When given the choice, I will always subscribe/pay/book directly with the company rather than use a 3rd party. If something goes wrong it's always easier to only need to deal with one company rather than two. Plus I'm choosing to start a relationship with a company that I give money to and thus want them to be able to use all of that money towards making the service and experience the best possible, rather than have them be handicapped by fees coming right off the top.
I have the opposite experience with subscriptions. Have you ever tried to cancel a gym membership? Famously, companies make it easy to sign up online, but require a phone call (likely with a wait) to cancel. Many places have passed explicit laws [1].
I was a monthly donator to a public radio show. After few years I wanted to switch credit cards (with no intention of canceling or changing my donation amount). They had redesigned their website and there was no discernible way to cancel or contact them. I blindly emailed them, but never got a response. My only recourse was to cancel the credit card.
Since then I've greatly preferred a third-party to manage subscriptions. For awhile it was Paypal. In the past decade it's been Patreon and Apple.
You're right that there are definitely some bad actors for cancelling subscriptions, it's really crappy you've had to deal with that! I once had a recurring charge from rackspace that neither myself nor rackspace's support could tell me which account the charges were associated with! Luckily my credit card company was able to put a block on any charges coming from rackspace rather than have to cancel the entire card.
I still think there are way more good companies than bad ones when it comes to cancelling and I do value building a relationship with the companies I patronize.
It is worrying to give so much power to a 3rd party, in this case google, who is notoriously difficult to deal with when an issue arises.
I'm a bit surprised the credit card companies or banks haven't come up with a system to manage reoccurring payments. They have to mediate these issues and are in a place where they can be a neutral-ish party to set standard rules. Its weird that it has ended up being "tech companies."
Do you have any tips on good screeners or places to find these SPACs? I've never invested in them yet and don't know too much about them. Are they traded just like regular stocks?
I look for them close to NAV don't like buying much out from there. The current best opportunities I see are, FPAC, TWCT, AACQ. They are priced well and should move when rumours come out. If you want one a little bit riskier but with a potentially sooner payoff, FUSE, rumoured to merge with Money Lion.
If your into options, SPACs with options create some great opportunities for Call Debit Spreads instead of having to buy commons and front the $10 redemption value.
There's also warrants which have more risk. FPAC+ and TWCTW are in my mind the best current warrants.
There is also Units! The best unit play right now I see is COOLU, its due to split soon and you will get one common and 1/3 of a warrant per unit, so buy in multiples of 3.
All of the tickers I mentioned are tech focused and backed by VC firms with a history of successful tech companies and SPACs.
There are a lot of garbage SPACs so you have to be careful.
Overall, your number one source for information should be SEC filings on Edgar. Read the documents there, research the management team, learn what the target payouts are and see who else is buying in.
SPACs are great and should last through the fall, the exchanges are looking at making direct listing much easier though and that will kill SPACs and probably be the move the pops the bubble.
The good thing about SPACs is that you have a focused management team of seasoned investors and you are investing with them and have the redemption price of $10 typically if there is a problem.
A SPAC is just a stock like any other. If you look for investor videos on YouTube, you'll find the same SPACs being pumped, both in pre-merger and post-merger form. There is also a SPAC ETF ("SPAK") that holds a bunch of them.
100% this. I made a pretty large costco order with instacart yesterday and expected to pay 15% in fees and tip, but when the order came I saw the store receipt and they overcharged me on almost every single item. The instacart order total was 35% more than what was spent at the store. The total lack of transparency is infuriating and I very much feel cheated.
Personally I really appreciate the photography and visual details of films and find that I feel I have to choose between reading the subtitles and noticing those intricate details in a film.
Unless you happen to have a magic crystal ball, it's a purely speculative gamble. Nothing about tsla's price is rational right now. The people who shorted yesterday probably thought the same thing...
All of the University of California schools (except for Berkeley and Merced) are on the quarter system. I really liked the quarter system. It really felt like professors couldn't waste your time with busy work activities. Everything was very focused.
UC Berkeley switched from quarters to semesters in 1983 ( https://dailybruin.com/2018/06/08/the-quad-the-long-convolut... ). At the time I thought it was because spring quarter is over later than spring semester (because of Christmas and New Year) and students from quarter-schools had a hard time finding summer jobs because the semester students had already taken all the jobs.
I went to school at a Canadian university with a 4 month summer break at the end of the winter semester: just as temperatures were warming up, it would last long enough to earn tuition, rent and food for the following school year.
What's the solution for unloading your car after a costco trip? How do I load my car for a camping trip? How do I unload lumber for my DIY home improvement projects? This project seems to have a very narrow view of how people live their lives.
By not having a gigantic costco a car-distance away, but by having smaller stores a bicycle-distance away. Making trips to the store becomes easier and more frequent allowing your shopping to fit in the saddle bags.
Barring that a big cargo bike can easily fit a couple car loads worth of cargo for the last-mile transport.
I imagine that the idea is that, for example, the lumber store would have a truck to deliver to your house, so that each and every person doesn’t need their own lumber-hauler.
