Biz
Bamboozle
Bamboozle
How careful are you when there is a fine print? What's the fine print you ask? The fine print is what's printed at the bottom of a contract/agreement, and the print is so small that you need a magnifying glass to even see it, unless you received via fax then it's completely unreadable because it's all smudged.
- I just renewed my mortgage. after long and hard fought negotiations, my bank offered me a 4.5% mortgage rate for 5 years. It's good but not outstanding. So I searched around, phoned... and finally found another bank that did offering me 4.01%. I almost took it. I was reading the mortgage contract, when 2 words peeked my attention: compounded semi-annually, this means that the principal1 was being reduced by my payments only every 6 month. So I ran an amortization table2 for both and: my bank at 4.5% was cheaper by $4,871 at then end of the 5 years than the other one at 4.01%, because the payments were compounded weekly.
- I was recently negotiating a contract and they wanted worldwide copyrights, forever until the end of times. Eventually we agreed on 18 month, their campaign was going to be 6 month. Everything was done via email, except toward the end it was done via a "crappy" low resolution fax. Since I could not read the contract, I got them to email it to me. It turns out that, they changed the copyrights portion of the contract to point to a web page! The web page did say what we agreed [almost], but a web page is very easily changed, and has no history. Were they trying to bamboozle me? Make your own opinion, but I got it back in writing in the contract.
How carefully do you read the fine print?
1 what I owe them ↑
2 a table with every payment, interest and principal ↑
How careful are you when there is a fine print? What's the fine print you ask? The fine print is what's printed at the bottom of a contract/agreement, and the print is so small that you need a magnifying glass to even see it, unless you received via fax then it's completely unreadable because it's all smudged.
- I just renewed my mortgage. after long and hard fought negotiations, my bank offered me a 4.5% mortgage rate for 5 years. It's good but not outstanding. So I searched around, phoned... and finally found another bank that did offering me 4.01%. I almost took it. I was reading the mortgage contract, when 2 words peeked my attention: compounded semi-annually, this means that the principal1 was being reduced by my payments only every 6 month. So I ran an amortization table2 for both and: my bank at 4.5% was cheaper by $4,871 at then end of the 5 years than the other one at 4.01%, because the payments were compounded weekly.
- I was recently negotiating a contract and they wanted worldwide copyrights, forever until the end of times. Eventually we agreed on 18 month, their campaign was going to be 6 month. Everything was done via email, except toward the end it was done via a "crappy" low resolution fax. Since I could not read the contract, I got them to email it to me. It turns out that, they changed the copyrights portion of the contract to point to a web page! The web page did say what we agreed [almost], but a web page is very easily changed, and has no history. Were they trying to bamboozle me? Make your own opinion, but I got it back in writing in the contract.
How carefully do you read the fine print?
1 what I owe them ↑
2 a table with every payment, interest and principal ↑
