5 Tips for Consolidating Credit Card Debt

Tip #1

Start with a list of your debts and set some repayment goals. Ask yourself how quickly you would like to eliminate your debt. Debt consolidation on its own doesn’t eliminate debt, it just transfers your balances to a new, hopefully lower interest rate, loan. This helps you pay off debt sooner.
– Scott Schaefer, Kitchener & Stratford Offices

Tip #2

Begin by taking advantage of any low-interest rate balance transfer programs offered by your credit card company. Know that there may be a limit on how many months the low interest rate will apply. Watch out for balance transfer fees that may eat up any potential interest savings.
– Howard Hayes, Cambridge & Brantford Offices

Tip #3

Work on improving your credit score before consolidating your credit to reduce your interest rate. Pay off smaller credit card balances completely, but keep the accounts open. This will lower your utilization rate, which is good for your credit rating. Cut up the cards so you are not tempted to drive up the balances again.
– Doug Hoyes, Co-founder

Tip #4

Don’t hesitate to contact existing credit card providers and ask them to lower your interest rate. If you have a reasonable credit score, you may qualify for one of their low-rate cards.
– Ted Michalos, Co-founder

Tip #5

Talk to your bank or credit union about a personal term loan. Term loans usually come with lower interest rates than most credit card rates. In exchange for this lower interest rate, know that you are committing to a fixed monthly debt payment.
– Jason Quinney, Brampton, North York and Vaughan Offices

Cloudy, increasingly FAIR; revisiting the FAIR Data guiding principles for the European Open Science Cloud

Abstract

The FAIR Data Principles propose that all scholarly output should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. As a set of guiding principles, expressing only the kinds of behaviours that researchers should expect from contemporary data resources, how the FAIR principles should manifest in reality was largely open to interpretation. As support for the Principles has spread, so has the breadth of these interpretations. In observing this creeping spread of interpretation, several of the original authors felt it was now appropriate to revisit the Principles, to clarify both what FAIRness is, and is not.


1.Growing awareness of FAIRness Open Science is a growing movement. The European Council adopted Open Science and the reusability of research data as a priority, as did the G7 at their summit in Japan [9]. This provided fertile ground for the rapid uptake of the FAIR Data Principles [25] since their recent publication [3]. The DG RTD (the Directorate General for Research and Innovation) of the European Commission took the lead [6], but in close collaboration with other directorates and the USA-based Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) of the NIH (National Institutes of Health) [15]. Science Europe has adopted FAIR principles as the basis for sharing administrative data on funding [7]. The G20 went further in the 2016 Hangzhou summit by endorsing the FAIR Principles by name [8].

The Principles have also resonated in many discussions beyond their original scope of research data sharing, in domains as diverse as Archaeology [22], and environmental monitors for “smart cities” [12]. This wide embrace of the FAIR Principles by governments, governing bodies, and funding bodies, has led to a growing number of data resources attempting to demonstrate their FAIRness, for an example, see ‘Being FAIR at UniProt’ [10]. The UniProt example is spot-on, but there are also emerging indications that the original meanings of findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable sometimes may be stretched; even, in some cases, in order to avoid change or improvement. In other cases, the proposed implementation of these principles, with the goal of an Internet of FAIR Data and Services, is beginning to raise concern and confusion. Therefore, with the broader community now forming independent, thoughtful opinions about the meaning and consequences of the FAIR Principles, it seems worthwhile to clarify their original intent and interpretation.




