Here in BC, for our public transit system it is broken down into three zones of travel and a person has an option of buying a bus pass that enables them to travel through various zones. As you may have guessed, buying the pass that allows you to travel through all zones is more expensive.

Not too long ago there was this program called “Scrap It” that was introduced as a way to get rid of older car models off the road that are not as environmentally friendly. As an incentive, people can get an incentive worth up to a little over $2000.

Apparently there are a lot of people that don’t opt for the credit towards purchasing a new car but instead opt to get bus passes that are mailed to them every month. Interestingly enough, many of these people don’t even use transit and so instead they look to sell off their passes to others and there is no rules about it.

For example, a three zone pass is about $136 a month normally and there seems to be a never ending amount of people willing to part off with them for about $100 or less. Not a bad way to save money if you are a regular user of public transit.

Haven’t tried this myself personally, but the main thing to look out for from what I read are people that ask for a lump some and then mentioning that they will simply put your name as the address to deliver the passes to every month as from what I read the person can easily just take your name off the list afterwards.

If you find an honest seller though, it looks like it can be a good and perfectly legitimate way to benefit both parties.

I was looking at an advertisement recently that indicated how students enrolled in a qualified educational institute or teachers can qualify to get hundreds of dollars off a certain product. Upon reading the requirements further, it also indicated that even parents can buy it for themselves too as long as they have children that meet the criteria.

I personally see this mostly on software products and a lot of times on special services such as a cell phone plan. The qualifications just seem so broad that it’s almost like they should simply make it a regular price for every non commercial customer.

People always ask say retail employees that they personally know if they can get a discount through them, but interestingly enough a lot of people don’t ask for student and teacher discounts which can just as easily be obtained. Of course, the only catch is that some products, mostly software, are intended for the use of the student only which should be clearly indicated.

But for things like buying hardware or through student membership discounts many times the businesses encourage people to buy things for others with their benefits.

I guess US elections are a lot more controversial than Canadian elections in terms of generated drama. Today I was using Twitter and upon logging in I saw this link on the top header of the page:

Recently the site decided to display topics that are hot surrounding the US elections campaign and as you can see there was this keyword of “VoteForTheMILF” on it which was very weird. Evidently, there is this domain VoteForTheMILF.com that redirected to the site johnmccain.com and so some people are trying to associate that John McCain owns it.

People must love drama and speculation to even think that would be the case I thought. This is one of those things I thought where with a little bit of technical knowledge you can pretty much determine its legitimacy.

In general, by looking at the Internet registries the domain voteforthemilf.com was registered anonymously and it simply redirects you to a site of the owner’s choice. People usually call this a “Domain Forwarding” feature. An often dead giveaway is to look at the domain server info as you can see here:

For myself, I know that people who register their domains with Godaddy who have a “domaincontrol.com” in that detail often indicates that the domain simply redirects to another. Take the actual johnmccain.com site on the other hand as seen here:

As you can see, the domain server is a bit more unique as there is an actual site and is using an actual web host for it. As of writing this, I notice that the voteforthemilf site now redirects to Google. People can start speculating that Google owns the domain now huh?

I’ve seen this done any times even from a general business point of view where people use this as a way to garner/inflict unwanted attention. So, hopefully this will help educate people a little bit before going on labeling spree. Now I’m just waiting for something like this to happen in the Canadian elections.

In the midst of reading all this news about that bailout plan in the US one thing that was raised was how a lot of people disagreed that banks should be given money and that these businesses need to fail for the economy to then build itself back.

The more I thought about it the more it was true in many ways I thought. Even for myself, most people that I know who are good with money went through something that hit them hard financially which made them better and smarter when it comes to managing money. In a sense, they weren’t saved by anyone else and had to build everything from ground up. Basically, no borrowing money, credit lines, etc.

What helped me a lot personally at a younger age was video games strangely enough as in most games I played you had to in some way manage money/funds and you tend to screw up enough to learn a lesson afterwards. So if there are parents that say games are bad for kids, well here is a great way to teach kids about money considering schools don’t really teach kids about money when you think about it.

As an adult I find that it is more about the people you associate with on a regular basis as oppose to necessarily having to fail so many times to learn. Cause in general, most successful people financially have failed in some way except what makes them different is that they found a way to get back up. So with that, you can learn so much from others in terms of what they went through to make you appreciate what you have and ways to make sure you don’t repeat what happened to them.

I was reading this article about different people’s views in life when it comes to money and business in general. One thing that was kind of interesting was the mentality on how you should try to accomplish everything before you get married and essentially starting a family.

What I personally noticed from my own experience in regards to this is that most everyday people say that you should get married first and then build your fortune together as it only makes sense to do so with the person you are attaching yourself with to go through all the success and hardships together. Whereas most business oriented people I found have a more systematic approach to it.

It was kind of interesting when I read that as just a few days ago I saw this report on how apparently the average age that people choose to have kids has gone up over the years with the main reason being that they want to make sure finances are taken care of ahead of time.

In my opinion, I think this comes down to belief mostly where you either see marriage as like a fairy tale type of lifestyle or a partnership of some sort. In this case, I think it makes more sense to try and establish your business first for the sake of balance and stability as by then you should be able to better leverage your time to focus on your next phase in life so to speak. Of course, either way has worked wonders for many.