Updates Blog

Would you like to know what the risk of an earthquake is in your area?  As a former Geology major (and as a survivor of the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 that measured 9.2 on the Richter Scale — the largest in North American history), I can speak from first-hand experience.  An 8.0 or bigger earthquake happens about once every 20 years in Alaska, but the last time such a severe earthquake happened elsewhere in America was around 1700 when an approximately 8.5 - 9.0 earthquake rocked Indian villages throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Understanding the risk is the first step in making your home more earthquake-resistant, and deciding whether to add an earthquake rider to your home insurance.  There are a couple of ways to judge the risk of an earthquake to your own home.  First, you can get a rough estimate of what could happen from this earthquake hazard map:

This map shows the severity of earthquakes that may occur.  The type of earthquake that has hit America in the past century is unlikely to topple well-built modern homes:  earthquake codes require them to withstand quakes up to about 7.8 in magnitude, or even 8.5 for specially quake-proofed buildings.  Older buildings would have trouble standing up to even a 7.5 quake.  Structural damage can range from falling pieces to general collapse.

An 8.0 quake could occur along the Pacific rim or near Yellowstone Park, while a 7.5 quake might occur in the orange-colored areas of the above map.  A 7.5 quake near a major city might cause tens of thousands of fatalities.  Then again, the biggest earthquake this century — the 9.5 1960 quake in Chile — killed only 2,000 people, largely because foreshocks caused most people to run out into the street beforehand.  The northwest coast is a special case because while quakes are less frequent there, a very intense 8.5 - 9.0 quake in the deep Cascadia Subduction Zone occurs about twice in a millennium.  The next big quake in this zone is thought by some experts to be due to happen 100-300 years from now, but it could come sometime this century.

Finally, history is often an excellent guide to the future so here’s a USGS map of past earthquakes.  The red circles mark quakes measuring 7.3 or higher on the Richter scale, while the smaller yellow circles mark quakes ranging from 7.0 to 7.2:

Here’s a big World Earthquake Risk Map that covers risks everywhere.  The key to colors on this extra-large map is at its bottom center. 

What can you do about the danger of a quake?  That’s covered in the Home Disaster Prevention Report, which is free to the public.

Following up on last Friday’s article, it occurs to me that the notion that money can buy happiness may not be as valid as the theory that happiness can buy money.  Researchers have concluded that people who are happy will usually grow more prosperous.

So always put happiness first.  Even if you don’t get rich, what the heck — perhaps happiness is the only success we should really seek anyway?

If you crave scientific proof, see Money Can’t Buy Happiness But Happiness Can Buy Money and/or Wealth and Happiness Don’t Necessarily Go Hand in Hand.

A new book by M.P. Dunleavey of The New York Times and MSN MoneyCentral answers “yes, but not in the ways most people think.”  This book has been getting attention and praise from Bottom Line Personal, the John Tesh Radio Show among others.

In Money Can Buy Happiness Dunleavey notes that many of us are “stuck on the hamster wheel of acquisition. We use our money to buy stuff, then expect this stuff to make us happy.”  But the truth is, no matter how much we buy there’s always something else we want.

Why do we do it?  Scientists have found a clue in our brain chemistry. When we think about a purchase, we actually stimulate the pleasure center of the brain. It’s a bit like the high an addict gets from drugs. Like addicts, we are left with less money after the “high” shortly dissipates.

Our acquisitive ways might even go back as far as our caveman ancestors. “If you were a Paleolithic hunter and your neighbors acquired stone spear tips, you would need stone spear tips, too, to get your share of the hunt. “says Dunleavey.

