If you've been thinking about accepting credit cards, you may want to check in to the fees and upfront costs of doing so. You will of course have to pay for the machine and the monthly maintenance on it. Then there is the discount fee that the bank will charge you for each transaction. This fee is based on your annual sales volume (the higher your sales, the lower your fee will be). You may even have to use a "middle man" to process your transactions (more fees). It can take several days for your money to reach your account. I just want to mention this, because these fees and costs can really eat in to your bottom line. Also, if you agree to accept credit cards, then you must do so for every transaction (meaning you can't say, well I'll just accept credit cards for the lower dollar transactions and not have to pay the discount fees on the higher ones). There are several rules and regulations you have to follow. Janet is right, most people come to the markets with cash. It's still very old school. We even barter with other vendors sometimes at our market.

The mortgage company makes even more money when they sign you up for those twice monthly payment schedules. My MC sent me a letter about that and the enrollment fee was also $300. But the two payments added up to more than my present monthly payment. Their explanation was that a partial payment resulted in 14 days additional interest being added to the total monthly payment. But that plan isn't designed for someone who can afford to make their monthly payments. It's designed for folks who are on fixed income, have all of their bills coming out of their accounts on the first of the month and don't have enough to cover the one big one (the mortgage) all at once. For some people it can be a Godsend. However, you do (they do) wind up paying more over the long haul. The mortgage company doesn't want you to pay off your loan early, because they make money on the interest that you pay. Likewise they cannot tell you not to send additional principle with your monthly payment. This information is in your original loan documents, but if you don't understand them yourself, get a lawyer to explain it to you. Your bank actually may have someone who will look at it and explain it to you free of charge. And yes I do all of my banking and bill paying on line. All the banks' on line bill paying systems are similar, so it's actually not difficult to change banks if you get better service from one than another. The best thing about paying bills on line is that they post on the date that you specify when you send the payment. If you mail a check, you never know precisely when it arrived, all you will have is the cancellation date stamped on the back when the mortgage company posted it. When you mail a check, the mortgage company can claim they didn't get it by the due date and charge a late payment penalty. Banks and mortgage companies routinely post debits in the morning and credits in the afternoon. So if your account has $100 on Monday, then you make a deposit of $50 Monday afyternoon, you won't have a balance of $150 until Tuesday afternoon. But if you leave the bank and go pay your light bill for $101 on Monday afternoon, your check will bounce on Tuesday morning. Then you owe the bank the $25 overdraft fee on top of everything else. So what I can't figure out is if banks are supposed to be so good at managing money, making money and gouging money out of Jane Q. Public, why are Janes tax dollars being used to bail out the @#(*&@# BANKS?????????? I think if a business is such a poor manager of their assets that they go broke, why would we want to help them stay in business? It's the taxpayers money that they have squandered to get where they are right now, why does the government want to give them some more? OK, I'm hot about this bailout program and while the President is a compelling speaker, I'm not convinced that this is going to help the country at all. And using tax dollars to shore up private business is wrong. Maybe I'll start a business that will provide a service to every American politician: An Iron-Clad Guarantee to Go to Heaven. They only cost the individual politician 1k and then he/she can do anything they want to for the rest of their lives becuase they know they will spend eternity sitting on a cloud. This is an essential business to America because right now there are only 7 politicians in heaven, and none of them are Americans. We want our politicians to be represented in heaven, so I figure they all need one of these guarantees. So if Congress grants me 1.2 billion dollars, I will issue enough guarantees to cover all our major politicians and many of the minor ones. I might even be able to cover some of the ones who are in prison right now. Course I'm going to need a bonus (like the big bank bosses got) and a nice hotel to live in (like Dallas mayor wants to build) and a corporate jet (at least as good as the one Lee Iaococa has) in order to complete my mission. Yeah, I figure 1.2 billion should cover it. But first I'm going to register myself as a minister of a church (that would be the church of IDM) so I don't have to pay any taxes anymore.

