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Deciding to use credit consolidation services as a tool to get your finances back under control is an important step and should never be taken lightly. There is such a big demand for these types of businesses that there seems to be new ones popping up everyday now. Even though they all promise to help you eliminate your debt, many fail to deliver. To help every consumer with their decision making process we have listed a few questions that need to be asked before deciding which credit consolidation program is right for them.Source: http://ezinearticles.com/6671122
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Satellite radio was one of the biggest success stories of the past decade. A generation ago, it seemed absurd that people would pay for radio. Then again, the same thing could've been said about television a generation earlier.
Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio hit the market with competing platforms, merged in 2008, and now combine to serve premium content to more than 21.3 million accounts. Sirius XM Radio (SIRI) CEO Mel Karmazin expects to tack on another 440,000 net subscribers during the holiday quarter.
Things seem to be going swimmingly at the media giant, going by this week's third-quarter report. Revenue is growing at a mere 6% clip, but earnings, free cash flow, and adjusted EBITDA are increasing at healthy rates. In other words, the model works. Expanding margins and sustainable profitability led credit rating agency Standard & Poor's to upgrade shares of Sirius XM Radio last week.
Could things get any better? Sirius XM is so confident in the quality of its product that it's boosting its primary monthly rates by 12% -- from $12.95 to $14.49 -- early next year.
The rub is that it can all go away, faster than you can say Baba Booey.
Watch Your Step
There are a few things that Sirius XM would prefer to see go away.
For starters, the average monthly revenue per user has shrunk from $11.81 to $11.66 over the past year. One of the reasons for this is that Sirius XM finds itself discounting its service to both attract new customers and retain existing subscribers.
Call up Sirius XM's customer service -- if you dare -- and threaten to cancel. Don't be surprised if they offer you a sweetheart deal to stick around.
It makes sense for Sirius XM to bend over backward since this is one of the more scalable models out there given its high fixed overhead and low variable costs. However, it's not exactly what you want to see happening just two months ahead of a widely publicized rate hike.
Folks also aren't converting as eagerly as they used to. Sirius XM's conversion rate -- the percentage of new car buyers who begin paying for satellite radio after their free trials expire -- has fallen from 48.1% to 44.4% over the past year. Again, this isn't the trend that any company wants to see before it makes its product even less attractive through higher prices.
These Audio Turnstiles Click Both Ways
Churn is a part of any subscriber-based business, but it's important to see this from the vantage point of gross additions and subtractions. Sirius XM ended the third quarter with 334,000 more subscribers than it had three months earlier, but this is actually the difference between 2,138,131 signing up for satellite radio and 1,804,448 people cancelling their accounts. These gross additions aren't cheap, even if subscriber acquisition costs are down to $55 per head. More important, the sheer volume of folks going in and out indicates that this industry is more mature than you probably think. It's not as if no one outside of its current 21.3 million subscribers has ever tried the service. They have, and every year more than 6 million listeners deactivate their receivers.
The math still works for Sirius XM. The company has been routinely profitable since early last year. However, what if the slow subscriber growth -- clocking in the mid-single digits on a year-over-year basis in recent quarters -- isn't as much a sign of the economic times or of sluggish car-buying trends as it is of a service that is simply peaking in popularity?
Tomorrow's Lose-Lose Scenario
Smart listeners will have every right to challenge January's price increase. Even if Sirius XM positions the move as adding just a nickel a day to someone's tab, it's not as if the increase is justified. Programming and content costs have actually declined 10% over the past year. Kindles and iPhones get cheaper over time. Why is Sirius XM taking a page out of Netflix's (NFLX) ill-advised playbook?
Source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/11/05/sirius-trouble-is-satellite-radio-headed-for-a-fall/
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What if there were a solution to many of the global problems that confront us, from climate change to poverty to civil wars? There is, but it is starved of resources. It’s called family planning, and it has been a victim of America’s religious wars.
Partly for that reason, the world’s population just raced past the seven billion mark this week, at least according to the fuzzy calculations of United Nations demographers. It took humans hundreds of thousands of years, until the year 1804, to reach the first billion. It took another 123 years to reach two billion, in 1927. Since then, we’ve been passing these milestones like billboards along a highway. The latest billion took just a dozen years...
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Satellite radio was one of the biggest success stories of the past decade. A generation ago, it seemed absurd that people would pay for radio. Then again, the same thing could've been said about television a generation earlier.
Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio hit the market with competing platforms, merged in 2008, and now combine to serve premium content to more than 21.3 million accounts. Sirius XM Radio (SIRI) CEO Mel Karmazin expects to tack on another 440,000 net subscribers during the holiday quarter.
Things seem to be going swimmingly at the media giant, going by this week's third-quarter report. Revenue is growing at a mere 6% clip, but earnings, free cash flow, and adjusted EBITDA are increasing at healthy rates. In other words, the model works. Expanding margins and sustainable profitability led credit rating agency Standard & Poor's to upgrade shares of Sirius XM Radio last week.
Could things get any better? Sirius XM is so confident in the quality of its product that it's boosting its primary monthly rates by 12% -- from $12.95 to $14.49 -- early next year.
The rub is that it can all go away, faster than you can say Baba Booey.
Watch Your Step
There are a few things that Sirius XM would prefer to see go away.
For starters, the average monthly revenue per user has shrunk from $11.81 to $11.66 over the past year. One of the reasons for this is that Sirius XM finds itself discounting its service to both attract new customers and retain existing subscribers.
Call up Sirius XM's customer service -- if you dare -- and threaten to cancel. Don't be surprised if they offer you a sweetheart deal to stick around.
It makes sense for Sirius XM to bend over backward since this is one of the more scalable models out there given its high fixed overhead and low variable costs. However, it's not exactly what you want to see happening just two months ahead of a widely publicized rate hike.
