We’re looking for basic tag sale information in our towns. Feel free in the comments section below this article, to tell us:

• Where (street address and town)
• When (time and days)
• Whatever else (Is it an estate sale? Is it at your house? Got anything special? A fundraiser for a local nonprofit organization?)

We’ll add more rows to the table as we get more information from you to help our readers plan their outings. (Nobody needs to be spending more money on gas these days!)

Want to add a tag sale for inclusion on a future weekend? It’s easy! Just log into your local Patch (free account) and click on “Post Your Own Event” at the bottom of the calendar right there on the homepage.

Here’s what we’ve found so far — happy hunting! (And be sure to upload a photo of your great find to this article.)

Lake Carmel	108 Towners Rd.	Fri., 9a.m.-4p.m.
Monroe	78 Old Colony Rd.	Fri., Sat., 8:30a.m.-3p.m.
New Rochelle	59 Hillside Ave.	Fri., 10a.m.-5p.m.; Sat., 9a.m.-6p.m.
Bedford Hills	720 N. Bedford Rd.	Fri., Sat., 10a.m.-5p.m.
Mahopac	77 Pigott Rd.	Sat.
White Plains	43 Partridge Rd.	Sat., 8a.m.-4p.m.
Hawthorne	265 Marietta Ave.	Sat., 9a.m.-3p.m.
Saugerties	80 Stephens Dr.	Sat., 8a.m.-2p.m.
Mt. Kisco	40 Byram Lake Rd.	Sat., 10:30a.m.
Yonkers	238 Croydon Rd.	Sat., 9a.m.-4p.m.
Putnam Valley	662 Oscawana Lake Rd.	Sat., Sun., 9a.m.-4p.m.
Fishkill	88 Mountain View Rd.	Sat., Sun., 9a.m.-5p.m.
Cortlandt Manor	5 Durrin Ave.	Sat., Sun., 10a.m.-4p.m.
Carmel	404 Nimham Ave.	Sat., Sun., 9a.m.-3p.m.
Hyde Park	81 S. Quaker Lane	Sat., Sun., 9a.m.-6p.m.
Scarsdale	848 Scarsdale Ave.	Sun., 7:30a.m.

Bedford police are cautioning residents about a recent rash of telephone scams in the area.

What typically happens, according to police, is a resident will receive a call from someone who claims to be a relative of the victim, usually a grandchild, said Lt. Jeffrey Dickan. 

The caller then describes a situation where money is needed—for example, to cover damage to a car or to get bail for a drunk driving charge. In some cases, the callers have claimed to kidnap a relative of the victim, and asked for a ransom.

Then the requests the resident to send money via Western Union.

If locals receive these types of calls, police warn, they should phone the supposed relative that the perpetrator claims to be. In some cases, residents have sent the money—which has been picked up in a foreign country—and this intereres with police further investigating the matter.

“If anyone receives a call like those described, locals should first contact the relative, then contact the police,” said Dickan in a press statement. “We will assist you in contacting [the relative].”

Dickan cautioned that the caller has in some instances put someone else on the line, who might claim to be a police officer. “Gather as much information as possible before sending any money,” he said.

The police can be reached at (914) 241-3111 for any questions.

 

 

Although not as common as they were just a few years ago, there are still various loan programs that give people an option to have a prepayment penalty.

If you get a mortgage that has a prepayment penalty, it means that you are agreeing in writing that should you “prepay” the mortgage before a specified period of time (usually less than 5 years) then you agree to pay a specified “penalty” to the lender.  Some prepayment penalties require you to agree to the penalty only under certain circumstances (for example, you may not have to pay if you sell your house), others require you to pay the penalty regardless of the reason you prepaid the mortgage.

When a lender agrees to loan you money, they have calculated their expected return on the mortgage and built it into their models, even calculating the period of time that they expect you to have the mortgage before it “prepays.”

Although winning the lottery happens, the most common reason that someone would prepay a loan off before the maturity is that they were able to find a loan offered by another lender with a lower interest rate and refinanced out of their current mortgage and into a new mortgage.

