Life Lesson: Look for Quality No Matter the Price

One lesson I've learned during my 5+ years of living simply is that free or cheap sounds great at first -- recycle, reuse, etc. -- but this is not always true. 

There's something to be said for quality. 

When I first began this lifestyle, it was all about keeping a budget and appreciating things that I had ignored in the past.  Smell the roses sort of thing.

I learned some great life lessons from this.  The beauty of the sun rising over my back yard as the birds begin to sing.  DollarTree is a great place to buy onion powder, hair clips, and gift bags.  You can bring coffee into the San Antonio Public Library. 

I also learned from some mistakes.  Buying a cheap bookcase may seem like a great idea - but those cheapo bookshelves can't take the weight, and they'll break after a year or two.  Flip flops are fun and don't cost much: but I loved them into plantar facsiitis, a very painful (very) foot problem. 

Over time, I've learned to balance being frugal and living simply with being wise about what I buy or make or use.  This takes many forms. 

1. I only have so much time given to me by God, so I'm not wasting it on bad writing.  I read quality books or magazines or newspapers - covering a wide gamut of genres, etc. 
2. I have researched and learned a great appreciation for older products, when things were made to last or to be refurbished and reused.  Buying old kitchenware at a garage sale doesn't bring just a great bargain, it also provides you with a better quality mixing bowl/garlic press/ pastry cutter than what you can buy new.  Just pick your sale carefully, and estate sales are better for this sort of thing.
3. Ditto for older furniture.  If it's really funky, then spray it white and call it Shabby Chic.  It's amazing how something sprayed solid white (or I suppose black would work as well) blends into your room.  Take a piece of sandpaper to it, and get that distressed look if you want.
4. Don't use coupons just for the sake of coupons.  Buy quality food for your family.  Too often, coupons offer you a great deal on something that you would never have bought in the first place -- and it's something filled with chemicals.  Ewww.
5. I also look for quality in relationships. Life is short, and living a simple life means being observant and appreciative of those around you.  I like to think of the people I know as all being part of a big zoo:  some are giraffes, some are chimps, some are puppies.  I try and avoid the snakes, of course.  All of us with gifts and talents, flaws and faults.  Living a simple life may mean a small social circle but it's a better quality of living now. 

Protecting Your EMail from Hackers - Free Sometimes Comes With a Price

More and more, I'm communicating online.  You are, too.  Even those holding on with clinched fists to old school ways -- snail mail, faxes, land line phones -- are recognizing the ease of some web tools.  Especially when they are FREE ....

At the top of this list, email.  Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail ... all are free.  In this day and age, you probably need to have a least one email account, right?  Then comes the next question, how to be safe online.

Earlier this month, a nice and easy to follow synopsis of what you can do to protect your email from being hacked was published by WikiHow - it's worth your read.

However, maybe one of the best bits of advice to keep your email safe (and other online accounts, as well) is to use really strong passwords and then change them on a routine basis.  Remember to use letters and numbers, lower case and upper case, and to see how tough your new password is against a hacker, get it checked online. 

For more help, check out the advice given by TheGeekStuff.  For those that understand that many of us need not only strong passwords, but ones that are easy to remember - read what LifeHack suggests.

Got a new password ready to go? There are lots of free password checkers online (and your security software may provide this service, too).  One you'll recognize:  Microsoft's Password Checker. 

Free Tax Software - Which is the Best Free Income Tax Preparation Software (2010)?

There's lots more free tax software out there on the web than I realized, and there's also lots of great sites that have taken the time to compare and review these offerings, giving you, Dear Reader, the skinny on which is the best deal in free tax preparation software for 2010. 

Here's what I found:

Top Ten Reviews - it's reviewing nine different tax filing software packages - but not the freebies are evaluated, these are the packages you pay for ... still, some good info in this review and I'm providing it here anyway.  (Who wins?  TurboTax.)

Tax - Compare - it's reviewing 4 free tax software packages (TurboTax, H&RBlock, TaxACT, and CompleteTax) and opines that TurboTax is best and CompleteTax is ... well, not so good.

Consumer Search - while they don't tell you all the versions compared, they are pretty bold about recommending TaxACT as the best free tax software out there (it came in 2d at Tax-Compare, by the way).  However, when you read their review of tax software overall, they're all over TurboTax as the best tax software out there.  Go figure.

City-Data Is a Great Source of Local Information

Just discovered City-Data.Com, a web site that contains forums organized by your city or town, and within that geographic umbrella, has all sorts of forums where folk ask questions and get answers from their neighbors in the community.

For example, today I was surfing around, investigating where hotels sell the furniture they don't want any longer.  (Yes, I'm still on my search for the Perfect Reading Chair.)  I stumbled upon City-Data's San Antonio forum on "furniture" -- and I learned about a scratch-n-dent for a local furniture store that I may check out this week. 

I also spotted:

Favorite Hole in the Wall Restaurants (San Antonio, Austin, etc.)
Where to Go for Hair Styling
Finding a Holistic Doctor in San Antonio
Low Budget Wedding in San Antonio

There's tons and tons more.  Folk relocating, people looking to chat about stories in the news, people asking for help in dealing with neighbors, all sorts of stuff.   And, it's free.  Check it out!

Freebies - Site to Track Down Free Samples Online: Not for Everyone

You can get lots of free stuff off the web, if you know where to surf.  And, there is a website that does a lot of that work for you, Freeflys.com, as recommended by the CouponMom in her email today.

So, I decided to give it a looksie. Here's what I found.

