Note: The following should not be construed as legal and/or accounting advice. If you are in an accident and need to calculate a loss, please contact an attorney and/or an accountant for legal/accounting advice. Remember - I do this everyday, but I still have a lot of people checking my stuff before it goes out. So, another thing the firm I work for does is help to calculate losses when people have been in auto accidents. I've been involved in a few cases now, so I'm beginning to get a...

So I started my debt reduction program. Since it's tax refund time, that went immediately to paying off the midwife for my new baby's birth, and an older debt, a matress I had bought on credit that was supposed to have been paid off with last year's tax refund. I haven't actually paid the midwife, though. The other debt was an under $20 medical bill that we just never got around to paying off. But now it is! 2 down, many more to go. I also got my first ever bonus check from work. I...

First of all, I'd like to say that the anti-social behavior this article is talking about has nothing to do with violence. Violence and video games is a completely different argument. Video games allow a person to feel as if they have accomplished something without doing anything. So you beat every Final Fantasy. Nobody really cares, except other people that have played Final Fantasy, and even they don't care that much. A huge problem is that a lot of women are not gamers. Some are,...

I suggest that the only reason people even notice that computers mess up is that they tell you. For years, people have been making mistakes- mistakes with products, mistakes with their lives, mistakes on the cash register - heck, I bet you could even find an accounting mistake somewhere. I think that if no-one had invented the error message, no-one would even notice that computer programs are buggy. They're certainly not more poorly made than anything else. Product defects have been arou...

I was fortunate enough to be able to live like a rich guy this weekend. I took a trip down to New York City and saw a Broadway play, The Producers, at St. James Theater, and stayed at the Omni Berkshire. Now, not actually being a rich guy, I hardly knew what to make of the whole thing. The hotel has so many service people, it costs almost as much to tip them as it does to stay in the hotel. Valet parking, bell service, a concierge... I normally stay at Days Inn, you know? The problem w...

So, last time we discussed how awful debt is. So today we will discuss how to get out of it. First, you have to be current with all your bills. Pay your rent, tithe, electric, heat, credit cards, student loans, home mortgage, everything up to the minimum you have to pay. Until you do that, you shouldn't be worried about paying stuff off. If you don't have the money to get current, sell something. If you are renting to own something, and are not even close to owning it, take it back to...

WizKids is a board game publishing company. Recently, they have decided to switch from using many distributors, to two - Alliance and Diamond. These two distributors are owned by the same person. They are also the two distributors who give discounts to retailers based on volume. Most distributors give discounts to retailers based on the discount given to them by the publisher. Alliance is also the distributor that passed on WizKids games when they were starting - WizKids is now abandonin...

I feel the bondage of debt, and I don't even have that much. I have student loans, and a very small amount of credit card debt. You hear all the time about people with tens of thousands in credit card debt, car payments up the wazoo, just barely squeaking by in their heavily mortgaged house with every modern convenience known to man. The problem with all that is not the consumerism, as we're often told. Stuff is not a problem in and of itself. However, the people with the most stuff se...

When buying insurance, you might be tempted, or even advised, to purchase insurance with an ordinary payroll exclusion in order to lower your premiums. I urge you not to unless you have thought it through completely. Yeah, saving money is great, but only if you don't plan on paying any hourly employees during a loss. The ordinary payroll exclusion means that anything you pay to non-management employees will not be reimbursed by the insurance company. How does this affect the loss calcul...

In the field of claims accounting, there is a type of claim that is a pain in the butt - the extra expense claim. Extra expense coverage is usually provided as an add-on to a business interruption policy. Basically, any steps you take following the loss to reduce the time out of commission will be reimbursed by the insurance company. Insurance companies want to pay the least amount they can, so they will pretty much pay for you to get back up and running quickly to avoid paying for your op...

Europa 1400: The Guild. This game is pretty close to perfect for me. I love the idea of owning my own business, making stuff and selling it, and that's what Europa is all about. But that's not what it's ALL about, that's just one thing it could be about. You start as a 'Citizen' in a city (more of a village at the time, though) and must slowly build yourself up in wealth and political power. Part of this is the fact that you are going to die, and you have to have a child in order to ...

So my wife is gone for the weekend to visit her father. That's nice for her, but it leaves me without anyone to cook for me and clean up after me. Like she would anyway, but the point is, now I don't even have her to tell me it's TIME to cook. The good thing about cooking without her around is that I can make whatever I want. The bad thing about it is I'm clueless how to go about making whatever I want. So, I go to the cupboard, and I take out stuff. Yesterday I made chicken parmag...

http://www.alphamom.com/site/wonderland/2006/11/because_mother_nature_made_bot.html I've never tried to link anything before, but this article had me cracking up. "Another important issue surrounding public breastfeeding is safety. A local parks director finally made this clear, after a woman at a community pool wanted to stay and breastfeed her baby while her five year old was swimming. “When you see something like that, it draws people's attention from the pool. You kind of take a d...

http://www.alphamom.com/site/wonderland/2006/11/because_mother_nature_made_bot.html I've never tried to link anything before, but this article had me cracking up. "Another important issue surrounding public breastfeeding is safety. A local parks director finally made this clear, after a woman at a community pool wanted to stay and breastfeed her baby while her five year old was swimming. “When you see something like that, it draws people's attention from the pool. You kind of take a d...

How do you look at a business interruption claim when there is no historical data to project what would have happened had they stayed open? This can either be extremely simple, or very hard. If the interruption was for a short period of time, the daily records from pre-loss can be used to project what would have happened. However, when such a small amount of data is available, some post-loss data must be utilized to project backwards. This is easier to understand when the interruption i...