Folks also aren't converting as eagerly as they used to. Sirius XM's conversion rate -- the percentage of new car buyers who begin paying for satellite radio after their free trials expire -- has fallen from 48.1% to 44.4% over the past year. Again, this isn't the trend that any company wants to see before it makes its product even less attractive through higher prices.
These Audio Turnstiles Click Both Ways
Churn is a part of any subscriber-based business, but it's important to see this from the vantage point of gross additions and subtractions. Sirius XM ended the third quarter with 334,000 more subscribers than it had three months earlier, but this is actually the difference between 2,138,131 signing up for satellite radio and 1,804,448 people cancelling their accounts. These gross additions aren't cheap, even if subscriber acquisition costs are down to $55 per head. More important, the sheer volume of folks going in and out indicates that this industry is more mature than you probably think. It's not as if no one outside of its current 21.3 million subscribers has ever tried the service. They have, and every year more than 6 million listeners deactivate their receivers.
The math still works for Sirius XM. The company has been routinely profitable since early last year. However, what if the slow subscriber growth -- clocking in the mid-single digits on a year-over-year basis in recent quarters -- isn't as much a sign of the economic times or of sluggish car-buying trends as it is of a service that is simply peaking in popularity?
Tomorrow's Lose-Lose Scenario
Smart listeners will have every right to challenge January's price increase. Even if Sirius XM positions the move as adding just a nickel a day to someone's tab, it's not as if the increase is justified. Programming and content costs have actually declined 10% over the past year. Kindles and iPhones get cheaper over time. Why is Sirius XM taking a page out of Netflix's (NFLX) ill-advised playbook?
Source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/11/05/sirius-trouble-is-satellite-radio-headed-for-a-fall/
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Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s call to hold a referendum on the rescue package agreed at the eurozone summit in late October has profound implications for European governance. It may also determine the future of the euro.
Less than one week before Papandreou dropped his bombshell, eurozone leaders had spoken unequivocally: “The introduction of the European Semester has fundamentally changed the way our fiscal and economic policies are coordinated at European level, with co-ordination at EU level now taking place before national decisions are taken.” Simply put, pan-eurozone financial governance had supposedly won the day.
Technically, Papandreou’s proposed referendum is not directly about fiscal or economic policy, but it is a decision that will have huge economic ramifications for the eurozone. Despite that, it was taken without any coordination with other eurozone leaders. Moreover, if Greece’s voters reject the deal that has just been proposed to them, the outcome might foreclose any further coordination on the country’s debt problems with the European Union. Greece would sink or swim on its own.
So, only days after the eurozone’s heads of state and government congratulated themselves on their summit success, the concept of coordination has been shown to be meaningless for the one country where coordination matters most. Papandreou’s move also exposes the fatal flaw of grand plans for a political or fiscal union to support the euro: the “people,” not governments, remain the real sovereign.
Governments may sign treaties and make solemn commitments to subordinate their fiscal policy to the wishes of the EU as a whole (or to be more precise, to the wishes of Germany and the European Central Bank); but, in the end, the people may reject any adjustment program that “Brussels” (meaning Berlin and Frankfurt) might want to impose.
The EU remains a collection of sovereign states, and it therefore cannot send an army or a police force to enforce its pacts or collect debt. Any country can leave the EU – and, of course, the eurozone – when the burden of its obligations becomes too onerous. Until now, it had been assumed that the cost of exit would be so high that no country would consider it. This no longer seems to be the case – or so the Greeks, at least, seem to believe.
This also implies that Eurobonds will never constitute the silver bullet that some had hoped would solve Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis. As long as member states remain fully sovereign, investors cannot be assured that if the eurozone breaks up, some states will not simply refuse to pay – or will not refuse to pay for the others.
With popular resistance to paying for profligate southern Europeans rising in Germany and Holland, governments there might be forced to ask their people whether they want to pay the huge costs implied by their commitments to bail out eurozone members that are unwilling or unable to pay. That is why the bonds issued by the eurozone’s rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, are trading at a substantial premium relative to German debt, while efforts by Klaus Regling, the EFSF’s head, to convince China, Japan, and other Asians to buy the bonds have gotten nowhere.
The broader message of the Greek move is that “coordination” has so far been a code word for almost total control by creditors (sometimes together with the ECB). The attempt to impose a benevolent creditors’ dictatorship is now being met by a debtors’ revolt. Financial markets have reacted so strongly because investors now comprehend that “sovereign debt” is the debt of a sovereign that can simply decide not to pay.
Holders of bonds of the eurozone’s member states have now been put on notice that, when the going gets tough, the real sovereign, “We, the people,” might be asked whether they actually want to pay. And the answer might very well be an emphatic “no,” as opinion polls in Greece and the experience of Iceland (whose population twice voted down deals agreed by the Icelandic government) suggest is likely.
Nobody can know at this point whether Portugal or Italy might be the next stops on this road of resistance. The result, however, is quite predictable: soaring risk premia throughout the periphery.
Papandreou’s decision to call a referendum in Greece could thus mean the beginning of the endgame for the euro. At this point, the common currency can be saved only if systemically important countries – namely, Italy and Spain – take concerted action to demonstrate that they are different from Greece.
This post originally appeared at Project Syndicate.
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The denial of a bankruptcy discharge can happen for several reasons, one of those reasons includes making false oaths and accounts. Either the bankruptcy trustee or the creditor can accuse the debtor of making false oaths or accounts and demand that the discharge is denied. Let's take a deeper look at these issues in a bankruptcy:Source: http://ezinearticles.com/6669146
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Source: http://www.legaldebthelponline.com/2011/11/03/are-there-reliable-debt-consolidation-companies/