T-Mobile HotSpot@Home Talk Forever Home to Launch Next Week

T-Mobile’s new HotSpot@Home Talk Forever Home will launch next week. You can read my earlier post for the details of the service, but in a nutshell, it is home telephone service. You install a wireless router which allows you to plug telehpones into it. You then have home service that uses your broadband connection. The router will allow you up to 2 phone lines. Each line will run $10 added onto your wireless plan that will get you unlimited calling in the US.

This is not bad if you currently have a wireless plan of $39.99 or greater through T-mobile which is a requirement to get the service. Right now Vonage costs $19.99, so this could replace Vonage or your current telephone service for only $10 a month. I am definetly going to sign up for this. Right now I currently use T-Mobile HotSpot@Home Talk Forever Mobile service that gets me free calls through my cell phone when using my broadband connerction. So pretty soon ALL my calls from home will be free.

T-mobile has become a pioneer with offering free calls through your high speed internet connection. I sure hope these services take off since quality has been great and you can’t beat the price.

Keep checking this HotSpot @Home Talk Forever Home Site for details on the launch if you are interested in the service.

Cut Down on Email Spam

I have recently been using Yahoo’s Mail Plus email account. Basically it is an uprade from Yahoo’s Free Email account.

There are some neat features like larger attachment size, more filters, etc, but the best feature is the Disposable Email Addresses. Disposable Email Addresses are just what they sound like, email addresses that you can throw away when you want.

Say for example my email address is: [username]@yahoo.com. I don’t want this to get on any spam lists otherwise I will be receiving spam forever! Yahoo Mail Plus lets you select a keyword, and then create multiple address off of it that forward mail sent to them to your main account.

For example if I choose the keyword [keyword], then I all the address I would create would have that key word as a prefix, you just choose the word after the prefix:

[keyword]-mail@yahoo.com
[keyword]-shopping@yahoo.com
[keyword]-amazon@yahoo.com
[keyword]-[….]@yahoo.com
All of the above would forward to my main account [username]@yahoo.com.

The neat thing about this is once you start seeing spam coming to one of these address, you can just delete it and no more spam. I use a disposable address for each specific account I have do I can easly filter emails and put them in their corresponding folders. You can also send outbound email with a disposable addess as your return address so that you don’t have to disclose your real email address.

Currently Yahoo only charges $19,95 per year for Mail Plus, I would be willing to pay up to $100 / year for this feature since it keeps my mailbox clean. (I hope Yahoo doesn’t read this!).

I can’t tell you how much I love this feature and how it helps me stay organized. I don’t think I will be leaving my Yahoo Mail Plus email account anytime soon!

Want more? Get it withYahoo! Mail Plus.

Amazon Kindle Review

So I decided to break down and purchase an Amazon Kindle. The Kindle is an electronic book reader where you download books to it and read them directly from the Kindle.

I have been using my Kindle for about 2 weeks so I thought I would take the time to write a review. I must say that it took me only a few hours to totally fall in love with it.

The size is very appropriate for reading and I can read with only one hand since I use a thumb to press the next page button. It is so compact that I can take it anywhere I think I may have some free time to read, like when waiting for a hair cut, or on the train on the way to work.

The books can be wirelessly downloaded. You pay for the cost of the book, but there are no cellular/wireless fees. The Kindle uses current cell phone technology for free. You just simply look up the name of the book that you want, and click buy. Your amazon account is automatically charged for the price of the book. The majority of the books, including New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases are $9.99 or less. So this is still competitive as a regular paper back book, but the kindle can hold many of them at a time. and you can bookmark the page on each book, so that you always know where you left off. No more searching through chapters trying to find where you stopped.

In terms of actually reading off the Kindle, the one-handed reading, the overall size of the reader, the sharp text and the variable font size all work together to make the experience while reading just as easy as with a book. I used the largest font size when I had the reader propped up on the treadmill. I was never able to read a book while on the treadmill since page turning was always an issue, but I have seemed to solve that problem. When you are looking at the screen, it doesn’t feel like the normal computer screen, it was very cleverly designed to make it feel like a book page with text on it. So you don’t feel that eystrain that you do when using your PC for 4 hours.

The battery life is very good. I am able to go several days without needing to charge. Charge time is very fast, in an hour or two the Kindle gets a full charge but I can still read for an entire evening on a very low indicator.

The Kindle also plays MP3’s, so if you take your Kindle everywhere then you also have an MP3 player. There are not many playback features yet as you can only play your MP3s randomly, but I hear those are in the works on a software update.

There are also other features where you can jot notes down, sign up for subscription content such as newspapers and magazines, etc. There is one very cool feature that I found myself using quite a bit, which is called Kindle NowNow. With NowNow uou pose a question and hit submit, similiar to a google search. Within a few minutes, you start to receive responses on the Kindle. This is very cool since you can be anywhere and ask a question and get many answers all for free.

Other than the NowNow feature, I currently only use it for book reading, which is what it really was designed for. There are some differences for example if you subscribe to a newspaper, you don’t see the images or any graphics, so if are a visual person the Kindle may not be for you, but in terms of book reading, I love it.

Ok, so the Amazon Kindle is somewhat of a luxury purchase as it is close to $400, but look at it this way, I am saving money on books as some of the selections come in under what the current prices are. I am also saving storage space, since my book collection is no longer requiring more book cases to stock it. And in the end, I guess I am saving some trees right?

