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Fall is a busy time. Now is the time to winterize and our fall home maintenance ideas can help you to:

*Keep the value of your property
*Get your yard and garden ready for next spring
*Do outside preventive maintenance before harsh winter takes its toll
*Do inside preventive maintenance to reduce heating bills
*Have furnaces inspected

Seed your lawn to replenish grass in bare spots auto insurance specialists well as to fertilize the grass. Nutrients will seep into the soil over winter. Your grass will be stronger and fuller in the spring.

Your fall home maintenance ideas should include cleaning gutters. Leaves become a pesky nuisance if they collect and clog your gutters, which can result in water running over the edges and can cause roof damage if the water freezes beneath your shingles. Clean gutters and apply any gutter guards, such as screens. Leaves and other debris won't collect and block gutters. Water will flow off the roof and through downspouts.

Replace any missing gutters to prevent water from collecting near the foundation which can cause leaks and your house to sink or settle. Pressure from frozen ground may push basement walls, causing cracks. Replace any missing downspouts as well.

Check windows for cracks and leaks. Replace cracked glass and any loose glaze or window putty. Check window frames and sills for a proper and tight fit. Caulk any warped spots or loose spots to prevent heat loss. Clear plastic can also be used as airtight cover inside windows. Double sided tape around the window frame holds the plastic securely in place.

Insects love leaf piles as a place to winter and multiply. Remove leaves near your house or foundation to reduce insect pest problems inside your house in the spring. Prune rose bushes and peonies. Peonies can be cut to the ground. Rose bushes should be pruned to the woody parts of the rose stems - about 6 inches or more from the ground.

Now is the time to plant tulip, daffodil, and crocus bulbs for spring gardens. Tulips and daffodils are planted 6 inches deep. Crocus bulbs can be planted a few inches over tulips and daffodils. The crocus will bloom first in the spring, followed by the tulips and daffodils.

Having your furnace inspected is a must for your fall home maintenance ideas. If you live in areas of freezing temperatures or below, drain your hose and store it. Water left in the hose may freeze, causing your hose to split. Window air conditioners in these climates should be removed or covered for the winter.

Electric outlets and light switches on exterior walls can let drafts rob you of your warm heated inside air. Special thin Styrofoam insulation template pieces, found at most hardware and home improvement stores, are made just for these drafts. Simply remove the light switch or outlet cover, insert the Styrofoam insulation template and put the cover back on. These fall home maintenance ideas should help you all winter.

Wendy Pan is an accomplished niche website developer and author. To learn more about maintainingmyhomeandgardentoday.info/save-expenses-with-our-list-of-fall-home-maintenance-ideas/fall home maintenance ideas, please visit maintainingmyhomeandgardentoday.info/Maintaining My Home and Garden Today for current articles and discussions.

Honest disagreement

One of the things that I really enjoy as a commentator on business is the opportunity that it provides to listen carefully to an obviously clever and successful individual and then, hopefully with a degree of surgical precision, destroy every argument that they have put forward.

I have long enjoyed that attitude toward John Moulton the founder of Alchemy. I listen, I respect and then - generally - I reject. All good clean fun and challenging exercise for my aging brain.

It came as something of a shock, therefore to find that when Mr. Moulton was featured on the radio recently I listened with diligence, considered his arguments and, to my mild dismay I found that I agreed with every word that he said.

Lehman et al

John Moulton was commenting on the greed and hubris that had been exercised without restraint and from which we will all suffer - except for those that perpetrated the acts of idiocy, mendacity and wild, unbridled avarice.

He was making the point that the criminals of the finance sector were not merely still enjoying their "ill gottens". The prisons were still being run by the same criminals. Worse, having, by any standards demonstrated that their claimed abilities were at best questionable, they, of all people are now holding forth as if they are the ideal authorities to resolve the problems that they have caused.

Surely it is not so long ago when the dot com debacle occurred that the lessons have been forgotten? Then, supposedly sharp money men spent millions of investors money on vague and unrealistic business propositions that they did not understand. And then, following spectacular failures, spoke at high profile conferences about how not to do it next time. As one of a kindly disposition I used to hope that they would choke on their rubber chicken.

Impressive or what?

Among the architects of the financial sector's miseries there are a few that with all the sincerity of an atheist reciting the general confession state firmly and with courage, "I take full responsibility!"

How brave, how touching, but they are still in a job. What is worse, they clearly have every intention of continuing to draw their excessive earnings for years as they apparently wait idly by, Micawber-like, for "something to turn up". "There is no short term solution to the pain" they say; give no indication of having a strategy - much less tactics - to mitigate the mess and while they avoid action, they are happy to talk - and talk - and....

If asked what sanctions result from their assumption of "full responsibility" they reply with a degree of cockney impertinence that Ruskin would have found infinitely more irritating than that he ascribed to Whistler, that there is no relationship between acts and consequences when one reaches their exalted position.

The rest of us do not equity loan bad credit "Go", we find that to collect 200 or any other sum is becoming, for most people virtually impossible. The wickedness of it is that the top executives seem to survive whilst those who have put their trust in them see their investments, large or small, disappear.

Lex in the Financial Times fulminates against grotesquely overpaid Chief Executives whose only claim to fame is that they collect their largess as they destroy stockholder value - with it seems, little practical effect.

Mr. Moulton, I salute you - just this once I hope - old habits are hard to break.

The missing ingredient

In the midst of all the brouhaha there is a key missing ingredient, one that I am certain the astute reader such as yourself, will have spotted. We have Top Level execs hired at great cost, paid fabulous sums and "earning" even greater bonuses for making short term profits and surrounding themselves with "golden goodbyes". We have traders earning vast sums gambling short term with long term deposits and raking off a decent percentage for themselves (under Top Level Execs guidance). And we have the short term investors caring for nothing but instant growth and dividends, yet keen to cry 'foul' when "the value of an investment may fall as well as rise".

So where, in the midst of this, is the humble customer? For without those customers having the confidence to lend the banks their hard earned cash, then those who gamble with the bank's long term future on those leveraged deposits, have no toys to play with. The trust that's needed for the banking system to operate can be carelessly lost.

This is a clear example of the lack of "joined up thinking" in the banking sector that so easily destroys that trust. To quote David Butler, who should know as he has served on the Investment Committee of the United Bank of Kuwait, and whose summaries are always so eloquent:

They think they know what the bank's top team strategy is: (plan approved by the Board)

They think they know what the managers and staff are doing: (HR director's reports)

They think they know what the customers think: (x million dollars per annum on market research data)

BUT they never think of relating each of these factors to the other two.

Duh....

Mr. Moulton, (and even perhaps Homer Simpson whose intellectual capacity competes favourably with some overpaid executives it seems), - you may have more in common than you think. Should you be talking? Of course my one track mind suggests that the subject matter should be Customer Engagement....but then it usually does.

Prof Tom Lambert author, international consultant and avid researcher is Chairman of TripleIC, the only company authorised to use the Lambert Protocol. It measures your Customer Engagement (the vital key to sustained success) Come and meet the team at tripleictripleic