Save money on your moving costs and reduce fees from companies

Lizzie Tyner | RSS | Sat, Sep 19 2009 | 0 Comments

SmartMoney recently posted an article about ways to cut costs moving. The article titled “Moving on the Cheap: 6 Tips for Cutting Costs” is really helpful to anyone moving or looking to move in the future.

You can pay anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000 to have your stuff moved from one place to another, so it is important to try to cut costs anywhere you can.

So first off, do some comparison shopping. Moving costs can vary greatly depending on what moving company your talking to. For that reason, it is important to get estimates from at least three companies before you decide on one. Websites like CityMove.com lets potential customers ask for bids that moving companies can respond to.

Of course, if you go back to a post on this site a few days ago, hiring a company based on price alone is a really bad idea. The moving companies are full of fraud and you really need to do your research before you hire a company to entrust all your things to. So doing a check on the background of the company you’re thinking about hiring is tip number 2.

Tip number three is to get rid of things you don’t want anymore. You will always have stuff around your house you won’t use once you’ve moved, so have a garage sale or something to get rid of it! The less stuff you have, the less it will likely cost you to move it.

Tip number four goes along with tip number three and that’s to make sure that your reduce the amount of times a mover has to go in and out of your house. I know that sounds kind of weird, but if you think about it, it really does make a lot of sense. If you reduce the amount of times a mover has to enter and exit your house, you will likely end up reducing you overall bill for the move.

Tip number five is to know what is covered by the insurance. If you’re moving and the insurance doesn’t cover something that is priceless to you, then it will be worthless in the long run. You need to make sure a dollar amount is placed on everything and that it is covered under all circumstances. In the case of moving, I don’t think that you can ever have too much insurance.

Finally, tip number six is to take advantage of a tax break being offered by the government! Right now, the IRS is allowing people who are moving to deduct the costs for a job-related move. All you have to do is move within a year of starting a new job and keeping that job for at least 39 weeks after you move. Also, the job must be at least 50 miles away from where your current job is.

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Tags: moving companies, investor, circumstances

You Can Call It Whatever You Like, It’s Still The Same Thing

Chris McClelland | RSS | Mon, Dec 29 2008 | 0 Comments

I love how some companies PR departments get creative(or at least claim to get creative) when they rename something but change little or nothing of the core product or business that they are renaming. It seems some companies and individuals are trying to reclaim some lost part of the market by hoping a quick name change will bring in a new rush of customers.

Sure it works, my cable company has changed it name about 3 times in five years. It holds about 80% of the market and everyone knows that its service is sub par. Your cable or internet can go off at random for days. Add to the fact that when this company decides to do maintenance work it basically shuts down the whole town of an internet connection for a few days. It has no multinetwork line backup, nothing, they are in fact a simple reseller of Quest Communications services.

You’d think with all this someone would come and knock the king off his hill. Well even though everyone in town knows that there service isn’t the best, newcomers to the town simply do not know and are force feed advertisement after advertisement from this company. It also helps that they own one of the local broadcasting channels and stream free real estate listings to your tv, with the only commercial between house listings are ads for there services. When enough people get mad, it seems that the company just changes it name, and then relaunches itself and goes on an even bigger marketing campaign in the local market to newcomers. However, I have as of yet to see a change.

So why do companies just change the name and never upgrade there level of service or product. The are many reasons some simple some complex. For starters it is easy to do a corporate name change, this might not do anything but change your name on paper, but for a simple filing fee to your local secretary of state you can now call yourself something new. It’s not quite like getting a new slate, more like pulling the cover over your potential new customers eyes. Some companies simply cannot upgrade there product/service b/c they are in fact dependent on someone or something else. If you are a reseller service and your core product has issues you can either choose to drop it or just keep relabeling it in order to keep up with the customer drop off rate by bringing in new customers.

In some cases companies rename something not because the product is bad but because they hope to increase consumer awareness by adding all sorts of marketing flare to drill into the minds of there hopeless victims(I mean, customers.) Take Wendy’s for example, a few months back Wendy’s started renaming itself in wake of slowing sales growth and a new consumer shift towards healthier eating habits. It tried to promote itself as a new better fast food place a valid start by any means, but what really stands out is it’s slogan for this marketing twist, “It’s not fast food, it’s Wendy’s”.

That’s kind of like saying a car is what people from New York drive and a vehicle is what someone from the south drives. A car/vehicle is the same thing, it’s a ford, a Honda, a shiny compact/large piece of equipment that we use to get from point A to B. There is no difference here than Wendy’s saying that they are not fast food. By fast food standards, “fast food” is defined as a drive thru restaurant one can order and receive food from in under 3 minutes. Nationally McDonald’s holds the fastest time for this with an average wait time of under 1 minute, but how can Wendy’s set itself apart.

Should we now assume that because they are no longer fast food they will take longer. No Wendy’s knows there customers don’t want to wait longer for there food to get to them. What about the salads and other “healthy” options on there menu. Wendy’s has been selling salads for years, other fast food chains had added more healthy options than Wendy’s as of late. So what has Wendy’s basically done. They basically called there car an automobile, a republican a GOP member, it’s all the same.

I like Wendy’s, some of there food is quite tasty, but if you are going to rename yourself, do it with a little more passion. Don’t put yourself in a class of other companies that simply pull the cover over the eyes of their customers. Consumers are smarter than that. The short sales spike to your bottom line, is not worth putting your corporate reputation at risk by simply putting a big shiny bow on the same old thing.

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Tags: cable company, few days, new york

The Mumbai terrorist seige has ended

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Fri, Nov 28 2008 | 0 Comments

After days of gunfire, grenades, and hostage taking, the terrorist killing spree in Mumbai, India is finally over. Indian commandos killed the last few gunmen that were held up at the Taj Mahal hotel.

Since the attacks started Wednesday night, at least 150 people were killed and many more were injured as more than a dozen terrorists attacked several locations around Mumbai.

The largest amount of casualties were found where the terrorists were holding hostages, at the Taj Mahal hotel, the Oberoi hotel, and the Chabad Lubavitch Jewish center.

The attacks were some of the worst seen by India short of full blown war.

Even though many people will be forever changed by the events that transpired in the last few days, the country as a whole will prevail. Our thoughts and prayers are going out to the families lost in the attacks.

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Tags: location, locations, hostages