Archives for July 2008

Nine Million People in the United States are Millionaires

July 27, 2008 By Sherry Tingley

According to www.cnbc.com, some of the nine million people feel poor. They are the “middle class” millionaires. Laurel Touby, a successful internet entrepreneur, who recently sold her website www.mediabistro.com for $23 million could be one of them. She tells CNBC that she is not that rich.

Money Making Idea

She wanted to build a website to include a community for the media where there were job listings, bulletin boards, classes, and a freelance marketplace. She raised money for her website by hosting parties where she invited editors, writers, and other content creators. Her parties went on and on and her contacts grew to thousands. Now, her website is worth $23 million, with an Alexa page ranking of 5,275 , which means that the number of visitors she gets is within the top 100,000 most popular sites in the world. There are 2,745 websites linking to mediabistro.com.

She sold her website in July of 2007 to Jupiter Media. She called her rich friends to see what they recommended she buy with her newly acquired wealth. When she was told to invest in a jet, she laughed and thought that if she did that, her money could be gone in an instant.

See how the really rich live

According to CNBC.com, a financial news site, “In 1985, there were 13 billionaires in the United States and today there are over 1,000 billionaires.” CNBC has a special page devoted to videos and information about the investment bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity partners who make up the .001% of our population. What toys do they play with? Perhaps a Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, or Dusenberg would pacify them? Find out how many cars Tim Durham, a 45 year old financier from Indiana has in his garage.

Job Search Remedies

July 25, 2008 By Sherry Tingley

Do you hate to perform a job search? Does it make you sick just thinking about searching for a job? Well, you are not alone. People who have worked their entire lives at a business and then get laid off or fired are at a loss when it comes to searching for another job. It may have been over 20 years since the person has written a resume.

Here are some job search remedies for you.
Find someone else to write your resume

Avoid the pain of writing your resume by asking someone else to write it. Of course you can pay someone to write it at Monster.com. For $249 you can get a cover letter and resume written for you. Tackle the job of writing your resume as soon as possible. If you put it off, you are losing months of time in getting that job. Don’t sweat it too much though because there are websites that can actually give you ideas about writing your resume.

Job Search Websites

LinkedIN provides you with search features for the zip code you live in and is a networking website of professional business people.
Monster.com will allow you to build your resume online or upload your own. They also offer professional resume writing for you.
Indeed.com is actually a job search engine. As of July 25, they had posted 141,178 new jobs in the past 7 days. It searches job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages.

When you are looking for a job, it is easy to get overwhelmed with advice. Try just a few of these ideas to see if they will remedy your job searching headaches. Leave us some of your suggestions to add to this article.

Rent a Movie

You may be depressed about your job loss, but watching this movie will make you think about your situation in a new light. This movie will move you from the couch to the floor because you are laughing so hard.

Falling into debt is like falling into quicksand

July 13, 2008 By Sherry Tingley

Debt is quickly becoming America’s ball and chain. The personal credit card debt held by consumers as of July 10, 2008 is $5,312,998,074,837.08. That is $5.3 trillion dollars of personal debt.

So you are not alone in your struggles to control your debt. The whole nation is right along with you.

Reasons to avoid debt

The weight it causes on your day-to-day functioning can be extremely burdensome.

Problems arise because sometimes it takes years to actually feel the pinch and pain you have gotten yourself into.

The credit card companies delight in your failure. They make things so easy for you to get into debt and they love it. One day, you make be sinking so fast, you can’t get out.

Track your spending

Hopefully you take managing money seriously and actually look and keep track of how much money is coming in and how much money is going out of your accounts. Being oblivious to this critical factor is what keeps people at debt’s beck and call.

If you were to relate this feeling to gaining weight, assuming that you didn’t have a medical problem that was causing weight gain, the day-to-day input builds up and soon you’ve discovered you’ve put on 20 pounds.

Stop getting further into debt

Have the courage to look at what is causing you to go into debt. Sometimes it takes a little cheering from others to encourage you to start making a strategic debt reducing plan.

Learn from the debt control experts

Dr. John DeMartini, teaches debt management principles that are so simple that anyone can remember and practice them. If I were to sum up his philosophy it would be: “If you emotionalize money, it goes. If you put strategies with it, it grows.” That philosophy is so true.

