Gather Little by Little

Photo by: javYliz

Many people are wondering why they haven’t received their 2008 economic stimulus tax rebate checks. This is especially true for those that expected to receive their payments based on the schedule the IRS published and haven’t yet received them. To further confuse matters, the IRS also said they were starting 4 days early.

It just so happens that I was one of those that were a bit perplexed. I was perfectly fine waiting until the last day for my SSN range (May 9th). That is until I talked to my mother on Monday and found out she had received hers on Monday morning (5/5). She has the same last 2-digits for her social that I do…so I joined the ranks of millions wondering why I hadn’t received my rebate check yet.

So doing what any blogger would do, I started scouring the internet for for answers and what I found was very interesting…

You can check your status using an online stimulus tracker

I didn’t realize until recently that the IRS has an IRS stimulus tracker and status application that tells you when you can expect your check and even how much you will receive. The trick is that it will only provide a status if your check is due to be deposited or issued within the next week or two. Many people are complaining that the application isn’t aware of their information. This actually occurred for me as well when I first checked my status, but a few days later it told me I was getting back $3000.00 (remember I have 6-kids) and I that I would receive my funds on May 9th.

Did you have a professional do you tax return? If so, you’re getting a paper check

Per the IRS, “If filing or preparation fees were deducted from your 2007 Refund or you received a rapid refund, you will be receiving a check instead of a direct deposit“. It doesn’t matter whether you received your refund as a direct deposit or not, you’ll be receiving a paper check. Refer to the paper check schedule to determine when you’ll be receiving your check.

Do you owe the government money?

If you owe the government money for things like taxes, back student loans, back child support, or anything similar that you reported to the IRS, your stimulus payment will be offset by that amount. In some cases, that may mean you don’t get one. Ouch!

Did you receive a refund anticipation loan or refund anticipation check?

If you choose to receive a refund anticipation loan or refund the tax rebate will be in the form of a paper check mailed to the address used on your tax return. This is because the IRS didn’t credit the money directly to your account but through your tax company. This information is straight from the the H&R block website.

Did you close your bank account?

If for some reason you closed your bank account between now and the time you received your direct deposited refund, the IRS will still try to issue you a direct deposit. This will of course result in the deposit being rejected, which will in turn cause you to receive a paper check.

Did you file your taxes late? It may impact when you receive your payment.

Your economic stimulus payment will be sent out no sooner than 6-weeks after your refund is received and no sooner than 2 weeks after your refund is mailed out. Further more, the payment schedule only applies if your return was received by the IRS and they finished processing it before April 15. If you filed your return on time, but close to the April 15 deadline, the IRS may not have finished processing it before April 15 and therefore your payment may not be received based on the published schedule.

None of these apply?

Well, if none of these reasons apply, than you might fall into the “who knows but the IRS” category and they actually do have something at the very bottom of their payment schedule page that says “A small percentage of tax returns will require additional time to process and to compute a stimulus payment amount. For these returns, stimulus payments may not be issued in accordance with the schedule above, even if the tax return was processed by April 15.“

Photo by: warrenski

Next to the current democratic race, the biggest topic of discussion on the news, in the office, and on the internet is the recession. Are we in one? Well, that is all part of the discussion. Some people, like the media, would have you believe we’re already in one, while others like myself, think the indications are we’re heading in that direction, but certainly not there yet.

Regardless of whether you believe we’re in one yet or not, the real question most people are trying to figure out is, what do I need to know to survive a recession?

Make yourself an asset in your current job

In a down economy, one of the most visible impacts is people losing jobs and the rise of the unemployment rate. One of the key things you can do to avoid being on of the statistics is to stabilize your current job situation the best you can. Be on the lookout for opportunities where you can make yourself more valuable to your manager and your company. This can include things like taking on new responsibilities, learning new skills that are needed, taking on some of your managers responsibilities, being the first to volunteer for tasks, and doing everything you normally do but with a little extra effort.

