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18 Nov |
You open the letter from the IRS, and it is the dreaded one. No, not that one, this one reads “You filed more than one tax return or someone has already filed using your information.” Whoa! You thought you did everything right. Chances are you did, well almost. You most likely have joined a not-too-exclusive […] |
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26 Oct |
Pat’s son had been transferred from Hawaii to Chicago for a new position in his company. To get his home sold, he was interviewing Realtors to do the job for him. He had interviewed two. Pat asked my help in deciding which one was the better choice. I had done consulting for Pat before and […] |
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07 Sep |
Cryptography (encryption) is as old as human written communication. Early Greeks used it to keep enemies from reading their battle plans as did the Romans. People have used various devices, which became more and more sophisticated as those who might intercept messages became more and more clever about breaking the cryptography. During the American Revolution, […] |
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05 Aug |
You are careful about tenant selection and employee hiring. Every applicant gets a thorough screening including a credit check, criminal background search and verification of all the information on the application. In fact, you make sure the application is filled out completely when the applicant hands it to you, and if it isn’t, you hand […] |
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05 Jul |
Occupancy rates stood at 95.3 percent in May 2015. Builders started 1.17 million new homes in June 2015 with a high percentage of those in apartment construction. In fact, multifamily construction has risen 28.6 percent and apartments 16.1 percent in June. Add to that that rents increasing some 16 percent over the last five years […] |
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05 Jun |
To hear them tell it, it’s the most secure thing outside of Fort Knox. We don’t have to worry about our credit card information being stolen once we have one of these. That’s the new, reformatted, updated-chip credit cards that are supposed to be in place by October of this year. But are they as […] |
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07 May |
What a deal! The ad on Craigslist says this landlord is renting a house that would normally rent for $2100 a month for just $1500! Where do you sign up? He seems like an honest, forthright guy. After all, he is on a mission in Africa and just wants to rent his house to a […] |
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05 Mar |
Ms. Driver was mad. She drove an ambulance for the “We Really Care Ambulance Service,” (not the real company) and one day her supervisor asked her to write a report about an incident that involved a customer complaint. Ms. Driver (not her real name) asked for a union representative to be present when she wrote […] |
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07 Feb |
Experian, the credit rating company, published averages recently. They report that the average debt per household is $78,030. They also reported that the average Vantage Score, that number between 400 and 850 that shows how creditworthy someone is, is 751. But those tell almost none of the story. What we will look at here are […] |
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07 Dec |
An acquaintance of mine who works for IBM is expert at hacking. He told me about a time he and his wife were in a coffee shop with free WIFI and he bet her he could get into their system in 60 seconds. It took him about 15 seconds. He looked around the room and […] |
