Step3 Prophet

Credit Card Disputed Charge (2nd Try)

I was reviewing my monthly statement from CHASE last weekend when I noticed something odd. I had a charge for $370 from a company called Istock *International. My first thought was, what the hell did I spend $370's on? A week before that I had purchased a digital still camera in Singapore for nearly the same amount, but I had already identified that purchase. It's not uncommon for me to not remember exactly what I purchased a month ago, but the size of the purchase and the unknown vender struck me as odd, so I did a little more research. I concluded that the purchase could either have been for a Macintosh stock screening application, or an online stock photograph vender. Neither of these purchases makes sense for me, especially since I was on travel to Manila pretty much the whole day in question, so I decided to dispute the charge.
            I was surprised at how easy CHASE made it. I've disputed an unknown charge on one of my credit cards once before, but that was about 10 years ago and I remember that it took awhile just to find out that it was a charge I had made after all but didn't recognize the company name. This time was quite different. CHASE walked me through the steps of identifying to them the charge in question, categorizing what I thought was wrong with the charge, provided me the merchants phone number, and allowed me to give them any comments I had or the merchant had if I contacted them. Using the phone number provided I was able to determine that it was, in fact, the photostock vender who assessed the charge. I'm not keen on paying for random photos since I don't use them professionally, especially digital ones. I tried calling them, but they were closed for the weekend so I went ahead with the dispute anyway. As a final step, CHASE asked me to mail in any evidence I had for the dispute. Since this was a charge I suspect I did not authorize, I have no evidence to send in.
            This morning I got a reply from CHASE saying that their initial assessment is that the charge was invalid, so they are giving me a credit toward next months bill. If the merchant offers evidence to the contrary the matter may come up again, as near as I can tell it's settled. Sweet! That was easy.

(I'm still playing around with email postings. For some reason my first post today didn't show the text!)

TSP redistibution and email blog test

  This post mainly to test my ability to email a post to my blog before I leave for a high seas adventure. I'll only have limited connectivity, so being able to email in blog posts would be a real time saver.
  I decided to change my allocation mix and my overall distribution of funds in my retirement account at work. My new split is 25% each to fixed income, large cap, small cap, and foreign investments. Probably not an ideal distribution, but then, my work retirement funds are only a portion of my overall investments. What I really wanted was a little more exposure to fixed income, handy way to gauge it a sector was over or under performing based on my own portfolio. That way I can make future redistribution and allocation choices more strategic.
 My retirement accounts are still pretty small right now, so it's not a huge change in allocation, but they will be growing rapidly based on my current investment rate which is designed to maximize my TSP contributions for this year.

October Update

Once again I've let the blog go on too long without a post. This is getting to be like my gym membership! J/K, my gym membership is free, so I don't feel guilty about not going to the gym for monetary reasons. However, I should still exercise more, and I should still post more as well. To be fair I've been out at sea for about half the time since I moved to Japan, but typepad has an email post feature that I'm going to try and take advantage of in the future.

So where am I know now in terms of finance? Not surprisingly I've been doing well since coming to Japan. While I pay more for housing and life's necessities like food and transportation, I'm also being compensated more for the cost of living difference. The networthIQ badge shows almost steady growth (baring a few stock market ups and downs).

Recently I've also taken care of a few personal finance basics. I picked up a money magazine at the airport during some of my recent travels, and while most of the financial advice it gave was stuff I already knew, sometimes you have to be reminded. That's why I just got my credit report from www.annualcreditreport.com. My credit situation hasn't changed much, but you should check for errors every 4 months or so and It's been about 9 months since I last checked.

Along those same lines I finally signed up for creditkarma.com. It's a web site that will check your credit with one of the bureuas and give you a free fico score. I've heard good things about it, but hadn't tried it until now. I found the site was pretty easy to use, and gave some good advise and tips about how to manage you credit limit. The only piece of advice I didn't agree with is the sugestion that you should open lots of credit accounts to improve your score. While this will increase you lower you credit to debt ratio, I think having many accounts exposes you to more risk. Another interesting thing it does is track fico history. I'll log in again in a couple of months to see if it has an update.