Managing Money in Tough Times

Well, it's the end of the month and the wallet's a little empty. The mortgage payment is coming up again but I'll get a paycheck soon, so things should be ok.

In the past, I've had tougher times - especially right out of college, wow did I have bills. Not fun. I didn't have much I could do at that point, so I used paycheck advance services once in a while to help make ends meet. I only needed them for a few days at a time or maybe a week at the most and then I'd pay it back. It was there when I needed it and it helped me.

All you do is take out a small loan, you post date a check with your loan amount plus interest and then when that day comes, you pay back your loan or you can pay it ahead of time and save some interest. The interest is high, but it's better than some bank NSF charges or getting a bad mark on your credit history.

Or go sell some plasma!
-TC

LCD TV Wall Mounts

So I bought an HDTV last year and I love it. It's a 40 inch Samsung. The contrast ratio is 30,000:1 and the picture is really great. The contrast ratio is really one of the main specs you want to look it. The larger the number here, the better contrast the TV screen can show, so the better the picture. The whites are brighter and the dark colors get darker. Between the lights and the darks you'll also get more variation, so things will just look better - plain and simple.

I was thinking about rearranging my living room so that I could hang my flat screen TV on the wall. I should be able run the wires through the wall pretty easily since it's an interior wall. So to do this, I started looking for LCD TV wall mounts. The cool thing is that there's a standard way of mounting a LCD TV to the wall. You'll want to make sure that your LCD TV is VESA compatible. If it is, then mounting your TV will be easy because VESA LCD TV wall mounts have been designed to be compatible with the Flat Display Mounting Interface (FDMI) Standard. This standard assures compatibility between TV manufacturers of compliant or certified mounting hardware.

Installing the LCD TV to the wall will still be a bit of work - even with the right kind of mount. I've got some friends that have small construction businesses, so I might have them help me since I can handle hanging pictures but that's about it. So I'll shop for the right wall mount and then have them over to help me out. That's the plan. I'll probably post here once I get the TV mounted and tell you how it went.

-TC

First Post / About

Well, I decided that as I research things on the web, I'll post what I learn here as kind of an online archive of useful information. Hopefully people will come across these posts and find information that's useful. I figure that if things are useful for me at one point, then there's a good chance that they're useful for others at some point, too.

So enjoy!
-TC