Arrive a little earlier, and leave a little later. I personally don’t care when my employees work, as long as they are getting their job done. Nor do I care how many hours they work, but my views are very different than standard management. In corporate America, the umber of hours you work is often equal to perceived value and contribution. Coming in a little earlier and leaving a little later just may make a difference.

I’m not generally one to advocate single points of failure, but in a down economy where your job may be on the line, it’s critical that you find niches in your job environment where you are needed. Look for opportunities where you can learn something about the job or its infrastructure that only you and maybe a few other people may know. Do everything you can to know it stone cold.

I’d also suggest you constantly look at your peers and honestly ask yourself, “Am I in the top 10%?“. If you can’t answer with a resounding yes, than you need to figure out how to get there. Analyze your peers. What are they doing? How are they doing it? Talk to your manager and get some feedback on what you can do to perform better. Tell your manager you want to take it up a notch, and ask them how you can do that…and do it. I’m an IT manager, and if one of my employees asked me “What do I need to do to take it up a notch”, I die of shock right then and there.

Most importantly, make yourself look busy. I am amazed at the number of employee’s I walk by casually surfing the internet. Not just once a day, but multiple times during the day…and not surfing sites related to work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the occasional mental break, but not 10 or more times a day. In a economy where jobs may become a little harder to keep and come by, you don’t want managers or co-workers even thinking twice about how busy you are. The potential risk, just isn’t worth it. So stay on task, keep focused, and if you need a break, take a walk instead. Not busy enough? Talk to your manager and tell them or better yet, find some work that needs to be done and do it.

Build a healthy emergency fund

I’ve written about the benefits and importance of having an emergency fund before. An emergency fund is a critical block in the foundation of financial success in good times, but even more so in bad or tough times. In times of recession where things cost more, people have less money, and may be struggling to make ends meet a healthy emergency fund can make a huge difference.

A healthy emergency fund can make that job loss less stressful by giving you some cash to pay the bills, keep the lights on, fend of the creditors, and frankly put food on the table. Too many people find themselves without a job and only a couple of weeks worth of saving. Not a good situation to be in.

Consider slowing down on your debt snowball, or backing off on the 401k investing a little and buffer up that emergency fund. Even better, cut your expenses and put the savings in your emergency fund. I realize I’m going against my own previous advice by recommending you slow down on the debt snowball, but I would far prefer that you take an extra year to payoff your debt than to be in a scenario where you can provide for your life basics due to a job loss.

Pay off your credit cards

Like building an emergency fund, paying off your credit card debt is good advice in or out of a recession. The great thing about paying off your credit cards now in preparation for a pending recession is that you won’t have to worry about being in a situation of not being able to pay them or struggling to pay them later. In a recession, you’ll have a hard enough time stretching your finances without the additional weight of debt pulling you down. Go ahead and pay it off now while you can so you don’t have to worry about it later.

Stop spending and frugal up

Prior to a pending recession or even during one is a really great time to change your spending habits. Begin learning to do without. Cut back on all of the extras that you’re used to, Starbucks every morning, lunch out everyday, and nights out of the town. Make your own coffee, pack your lunch, and cook at home. Implement a 24 hour rule on your spending and don’t buy things until you’ve had 24 hours to think it over. Before grocery shopping, make a list and only buy what’s on the list.

These are just a few of the many things you can do to “frugal up” your lifestyle and not only put some extra money in your pocket but get into the right mindset to survive any potential recession. After all, you don’t really need all of that stuff anyway.

Pursue alternative streams of income

Most advice for surviving recessions focuses on reducing expenses. While this is certainly a great idea, I also advocate looking for opportunities where you can increase your income. In addition to your main job, pursue alternative streams of income. Specifically, look for income opportunities that might excel during a recession. Maybe start a blog about the recession or how to keep your current job.

Look for opportunities in careers that are far less effected by the recession. People will continue to eat, need medical attention, require clothes, etc. Maybe start shopping yard sales and re-selling clothing on eBay.

Be creative and look for opportunities. Remember, a recession doesn’t mean people won’t spend money, it just means they will pay far more attention to detail when making a spending decision. Use this kind of information to your advantage.