What can we do to combat the inner lizard within that can’t resist acquisitive spending?  Here are some suggestions from leading thinkers:

• Duleavy says that since relationships have been found to be key to happiness, it makes sense to spend your money on loved ones.  Health also makes us happy, or as the Roman poet Virgil wrote, “The greatest wealth is health.” Dunleavey suggests doing fun exercises and buying fresh, natural food ingredients. Finally she advocates charity to a cause that has great personal meaning to you, because the act of giving stimulates positive feelings of connectedness and happiness.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, of Claremont Graduate University’s Quality of Life Research Center and author of the influential book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, believes that happiness comes from total absorption in challenging activities. “If we agree that the bottom line of life is happiness, not success, then it makes perfect sense to say that it is the journey that counts, not reaching the destination” he says.
• Ben Franklin said “If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the Philosopher’s Stone”.  This legendary stone could supposedly turn inexpensive metals such as lead into gold and/or create a potion that would make humans younger.  With that in mind, here are some suggestions for saving money from the CFA’s Special Report, “The World’s Best Consumer Tips” Part IV: Rates, Rebates & E-States:

The tipsheets in the “Best Consumer Tips” series cover a lot of ground, but there are still quite a few more subjects we’d like to cover.  For starters, here are the best ways we know of to get tax relief: 

1. Tax Preparation.  By preparing your taxes more carefully you could cut your tax burden, probably saving many thousands of dollars over the years.  Just follow these tips:

1. Using either tax software or a professional tax preparer will help you find deductions.
2. If you use both tax software and afterwards see a preparer, you’re motivating the preparer to find more deductions than the software could find.  You should at least try this once, and if it works then visit a tax preparer again every few years.
3. Keep all your receipts in one place, then when you pay your bills, save anything that may be deductible.
4. Visit a bookstore and pick out a tax-help book that has tips on finding deductions.
5. Make a conscious effort to be more thrifty. This will reduce your need to generate income (which in turn will lower your taxes). You can take the money you saved and invest in something tax-deductible such as a business startup, charity, education and so forth.

2. Big Ones.  Here are some underutilized big tax breaks:

1. Property taxes are deductible on your federal return, you can appeal to reduce them, and some states allow tax breaks for seniors, veterans and the disadvantaged. State income taxes are also deductible.
2. Open a deductible retirement account such as an IRA, a corporate 401(k), or if self-employed a Keogh.
3. Defer taxes through annuities, health savings accounts, IRAs, or (for capital gains) property swaps. If you can defer income to non-income-producing years, you’ll pay much less in taxes.
4. Many tax breaks for education are available: Lifetime Learning Credits, the Hope Scholarship credit, Education IRAs, and deductible student loan interest.
5. Start a business so you can deduct related travel expenses, credit card interest, child care, a home office, and paid jobs for your kids.
6. File an amended return if you know of deductions you could have taken the last three years, but didn’t.

3. Your tax refund. If you adjust your withholding, your IRS refund can be added to your monthly paychecks so you won’t have to wait until next year. Over many years, getting your refund early can earn interest which could amount to hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Perhaps you’d like to know a little more about longtime consumer advocate David R. Snell, founder of The Consumer Freedom Alliance.  You can judge the CFA (not to be confused with “the other CFA”, the Consumer Federation of America) by David’s record of sacrificing much of his own time for the cause of dedicated consumer advocacy:

• (2005 - Now) Director of the Consumer Freedom Alliance, and the architect of most of its content and programming.
• (2002 - 2005) Creator of the LiveDrive Initiative:  LiveDrive is an invention we hope will improve traffic safety and save thousands of lives every year.
• (1998 - ) Founded the Internet design company Ark Royal Software, which operates pro-consumer sites at 100-free-magazines.com (a magazine price comparison site) and 10money.com (a financial advice site — and the precursor to the Consumer Freedom Alliance).
• (1997-1998) Architect of the Gemini Project which proposed to reduce obnoxious spam, telemarketing and junk mail and replace them with permission-based marketing.  This visionary proposal didn’t garner sufficient support, but some of the ideas it describes have started to be implemented.
• (1984 - 1997) Experienced computer programmer who founded Ark Royal Games and designed several computer games including Trivia Quest in 1984 and Adventurer-Kings, a play-by-mail game that attracted thousands of fans in the nineties from over a dozen countries.  (Okay, maybe designing games doesn’t fit the definition of consumer advocacy… but it helped consumers have lots of fun!)