1.  First, this site makes you join its membership (at no charge), so you may want to read its privacy statement before giving out your info.  The site is upfront that members will be receiving mailings from "Freeflys and its partners" - at least they're letting you know in advance, in bold print, right?

2. I joined.  It asks for my home address, etc., which I was hesitant to give.  Then I realized that they would need my mailing address to send all the free stuff, right?  So I caved.

3. Then I spent a long, long time going through all these windows with "join this survey" stuff.  Window after window.  Where are the freebies?

4. Finally, after saying No, No, No to all this survey stuff, I get to a page that has a list of the types of samples they offer.  They've got the option of an RSS feed for freebies, but it doesn't allow feeds into MyYahoo, Google, etc. (opens to my bookmark menu), so I'm not interested.   

5. Then, I go thru the lists.  What they're doing is linking you to the manufacturers' sites that also want you to do stuff (like join their Facebook site as a fan, etc.) before you get any free sample.  You don't get to just check off which free samples you want.

6.  And, after all this time and effort, not that much is being offered.  Five samples on the Food items list.  I'm not interested in anything here, except for maybe the Green Tea offer.  Except I've got a HUGE box of green tea that I already bought in a great deal (I drink a lot of this stuff), so I'm not swooning over a couple of free bags here.

Bottom line:  I was disappointed.  Maybe you won't be, if you like all this survey stuff and any free sample is fun for you.

Freebie Dangers: ActiveX Controls on Printing Online Coupons

A variety of online sites offer coupons that can be printed and used at your local grocery store (or elsewhere). However, many of these sites require special software downloaded to your hard drive in order to accomplish printing the coupons -- and some of these downloads include placing ActiveX controls on your machine. (If you have security software in place, it will stop this from occuring automatically and ask you to decide whether or not to allow the ActiveX control to proceed.)

What is an ActiveX control? Should you allow this, or should you forego the coupon offers?

1. ActiveX controls only work with Windows - if you have a Mac, just skip the rest of this post.

2. An ActiveX control has full access to your Windows operating system. This comes with a risk that there may be some damage to software you've already installed on your PC, or that it may harm data you've stored on your computer. Your safest route, when offered something with an ActiveX control, is to decline the download. But, what if you're chomping at the bit for those coupons you've discovered online?

3. If you want the coupon printing function, then you need minimize this risk. First, Microsoft has set up a registration system so that some browsers (ie., Internet Explorer, etc.) can identify and authenticate an ActiveX control before downloading it. Make sure your browser is doing this (for example, will the latest version of Firefox or Safari check the Microsoft registration?) Second, check around the web for those that have been using the coupon site without a problem. The really popular, time-tested coupon sites will probably offer a safer avenue to their coupon offerings than some lesser-known websites.

4. One last thing: don't print what you don't think you'll use. Each coupon is going to use up printer ink - and those color coupons can really eat into your printer budget.

Freebie Dangers: Getting Your Yahoo Email Hacked

Yesterday and today, the news is filled with Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo E-Mail account being hacked, and the contents spread over the web. Last night on TV, I heard that even her teenaged daughter's cellphone number was revealed - and that she was getting calls from strangers.

Look, I don't care how you're voting -- there are mentally ill people out there, surfing the web, who don't need to have personal contact information for the minor children of politicians, celebrities, and the like. That's just dangerous and children should be protected no matter how famous their parents are.

Okay, enough of the soapbox.

Freebies are great, but ....

Freebies are great. Simplifying life means taking advantage of freebies whereever you find them.

And one of the great free services that's out there is Yahoo Mail. I use it everyday -- along with Yahoo Calendar, and I'm very happy with the service.

But is it safe? Can my Yahoo E-Mail Be Easily Hacked? Just how private is my Yahoo mail?

Well, I went and found a blog with a detailed explanation of how Sarah Palin's email was hacked (go here for details) and discovered that you're only as safe as the hacker's access to your personal information.

In Palin's case, he (or she) had the opportunity to surf the web for all sorts of personal information (where Sarah Palin went to high school, her residence's zip code, etc.) which he/she then used to start playing around with the secret questions that Yahoo asks when you report to Yahoo that you've forgotten your password.

So, once the hacker had her username -- not sure how he/she got that -- he/she started playing around with the Secret Questions until he got to change the password himself. And then, the hacker took over the mailbox after changing the password to "popcorn" -- reading it, disseminating it.

What Can You Do to Protect Your Freebie Email Account?

Yahoo has some security suggestions -- they seem inadequate here. As of this posting, I did not find any clear, easy-to-follow article or post that provided clear guidance on how to protect your Yahoo E-Mail account from being hacked just like Sarah Palin's.

I did find these suggestions:

1. Use a long, strange password and change it often. Nothing connected to your personal information. Letters and numbers.

2. Use different emails for different things. Have disposal emails. (I do this -- I have an email address for newsletters and the like, not only a separate account but on a separate service. No personal information goes thru here.)

3. Protect your computer with firewalls and a good anti-virus software (me, I use AVG - it's free and it's good).

Two things I would add:

(1) have your own set, bizarre answer to any secret question - your mother's maiden name? Manufacturer or Llama ... name of your first pet? Lawn or Expense. Why? Even if they can get your username, no amount of personal information is going to give them your zany answer to the secret question; and

(2) change your IP address via your ISP periodically -just call and ask, they can do this remotely.

Maybe we'll get some good techie advice soon - and maybe Yahoo will even go public with some more advice on this issue. If I see/hear anything more, I'll post it here in the Comments.