I love negotiating and getting what I deserve, especially when it’s from a bank or the cable company. I hate when they steal your money or provide you with sub-par service without some time of reimbursement. So you can imagine my thoughts when Lauren’s cable went out for a few days.

The Internet went out on Friday, and Comcast promised they would come within a few days. On Monday they set up an appointment for between 9am and 1pm on Monday (they couldn’t pinpoint it any more than that??) and at 2:30 still weren’t there. In fact, they never came. They didn’t set up another appointment until Wednesday, when they said they would come on Friday. Nope, they didn’t show up. They didn’t even call. They finally came on Tuesday to fix the Internet. A week and a half without Internet. Can you imagine??

So of course, we called up to get what was rightfully ours. She should be reimbursed not only for the time that the Internet was out, but also for the time she had to spend waiting for them, the disrespect she was shown when they didn’t call to say they would be late (not to mention when Lauren called to ask about their status and was told, “we’re coming soon” the day they never showed up).

The conversation was pretty typical, and started off with Lauren explaining the situation and the woman on the other end saying she’d help any way she could. She offered $9 to make up for the week and a half the service was out. No way was that good enough. So Lauren requested to talk to a supervisor. After 20 minutes, the supervisor finally came on the line, heard the story, and offered $15 to make up for the inconvenience. I thought that was still too low, but the truth is that out of the $24 bill, $15 is over 60% of a month’s service, which is pretty good. And after being on hold and talking for over an hour, we decided it wasn’t worth wasting any more of our day.

I’m adding Comcast to my list of companies I hate. 33% of America has no choice but to use Comcast, so they continue to take advantage of their customers and completely disregard the fact that people have lives. I wonder what they would say if they arrived, called, and told them that I would let them in anywhere from one minute to 3 hours from now.

I’ve never been much of a shopper. I hate the idea of spending an entire day at the mall looking for one or two items. I don’t shop until I know exactly what I need. My underwear is disintegrating? OK, I’ll get exactly what I need, nothing more. I’m the king of not buying on impulse.

Last year, I wanted to get a book and a shirt. The book was Will Schwalbe’s “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.” The shirt was just a polo to replace an old one in my closet. I set out for the mall, which had a Barnes and Noble and an Old Navy next to each other. I set out and found the book, but it was $17. It’s a tiny book. A great book, but tiny. There was no way I was going to spend $17 on something I would read in 2 hours. So I went next door and found the polo shirts. O wait, I didn’t because they were all out of my size. I drove home, disappointed that my shopping trip had been a disaster.

I went online, and found the book on $8. And the polo shirt was easy to find for a great price. In the color and size that I wanted. Oh, and the Internet was not sold out of my size. So I had to wait a few extra days, but I learned an important lesson: It rarely pays to leave the house.

OK, so that’s not quite true. For clothing, it’s always nice to try something on before you buy it. But in this situation, I thought it was nice to know that I could always find stuff for cheaper online and never have to deal with the hassle of driving, parking, and navigating my way through a bunch of middle-aged moms. The advantage of getting my book and shirt that day was greatly outweighed by the extra cost I would have to pay to buy it from the store.

Before you run off to the mall, decide how important it is that you get that item immediately and whether maybe you’d be better off waiting a few extra days to save yourself both the money and the hassle of having get yourself to and from the store.

I found a few sites that I really like to answer financial questions that I wanted to share with everyone. Cash Commons and Basically Money both allow you to ask and answer any financial question you like, vote for answers you life, and earn points and awards which mean nothing but gives you a better reputation on the site. I’ve asked several questions and answered a few others and I’ve gotten a lot out of the site so far.

The question I’ve been most interested in lately is what to do with the money I’m saving. I’m able to save over 50% of my paycheck, but I’m not entirely sure how to spend that money. I narrowed it down to several choices:

• Aggressively pay off my student loans, which stand at around $23,000.
• Invest the money knowing that I can probably beat the low rates of my student loans (~2.8%).
• Save it in an online savings account earning only 1.40% APY but allows me to have some flexibility later.

I’ve gotten a lot of excellent feedback, some that I agree with and some that I know may be helpful in someways but ultimately don’t feel comfortable with.

Here are a few of the various responses I’ve gotten and afterward I details what I ultimately decide to do.

Dr. Dean: Pay off the student loans aggressively after building up a 6 month emergency fund.

