Shipping Matters.

It’s important to show customers that you will ‘deliver’ the best services from all aspects of your business. From buying the product to contacting the company during the use of the product to purchasing more products from the company. As a customer, I expect the best if I give a company my money – and why shouldn’t I?

This week I ordered a few laptops for work. Granted, they are not both for me to use, but it’s been interesting ordering them and comparing the whole process or researching, finding, ordering, etc. I’ll throw up a few screenshots in this. But first, I wanted to point out the different shipping dates for each laptop.

Laptop #1 ordered on April 28th: MacBook Pro ordered through the Apple Store online.

Laptop #2 ordered April 30th: Dell Laptop ordered through Dell.com

So, the Mac is set to arrive on Tuesday – the Dell on May 19. I’m sure that Dell has a lot of orders being a top PC maker, but I’m surprised though, as big as Dell is, that it takes that long to assemble and ship a standard laptop for basic use. Maybe it’s the whole production process that Dell uses compared to what Apple uses? Are they both ‘made-to-order’?

One other thing I noticed are how drastically different the websites were. I’ve noticed this for years now as I order computers for work, etc. One thing I really like about the Apple order process is how simple and clean it looks. Here’s a screen shot giving you the choices of laptops you can select from from Apple. Notice how simple it is. Only the facts, specs, and prices. That’s all I’m looking for.

And here is the Dell selection. Notice the use of many ‘!’ They must be really excited about all that hard drive space. Then they give you the ‘Instant Savings’ and use many font colors for features. And, I’m personally not a huge fan of the star rating system – their products should be good without customer rankings involved.

Now for the building process. At apple you pretty much scroll down a single page, select your options, click ‘Add to Cart’ and your through. Once again, very simple, clean, just the facts and choices. No ‘Limted Time Offers!’ or ‘Get your 30-day trial!’ Here you go:

And back to Dell.  Instead of scrolling through a single page, you click through about 12-15 pages of each option. You can switch to a ‘List View’ if you want which is good – but in a design perspective you’re scrolling within windows (frames) which just sort of looks bad to me. Granted, most of it is pretty easy to know what options you want, but some of it can be a little too much. And why does it cost more to have certain colors for a laptop? Below is a a screen shot to select your processor – looks a little busy.

The checkout process for both are about the same. This just made me realize how much I enjoy a simple, clean website. Easy to navigate, research, find what you’re looking for, purchase and check-out.

Unplugged.

Kara and I haven’t had cable in the past few weeks. Honestly, it was something we really didn’t plan on doing, it just sort of happened. It hasn’t been all that bad either and we can plan our ‘tv’ watching, well more like computer watching, around our NetFlix schedule. Instead of watching ‘24′ on Monday’s, we watch a movie instead on NetFlix. Then on Tuesday we catch up on ‘24′ on Fox.com.

Little changes like that allow us to still catch our favorite shows like ‘The Office’, but now we learn to live without those other ‘filler’ shows as I call them. I do miss ‘The Soup’ though – nothing like waking up on Saturday laughing your head off at reality tv clips.

edit: It would be interesting to do a study on people’s buying habits on those that have cable and those that do not – or rarely watch tv.

A Little Weekend Recap.

After work on Friday Kara and I got in the car and headed for my parent’s house about an hour away from Brunswick. We went up Friday night and Saturday to see my folks and Saturday afternoon and Sunday we saw her parent’s and her cousin and his family. Well, we wanted to make the trip up fairly quickly, as my Dad cooked dinner for us. (I guess when you’re retired you cook and bake cakes and do lots of yard work?) We made a quick stop at Target then another quick stop to get gas. Then we hit I-95. In about 10 minutes we were stuck in stand-still traffic. And we stood still for what seemed forever. We had only passed two exits since leaving Brunswick and Hwy 17 was nowhere near for us to jump on instead.

About 2 hours later we were finally re-routed to a truck weigh station – through the weigh station – and onto Hwy 17 that’s just behind it. I-95 was shut down going north for miles. Construction? Paving? Government cover-up? Who knows, but I’ve always wanted to go through a weigh station to see what it’s like for some reason.

After driving on Hwy 17 for a few miles, it too was blocked to a certain point and we were re-routed back on I-95! So, we arrived 3.5 hours later at my parent’s house. A little late for dinner – but we still ate and it was good.

Saturday we woke up and ate a nice breakfast. We headed over to Kara’s parent’s and spent some time with them talking and seeing her extended family well into the evening. Yesterday we went out to Tybee Island. It was a beautiful day.  After a good dinner at The Crab Shack we headed back and Kara and I headed back to Brunswick.

This coming weekend: Vero Beach.

Get Smart with your Money Tip #3

If you can create a budget, then you can create a cash flow worksheet. You might be thinking, “Huh? Isn’t that what accountants use for work?” Well, probably a more advanced version, but you are your own accountant for your own money and you need to see on paper where your money is going each month and how it’s used. Basically, a cash flow worksheet helps to further break down the budget to get to that zero balance each month. Take your income minus your outgoing to see where you stand. It helps to determine what you’re really overspending on (or underspending on), and if you have lots of money left over after creating the worksheet (remember the goal is to get to a zero balance, not have left-overs). You could pretty much use it for a wide variety of ways, but those are just a few to get started.

If you hammer out the details now with what all of your outgoings are, then you’ll eventually become trained to keep doing it this way for years to come. Kara and I have a pretty detailed budget each month and we are aware of each of our outgoings. We sit down, go over it and we’re done. It used to take  a while to get it squared down each month. Now it probably takes us 10-15 minutes once a month. The good thing is, once you get it down, it pretty much repeats itself each month with a few changes here and there. If you simply jot a few things down each week, or keep it in your head, you’re not going to defeat debt – trust me. Never write  a check, or pay a bill again wondering if you have just over drafted the account, or if  you just spent money that should have gone to the power bill. Get the details hammered out now to avoid mistakes later.

