Sherry Tingley

Debit Cards

October 12, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Debit cards are used by millions of people in this era. A debit card is another method of payment instead of using cash when purchasing something. It is a plastic card that is also called a check card or bank card. Having a debit card is like having a credit card minus the credit line. It is a great way of managing your money because you make sure that the things you purchase do no exceed to the amount you have in your bank. Many people regard a debit card as just another way to pay for a purchase.

Opting for a debit card is very easy. You don’t have to worry about your low credit report because the providers don’t check your record. It means everyone gets approved. Go to your bank and ask for an application. Fill out the application form and deposit funds into your deposit account. There are no extra payments involve in this process. After a week, your card will be delivered to you by mail along with a PIN needed for setting up and activating your debit card. A telephone number is included in the mail and you will have to call that number to answer some questions. After the call, type in the PIN and your debit card is activated.

Owning a debit card is very convenient for eliminate the need to write checks and show any identification. A person can freely use the card almost everywhere in many areas around the world. On the other hand, debit cards help you to control your excessive shopping habit because you can’t spend more than the amount in your account. It takes out a lot of tiresome jobs of paperwork to keep tracking your bills. Most importantly, using a debit card to shop on the Internet is the safest for you because it won’t expose your bank details, thus, preventing theft.

On the contrary, there is a risk involved in having debit cards. When your card gets into the wrong hands, expect that they can drain your bank account. Remember that a PIN code is not needed when using debit cards to transact a business. Avoid this problem by keeping your card in a very safe place always. Keeping and hiding your debit card receipts is very helpful to prevent thieves from gathering information through them. If your card is either lost or stolen, report this immediately to your
banking institution.

Debit cards are offered through Mastercard or Visa and these can be used anywhere. They are readily available in ATM’s, POS (Point of sale) terminals, and online as well as over the phone. Debit card registers can be used to record your spending, just like you would use your check register.

Create a Business Plan

October 12, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

A business plan is a formal statement written when a person or a team in an organization wants to reach a goal and it states what your ambitions are for the company in the future. It is possible to hire a professional to do the business plan or you can write it all yourself. Describe what your business is about right now and what you want it to become in the future. All business owners have visions and ideas about their businesses. Creating a business plan will make those dreams become more concrete.

Some things that are essential to be included in your business plan:

Your business – Your business name, the business address, phone number, email address, and website name with the URL. Don’t forget to write your name as the owner and list other owners if there are any.

Business description – State here how you came up with the idea of creating your business. Describe each section of your business. Write a summary about your business and make it interesting so as to get the attention of prospective investors. You can site reasons why you need the money for your business. Mention your competitors as well. You can list supplies you use for your business and what you do on a daily basis.

Products or services offered – Be specific in writing how your business operates. Explain how you market your products or services.

Personnel – Who are the people working for you and how many employees are there? What are their roles and responsibilities in the company. The same thing applies if you are the only person running your business. State your role and how you run your business.

Your plan – If you want the financial aid of a lender or are planning to apply for a loan from the Small Business Administration, keep in mind that a business plan is required to acquire the financing. Your business plan is crucial for the success of your business.

Financial Data – Write down how much money you want to borrow for your business and how are you going to spend the money. An explanation of the expected profit and loss should be included. Also document how much money you earn monthly and your personal financial statement. Include your expected revenue in your business. Attach some supporting documents that you think will be helpful to the success of your business plan. For the investors, this data is the most important part of the business plan.

A business plan is the map of your journey to success. Coming up with a good business plan is not easily done overnight. It is a task that needs effort and time on your part. Some business owners neglect preparing a business plan until the night before their meeting with the bank. You can guess the results of those actions.

Be creative but make a realistic business plan. If you haven’t written one yet, now is the time to start.

Debit card fraud

October 7, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

If you are like millions of people, you use a debit card to make your purchases in grocery stores, restaurants, fast food restaurant and a host of other establishments including the Internet.

Recently a debit card fraud took place and it was only caught because of careful checking of online transactions. Four purchases were made in a local area for Chinese food and pizza. They looked like normal purchases and perhaps would have gone unnoticed until much more damage was done. However, no one had visited these particular restaurants in months.

So how did this happen?

It took a visit to one of the restaurant to shed some light on the problem. The manager examined his receipts and was able to find all three transactions. This then triggered the manager’s memory of the customer who had telephoned in an order and read the debit card number as well as the expiration date. The thief then came in to pick up the order and all he did was sign the receipt. No one asked him for a card and no one cared that the signature was basically not readable.

Fortunately, because the thief had done this three times, the manager could describe the individual. He also had access to photographs of the person that were on his security camera. So there was no question that this was a fraudulent transaction.

Apparently someone who worked at a fast food restaurant had written down the card number and then used it. It was amazingly uncomplicated.

To protect yourself from this kind of debit card fraud, you need to make sure that when you are out and you hand someone your debit card that you can see what they do with it. It should not go out of your sight because writing those numbers down doesn’t take much effort. It just takes a minute. Make it a habit to either pay cash at the drive through fast food restaurants or make sure that you can see your card at all times.

In this fraud case, the debit card owner was checking their banking activity daily so the purchases were caught early enough not to do significant damage, but the consequences were that the card had to be cancelled and reissued with a different number. That can be a major inconvenience. Then there had to be a report filed with the bank that required disputing the charges and signing paperwork to that effect. The bank handled the rest of the dispute and reimbursed the money to the card owner.

So how common is this?

A bank teller recently said that there were at least two to three people a day that come in to dispute purchases that were not made by them. These purchases mostly involved unexplained Internet purchases and not debit card fraud. Debit card fraud is not as common, but it still happens and that should alarm anyone who uses debit cards on a regular basis. To protect yourself from this happening to you, take care when using your card and don’t let it out of your sight for any reason.