Prosper.com Experiment Update III

It’s been about a month and a half since my last Prosper experiment update so I thought I would share what is going on with it.

Well not much new to report, and that is good news! All 37 loans are still current, and I was able to pick up another $50 loan (Credit Rating: AA @ 11.00%) with payments from the outstanding loans. This puts me now at 38 loans with an average interest rate of 13.01% One of my loans is also being paid off, so should have enough in my account to pick up another $50 loan. I think I am going to go a little riskier this time to increase my overall loan percentage. One of the loans went late last week, but then was paid up in a few days, so I received a late payment fee of $.03. That loan was an AA Credit Rating, so I assume he just forgot to pay it. I’ll definitely take the late payment!!

One thing to remember is that if you decided to get involved in lending on Prosper, make sure as soon as your account reaches $50 (minimum loan amount) you bid on another loan as the prosper account does not pay interest on the cash balance in your account. To keep that loan interest rate up there you need to keep all your money into loans.

So far things are going well and I hope it continues this way. Only time will tell what a possible recession my do to my loans, but as I said before this was throw away money for me, as had I invested it the stock market, I would have lost it all!

Yahoo Toolbar Lets You Keep All Your Bookmarks In One Place

For a while now I have been plagued with having 2 pcs. One at work and one at home. My biggest issue was trying to keep my Internet Explorer bookmarks in sync between the two computers. One of my coworkers mentioned trying to Bookmark fucntionality that comes with the Yahoo! Toolbar. I was hesitant since I hate installing thid party browser programs since they all tend to just give you more spam. Since it was from Yahoo!, I figured it would at least be spam free. It was free to download so I thought I would give it a try.

After installing, I noticed that it gave me all the shortcuts for the Yahoo! sites I usually use, such as Mail, Calendar, Yellow Pages, etc. It is configurable to add almost any page that Yahoo has. You can also create your own buttons as well. I also liked the fact that I can see if I have new mail just by looking at the tool bar.

I then started to look at the Bookmarks function. It was very straight forward to add bookmarks and bookmark folders. You just click “Save This Page” and a little pop-up asks you where in your bookmark folders you want to save it. And that is it.

So I spent 15 minutes moving all my bookmarks from IE into Yahoo. I then installed the Yahoo Toolbar on my work pc. And sure enough all my bookmarks were there.  Another great feature is that if you ever use another PC where the toolbar isn’t installed, such as a public pc at an internet cafe or something, you can go to http://bookmarks.yahoo.com to have access to all your bookmarks. (You need to sign up for a Yahoo account to store bookmarks on their server).

This is a time saver for me since I no longer have to go back and forth between PC’s to sync bookmarks. I also think Google has a feature like this on their toolbar, but I prefer Yahoo’s since I get the new mail alerts for my email account. I am not sure how long features like this have been around and I am kind of amazed that I never realized it. Simple things like this can make my day so much easier since I spend most of it on the internet for work.

For those of you that use the Firefox browser, Yahoo also has a version of the Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox.

Dental Insurance - You Need It! Do You Have It?

Dental Insurance seems to be more of a luxury these days as more and more employers don’t offer it. My current place of work only offers health insurance to keep costs low, so I finally decided to start looking around of some Dental Insurance on my own as we have been too lucky with no dental issues and I expect the other shoe to drop soon. Obviously it is not as important as health insurance, but in the end it is nice to know you have some sort of protection if needed.

Geez, where to start? There has to be over 10,000 ads and scams out there regarding Dental Insurance. Everywhere you go on the internet you see  Dental Insurance ads. Most of them don’t look legit, so I thought I would share my personal exprerience with you. I stumbled upon DentalPlans.com. They seemed to be legit enough from the look of their website so I thought I would see what they had to offer. It was comforting to see that they had some bigger name plans from GE and Aetna, rather than fly by night shops I have never heard of that would disappear the day before your root canal.

Since I am married with a baby on the way I needed to look for Family Dental Plans. Now don’t forget that since you are getting the insurance your self it is gonna cost you a bit more, especially if you are needing family coverage. There is still going to be out of pocket costs, but the idea is to minimize them as much as possible. My main goal was to find a plan that picks up 6 month checkups. Since we both get 2 a year I wanted to make sure that we weren’t paying more out of pocket just for the simple exams.

After going through pretty much all the plans, we decided on GE Wellness Plan (Dental Only). This plan costs $159.95 per year for a family. It covers 6 month checkups up to $43 per visit. So for two people twice a year, the plan will already pay for itself. We will just need to pay for the cleanings which run about $60 per adult which are discounted from $83 per the plan. So there is still some cost involved, but at least it isn’t full price and is managable. Like with health insurance, the real savings come in when you need major dental work done, which thankfully neither of us have needed, knock on wood.

The whole process using DentalPlans.com was pretty painless. You don’t need to sign up to register to see pricing. You just sign up when you are ready to enroll in a plan. I did call their 800 number since I had a few questions and they were very helpful and courteous ( a rarity these days when dealing with health-care folks!!!).

I did notice that they currently are having a promotion that if you use the coupon code: SELECT you will get 10% off of any plan. Unfortunately I signed up before this promo, but just having the security of dental insurance is good enough for me. Now all I need to do is get all my teeth knocked out!

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