Its Monday

I'm finally starting to get caught up with life after school.

This weekend got the new fuser unit into the HP 2840 so it is back up and running. Its amazing how much we were using the copy function and how that is a recent luxury to have a copier in the home. Also got most of the bills paid, most of the filing done and my note book computer fixed. Dell did a good job with their tech support, I'm impressed. I also ran our credit reports and everything is as I thought. So all in all it was a productive weekend.

Two stories in the news today.

The first story is about another possible change to how Credit Unions operate. The government is looking to change the tax status of these institutions from tax exempt to regular corporations. This would increase the costs of the organizations and restrict credit or the loans the CU's can make. Banks like this because they feel CU's have an unfair advantage by being tax exempt and therefore can operate at lower costs. The banks are right, it is an unfair advantage. However, one has to look at why CU's started in the first place and why they are still popular today. CU's started because banks were not interested in the accounts of small depositors, they still aren't. Lets face it, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and even WaMu would rather you go else where then have an account open with a balance of $50 and adding $5 dollars a week. Its not cost effective for them to service such accounts and even costlier for them to service the small balance checking accounts. They will make these accounts available because the law requires them too, but there are fees and restrictions on these accounts that can often make them cost prohibitive to the depositors.

So if the CU's have to pay taxes instead of returning all the profits to the shareholders (depositors), the people most likely effected will be those the banks do not want as customers anyway. Those of us who the banks might like, who can have higher balances, can stay at the CU's because the fees will still be comparable to banks. Long live the CU's.


The second story is about a new wonder material called Aerogel. This stuff is an insulator like none other and can be used to clean up oil spills and other hazardous waste sites. If it works as advertised, it will make the company making the stuff very rich. Read the article.
Hat tip Lucianne.

Have a good day and thanks for stopping by.