Don’t Panic

Finally, don’t panic. First off, we’re technically not in a recession yet, regardless of what the media is saying. Second, a recession is a normal part of the financial cycle. What goes up must come down right? Remember, this isn’t the first recession, nor will it be the last. Who knows, you just may end up making your current financial situation far better as the result of preparing for a recession. Change isn’t always bad!

More tips on surviving a recession:

• Frugal tips to survive a recession
• 5 Strategies to Survive An Economic Slowdown
• Survive A Recession , Think Long Term
• 5 Ways I Plan To Survive The Recession
• Top Career Choices in a Recession: But is This How We Should Be Selecting Jobs?
• Preparing For and Surviving an Economic Downturn

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MyPoints is a great program, but let’s face it going through their emails can get a bit tedious and time consuming. I tend to work through my MyPoints emails every couple of days. I used to do them daily, but it just wasn’t worth the hassle for a few emails. I then went to the opposite extreme and tried doing them each week and even tried every two weeks but found that some of bonus emails and surveys expire if not processed quickly. Expired emails = lost points = not good.

Over the past 6-months of using MyPoints, I’ve really worked hard to simplify the process of working through my MyPoints emails. So let me share with you how you can spend literally less than just a few minutes a day working your MyPoints emails. Yeah, yeah, I know…this all sounds like one of those late night infomercial commercials…but bear with me, I promise it’s not. Keep reading and I’ll even throw in a handy dandy email slicer absolutely free! (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Overview

Rather than jump in to the details, I’ll summarize the process first, then dive in and give you all the necessary detail. It’s actually very simple, just requires a little bit of explaining.

When I have a few minutes to work my MyPoints emails, I log into my Gmail account and navigate to the list of all the MyPoints emails I haven’t processed yet. I open up the first email, scroll down to the orange button that says Get Points and click. I then press the J key in GMail to go to the next unread email, scroll down again to the orange button that says Get Points and click, press J, and continue this process until all of the MyPoints emails have been processed.

If it’s a survey, I go ahead and open it, but don’t complete it yet. I finish processing all of the emails first, then go back later and do any surveys if I have time. If I skip surveys, I can do all of the 10 or so MyPoints emails in about a minute. That’s it. Told you it was simple. Yes, I hear you, “Wait, Wait, Wait. What is all of this about going directly to the MyPoints emails, pressing the what key?? Every time I click on the orange Get Points button it navigates me straight to the site.“.

With the overview out of the way, let’s jump into the details, get your questions answered, and show you how to set-up this whole process.

Use Gmail’s filtering capabilities

I’m an avid Gmail user and have been since shortly after it was released. Gmail is interesting, as on the surface it seems very simple, but Gmail literally full of powerful little features and capabilities. One of the features I really like is filtering. Filtering allows you to place one or more filters on incoming mail and have Gmail automatically do something with it. The something can be deleting it, archive it (skips your inbox), starring it, labeling it or whatever else.

I didn’t like the MyPoints emails cluttering up my inbox, so I set-up a filter to look for all emails coming from MyPoints. The filter both labels the email with a MyPoints label and archives it so I don’t see it in my main inbox.

When I’m ready to work my MyPoints emails, I open up Gmail and select the MyPoints label. Labels can be found in the left hand sidebar under the Labels section. This will cause Gmail to show all emails with the MyPoints label only.

Turn on Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts

Another “hidden” feature that Gmail provides is keyboard shortcuts. These are key presses you can enable that do various Gmail functions. To enable keyboard shortcuts, click on Settings up in the top right corner, choose “Keyboard Shortcuts On”, then scroll to the bottom and press Save Changes. Now navigate back to your inbox by clicking on Inbox in the left hand sidebar. You should now see a dark black greater than sign (>) next to the first item in your inbox. That little greater than sign is the key indicator that keyboard shortcuts are now turned on.

To see all of the various keyboard shortcuts, press the ? key. A transparent gray window will pop-up showing you a list of all the various keyboard short cuts available. Note, delete is missing. I’m not sure why, but it’s Shift-3 (or #).