And here are some semi-interesting facts about David Snell’s youth:

• Born in 1961 in Alaska on “Freedom Day”, June 19 — a holiday celebrating the ending of slavery in Confederate states after the Civil War
• Alaska state junior chess champion, 1978
• National Merit Scholar semifinalist, 1979
• Attended Oregon State University 1979-1984, majoring in Computer Science

ConsumerAces.com is now live!  Its purpose is to showcase the sites, blogs and personal pages that best serve consumers. We’ll be happy to honor not just consumer advocates, but anyone who posts great content that helps consumers live better lives. The home page of ConsumerAces.com says it best:

“The world tends to honor those who focus on achieving fame or fortune. We believe that the real “million-dollar sites” are those sites, blogs and personal web pages that positively impact the lives of people who visit it — they’re not just profiteering cash cows or useless eyeball magnets. ConsumerAces.com honors those who really improve the lives of consumers with the Million-Dollar Site Award.

We make it easy to put consumer tips on your web page, so virtually anyone can win this award. Who knows, your web page might just save someone’s life by giving out helpful tips to improve everyone’s health, safety or financial freedom. And even a single life is worth a lot more than a million dollars!”

What’s the best consumer site of all? We think it’s ours, out of pure honesty. So naturally we gave ourselves our own award. Here’s how it turned out, graced by the visage of the CFA’s Monkey-In-Chief David Snell:

You can save the above graphics and do what you like with them. Just right-click on a graphic and save it to your computer’s hard disk (for example as “aceaward.jpg”.)  If you display it on the Web, our only condition is that you link to us.

To continue quoting the home page of ConsumerAces.com:

“You can actually design your own award:

• Choose a category and insert your name, and/or the name of your site or blog.
• Grace it with your own picture, or choose from portraits of twelve famous persons.
• You can even rename the country!

You don’t have to have a big or snazzy site:  Any web page that conscientiously serves consumers deserves a Million-Dollar Site Award.  We’d like to recognize your excellence.  The criteria is fairly easy to meet:

• Display content that is helpful to consumers.
• Be a site that overall is good for humanity.
• Do nothing illegal, nasty or anti-consumer.
• Include Americans in your audience.

You can apply in one of these fourteen categories:

1. Career &Entrepreneurial sites that can lead to a brighter future.
2. Conservation sites that conserve energy and raw materials.
3. Consumer sites that advocate a wide range of consumer issues.
4. Education sites you can learn a great deal from.
5. Financial sites that help you manage money much better.
6. Health & Fitness sites that might just make you feel like a million bucks.
7. Home sites that help you make a nice home.
8. Living sites that dispense excellent life advice.
9. Nature sites that protect animals and the environment.
10. Personal sites that express interesting opinions and fine sentiments.
11. Safety sites that can secure you from criminals or potential disasters.
12. Shopping sites that help you make good purchase decisions.
13. Thrift sites that encourage you to waste less and save more.
14. Other sites that help consumers in miscellaneous ways.

A great way to improve your site and increase your chances of winning this award is to prominently post great consumer-friendly content on your site.  The easiest way to do that is to take a few minutes to grab free content from our sister site SmartConsumerTips.com.

Experience the excitement of winning the recognition you deserve — Apply today!”

The next step? Allow every consumer to use this imaging technology to help them learn helpful consumer tips. Everybody knows they should learn them, but so often we get tired of keeping up. We want to make consumer education as easy and fun as possible for people. We’ll talk more about that in another blog entry within the next month or two!

In my last post, a press release entitled Exposed! $5.7 Trillion Cost Of 12 Worst Consumer Mistakes, readers can see how expensive America’s bad consumer habits have become.

Over the past year, I’ve been trying to further the cause of consumer education so we can begin to address these problems.  But with little success to this point.

