financial

There was a time when people referred to the "American Dream." The dream was that if you worked hard and smart, that you could become something better than you were. Immigrants flooded our borders hoping to jump on the capitalism bandwagon and make something of themselves.

What's interesting is that they have. In fact, a study by Johns Hopkins in 2001 found that even when considering Caucasian European immigrants against native-born Caucasian American's (in order to remove any racial prejudice from the numbers,) immigrants generally had greater than a 35% better net worth.

As an employer, entrepreneur and father, the average work ethic in the US seriously concerns me. I have to say we have an exceptionally good batch of employees right now, but when we were located in Alabama, finding good employees was exceptionally hard. Several people seemed to feel entitled to work 5 hours a day, and then spend 3 of those browsing the Internet or chatting with other employees. Unfortunately I didn't just have a bad batch, it was something I saw over and over. If you had to let someone go due to lack of work ethic, suddenly they threatened you with a lawsuit (one even went to arbitration.)

Recently I finally gave in to my wife's promptings and got an American Express gold card. I've never wanted an AMEX before, just figured it's a hassle compared to using a debit card. I finally gave in.

The protections offered by AMEX as everyone knows are leaps and bounds above anything offered by a debit card, so losing your AMEX card isn't going to impact your checkbook like losing a debit card will. In addition, my card earns "reward points" that I'd never get if I just continued to use my debit card.

More importantly, the level of customer service from American Express is exemplary! I've already dealt with them twice. The first was when all my secondary cards arrived before my primary card arrived. Two days later I still didn't have the card in my name so I got nervous and called. He assured me it would be there shortly and suggested that if I didn't have it by the weekend to call and they would cancel the card that hadn't arrived and send a replacement via overnight UPS. What other company would send you a replacement card overnight?

Next, I was looking online and noticed my billing date would fall alongside my mortgage and both car payments, so I used their online system late Thursday evening to send an email asking how to get my billing date changed to the middle of the month. At 5:49 AM Friday morning I had received a response that they had changed my billing date for me per my request. Not only that but instead of sending out a bill when it would have been due, and then another two weeks later, they told me that my first bill would not arrive for an extra two weeks due to the change.

It's like night and day compared to dealing with any other card on the planet.