Why Should I Make a Budget?

You say you know where your money goes and you don’t need it all written down to keep up with it? I issue you this challenge. Keep track of every penny you spend for one month and I do mean every penny.

You will be shocked at what the itty-bitty expenses add up to. Take the total you spent on just one unnecessary item for the month, multiply it by 12 for months in a year and multiply the result by 5 to represent 5 years.

That is how much you could have saved AND drawn interest on in just five years. That, my friend, is the very reason all of us need a budget.

If we can get control of the small expenses that really don’t matter to the overall scheme of our lives, we can enjoy financial success.

The little things really do count. Cutting what you spend on lunch from five dollars a day to three dollars a day on every work day in a five day work week saves $10 a week… $40 a month… $480 a year… $2400 in five years….plus interest.

See what I mean… it really IS the little things and you still eat lunch everyday AND that was only one place to save money in your daily living without doing without one thing you really need. There are a lot of places to cut expenses if you look for them.

Set some specific long term and short term goals. There are no wrong answers here. If it’s important to you, then it’s important period.

If you want to be able to make a down payment on a house, start a college fund for your kids, buy a sports car, take a vacation to Aruba… anything… then that is your goal and your reason to get a handle on your financial situation now.

Thursday Thoughts on Self Publishing:

The beauty of self-promotion is that it is uniquely suited to the Internet where self-made experts can reap very big profits, even though they’ve never gone through conventional business channels.

For instance, if you are trying to get published with a major publishing house, you will probably face the Catch-22 where they will only publish well-known authors or those people who have already made a name for themselves in their business.

Using the WWW you can make yourself the expert and start to build a marketing platform AND print your ebook to an audience of interested parties, without having to get the approval of a major publishing house. Then, after you’ve convinced everyone that you really are an expert on something, if you want to go through the official channels, it will be much easier to convince them to publish your books. ~ Connor

A Few Links on Self Publishing I Ran Across Today:

• http://www.lulu.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-publishing
• www.Xlibris.com/SelfPublish

How to Create a Blog in Minutes

How to Create a Blog in Minutes – kewego

How to Create a Blog in Minutes – kewego
http://www.ccdownloads.net/ Free Killer Software Downloads – 100% Legal. In this video we will cover how anyone can create a web 2.0 blog in a mere few minutes.

Keywords: free blog how to blog free ftp software free blog software download

Planning to release a high priced product or package?

Then study this important fact: at the average, around 80% of your sales will be made on the first day. Therefore, it is essential to have that perfect product launch to guarantee that your first day of sales will be a tremendous triumph.

1. Forget the concept of a big ticket product. It’s always a big ticket PACKAGE. Boost up the perceived value of the primary product you are planning to offer by packaging it with high powered extras that your customers will love. Provide for them an item and it’ll be difficult to convince them to make a purchase. Provide for them a package and they’ll get excited to know what are inside of the same.

2. Create a joint venture, or JV, with well-known online businessmen. If they accept your invitation, they will be your JV partners. They will provide aid in selling your package. To repay their help, you have to provide for them a commission for every successful sale they will be able to lead to your sales page. JV partners often expect a commission rate of 50% of the selling price, per sale. Truly, JV partners are comparable to affiliates, only, with the comprehensive selection method you will require, you will be able to associate yourself with JV partners who will give you access to a bigger audience courtesy of their big mailing lists, more value for your package thanks to the extras they will provide which will be taken from their own inventory of products, and better promotional mileage because of the many JV partners who share your sales goals.

3. Generate pre-launch hype. All the biggest online marketing product launches in recent memory generated a high level of pre-launch buzz. Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing intrigued a lot of people with the alleged leaked chapter of the main eBook product of the package. Frank Kern’s Mass Control tried to win a phenomenal amount of attention by releasing several high impact, high value videos in the days towards the release of his baby project. These campaigns earned more than a million dollars on the first day of the release of their packages. Building pre-launch buzz will guarantee enough traffic come the day of launch, visitors who will already be excited to check out what your product is all about.

Hope you enjoy ~ Connor http://www.small-business-credit.org

Families exists only on paper says Sylvia Porter

“The average family exists only on paper and its average budget is a fiction,invented by statisticians for the convenience of statisticians.”
Sylvia Porter

Found this quote online today, and something about it really struck home for me.

Once you start probing family budgets, expending time and energy researching the
subject in-depth, it becomes quite clear, that most families are caught in a vicious,
almost never-ending cycle of “What comes in must go out.”

Most families might feel that budgeting is a futile effort, unnecessarily burdening
them with thoughts and ways, to go broke methodically and slowly, without the
creature comforts and indulgences of our human modern-day society.

Others might voice that they feel as if they are merely throwing money away, in a
never-ending and dizzying spiral of spend, spend, spend. People are getting deeper
and deeper into debt, no matter how hard they try to get out of it. Questions are
then raised : How do we stop these courses of action? How do we change the
thinking around family fiscal discipline?

Learning How to Boost My Credit Score

Note: Here is some good info I ran across when I tried to get a second mortgage several years back, and had a rude awakening. Hope someone finds it useful. Connor

There are many misconceptions about credit scores out there. There are customers
who believe that they don’t have a credit score and many customers who think that
their credit scores just don’t really matter. These sorts of misconceptions can hurt
your chances at some jobs, at good interest rates, and even your chances of getting some apartments.

The truth is, of you have a bank account and bills, then you have a credit score, and your credit score matters more than you might think. Your credit score may be
called many things, including a credit risk rating, a FICO score, a credit rating, a
FICO rating, or a credit risk score. All these terms refer to the same thing: the three digit number that lets lenders get an idea of how likely you are to repay your bills.

