Welcome to Danville, Part 2

I wonder how much money will pass through Danville’s new Home Depot this weekend?  The first big store at  Coleman Marketplace opened its doors yesterday.  Tomorrow should be a big day for them as the weather will be nice and homeowners around Danville, VA will no doubt find new reasons to work on old house projects.  I’m sure Home Depot will feel quite welcome here in Virginia’s Piedmont!

I want to thank Home Depot for inviting our own “Dollars for Dually” campaign to be at their Grand Opening on Saturday as well.  All donations will go towards helping God’s Pit Crew replace their oldest dually pickup truck.  We’ll be there from 10:00am until 2:00pm along with WAKG 103.3FM.

Finally if you visit the Home Depot Grand opening tomorrow here’s a link to a Behr paint rebate. (Expires 6/30/08)

Keeping your name out of the paper

This week the City of Danville published the names, addresses, and amounts owed of everyone in town with delinquent real estate taxes. Instead of joining in with the many voices who say that these people deserve public shame and embarrassment, I’d like to approach it differently. We should all exercise at least a modicum of compassion before passing judgment on people who we don’t know anything else about except that their taxes are past due. I seriously doubt that the majority of real persons on that list intentionally decided to not pay their taxes, though a few may have. Most people have good intentions when it comes to paying their bills, and in general just living their lives. For these people perhaps one thing lead to another and the tax bill simply got put off repeatedly until it was just too overwhelming to deal with. This is the case with so many otherwise good people who don’t have a good spending plan or budget to make sure all their bills get paid on time.

Here’s a simple tip to keep your name from appearing in the paper. Start a special savings account for the sole purpose of paying taxes. You know how many times you get paid between now and when the tax bill comes in. Figure out how much you need to save every payday in order to have the money available when you need it. Direct Deposits and Payroll Deposits can be setup to automatically send a portion of your paycheck to this special savings account so that when the bill comes at the end of the year, the money will be there to pay it. The same account could be used to save up to pay for homeowners insurance, school tuition, or anything that you only pay once or twice per year.

Another option is to take out a loan to pay taxes. That’s probably a good option if your name is already on the list! Either way you go, loan or savings, take the time to sit down and map out proactively how you plan to spend your money in the coming months. Then stick to your plan!

2nd Annual Southside Show-Biz Tradeshow

Danville’s 2nd Annual Southside Show-Biz Tradeshow was packed with fun and excitement yesterday. Our booth was themed after the movie Casino Royale, the most recent James Bond film. Our guests could view a short slideshow of “007 Reasons to Join PCU”. They also played our roulette wheel to win chocolate casino chips and their choice of PCU prizes. (99% of our guests won! If one person wins everyone wins because that’s just how credit unions work. They benefit everyone who participates.) Those who landed on “00″ even got to go on a Top Secret Mission to decipher the hidden clues on our website. Of course we remind you never to play such games with real money. Save your real money at the credit union! Thank you to all our members who stopped by to say hello and win a prize. I hope others who stopped by will also take a moment to see what our credit union has to offer.

Many business whose employees may join our credit union were on display too. I did not get the chance to visit many other booths but here are the ones I recall. If I missed any let me know!

• Danville Public Schools – The group who founded PCU!
• Sylvan Learning Center- A new member group.
• Danville Community College – I don’t know if they were there but I saw lots of people with DCC name badges at the show. See our recent post about them here.
• Averett University – my alma mater!
• Carlisle School – a private school located in Martinsville with a satellite location in Danville.
• National College – Love that shade of Purple.
  
• Woodlawn Academy – a private school in Chatham.
• MFA(Riverside Healthcare, Piney Forest Healthcare, and Gretna Healthcare) – They had a MFA Idol contest! I really wanted to try their balance testing machine.
• Abingdon Place – I didn’t get to see their booth but they sometimes let me play their piano.
• Commonwealth Home Health Care kept us all hydrated with free bottled water. They also gave away a few DVD players.
• The Danville Register& Bee gave out newspapers, sodas, & popcorn.
• Dan Valley Foods
• WBTM 1330 and WAKG 103.3 were there.
• Dewberry had the coolest pens ever!
• Office Plus had what looked like half the store! They gave out a well stocked goodie bag as well.
• Multi-Wall Packaging

The newspaper reports that several hundred people attended from the community and over 70 area business participated. (They even published a photo of me in my Casino garb!)