PTA is now a merchant
After many years of "meaning to do that soon", I've finally got around to making Perl Training Australia a merchant, and hence able to accept credit card transactions. At least that will be so once I fax in some ten pages of documents and provide the bank with a small sum of cash.

I've called an incredible number of banks in the process, and found a very wide difference in the knowledge of their representatives, particularly when it comes to on-line based systems, as opposed to ones with terminals.

What I also discovered is that there are products that exist that the banks do not advertise, and do not recommend when you explain your needs and requirements. You can't find these products unless you know about them already, or suspect they might based upon discussions with other banks. They're sort of like banking easter eggs.

Once I discovered the existance of these easter eggs, the process became much much simplier. Go to each bank, mention the magic words, and lo! An offer for an extremely low-fee and flexible facility appears. Either that, or the customer consultant gets very confused and you get transferred through five different departments.

The other thing I found surprising is the variation in fees and conditions for what is essentially the same service but at different banks. Sometimes a difference in ongoing charges and establishment fees of 300% was seen.

One particularly frustrating occurance was that different consultants from the same bank would disagree with each other. One bank gave me two pieces of conflicting advice regarding making payments into a third-party bank account. Another gave me three different pieces of advice as to our eligibility to use a particular service.

In the end, I found a very knowledgable consultant, who also happened to have done some Perl programming in the past, lived in the local area, was interested in learning more about GnuCash, and dismissed a number of the fees and charges that I had expected for the facility that I was after. I think I've made a friend in merchant services, and that should hopefully assist matters as they progress.

For those wondering what these merchant easter eggs happen to be, they're services provided by a group called Cardlink, who provide on-line processing capabilities. Cardlink operate on behalf of the banks to provide on-line terminal replacements, batch processing facilities, and real-time "e-commerce" facilities. They have a lot more technical clue than the banks, and their staff have been very helpful in answering my questions regarding standards and interoperability.

The downside is that Cardlink's programmer API is a windows-only system, and they can't provide me with the network protocol that gets used. That's okay, because I wasn't really planning to use their programming APIs in anger, and with the service I've negotiated I'm getting Cardlink's services for free. However cardlink have shown themselves to be quite clueful, and have informed me that they're very willing to look into providing alternate solutions based upon customer demand. That's a good sign.

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The cost of living
Time is money, and money is time. I'm in the fortunate position of being able to convert between the two very easily. I have lots of contacts and work available, so I can easily turn time into money by working. However that work also tends be very flexible. If I want to, I can arrange to have lots of time by delaying work, or outsourcing parts of it to others.

I find that I never have enough time. My overall goal is to ensure that I accumulate enough money -- which I can then turn into time -- so I can spend my days happily doing the things which I enjoy. These include learning, writing, gardening, spending time with friends, and spending time underwater. I'm also partial to the occasional game or two.

What I find interesting is looking at the rates at which I can sell time (by working) or buy time (just by living). This lets me convert from using dollars (which I don't really care about), to days (which I do).

Based upon the 2003-04 financial year, and excluding weddings and funerals, the cost of living for Jacinta and myself with our current lifestyle is about $72/day, plus tax. That drops to about $57.50/day (plus tax) if diving-related expenses are excluded.

Using these figures, I can answer all sorts of interesting questions. How many days could I spend relaxing if I didn't buy this new toy? How many days can I spend relaxing if I choose to allow this asset to be exhausted? How many days of relaxation do I get for doing a particular job?

However, the most interesting question, "when can I retire?" is not one that can be easily answered. I can retire when my investment revenue exceeds my cost of living -- or when I have around 20 years in the bank. I could retire before then, but not without the risk of finding myself short in my old age.

This means that my "cost of living" figures aren't as useful as I'd like them to be, as they only tell me what I'd gain in time if I spent my savings, not what I'd gain by investing them. Assuming a real ROI of 5%, I'll need twenty times my daily cost of living to obtain the cost of a "perpetual day", which in this case is about $1440. Each "perpetual day" of savings represents one day each year that I don't have to work.

A perpetual day is a much more useful measure of time to money -- "If I don't buy this new toy worth $1440, I can have an extra day off work each and every year for the rest of my life."

If I actually use the perpetual days that I have saved to let me relax each year, then I'll have 365 perpetual days worth of savings in about eight and a half years, assuming my rate of saving remains constant. Put another way, in around four years I'll need to do only half as much work as I do now.

Obviously if I continue to work as hard as I am now, I'll reach the end goal significantly sooner than 8.5 years. The same applies if I can continue to increase the rate at which I can save money.

Well, that's something to look forward to. I better get back to my accounting now.

Meet the flags
Is your flag HOT or NOT now has a meet the flags listing. Some of the discussions are quite educational. I'll expand these more as I have time.

Better online banking security.
It's good to see that the Bendigo Bank is actually taking a huge step in the right direction for online banking services. They're rolling out one time password generators to their clients. These mean that internet banking authentication is no longer based upon something you know (your account ID) and something you know (your password), but instead the much more secure somethings you know (account/password) and something you have (security token).

The bank previously had these devices for their business customers who wished to perform large transactions. However, my understanding is that they were only used for transactions (not login), and only the more expensive devices were available. The move to making inexpensive ($20) tokens available to all customers is fantastic.