Are You Paying Too Much Council Tax?
Apr 19th, 2007 by Freddie
I love ideas.
You could call me an ‘ideas and information junkie’.
Honestly, I can’t get enough of ‘em.
You see, I reckon I never picked up an idea or piece of information which didn’t come in handy at some point.
Example. Once I had a bash at learning Russian.
Why?
God knows. But I sent off for the tapes and ploughed through them. Heck, by the end I could make a fair fist of asking the way to the hotel Ural and saying “My name is Boris – please can you refill my glass with vodka…”
Seriously.
Anyway, this nearly came in handy when I was short- listed to be the first Briton in space. It was the Juno mission in 1989 – a joint Anglo-Soviet mission – and I made the final 10!!!
Not a lot of people know that (although, it has to be said, even people I bump into casually, end up knowing
it…)
My limited Russian sure would have come in handy had I made it. (I was bounced due to my eyesight. Come on guys… as if I would have been steering the damned
thing!)
My serious point is that without a doubt, highly successful people are constantly learning. Really, they are.
I never met a millionaire who wasn’t a none-stop learning machine.
What about you? Did your serious learning stop when you left full time education?
(I don’t call tabloid newspapers and trash TV ‘serious learning’ by the way – in case you hadn’t guessed!)
If so, it’s time to change that.
Become an avid, greedy reader and soaker-up of any and all information.
If you don’t do this, when you really, badly need a tool and you reach into your box…. Guess what?
It’s empty.
Here’s what the legendary Gary Halbert said to me on the subject. Sadly, Gary passed away only last week. A great loss and a hell of a guy.
“I love ideas. There is nothing more energising than that magic moment when a truly incredible idea comes to you (almost always fully formed) like a special personal gift. But I’ve found you have to work for ideas. I find it fun. Here’s one of the ways I go about it:
I usually get up fairly early (around 6.30 a.m.) and put on a pot of water for coffee. Then I trot down to the News Cafe and snag a copy of the Miami Herald. As I sip coffee, I browse through the paper and I cut out articles and ads that interest me and put them in a tall wooden box with a slanted wooden lid (it was designed to be a vegetable bin). I call this my ‘fodder file’. There is no rhyme or reason as to what goes into my fodder file. All it has to be is something which stimulates my interest. Anyway, eventually my fodder file is stuffed so full it won’t hold any more. I set aside half a day or so to go through all the articles, discarding some, filing others away and neatly setting aside a few that are of immediate interest to me.”
On this subject, let me leave you with a quote from my all time favourite motivator, Jim Rohn.
“Be a collector of good ideas. My mentor taught me to keep a journal when I was twenty-five years old. I’ve been doing it now all these years. They will be passed on to my children and my grandchildren. If you hear a good health idea, capture it; write it down. Don’t trust your memory. Then on a cold wintry evening, go back through your journal, the ideas that changed your life, the ideas that saved your marriage, the ideas that bailed you out of bankruptcy, the ideas that helped you become successful, the ideas that made you millions.
What a good review-going back over the collection of ideas that you gathered over the years. So be a collector of good ideas for your business, for your relationships, for your future.”
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Quote of the Day
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“You have to think anyway - so why not think big?”
- Donald Trump
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Money Saving Tip: Are you paying too much Council Tax?
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Here’s a simple way to find out. Just enter your postcode at the Council Tax Valuation site http://www.voa.gov.uk/cti/InitS.asp?lcn=0 in order to discover what band the houses in your immediate locality are rated at.
If your home is a similar size to your neighbours but you seem to be paying significantly more Council Tax, you may be able to appeal to your local council and obtain a reduction.
If the valuation office agrees that you should be in a lower band, you will be entitled to be repaid your overpayments all the way back to 1993, when council tax was first introduced (although previous owners will be entitled to overpayments made when they lived in the property). Some people have claimed up to £2,500 in overpaid council tax, so it’s well worth checking. Find out more go to:
http://www.electricmessage.co.uk/a.php?a=460
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SCAM ALERT: Don’t Fall For This Old 419 Fraud
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Can there really be anyone who hasn’t heard of this one?
It seems so. I regularly get emails from people asking if it’s “Okay if I use my bank account to launder twenty million in Nigerian money – I get to keep a million of it.”
Well, sheesh… I GUESS…
Advance fee fraud or ‘419′ fraud (named after the relevant section of the Nigerian Criminal Code) is a popular crime with the West African organised criminal networks.
There are a myriad of schemes and scams - mail, faxed and telephone promises designed to facilitate victims parting with money.
All involve requests to help move large sums of money with the promise of a substantial share of the cash in return.
This type of scam, originally known as the “Spanish Prisoner Letter”, has been carried out since at least the sixteenth century via ordinary postal mail!
These scams have come to be associated in the public mind with Nigeria due to the massive proliferation of such confidence tricks from that country since the mid- eighties.
The laws from Section 419 and laws in place in other jurisdictions criminalising the offences do not scare away the criminals who profit from these crimes. The stakes and profits are simply too high and many government officials are believed to be involved with the criminal gangs.
Victim’s individual monetary losses can range from the low thousands into multi-millions. True figures are often impossible to ascertain, because many victims, embarrassed by their naiveté and feeling personally humiliated, do not report the crime to the authorities.
Others, having lost so much themselves, become “part of the gang” recruiting more victims from their own country of residence.
There are tragic cases of victims being unable to cope with the losses and committing suicide.
So totally ignore any emails purporting to be from officials requesting you help them move large sums of money.
But you knew that anyway, right?
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Okay, catch you next week. This issue has prompted me to go and idly flick through my Juno mission memorabilia and maybe throw a few darts at a picture of Helen Sharman. Not that I’m BITTER or anything….
(PS In case you were wondering, Helen Sharman was the first female Briton in space, having beaten me to the position. Um… I think I might have to rephrase that… oh heck. Whatever. You get my drift.)
Yours,
Stuart Goldsmith
The Money Tree