Get Smart with your Money Tip #2

Create a monthly budget for yourself or your family. Do you really know how much you spend each month in food or gas or clothes? Before Kara and I had a budget, we would spend on things, never put stuff on credit cards, but we never kept track of where our money actually went. If we had the money in the bank, and if we were getting paid soon enough, we would just buy it most of the time. Once you sit down and really think about how much you spend on food, bills, gas, etc then it will all come together. It may take a month of just keeping your receipts to really get a good grasp of how much you really are spending instead of just making a wild guess.

Each month we sit down and create our new monthly budget – and it really opened our eyes at the beginning to see some of these numbers on paper. And don’t think it will be easy. You’ll probably get aggrevated, wonder why you’re doing this, and just want to leave. But, keep trying at it and it will work itself out. Remember, it’s just numbers on a piece of paper – you’re bigger than that!

Doing this really made us think twice about stuff we needed and stuff we wanted just because we had money in the bank. Granted, sometimes we do overspend in certain areas, but then we take some money out of other areas for that month to make-up for that. So essentially we never have a negative balance. And yes, we do have money to blow at times, but we’ve learned to limit ourselves in that. Heck, after paying off so much debt and looking at the money saved by not paying interest on that debt, it makes us even more focused to keep paying it off. (I’ll post some examples up in a few weeks).

These tips are high points taken from Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. For more info, see daveramsey.com

Get Smart with your Money: Tip #1

Save for emergencies. We all know that they come up when we least expect it (car breaks down, AC goes out in the house, you make an unexpected trip, etc). A good $1,000 is great if you can swing that. Remember those times of just throwing emergencies on a credit card? Once you have the $1,000 saved up, you won’t need a credit card to use for emergencies – just use the cushion you have saved up. If you can, try saving more, but make $500 – $1,000 your goal. Believe me, I would feel like a target  if we didn’t have that cushion of money in the bank – it’s totally worth it.

Oh yeah, and just because you save up your cushion – it doesn’t mean that you get to go blow it on that new gadget or kayak. Keep it in the bank! Buying stuff is another tip for another day, but first we have to learn to pay ourselves and to not buy everything that we think we must have.

These tips are high points taken from Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. For more info, see daveramsey.com

What’s your brand?

I came across a site that puts your 5 favorite brands into 1 graphic. I wonder if they have people look up each brand or if it’s somehow automated? After looking at mine I find quite a few healthy foods listed – except for the donuts. What brands are you? Anyway, check out http://www.5brand.net to get your brands on.

Get Smart with Your Money.

Money. This word has been the driving factor of the world for who knows how long. It’s amazing that this word can create power, failure, great things and terrible things – but it’s not the money itself that does that, but the people who use it. With the economy the way it is today, people need to get smart with their money. I mean, it is the money that is yours to keep. Are you saving it, spending it, investing it or just paying bills with it and floating along? I’m by no means an expert in money, but I’m glad to be hosting a Dave Ramsey group for my church again for the next 13 weeks. Kara and I taught it just about a year ago, and decided to break out the teaching skills again for round two. And we aren’t professional teachers either – we basically pop in a DVD and watch a video for an hour. Honestly, it’s the best thing that Kara and I have done for ourselves – taking and teaching/hosting this series of videos to people at our church. And best of all, the concepts are so easy to follow and make perfect since to anybody. (I believe we even have a high school student in our class now).

Before getting married we thought we had a good concept of what we were suppose to do with our money – use credit cards sparingly, pay them off each month if you do use them and save money and then buy the stuff you want – then start saving again. Sounds about right and safe…not really.

What about those car payments, or student loans that show up in the mail each month? Just pay them as they come – they will eventually go away in 6-20 years. What about the interest that you pay with those payments? It’s not big deal, just pay them each month, I can afford it. Wrong.

Kara and I got married we had 2 car payments, a brand new mortgage, and my student loan and no credit card debt thankfully. We now have both cars paid off (mine was paid off 3 or 4 years early) and we are paying like crazy towards the other stuff. It’s amazing to look at how much we save each month by putting extra cash towards these things by not having to pay interest by paying down the principle. It’s also amazing to not get car payments in the mail each month. It’s little things like that that Dave teaches that can make all the difference. And even my description of it seems more complicated than Dave explains it.

So anyway, that’s just 1 example of how taking/teaching/hosting these classes have changed our view of finances in our household. So, I think I might start posting some points of interest on here each week after each small group meeting. I’m looking forward to seeing how this will change people’s lives forever.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is my new best friend. I know it’s been around for a while, and I’ve always seen the link in my Gmail account, but I’ve honestly really never taken the time to check it out. The other day Kara emailed and said that we now have a calendar online and we can both view and add to it through Gmail. We checked it out and it’s very awesome – especially with schedules getting busy with work on weekends, traveling, family coming to town, church events, etc. Usually I just sort of keep dates in my head of where I need to be and when, but this really helps to see what we both have going on. You can even divide the calendar by entries – the pink dates are Kara’s and the brown dates are mine.  You can also print the calendars out into a nice, neat format to put on the fridge or wherever in your house.Another aspect of it that I enjoy is that I can view and add to it using the Google Mobile app on my phone. I do wish you could add dates to it other than the current date – that would be neat.

I’m not sure why, but this calendar thing really makes me happy.

Oh yeah…did I mention I saw Third Day back in November?

I think we were doing a remake of the ‘Wherever You Are’ album cover.

photo posted from my iPhone