My first effort was a tool I called the “Ultimate Personal Finance Makeover” (later renamed the “Ultimate Money Makeover”.)  It showed about thirty ways that most consumers can save tens of thousands of dollars over a five-year period, simply by improving their consumer wisdom.

You might think that the buzz about such a web page would spread like wildfire (and that’s what I was hoping for) but as it happened, the reaction was lukewarm.  I was forced to conclude that people ultimately are motivated by desires from within, not by attempts to inject them with common sense from without.

Undeterred, I created a site at http://www.consumerwit.com that encouraged people to spread the word using viral humor expressed in funny pictures.   This site was another bust, I’m afraid.  People want to forward something “hip”, and right now most people are spreading videos rather than still pictures, no matter how funny.

We’ll launch more projects to spread consumer tips in the coming months. What all these efforts have in common is this mission: persuading consumers to optimize their health, safety and financial freedom, while encouraging them to spread the good word.

What job would I REALLY like to have?  Well, first I’d like to have something that’s pure fun (hint: this isn’t it.)

But the choice of my moral backbone is a perhaps Quixotic mission of consumer advocacy.  Imagine this:  suppose I could persuade consumers to stop bleeding that $5.7 trillion dollars every year, and I received a commision of one millionth of one percent on that amount.  That’s one $57,000-per-year-job that I’d be very proud of.

Is it possible to make a website that’s both persuasive and enjoyable enough to achieve the mission?

With the help of enough conscientious Americans, from ordinary people to established consumer advocates, it can still be done.

PRESS RELEASE — $5.7 TRILLION COST OF TWELVE WORST CONSUMER MISTAKES IS EXPOSED IN SHOCKING NEW REPORT

Seattle, WA (PRWEB) July 25, 2007 — What are the twelve most disastrous mistakes American consumers make?

One consumer advocate has researched and ranked them. Their total estimated cost amounts to a staggering $5.7 trillion per year. Astonishingly, that averages out to a yearly dollar drain of $19,000 for every man, woman and child.

The shocking facts are exposed in “The 12 Biggest Consumer Goofs,” a new Special Report from the Consumer Freedom Alliance. It ranks the most damaging mistakes being made by American consumers, based on the best available estimates from a variety of consumer organizations and governmental agencies.

“These mistakes account for a little over one half of America’s $11 trillion GNP, making these mistakes a virtual must-know for all Americans” commented CFA president David Snell. “Consumers can tremendously benefit in many areas, from crime prevention to career advancement.”

According to this report, money management mistakes account for approximately one trillion dollars of the total. Disastrous personal decisions including medical and safety mistakes cost consumers $2.2 trillion yearly. Crime is the biggest problem, including fraud and the failure of consumers to protect themselves adequately: Its yearly cost is a whopping $2.5 trillion. “Inevitably this type of study requires some approximations, but the overall conclusions are not in any serious doubt” said Snell.
 

Report details

Anyone can read the list of consumer mistakes at http://www.smartconsumertips.com/12online.htm  The descriptions of these “dirty dozen” mistakes include links to the those help sites judged best by the CFA, along with enlightening quotations from famous historical figures. Readers can visit HeroVote.com to read quotes from five famous historical personalities and vote for the most inspirational quote.

Other writers have suggested lists of the worst mistakes, but this is the first time that such a list has been substantiated by careful and quantitative research. Anyone can visit http://www.smartconsumertips.com/12proof.htm to view the supporting evidence. Press members wishing to learn more about the Consumer Freedom Alliance should visit http://www.smartconsumertips.com/12public.htm, where they may elect to receive notices of newsworthy consumer stories.

The 12 Biggest Consumer Goofs is released to the public domain and can be freely used or excerpted. The CFA encourages reporters, webmasters, bloggers and other members of the media to download free web content based on that report from http://www.smartconsumertips.com/12public.htm. Anyone who is interested in promoting the good of humanity is welcome to use it in any fashion they deem worthwhile.