When interest rates drop, many people refinance and prepay numbers go up dramatically.

How To Tell If You Have A Prepayment Penalty On Your Mortgage

The easiest way to find out if you currently have a prepayment penalty is to dig out the paperwork you have from when you signed your final paperwork and look for your mortgage note.  Most often, there will be wording in your note that outlines the prepayment penalty terms.  Sometimes there will also be something called a “Prepayment Penalty Rider,”, but it will vary depending on when you closed your loan and your lender.

Are Prepayment Penalties “Bad”?

Some loans never allow a prepayment penalty. For example, there is never a prepayment penalty on an FHA loan, VA loan or USDA loan.  Does this mean that prepayment penalties are bad?

Prepayment penalties aren’t bad — in fact, I tend to view them as a potentially good thing.  For example, let’s say that in exchange for agreeing to a prepayment penalty a homeowner:

• Is aware of the prepayment penalty, what it means and what the terms of the prepayment penalty are

and

• Received a lower interest rate and/or lower closing costs

and

• Is given the choice of having the prepayment penalty

Then, a prepayment agreement can be a good thing for both homeowner and lender.

The simple reason many people think that prepayment penalties are “bad”?  Because, in the past,  people haven’t been made aware of these three things.

Justin McHood works for Academy Mortgage and is based in Chandler, AZ. He is a contributor to Zillow Blog and has conversations about mortgages whenever he can. Learn more about Justin at http://www.mortgagecommentator.com.

Social Plugin Analytics in Google Analytics

Thursday, July 07, 2011 | 10:59 AM

With our recent Social Plugin Analytics launch you now have the ability to analyse how users engage with any social plugin such as Google’s +1 button and Twitter’s Tweet button. Now it’s time for the lowdown on how to set this feature up to work for you. If you are a developer, you should pay particularly close attention.

If you’ve added +1 buttons to your site and your Analytics implementation is up to date, integration is automatic and you should already see data in your account. You can ensure the +1 integration is working by taking some simple steps.

If you want to integrate with other social plugins, like Twitter, we’ve also made it really easy. The latest version of the tracking code has a new _trackSocial method to capture various aspects of a social plugin interaction. Using the async javascript snippet, the easiest way to call this method is to use:

_gaq.push([‘_trackSocial’, socialNetwork, socialAction]);

And if you’re using the traditional snippet you’ll need to use this syntax:

var pageTracker = _gat._createTracker(‘UA-xxxxx-y’);
pageTracker._trackSocial(socialNetwork, socialAction);

You then want to call this method somewhere where you know the social plugin has been clicked on. We’ve included some example on how this work with Twitter’s plugin API as well as Facebook’s plugin API and you can see a working demo here. Sweet!

If you are building an integration for use by several Analytics users we encourage you to use the code for the async snippet for now. Also, to enable the development of integrations such as these we would like to share with our customers that we are working toward better compatibility between the sync and async tags with the goal of enabling calls such as _trackSocial to work for both version with the same syntax.

Finally, if you are a developer of a content management plugin which adds social plugins to websites, or if you build social plugins, we want to work with you! Ideally we’d love for all users of your plugin and Google Analytics to have seamless social analytics. In the developer community spirit we’re giving out free t-shirts to the first 100 developers who integrate a social plugin, or a Content Management plugin that adds social widgets to sites with Google Analytics. Let us know what you’ve done by submitting your plugin here.

UPDATE: 7/8/11 5:30pm PST, corrected references to the social plugin analytics feature.

Posted by John Jersin, Google Analytics Team

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Top iPhone apps to read, scan, sort business cards

Most popular free and paid downloads

Editor’s note: This continually updated list, powered by app-ranking site TopAppCharts.com, displays the most popular free and paid iPhone apps related to business cards, based on a search of the phrase “business card” at app-ranking site TopAppCharts.com. The list includes apps that can scan physical business cards and digitize their contents as text:

Source: TopAppCharts.com.