Every time you apply for credit, apply for a job that requires you to handle money, or even apply for some more exclusive types of apartment living, your credit score is checked.

In fact, your credit score can be checked by anyone with a legitimate business need
to do so. Your credit score is based on your past financial responsibilities and past
3 payments and credit, and it provides potential lenders with a quick snapshot of your current financial state and past repayment habits.

In other words, your credit score lets lenders know quickly how much of a credit risk
you are. Based on this credit score, lenders decide whether to trust you financially and give you better rates when you apply for a loan. Apartment managers can use
your credit score to decide whether you can be trusted to pay your rent on time.

Employers can use your credit score to decide whether you can be trusted in a high responsibility job that requires you to handle money.

The problem with credit scores is that there is quite a bit of misinformation
circulated about, especially through some less than scrupulous companies who claim they can help you with your credit report and credit score – for a cost, of course.

From advertisements and suspect claims, customers sometimes come away with the idea that in order to boost their credit score, they have to pay money to a company or leave credit repair in the hands of so-called “experts.” Nothing could be further from the truth. It is perfectly possible to pay down debts and boost your credit on your own, with no expensive help whatsoever. A good place to start your credit quest is to check your FICO score (www.myfico.com)Technorati Tags: credit, money, fico, finance

TrackBack as an Internet Standard

In 2002, Ben and Mena Trott had an idea for how blogging systems could communicate with one another more effectively about the plethora of content being created. They dubbed the idea “TrackBack” and they implemented it in Movable Type. What followed surprised everyone, the idea and technology they created spread like wildfire. Now, several years later, TrackBack is in use by over 50 million blogs and news sites across the Internet.

As many familiar with the protocol will attest, TrackBack, despite its wide market adoption, is far from perfect — largely due to the fact that TrackBack was invented for a blogosphere that was much different in size and makeup. Today, blogging has exploded in popularity, presenting TrackBack with a whole new set of challenges to address. Specifically, those challenges include the need for:

• Standardization
• Protocol Extensibility
• Authentication
• Better documentation

Since TrackBack was invented, little has been done to secure TrackBack to prevent people from abusing it and generating unsolicited, unwanted, and ultimately irrelevant “TrackBack Spam.” Managing unwanted TrackBacks takes time away from bloggers and blog hosting services that could be better spent elsewhere.

Also, over the years, a number of protocols have emerged to service roughly the same set of problems as TrackBacks — to inform resources and services on the Internet of the availability of new content. TrackBack and “update pings” have a lot in common, and the industry could benefit a great deal by simplifying and potentially merging them into a single and cohesive standard.

Finally, Six Apart has engaged many companies wishing to extend the TrackBack protocol in some way, a proposition that Six Apart is excited about and encourages. However, no one company should ever be a constraint on anyone’s desire to innovate and deliver new and interesting technologies to the blogging world. Extension of the protocol should be simple, logical, and enabled by the protocol itself.

Business Credit – Interest Rates

Most credit card issuers have ’small print’ clauses like this in their credit card contracts:

“How We Apply Payments: We will apply your payment to pay off lower-rate balances before paying off higher-rate balances.”

Here’s an example to illustrate what that means: Say you transfer $4,000 onto a new credit card offering 0% interest on that balance for 12 months. While the card has a 0% rate on the balance transfer, it has a 14.24% interest rate for new purchases. From the time you get this card until the transferred balance is paid off, every payment you make will go toward paying down the transferred balance–none of it will go toward new card purchases. So, in this example, any new purchases would incur a finance charge at the 14.24% rate.

Pay That Down

Here’s how that can play out. A cardholder transfers a $4,000 balance at 0%. Once she receives the card, she charges $500 in new purchases. When the bill comes, she pays $500–the same amount she made in new purchases. She assumes there will be no finance charges because all that remains is the $4,000 she transferred at 0%. But that’s not how it works. The credit card company applies that $500 payment to pay down the 0% portion of the balance, while the $500 in new purchases is charged out at 14.24%.
Business Credit Cards

Tags: credit, visa, business, debt, finance

Mompreneur Rises From the Ashes

For Las Vegas entrepreneur Richelle Shaw, dating three men in three cities didn’t add up to a winning proposition at first. No, this isn’t a Sex and the City rerun; it really happened and, after a few major bumps in the road, there is a happy ending.

Embedded Video

What is unique or special about your business that gives it an edge over your competitors?

SHAW: I understand how to market. The customers drive my business. Actually, the results from marketing campaigns drive my business. Not what I think, not what my friends or staff think.

Were there any challenges that you experienced along the way that appeared to be more difficult because you are a woman?
SHAW: When I first decided to buy the business, I went to SBA. I was approved based on my credit and experience; however, they did not like the business. SBA told me that I would never be able to compete with AT&T. Eight years and almost $100 million in sales between the two companies, I think I learned how to compete. Also, I found a venture capital group [that] was going to give me $5 million; they asked for an engagement fee of $75,000. I wired the money and never heard from them again. Just dumb! So when I bought the company I had to start with no money in reserves. I created a deal with my boss to finance the company with receivables, but I had to get new business fast. We sold off the less profitable divisions and laid off staff to make it work. Then, after 9/11, I was forced to start over. This time, with no customer base that I could leverage, no cash and no credit because I had to file bankruptcy; so I had to use my creative sales and marketing skills to rebuild. The best thing to ever happen, because when things turned around, I did not owe any loans or half of my company to any other investors. Were these challenges because I was a woman, I am not sure, but they were difficult.

Tags: business

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