I do not usually reprint what has been sent to me via press release, but when I saw the word “share” in this release from Andrea Woroch, I was suddenly reminded of the book Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  What fragile memories we have, author  Robert Fulghum intimated, that we only [...]

You think, “I cannot do this anymore. It is crazy. There is no hope for this economy. I cannot hold on any longer. I am sinking. I need to foreclose now. I will do it.”
But wait! At the back of your mind, you are thinking – is there another option? Options? You are thinking – I think I may have heard of something.

There is one: through a short sale. But again, it is not that simple.

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It was one of the hardest decisions you had to make.
In your mind, okay, I will let go of the house. I cannot pay it anymore. It makes no sense to pay for a steep mortgage when the value of the house has gone down by half. No sense. Everybody is doing it anyway. I should be fine.

You do it, sign the papers, let the bank foreclose and rest on your laurels.

Then while sitting on the living room of your new rented apartment, you get a bill, a huge tax bill because – guess what – you have made money on the foreclosure of your home. Money? But where is it?

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If there is anything that I have learned during all my years of existence, it is that you do not get answers if you do not ask any questions.
So I ask my questions, no matter how silly or how dumb it sounds. Doubt is also an element that I constantly entertain in my mind, so I confirm and re-confirm until the thing has no choice but to sound true.

So on the day that I got my credit card statement and alarm bells were sounding in my head, I picked up the phone and called Citibank direct.

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I need only to look at my spam folder and my 139 spam emails to realize that these scams are not few and far between, and that the scammers have been getting bolder and that a lot of thought and resources are being put into this. My financial planner emailed one scammer, saying, “it is more fulfilling to do good and honest work rather than scam people out of their money”. To his surprise, the spammer had the temerity to respond: “What if you finally get this fund, what should I do to you? Do you want your payment or not?”

I will confess to one guilty pleasure. But first, the background. I have been using a Treo 650 cellphone for as long as I can remember – okay, I used it for 4 long years.  Our story started when I saw it in the hands of my brother and fell in love with it.  I [...]

Let’s begin at the beginning. When I saw this ad one fine day, which took up more than half the size of a newspaper, and no fine print, my savings!savings! antennae went up and I began, consciously, to put more heart (and thought) into my purchases. I had a target, and that is to use my Citibank card for purchases Php1,500 and above. There were times when I would try to sweet talk the salesladies into cutting up my purchases (I remembered seeing in the ad, “a minimum of Php1,500 single receipt”, so I thought there had to be something there) so I would get different transaction receipts for every Php1,500.

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9:50 p.m. We were going up the escalator of a popular mall when C suddenly felt her Crocs being pulled by the escalator grills. She tried to pull it but it would not budge. Looking up, she saw that she was nearing the top, the end of the escalator. She had the sense to pull out her feet and hop to safety. Horrified, she saw her Crocs go deeper into the grills, which kept going and going and going.