Justin Germino Ramblings

I was at a birthday party for a friend of my wife’s in Scottsdale last weekend and the place was pretty posh up in Kierland Commons, one of the negative aspects of the evening was the staff at the place. They were inattentive and just huddled around in groups instead of actively seeking out and taking orders for drinks. Several people were standing around for fifteen or more minutes waiting for a server or host to come by and take a drink order.

Poor, slow service is something that really drives me crazy when I am at a restaurant or bar. When waiters or servers are just standing around watching a party instead of taking order fulfillment, I can’t help but think they are just not being proactive enough about making sure people are getting drinks and being tended to.

It’s about customer service and in this economy and the hospitality industry you just can’t afford to have a lack of good high quality customer service and attentive staff members.

-Justin Germino

Reading in the news lately that births are down across the country due to the economy being poor and people choosing to put off or delay having children until they can face better economic prosperity. This seems like a good decision because according to BabyCenter.com calculator, if you have a newborn baby in 2009 you will pay at least an estimated $355,906 dollars over the next 18 years supporting your new child.

Thats right, if you have two children you are spending almost 2/3 of a million dollars over eighteen years to support those children, families of three or more kids sink over a million dollars over that length of time into child expenses. I have a childless friend who is very money focused and declares kids as “income reducers” and I see why when you add the numbers up. That being said, those who choose to have children clearly have enough love and know that life is not all about money, and in the end of eighteen years, would you rather have a healthy and successful child or a few extra hundred thousand dollars? -Justin Germino

Seems like everyone is trying to find ways to cut their expenses and try to save some money each month to stretch out their paychecks more and more. People are looking for ways to cut cost in any way possible from buying cheaper groceries, cheaper houses, cars and even shopping for cheap insurance.

Before you can find ways to cut costs, you need a bottom line on all of your income vs expenses and the best way to tabulate this is with an excel spreadsheet. Even if you use websites like Mint.com which are great, they take a lot of time to add in account numbers and they don’t factor in non-bill expenses fast enough, instead relying on trends.

1. Take a spreadsheet, document all your incomes for a month
2. Then document all your paper bills (student loans, credit cards, mortgage, utilities, cable, internet…etc)
3. Document your flexible expenses (look at your bank statements and add up how much you spend on food/groceries the last 3 months and average it)
4. Do the same for your gasoline expenses

Now you should have how much you have coming in, and how much you have going out.

If you are fortunate, then you have more money coming in than going out and this means you can put more of it toward paying down debt, or toward savings. If you are not so lucky, then you have to cut expenses.

Ways to do this involve cutting back on television services (cut out premium channels, or if you have boxes in 3 rooms, cut down to 1 or 2 rooms)

Go out to eat less and if you do, make price a factor (eg. no more than $100 per month in eating out or something like that)

Many people say sell things from the garage that you don’t need, and this supplies maybe a small one time influx of funds, this is best used to payoff a small debt or put right into savings or you might be tempted to spend it.

Good luck managing your bills folks, in this economy it is harder than ever for the average person.

-Justin Germino

I am not one who should be giving financial advice as I myself have made many financial mistakes in the past, but one of the things I have learned over the years is to make sure you keep an emergency fund so that should a situation arise where you have to pay for an unforeseen expense, you can cover it without having to shoulder it on a credit card.  I have read the book “Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey and he mentions that before you even attempt to chop your debt down you should save up and have $1,000 in a savings account that is used strictly for emergencies only.  Only after you first establish an emergency fund you start focusing on paying off your debts from smallest to highest.

Recently an unforeseen expense with one of our vehicles which requires fixing had me thankful that I had put that money away for such a purpose, now to grow it back and continue the course to hack away at debt which is a long term goal.

-Justin Germino

We wanted to do a vacation on the East coast this year, and instead of looking at Myrtle beach vacation rentals or staying at a hotel for a few days, we decided to do something extravagant.

I am quite excited that in two weeks our family will be taking our first Disney cruise, it is a three day cruise that leaves out of Florida and tours Nassau and Disney’s private island.  I am sure the trip will go very fast, and I know my children are eager to see what being on a big luxury ship is like after hearing about our previous cruises.  Family vacations are just always something I look forward to because you get to jump outside the normal drone of everyday routine and shake things up with something fun and exciting once and a while.

-Justin Germino

I spent just under an hour playing Punch Out! on the Wii the other night and my biceps and tendons in my inner elbow are pretty sore, plus I was actually sweating from my forehead from the exertion.  See I play my Wii games the way they are meant to be played, standing up and with full motions.  Combined with the Wii balance board and Wiimote and Nunchuck, Punch Out! actually burns quite a few calories as you have to actually shift your body left or right to dodge, as well as throw punches.

I wish it had more motion recognition and allowed you to throw different kinds of punches based on the motion you made with the controllers, instead you have to hold up on the control stick to punch high and down to uppercut, this kind of took some of the realism out of it, but the game is classic, cartoonish and extremely fun.  Plus you work up a little bit of a sweat while playing.  I highly recommend Punch-Out!! for the Wii if you enjoyed the NES version of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, Black and Bruised for the Playstation 2 or any other cartoonish type boxing games.

-Justin Germino

It’s funny that companies can just market entire swaths of email addresses or consumers collected from various surveys and studies, they sell this information to advertisers who are looking for a “target” audience to sell their product to. You can buy blocks of leads for just about any service that can be offered from life insurance leads to health care leads.

Nobody actually knows what listings and distributions their information actually belongs into, your street address, name, and any other public information collected on websites like Pipl, or from any number of surveys you may have completed in your past are used to create these lists in the first place.

The next time you have a phone call or email from someone selling a product or service, stop to think about what listings or leads your name or information and how it arrived there.

-Justin Germino

I was at the Rock Along Productions Meetup Mixer on Saturday night and spent a decent portion of the evening talking with someone who works at a local Toyota dealership. He was telling me that although the Cash for Clunkers program is spurring consumers to trade in old cars and helping car buyers, it is in fact causing most dealers to lose money.

The dealership he works for lost over $60,000 last month alone and many other dealerships are in the same boat. The reason is simple, even with the additional influx of funds there is only enough money to rebate every dealership in the country 5 trade-ins, yet most of the big dealerships are applying for fifteen or twenty rebates a day. This first come first serve rebate processing means that the small dealerships with less staff and less volume are not able to get reimbursed.

To make matters worse is if the dealerships do not get the rebate by the time the older car gets sent to salvage, the dealer has to write off the loss and cannot get the rebate after the car has already been salvaged. I found this information to be quite interested and it changed my point of view on the program in several other ways.

For instance, trading an older less fuel efficient car in for a new fuel efficient car isn’t as beneficial as you think. The money and environmental damage caused by salvaging an old car and disposing of it is far more detrimental to the environment than keeping it and driving a less fuel efficient car around. So though it may save the car buyer gas money, it is actually worse for the environment to dispose of all the older cars.

-Justin Germino

Today is the first day of first grade for my oldest son, and I am amazed at how rapidly the years have gone by. He will be six in October and I am so very much impressed by all he has done and continues to do.

A true fun loving and sensitive boy, who I genuinely like not only as a parent, but would be glad to be his friend had I been a kid myself. He is truly a magnificent kid and I am so proud of him.

I hope he has a wonderful start this year in school and continues to learn and thrive as successfully as he has in Kindergarten.

-Justin Germino