rich people, famous people [...]
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It’s been a while since we did a scam post. Fake reputation scams happen on-line and off-line and can be one of the toughest frauds to detect or avoid.
On E*Bay it’s well known that malicious users will build up a reputation by selling small, inexpensive items (paperback books are popular) or by running an honest-to-goodness [...]
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There are a number of behaviours which are universally despised, yet often creep up as a scummy way to get a good deal out of someone. When an offer is made and accepted, to then take back your offer and try to get a better deal is a very low move. If you’re haggling in [...]
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I’ve written before on my opinion of experts. I definitely think there are times when we need to seek out someone who knows more than us about a subject, but that certain professions cultivate this to a degree that’s detrimental to their clients. Beyond this, there are people who go even further and try to [...]
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While visiting the parental units for Thanksgiving, my dad told an intersting story about what happened to their van when he went to get an oil change.
There was a young man (my dad said he looked about 16) who was driving the vehicles into the bay for the oil change. My dad thought he was [...]
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This post is part of our scam category. With scams the best defense is often to discuss them and let people who haven’t run into them know how they work. Unfortunately, talking about scams can seem like a “how to” for scam artists, which IS NOT my intention here. I always love reading about scams [...]
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Energy market de-regulation
In Ontario the energy market (natural gas, electricity) was de-regulated a few years ago to introduce competition in the energy marketplace. This has created a lot of problems because the energy resellers use door-to-door salespeople to sell the contracts and many of them seem to be crooks.
The problem
The biggest danger from door-to-door [...]
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1) Find “high-return, no-risk” opportunities and give them your money
2) Do business with someone who tells you to “trust me”
3) Do business with someone who discourages you from talking to other people (“this is a confidential matter, don’t tell anyone about it”, “don’t let your friends and family be dream-stealers!”, “don’t talk [...]
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