Mighty Bargain Hunter: Pay only the minimums on the student loans and throw the rest of the money into an emergency fund so that I’ll have added flexibility later.

MrChrister: Pay off the bills, invest a little for fun, save up for a big purchase, and enjoy the extra money.

ScottW: Save and travel. Create memories

Thanks for your advice guys, and I’ve taken a combination of your answers and decided to do this:

Save an additional $500 a month and building up a nice savings account. I will be sure to treat myself well and enjoy experiences and create memories rather than buying toys and gadgets I will likely forget about. I am increasing my “fun” budget by $100 a month for this, and I will not hold back if that needs to increase for special occasions. I’ll also be investing $200 a month, and I will save the other $200 in a savings account targeted for student loans (but I’ll take Mighty Bargain Hunter’s advice and retain some flexibility, even if it means losing 1%.)

What do you think, am I being smart or should I be more risky or conservative?

If you’ve ever bought or sold anything on Ebay, you know that Paypal is the most convenient and most widely used form of payment for transactions.

Paypal is really convenient. You get paid immediately and can transfer the funds immediately after getting paid (there are some restrictions) to your bank account. It’s one thing you don’t have to worry about and you definitely save a lot of time not having to be concerned about accepting certain credit cards and processing payments. It’s automatic and you don’t have to deal with it.

Of course, with any service, there are fees. Paypal takes part of every deposit that comes to your account, for business accounts. For a $250 transfer into your account (from your own bank account), you would pay over $6.50. That’s almost 3% just to fund your account. And of course there are fees for accepting payments too. Another 3%. So if you’re doing business regularly and there is money coming in and out of your account, you can end up paying a lot for this convenience.

There are no other tools out there that do what Paypal does and is used and accepted by so many people and online stores. When using Ebay, you actually pay two sets of fees: Ebay fees and Paypal fees. This can really cut into your profits and you should calculate this when deciding on the price you want to set for your items.

I just received $40 for selling an item, and of that, actually received $38.54 after the fees, which is over 3% in fees. Not horrendous, but if you’re doing a decent amount of business, it definitely adds up. Paypal is a great service and there’s no replacement. But know that you’re paying for that quality. With all the free services out there, I’m surprised they are able to be THE go to payment service with little competition from others who would accept smaller fees.

This summer, Paypal sneakily rolled out new fees of 2.9%, plus 30 cents for payments classified as “Goods” or “Services.” Previously these types of payments were free (typically they were used for transfering money between friends, or having money transferred from outside of Ebay), but without alerting anyone, Paypal added these fees to all types of accounts. They sent an e-mail regarding the positives changes that were happening, but that email didn’t say anything about changes to the fee structure.

Enjoy this service, but be aware that with Paypal, you are paying a high premium for the convenience of using their service. For awhile, Google Checkout provided comparable service for free, but started charging similar fees earlier in the year. At least they were up-front about it. I’m interested to see when the next service will roll out with lower fees and higher transparency.

We’ve all had bad bank experiences, and I wanted to share mine.

I opened my account back in March, and in August saw a banner on the site for $25 free when I start using bill pay. The only qualifications listed were that I had to make two bill pay transactions within the first month. No problem, I was about to start anyway, so the timing was great.

I started using bill pay, made my mandatory transactions, and about 3 months later realized that I never got my $25. Frustrated, I called up. After being put on hold for 20 minutes, a customer service representative said that since I opened up the account in a branch, technically my bill pay account was activated then even though I didn’t use it until August.

That’s a load of crap, the all time dumbest rule ever. I never signed anything saying I wanted to use bill pay, so I went into a branch to talk to an accounts manager, Wendy, who has been extremely helpful. She did some research, called up a few people, and got it all taken care of. They said that they would put in a request and a check would be mailed rather than deposited into my account. No problem, as long as I got the money in the end.

A month went by and I still never received my check, or any other communication from Bank of America, so I went to go visit Wendy again. Again she helped me and called up some people, complained about their system (which I loved because she knew that it shouldn’t be this difficult to get what you deserve), and put in a request for me.

Wendy was wonderful and I couldn’t thank her enough. After sitting with her for half an hour, she figured I had to get back to work after my lunch break and offered to finish up talking to different people over the phone and assured me that everything would be taken care of. I have no doubt that she exhausted all effort.

I just don’t trust Bank of America to come through.