2.Becoming cloudy Achieving the transition from the current closed and silo-based approaches to research towards more open and networked scholarship needs important changes in the science reward and methodological practice. But it also needs an increased support infrastructure of FAIR data-publishing, analytics, computational capacity, virtual machines and workflow systems. These infrastructure needs have been – and are being – addressed intensively at the European Commission level, especially in the context of the 2016 Dutch EC Presidency [16] and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) [5], the e-IRG roadmap [16] and in the US through the NIH Data Commons projects. In Australia, ANDS [2] and AARnet [1] follow a very similar approach and recently, the East African Community has adopted the Dakar declaration on Open Science in Africa [23]. In South Africa, the

African Data Intensive Research Cloud [21] is part of the roadmap for research infrastructures as well. Common to all these is the idea of building infrastructure based on rich metadata for the resources in the research environment, that support their optimal re-use. Provision of all such resources and services will necessarily involve a mix of players, including commercial and public ones. A group of early-adopter EU member states is preparing the GO FAIR initiative [13], which is a proposal for the fast-track implementation of the EOSC. Ensuring that in such globally dispersed infrastructures all provided resources are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, as well as ensuring that the qualities of a service (i.e. what it does, and how), as well as the quality of a service (i.e. the degree of excellence), are appropriate for the researchers’ needs, requires widely shared and adopted standards and principles, In addition, there is a need for set of community-acceptable ‘rules of engagement’, that define how the resources within that community will/should function and promulgate themselves.

These rules of engagement may vary depending on the needs or constraints within any given community, but in each case, the FAIR guidelines assist the interaction between those who want to use community resources and those who provide them. FAIR guiding principles provide a scaffold for building such rules of engagement within each community.

(Read more: https://content.iospress.com/articles/information-services-and-use/isu824)

The Progressive Homeowners Insurance Quote Diaries

Progressive Homeowners Insurance Quote – You might want some life insurance to cover any debts and funeral costs, but you might not require a huge policy. Life insurance doesn’t seem to be on the surface of the list of things to discuss before the great majority of people become wed. Not buying any extra life insurance is the most affordable thing to do.

 Progressive Homeowners Insurance Quote An insurance coverage cover gets invalid when the car is sold to a different man or woman who isn’t involved in the contract. For an individual who’d taken the life insurance plan cover, they’d be handled in meeting the fiscal expenses. Possessing senior life insurance plan cover may be in a position to sustain the money required during the period involving a survivor having the capacity to get the social security advantages left behind. The very first thing you ought to do is get your insurance business to take a fairly higher repair estimate. Insurance organizations are usually eager to refund part of the brand new insurance to the client in case of selling insured vehicles to new owners. Some insurance providers have discounts that others don’t. Take notice that not all insurance companies are made equivalent.




Your insurance provider is going to assess the damage. There are many companies that offer such insurance, but you must look for the best bargain. As demonstrated by lots of experts, it is advised to obtain a policy that covers 5 to ten times your annually salary. Fronting means you have a policy in which you have yourself as the motorist and someone else mostly an older individual as the most important driver while in reality you’re the primary driver. You’ll be delighted to be aware that a classic motorcycle insurance program isn’t overly pricey. Whether you own a classic, classic or old bike insurance plan, you’ll have the ability to obtain from extensive consented value protection and conserve a lot of cash on the yearly premium. You are able to receive quotes and attempt to figure out the plan by your own.
You should make an effort to compare three or more distinct quotes to make certain that you are receiving the suitable coverage for the perfect price. Ideally, you need to supply quotes from several suppliers so you are able to compare them and select the ideal package. progressive homeowners insurance quote – the Story As soon as you are done, get homeowners’ insurance estimate and discover how much insurance you’re going to have the ability to get. To seek out protection against flooding, homeowners need to acquire a distinct policy for this. The homeowner is permitted to decide on any or most of the coverage choices as liability insurance. Without this type of update, it would be challenging to attain insurance.

Essentially, this kind of insurance offers you a means to recover some or all your medical expenses while in a foreign state. It is the form of insurance that’s needed if you had to carry out funding on the bike itself. Sometimes people assume they must remain with the insurance they have removed with their mortgage provider. When it’s the perfect insurance for you will be dependent on your precise requirements. There’s various coverage Insurances on the industry, there’s a different type of Insurances dependent on the age and the coverage premium amount and you will find medical assessments that affect the coverage prices tremendously. (Source: http://thenewportchicago.com/the-progressive-homeowners-insurance-quote-diaries/)

Payday Loan Alternative a Good (Or Risky) Thing?