chisue - It may have become easier for Canadians but a few years ago it was a nightmare. That said (and I worked in a bank at one time) my boss in an M & A company used to just write U.S. $ on his Cdn. cheque and mail it off and it always cleared, but then I know that the Bank cleared it "by hand" - he was extremely well to do, which can make quite a difference as opposed to being a fee-paying middle class person. I remember before GardenWeb was taken over and I was going to join and pay the $15 US I think it was and the hoops I was going to have to go through - so I only looked at the "free" forums - wasn't worth buying a U.S. $ money order and paying the fee for that. Many Cdns. now have U.S. $ bank accounts so that might be helpful as well - we don't. And it used to be to get a U.S. $ credit card you had to have an address in the U.S. to have the statement delivered to. We are so similar yet when it comes to anything involving buying something ("shopping") we become international! Just ask any Cdn. ordering or trying to order something on-line from the U.S. - even if it is allowed, versus an American ordering from Canada. Big difference. By the way, I don't like PayPal - maybe because I almost signed up one day then changed my mind and even though it has been 5 years I keep getting e-mails regarding hacking into my account - spam of course - but rather alarming since I didn't even complete half of the application and of course did not submit it. It used to be that there was a bank in Wilmington, Delaware that could clear Cdn. cheques. When we were in NY last month I did see lots of TD Banks - we bank at TD in Toronto - but to do anything with my debit card I would have had to use the ATM machine - which thankfully had a PLUS sign - the way my day had been going I was expecting it not to. (I had just been trampled by a gaggle of teens who saw Jennifer Aniston and wanted to get to her.)

Greg H, Your message tells me how you are managing ... debt. Wisely, yes. To your advantage, yes. It's still ... debt. D-E-B-T - a four-letter word! Cut it whatever way you like, it's still debt. Which can be become a *serious* problem when it's misused. That you are obligated to pay - even if you get a temporary lay-off, or with certain specific skills no longer in demand, a pretty well permanent one, or suffer permanent disability, or have a kid who subsequently develops a need for $50,000. worth of uninsured medical care - or even die. There's only one way you can avoid it - go bankrupt. Which steals from other folks who gave you services in good faith, from which you walked away. Some do that several times - walk away ... smiling. The message was, as I said earlier, not directed to the likes of you or people anywhere near as smart as you when it comes to managing money. Like, maybe, your friend's kid who, though s/he was in college, wasn't too smart when it came to money management. A local Canadian financial consultant complains that they don't teach much about it in school. If the corporations, including the financial ones, get their feet more heavily into the schools, there'll probably be even less. In his book, he offers advice on how to make a rate of return of 40% or better on your money - guaranteed. Proviso - you can only make that (before-tax) rate on store-issued credit cards whose balance you pay off. Maybe, had your friend's offspring not been willing to pay attention to his/her parent, as being out of the dark ages when it came to instructions as to wise ways to live, s/he'd have listened to you had you offered some advice. The reason for making the point about it actually being a debt that was being incurred when you use the card was to try to get some people who know much less than you about money management to begin to think about it somehat differently. The point of the message was to show them how they might reduce their cost somewhat if they followed a different pattern than some may have started through following the easy path of signing up for a store-issued card. I approached it with some trepidation, for I was advising ... taking out an additional card. Which could (too?) easily have a major debt run up on it, as well - leaving the holder in a deeper hole than previously. Should I become aware of that result springing from advice which I had given, it would trouble me greatly. Much more concerned than I was about complaints such as yours - which I hear about half of the time that I make this point. By the way - you didn't say that I was wrong - you just said that everybody does it, right? By the way, elsewhere in the message, when I was not dealing with the specific issue of the debt aspect of the card, I referred to them without using the quotation marks. Your country - government and people - is drowning in debt. And digging the hole deeper, daily. The "value" of your dollar is dropping - had you noticed? Good wishes to you for wise management of your money - and assets, Greg. ole joyful