Click on your first email using your mouse, or just press enter. The email that had the > symbol next to it is now shown. Neat huh? You can now press the J key to move to the next unread email or press the K key to go back one email. Using the J and K keys, you can quickly navigate through your email without ever removing your hands from the keyboard. If you use Google reader, the J and K keys should be all too familiar.

The use of the J key is the main technique in moving from one MyPoints email to the next quickly. I use the page down key to scroll down until I can see the orange Get Points button and then use the mouse to click. To process a MyPoints email, hit J to move to the next email, press page down once or twice, then click Get Points. Easy huh?

Now I’ll show you how to keep the MyPoints offer from displaying right away and hiding your email

Use Firefox

Another internet tool I couldn’t live without is the Firefox browser. Firefox is a free open source browser that is far more powerful and faster than Internet Explorer. Firefox is completely extensible, and literally thousands of various plugins are available for it that will make it do pretty much anything you could ever want.

Firefox is also highly customizable, which leads me to how I keep the MyPoints advertiser page from displaying on top of your Gmail when you click on the orange Get Points button. What we’re going to do is force firefox to open links in a new tab, but in the background instead of the default foreground. Here’s how:

1. Go up to the URL bar (also called the address bar) and type: about:config then press enter
2. In the filter field displayed type: browser.tabs.loadD. Firefox should now only show you one setting called browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground
3. Double click on browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground so that it’s value changes to true instead of false.

That’s it, you can now close that tab and continue browsing. Now whenever you click on a link, a new tab will be opened in the background containing the contents of that link. In other words, now when you press the orange Get Points button, it will open in another tab in the background and you’ll still see the email in the foreground you just clicked on.

In Review

At this point, I’ll assume your using Gmail and you’ve loaded Firefox. You’ve also set-up Gmail filtering, so the last few days worth of MyPoints emails are all organized up under a MyPoints label and in one location.

Again, click on the first email and begin the process of scrolling down to the orange Get Points button and click, press J, scroll, click Get Points, J, press scroll, click button, press J…etc.

Continue this process until all of the MyPoints emails have been worked. Again, if it’s a survey, go ahead and click to open the survey, but don’t do the survey yet.

Now, looking at your Firefox browser, you should have your Gmail in the foreground and few (or many) tabs which contain all of the MyPoints promotional websites and surveys. You have two options 1) Don’t look at them at all and just close them all or 2) Navigate to each tab, take a look at what they have to offer and then close the tab or do whatever else.

If I’m in a big hurry, I do option 1. Generally though, in order to promote what MyPoints is really for, I navigate to each tab and take a look at the offering. For option 1, just select the tab that you want to keep open (most likely your Gmail tab), right click on the tab with the mouse, and choose “Close Other Tabs”. This will close all of the tabs except the one you selected.

If you go with option 2, than as you review the site, just click the X on the tab to close it. You can also press Ctrl-W on the keyboard.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it. The exact way I work through my MyPoints emails quickly and easily. Don’t want to switch email accounts, but interested in using Gmail? No problem. Another really slick feature that Gmail has is the ability to act as an email client for other email accounts. You can find instructions on how to consolidate your emails to Gmail on Lifehacker.

Not sure about Firefox? Give it a try, you’ll love it. You can even make it look just like Internet Explorer 7 by installing the Vista-aero theme. Don’t like the way Firefox does something? Just do a quick Google serach, I can almost guarantee you that you will find a setting to make it do exactly what you want.

Don’t do MyPoints? Well, that’s easy too. Just sign-up! I’ve written about how much I like it before. We’ve received more than $100.00 in Target giftcards using MyPoints and eaten out at Olive Garden a few times. All for just reading a few emails.

Have any tips or tricks for reading through your MyPoints emails? Already use a similar process to mine, but maybe do something a bit different? Add a comment! If for any reason you are confused or can’t get it to work as I’ve described, please add a comment and I’ll help you out!