Use a debit wallet register

Tracking your expenses with a debit wallet register will help you quickly identify any unauthorized charges to your bank account. Protect yourself by keeping good records.

Designer Checks of Well Known Artists

October 7, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Designer checks are becoming more popular this year. Some people may wonder what designer checks are? It’s really no mystery. They are just really fun checks with designs on them that make them stand out from the regular and plain checks people are used to.

Check printing companies have the ability to print anything they want for the background image on the checks that people order. So they have just jazzed up the scene and added some stylish, artistic styles of checks.

The background designs that you can enjoy include marbelized designs, tie dye themes, floral images, graphic designs in circles, triangles and any other shapes you can imagine. Gone are the days where your only choices where the safety blue background or the boring green safety backgrounds.

designer-checks-mary-engelbreit — Kathy Davis Designer Check

One special artist that has her designs on checks is Mary Engelbreit. She began her career as an artist at a very early age. When she was 10 years old she had a special place in her home that was deemed, the studio. She loved drawing and eventually began her first successful publications through a greeting card company. She now has her own company called the Mary Engelbreit Studios. Her illustrations are available on personal checks, checkbook covers, debit card covers, address labels and bill organizers. They have a playful, childlike theme and give you that unique designer theme.

Kathy Davis designer checks — Kathy Davis Designer Check

Another artist that has her artwork on designer checks is Kathy Davis. A world renown, respected designer, Kathy has created more than 15,000 designs. Coming from a career in teaching, her new artistic designs have helped her to succeed in these tough economic times. In 2007, she was so successful that she was making $15 million dollars in annual revenue.

Her mission is to “scatter joy.” She is well known for helping people to create their most abundant life. Her illustrations can be found on greeting cards, personal checks, checkbook covers, stamps and a variety of other mediums. She is best know for her work in watercolors and her subjects are floral presentations and nature. The designs she creates are cheerful, using bright colors and a playful brush strokes. She has made a great contribution to the designer checks available now for you to enjoy.

Our last artist to discuss is Thomas Kinkade. His work is well known for the conservative old American themes. He often paints pictures of quaint homes, gardens, churches and has Christian based ideologies throughout his works. He often hides the letter N in his pictures in honor of his wife, Nanette. He sells his mass reproduced work throughout America and has earned as much as $53 million dollars for his artwork. In the line of printed designer checks, you’ll find some of his most famous church paintings with scripture verses on them as well as his garden designs. The designs are also found on address labels and checkbook covers.

With the large variety of designer checks available to the public now, there is no reason to not enjoy using them to brighten up your personal image and give you pleasure each and every time you write a check.

Launching a new website – Days 21-30

September 29, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

checksmall-web-traffic Launching a new website is not as easy as some would have you think. This is the last article in a series of articles that covered the promotional strategies of the first 30 days in the launching of a new website. Time will help any new website get more traffic and this site is so new that it will have to go through some growing pains for the next four months. Patience is needed to develop and get these new sites to a profitable stage.

The last week of the month showed some solid traffic increases. The total visitors for the month was 1018. As a whole, that wasn’t too bad. Next year at this time, it will be interesting to compare the differences.

Using SEO elite, I checked for the number of backlinks and there were 22 backlinks. These backlinks were acquired by writing articles and making comments on other people’s websites.

I checked the main search engines to see how many pages were indexed with each engine. Google has indexed 104 pages. Yahoo has 38 pages. MSN has only one page indexed and I’m not sure how to get more pages indexed by them. I just found a link to submit sites to MSN: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx so now I’ve submitted to that website. Alta Vista reported indexing 38 pages and All The Web has indexed 38 pages.

One strategy that I have added to this site is to add a blog. I think that WordPress blogs are very search engine friendly and I believe that adding content to it on a regular basis will be helpful.

I was able to get some help in making my website comply with the W3C, the web standards organization for all web pages. I have tried in the past to get compliant with that website, but my web skills were not good enough to understand how to change things to get into compliance. A friend of mine from the Philippines told me about a fellow named Taylor S. Ripley. He runs a web development and hosting site at http://www.turkreno.com/. I gave him a call and he was nice enough to walk me through correcting all the mistakes that were on my front page. He also helped me create a more useful sitemap and I have submitted that to the search engines. He was so knowledgeable and helpful. I highly recommend him as a person to help you with your SEO efforts. It was so nice to meet someone that was so helpful.

So to wrap things up for this 30 Day Plan, I’d like to review the most valuable lessons that I learned during this time period.

1. When developing a new site, submit a basic sitemap for at least part of your site to Google webmaster tools so you can start getting some traffic.

2. When your site is completed, submit another sitemap to Google so that they will index all of your pages.

3. Submit your new site to Yahoo, MSN, All The Web and Alta Vista.

4. Begin the process of creating a sense of community by visiting other sites that relate to your topic and participate in their conversations on their blogs.

5. Write articles that relate to your product or website and make sure that they get distributed to a large number of directories.

6. Make sure your site is W3 Compliant.

7. Be patient and keep contributing to your site by making it better and offering people more resources and help.

8. Start trying something, anything. Some of what you do will work, and some things won’t. Doing something is better than just dreaming about it.

9. Realize that it takes time for your new project to become profitable and know that it is possible to get your sites profitable enough to support yourself.

10. Network with other people through http://www.meetup.com to find others in your community that are pursuing the same types of business.

I hope that part of this experience has helped you learn what you can do to get your sites started an on to profitability. Good luck with your projects!