March 29, 2024

Bucks Blog: Spam Texts Vex Me and Make Me Feel Old

Federal Trade Commission officials at a recent news conference about spam texts.John Gress for The New York Times Federal Trade Commission officials at a recent news conference about spam texts.

I haven’t lived in Atlanta for several years. But my cellphone, which still has an Atlanta phone number, apparently maintains a very active social life there. Every weekend it gets invitations to wild parties throughout the city, including a hip place called “The Mansion Elan.”

Here’s last Friday’s promo: “#1 Party in ATL #MansionElan TONIGHT!! [18+] EVERYBODY FREE ALL NIGHT!! FREE DRINKS TIL 12 Are you coming?”

Shortly afterward, another party center, Obsessions, chimed in, apparently from the same number. “College Ids free all night Long last week was crazy Are u coming?”

These were followed by an invitation to “Metro Lanes,” apparently a bowling alley and roller skating place that sounds downright retro. “U Comin,” was the only exhortation.

No, I’m not. And you probably don’t really want me to, anyway.

A video on the Mansion Elan’s Web site mostly shows attractive, young people dancing and drinking with abandon. I’m a mostly unhip working parent who writes about personal finance from the hinterlands. Even if I still lived in Atlanta, I would be fast asleep by the time things got rolling at these places. So not only are the texts annoying, they make me feel old and boring. They ding my phone, making me think I have an important message — from my husband, a friend or, more likely, my child’s dentist. But, no. It’s only another invitation.

The Federal Trade Commission is supposedly cracking down on text spammers. The commission recently filed suit in eight courts to stop mass texts about fraudulent gift cards. The Mansion Elan is an actual location. It is not trying to trick me into anything, except a night out followed by a hangover. But that does not make it any less annoying.

When I tried calling the number on the text message, it said the voice mail account on the number had not been set up. (Go figure.) So I searched online and found the Mansion Elan’s Web site, which included a phone number. I called and a voice menu directed me to leave a message for the general manager. So I did, requesting that the Mansion Elan stop texting me. (I didn’t say I was a reporter.) So far I have not heard back.

A year or so ago, when I first started getting these texts, I put a block on the number through Verizon, my cellular carrier. That worked — for a while. But the block expired after six months. If I want the option to block specific numbers permanently, I have to pay an extra $4.99 a month, according to Verizon’s Web site.

I think my cellphone bill is high enough already, so I went online again to put another temporary block on the number. Of course I had forgotten my user ID and password, and the system would not accept the answer to my “secret question,” even though I’m pretty sure the name of my first elementary school has not changed. So I had to take another 10 minutes or so to reset my credentials and log on.

By the time I was finished, I was thoroughly annoyed with both Verizon and the Mansion Elan. But at least I’m free of the regular reminders about my dull nightlife — for the next six months, at least.

Have you received spam texts? How did you handle them?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/spam-texts-vex-me-and-make-me-feel-old/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Your Money: She’ll Tell You, It’s Time to Think Ahead

In the days after Chanel Reynolds’s husband was hit while riding his bicycle near Lake Washington here and the best-case possibilities just kept getting worse, she was not yet consumed by grief. There were no dogged middle-of-the-night Web searches for faraway cures for his crushed upper spine or tearful bedside vigils with their 5-year-old son.

Instead, the buzz in her brain came from a growing list of financial tasks that grown-ups are supposed to have finished by the time they approach middle age. And she and her husband, José Hernando, had not finished them.

“I was finding it really hard for me to stay present and in the room and to be able to hear what the doctors were saying because I was so overwhelmed with not knowing how much money we had in our checking account, and the fact that we had our wills drafted but not signed,” she said. “I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to float a family by myself.”

In the many months of suffering after Mr. Hernando’s death in July 2009, she beat herself up while spending dozens of hours excavating their financial life and slowly reassembling it. But then, she resolved to keep anyone she knew from ever again being in the same situation.

The result is a Web site named for the scolding, profane exhortation that her inner voice shouted during those dark days in the intensive care unit. She might have called it Getyouracttogether.org, but she changed just one word.

The site offers some basic financial advice, gives away free templates for a master checklist and provides starter forms to draft a will, living will and power of attorney. There’s also a guide to starting a list of all of the accounts in your life that someone might need to access and shut down in your absence.

All of these forms and lists are already out there on the Web in various places, though rarely in one place. But there are two things that make Ms. Reynolds’s effort decidedly different.

First, the world of personal finance suffers from an odd sort of organizational failure. We tend to organize our thinking around products: retirement accounts, mortgages, long-term care insurance.

But in the real world, it’s a big life event that often governs our hunt for solutions. Sometimes, it’s a happy one, like getting married. But there are few ready-made tool kits like the one Ms. Reynolds has assembled for people considering the possibility of serious illness or death.

The other thing that compelled me to sprint here right after I stumbled across her site Tuesday night was that it is not neutered, stripped of the mess of feelings that govern much of what we do with our money. Sometimes, we just need to meet the person in personal finance. Maybe, just maybe, hearing the story of someone who has been there, in the worst possible way, can finally push us all into action.

And we desperately need to act. According to a survey that the legal services site Rocket Lawyer conducted in 2011, 57 percent of adults in the United States do not have a will. Of those 45 to 64 years of age, a shocking 44 percent still have not gotten it down.

People who get a fatal diagnosis from a doctor at least have a bit of time to sort things out. But Ms. Reynolds and her husband had made only a few plans.

Mr. Hernando was 43 years old on the day in July 2009 when a van mowed him down while making a left turn into the path of his bicycle. He was a self-taught engineer who played guitar in a band called Moonshine back when Seattle was the world capital of rock. At the time of his death, he rode for a cycling team and was a Flash developer working at the highly regarded firm Frog Design.

Given all that vitality, death was the farthest thing from Ms. Reynolds’s mind when she kissed him goodbye after failing to persuade him to take their son along for the ride. Which was why she was confused when she checked her phone from a party two hours later and found 14 missed calls, none of which were from numbers she recognized.

After his death, this much was clear: The family with the six-figure income and the four-bedroom house that they had bought in the Mount Baker neighborhood one year before had a will with no signature, little emergency savings and an unknown number of accounts with passwords that had been in Mr. Hernando’s head.

What saved Ms. Reynolds, now 42, from ruin was life insurance. They didn’t have a lot, but they had just enough (a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the end) to keep her from having to go right back to work as a freelance project manager and sell the house at a big loss right away. It helped pay for the education of their son, Gabriel, who is now 9, and for Mr. Hernando’s daughter from a previous relationship, Lyric, who is 16 and still close to Ms. Reynolds and her brother. Ms. Reynolds now carries a $1,000,000 term policy on her own life.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/your-money/estate-planning/shell-tell-you-its-time-to-think-ahead.html?partner=rss&emc=rss