If you’re one of the millions of Americans for whom payday can’t come soon enough, technology is catching up with your dreams.
Uber, McDonald’s and Outback Steakhouse are among a growing number of employers that are offering workers an on-demand system that gives them access to their money the day after they earn it.

Amazing Beautiful Girl Playing With Dog


The Instant Pay Smartphone App

The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about a new smartphone app from Instant Financial that allows workers to draw their pay the day after they performed the work. If they have an emergency or a bill that needs immediate payment, they can collect their earnings with a few swipes on their phone.
The Instant Financial app, which is free to employees, sends a notification to users’ smartphones each morning at 10 a.m. telling them how much they earned the previous day and giving them the option of depositing half the money on a debit card.
Several other apps on the market charge workers a fee to draw cash, often about $3 a transaction. Instant Financial charges employers to use its service instead.

A Threat to Payday Lenders

If the new technology spreads, the big losers might be payday loan companies that specialize in advancing cash at extremely high interest rates. Payday loan outfits typically charge interest rates of $15 per $100 borrowed, the equivalent to more than 400% annually. The loans often come with terms that make repayment difficult. About 12 million Americans take out payday loans each year.
The technology is getting strongest interest from workers with hourly jobs whose work schedules often vary. Advocates say next-day payments allow employees to collect when they need the money, giving them more financial control.
The Journal quoted the human resources director of a company that operates 54 McDonald’s restaurants in Florida. He said about 20% of the franchisee’s 1,300 workers receive money each day. He said they become very attached to the technology and anxious whenever there’s a glitch or service outage. “It’s almost like a drug,” he told the Journal.
(Read more: https://www.debt.org/2018/01/15/payday-loan-alternative-a-good-or-risky-thing/)

Can I Settle a Debt for Less than I Owe?

The quick answer is: Yes! The whole goal of debt settlement to pay less than you owe and that is what all the debt settlement companies promise will happen.
The real question should be: A) How much less? B) How long is this going to take? C) Is there a price to be paid somewhere down the line?
The quick answer to those question is: Nobody knows for sure and yes, you will pay a price.
Amazing Group Dogs Sweet love

Probably a heavy price.
If you believe the advertising spin that debt settlement companies use on TV and radio, it seems possible that you will “… pay back pennies on the dollar!”
That is possible, but so is the chance you bought the winning lottery ticket last Saturday night.
There is no documented data on how much of your debt you won’t have to pay. Experts say that if all goes well, you will be lucky to have 50% of your debt excused, but it could be (and often is) less than that.
As for how long the process takes, there is enough data to say that in most cases, it takes 36-48 months. Interest on the debt accrues during that time.
So, if you have a $20,000 credit card debt, for example, and were paying the average interest rate (in 2017) of 15%, your debt would grow to between $29,000 and $32,000 in 3-4 years.
So, if you owe $30,000 and a debt settlement company gets half forgiven, you only owe $15,000.

That might sound good, until you add on the additional charges and total up a final bill. Those charges include:

  • A 25% fee for the amount of debt forgiven. If you owe $15,000 is forgiven, that means a fee of around $3,750.
  • The IRS considers any forgiven debt as income, so if you had $15,000 forgiven, you’ll pay taxes on that amount. Estimated total: $5,000.
  • Lenders will report debt settlements to the credit bureau agencies and it becomes a negative on your credit report for seven years. That lowers your credit score and raises the interest rate you will pay for future loans and credit cards.
So, when you add everything up after three years, the original debt of $20,000 could cost you about $23,750 to settle. That is $15,000 to the lender for settlement; $3,750 in fees to the company and $5,000 in taxes to the government.
(Read more:  https://www.debt.org/settlement/

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