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Not your typical Costco – or is it?

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Costco TaiwanA surefire way for me to break the monthly budget is to go to Costco! Taiwan is now blessed (or cursed) with five branches, including a newly opened one in TaiChung County.

I’ve been a member for a few years now, and an advocate since I discovered their hotdogs a few years earlier! Of course, having a car makes shopping there much easier, and more expensive.

Today, somehow we managed to drop nearly NT$5500 on stuff for the home and the business. Such necessities included 12 bagels, 24 tubes of glue, several books, 2 picture frames (for my old calendar), 2 large bags of Coffee (unavailable at such good prices anywhere else), gluesticks, and a bunch of other nicknacks.

During the course of shopping, I decided to photograph some things you couldn’t find in your typical Costco in Main Street, USA. So here they are! Can you identify them?

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No prizes for guessing correctly what they are! Does your neighborhood Costco stock these products or brands? Apologies for the photography!

What’s in your wallet? Money Meme

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Here’s a picture of my wallet as it is right now… It’s quite a bulky thing, but that’s probably because of all the crap I keep in it! I don’t usually carry it in my pocket! It’s in my bag most of the time.

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So, let’s see what is in it!

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One Taiwan ARC Card; two driving licenses; one car registration; two insurance cards (one already out of date); one bank account number (why?); a 2007 calendar; one NT$1000 bill; a National Health Insurance IC card; an MRT card (called EasyCard!); a CostCo Membership card; a Telephone Card (with IC); a Subway Customer Card (we have one near here!); a MasterCard and some ATM cards, none of which I use particularly often; and a NT$5 coin. That’s it. Oh, and I found an insurance sticker with a phone number that I SHOULD stick on my car window, but always forget to…

It was helpful, I threw out the old calendar, and reminded myself to renew my car registration; I also have to stick the Insurance Sticker on the window, just in case.

OK. So here goes: who’s going to follow me in this meme! Let’s see if Elizabeth at Table for Five will…!

Do mention in the meme: This meme was started by InvestorBlogger.

Credit Card Spending: What’s your first bill in 2008 like?

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Today was the day that my first credit card bill landed on my doorstep with a small thud! Thankfully, for me, the thud was due to the included catalogue, NOT the size of the bill. But with the worsening economy in the US, home to the majority of my readers, the first credit card bills of 2008 couldn’t be coming at a worse time. So, as I peruse my light reading, I can’t help thinking of those for whom things are much worse:

So, how did I do? Let’s see. It seems that in December I spent nearly NT$14,738 on things that I can’t remember (I’ll have to look over the bill from December to see what went on!).

But WORSE, I only paid about $7,179 dollars of the outstanding balance off, meaning that I incurred an interest charge on the remainder – I haven’t done that in months. At 11.5% per annum, that’s about NT$174 (or nearly US$5.00).

The other charges are minimal (all currencies NT$32.5:US$1).

  1. The biggest is my regular insurance/investment product that charges about $2000 to my card every month. I should really blog about that product from Cigna but I can’t make up my mind if it’s a good thing or not.
  2. Then I added a $1000 amount for a regular membership of the local video store, as I was in the middle of watching the DVD series The Apprentice Series 4. Very enjoyable overall, though the final candidates didn’t surprise me at all. We still have a few hundred dollars outstanding so we can rent more movies.
  3. Of course, my mobile phone bill came in at $398 but that was for 2 months, not one. I hardly use it these days at all, even for incoming calls. It helps if I charge it and turn it on!
  4. We also went to Hola in Taipei which is a furnishings store near B&Q, where we were looking at the Roomba. Between these two stores, we bought a new shower curtain, and a few odds and ends: total $1233.

So why didn’t I pay off the bill in full? Well, it was for a stupid reason: I was trying to save a round number to open a new CD. I had planned to open one for NT$100,000 (about US$3,000), but that move cost me more than I’d have earned. I prefered to earn 2.4% per annum instead of paying off a bill that charged 11.5% per annum – how dumb is that: to spend $174 to save an extra $20? Not a smart move.

Have you ever made dumb moves with your credit cards? Let’s hear it here.