Pay your debts on time

Automate your credit card payments using online bill paying with your local bank. Life so frequently just gets going and people forget to put payments in the mail. Don’t let being forgetful be the cause of late payments. Late payments can ruin your credit.

Order a free credit report

A recent amendment to the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act requires each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies “ Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to provide you with a free copy of your credit report, at your request, once every 12 months.

The Federal Trade Commission offers you a free credit report, so take advantage of it and find out what problems you may be having with your credit.

Make a plan and move on

Perhaps the worst thing to do when you are in financial trouble is to give up. It’s also the easiest and certainly it’s understandable. However, when you give up, life just gets worse. It might seem like you have little or no control over your situation, but in reality, the opposite is true.

William Ernest Henley, in the late 1800’s, said, “I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.” Your attitude determines your future. Make a plan to track your finances, pay your bills on time and take charge of your debt reduction plan today.

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Mortgage Loans In The News

July 11, 2008 By Sherry Tingley

Mortgage loans are in the news today as two of the largest mortgage companies in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, lost nearly half of their stock value during the week of July 11, 2008. They own over one half of all the mortgages in the United States, with a total value of $5.2 trillion dollars. They have posted $11 billion in losses.

For the average Joe, those numbers are barely imaginable. But wait…let’s see what $5.2 trillion looks like…$5,200,000,000,000.00. So if they’ve lost $11,000,000,000.00 what is left? Try $5,189,000,000,000.00.

So what percentage of their assets did they lose? I believe that would be .002. Please correct me if I’m wrong. To relate that to everyday living, if your monthly take home pay was $3,000 and you lost .002 percent of that, how much would that be? $6.00.

Is that why Senate Banking Committee chair Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) called the mortgage giants sound, saying they are being unfairly punished by Wall Street?

Mortgage loans are probably the single largest purchase you will make in your lifetime so it makes sense that a lot of people are doing searches for the term “mortgage loans.” In fact, according to one reliable keyword tool on the Internet, there are 637,449 daily searches for just the word mortgage. That same keyword tool tells us that all of the advertising dollars spent on just the word mortgage during one month total $4,603,982.63! Google is making money from the mere word “mortgage“!

The bottom line is that people with risky (sub-prime) loans are defaulting on their mortgages causing nationwide economic worries. This may impact the rest of us, making it difficult for us to buy or sell our homes. Seems that the best advice is to avoid getting another mortgage loan and keep our own mortgages current.

Ecommerce Business Advice

July 10, 2008 By Sherry Tingley

Ecommerce is a hot topic today because so many people want to be successful at it and so many seek ecommerce business advice.

Chris Malta, owner of WorldWide Brands provides the newcomer to ecommerce some suggestions about product sourcing. WorldWide Brands offers customers a research tool that reports the feasibility of product sales for thousands of products. He also provides contact information for suppliers that will sell products to individuals who only want to purchase small quantities of products. An excellent way for a small business owner to get their ecommerce site started.

Mr. Malta also runs a blog on his website that is full of good business advice. He personally responds to each customer comment in a thorough manner. His posts are long and well thought out and that is what helps him establish credibility with his current customers and helps him sell new training materials. People become repeat customers because of his honesty and business advice. Finding quality ecommerce business advice is easy to do when you read through his blog.

One of the most crucial bits of ecommerce business advice he gives people is that when you are opening a new ecommerce website, choose one line of products. One line of products allows you to become an dependable authority about that product line. You will also get the benefit of being able to get natural traffic from the search engines when you focus on the niche marketing keywords for your product line.

Building credibility with your customers is invaluable for customer satisfaction and for repeat business.

Chris tells us in one of his blog posts:

Trying to market multiple stores at once takes way too much time and energy, and they all suffer for that. When you deal with only one store at a time, you can put all of your efforts into getting that store off the ground. Once you have one making a profit, go to the second one. Check your Market Research within our Supplier Database to be sure that the one store you start with carries products that are selling well right now.

Selling different kinds of product lines in one store confuses your customers, and absolutely kills your Search Engine rankings, which are very important. Stick to one type of product line per store!

Chris Malta is using the internet and blogging software to dramatically impact his ecommerce business. He is definitely an influencial leader in the field of ecommerce business.