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What helps you eliminate bad spending habits?

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How many times have you made financial mistakes because of bad spending habits ?  Too many to count? Already reached perfection?

Life gives people daily opportunities to use good money management strategies or to ignore them. The good news is that if you have failed, there is always another day to try again at your goals.

Money management strategies can be as challenging for some people as going on a diet. For other people, keeping a budget and sticking to your goals is no problem at all.

Here are a few causes of people who have gotten themselves into bad situations.

  1. Poor communication with your significant other about money.
  2. Lack of setting realistic goals so spending is much easier.
  3. Little or no record keeping so you are unaware of how much you are spending.
  4. Allowing yourself to purchase things because you think you deserve them.
  5. Lack of career preparation so income levels aren’t what they should be.
  6. Taking care of everyone else before you take care of yourself.
  7. Failing to look at the consequences of barely meeting your bills from month to month.
  8. Little or no savings to rely on in case of emergencies.
  9. Being a recreational shopper.
  10. Not being able to distinguish between needs or wants.

Here are a few tips to help you break your bad spending habits

  1. Leave your credit cards at home. It’s much easier to spend if you take them wih you, so just leave them at home.
  2. Limit yourself to 1 or 2 credit card accounts. It’s easier to pay them down if you don’t have so many credit cards.
  3. Shop with a list and plan what you are going to buy.
  4. Recognize when you are impulse shopping.
  5. Go shopping with a friend that knows your goals.
  6. Use what you already have in your home.
  7. If you need therapy, get it. Don’t using shopping as therapy.
  8. Be resourceful and try to do without what you think you want.
  9. Remember: No-one ever became rich by spending all of their money.
  10. Ask yourself: “Do I really need this?”, “Will I end up wasting this?”, “Is this an extravagance I can easily live without?”

So find out what the real culprit is behind your urge to splurge and recognize it. Read about how to fix your bad spending habits.

Remind yourself daily that money or a lack of it doesn’t determine who you are. Your worth as a person has nothing to do with how much money you have. Once you truly believe this, and money is no longer connected to your sense of self-worth, you open up the psychological barriers that were keeping you from wisely handling the money you do have and limiting your ability to make more. 

Build a library of the best personal finance books out there. Find a great list of books at the Get Rich Slowly blog.

What helps you eliminate bad spending habits?

Baby Boomers Guide to Using Twitter

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If you ask your Baby Boomer neighbor to twitter you next time she finds a sale on lobster at Albertsons, you will probably get a quizical stare. Not many in this generation are familiar with Twitter, but many want to know what is going on so here is a short guide to using twitter.

What is Twitter?

According to Om Malik,

“Twitter is a micro-messaging service that has caught the imaginations of everyone from tech mommies to cable news networks, sports stars and Hollywood stars. It has become the source of breaking news and rumors.”

A twitter is an instant text message from a cell phone or computer. A twitter is a sentence that is less than 140 characters long. It’s a short, but sweet message, like a chirp from a bird. The purpose of a twitter is to tell someone what your latest thoughts or activities have been. Twitter messages can be read from a mobile phone or the internet. You need to set up an account at Twitter.com to use this service.

Who gets your twitter messages?

Someone that you have asked to follow your messages or that has asked you if they can follow you. You can have no followers or you can have thousands of followers. It’s all up to you.

Websites such as twitterholic.com will tell you what people or organizations have the most number of followers. CNN Breaking News has the most number of followers (437,573) which makes sense. People can get breaking news on their cell phones when the stories are released. President Barack Obama has the most number of friends (374,715) however, he has not made any posts since he became President.

What is a tweep?

Tweeps are people who receive your twitter messages. You too can become a tweep.

Who invented Twittering?

Twittering, commonly referred to as micro-blogging or micro-messaging was the brain child of Jack Dorsey. He started a company that was using software for emergency dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the web. He and Isaac Stone, they wrote Twitter’s prototype, using instant text messaging, in about two weeks. They took their ideas to a company called Odeo and teamed up with Evan Williams, well known for his role in Blogger, one of the first web applications for creating and managing blogs. They launched Twitter Inc., and three years later Twitter has approximately 5 million users. In February of 2009, they received a buyout offer of $500M. 

Who cares about your tweets?

This depends on you. If you are a witness to an earthquake, a fire or other natural disaster, you may be the key to notifying people about the emergency situation. You may save lives by your quick thinking and quick messaging.  You might come across an article that you love and want to tell people about.  If you can type your message in 140 characters or less, you can tell all of your followers about it. If you find that the url you want to announce is too long, go to tinyurl.com and make it shorter.  Have you read a good book lately?  Gone to a good movie? Gone to a horrible movie?  Let others know about it. Tweet it! See the bird below this post? Baby boomer tweeps are invited to click on this link and share this post. You can follow my tweets by going to twitter.com

Five Tips To Keep Websites Ranking Well

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If you have a business on the internet, then you are well aware of how important it is to keep your search engine rankings for your best keywords. When your rankings drop, your sales drop immediatley. When your website gets dropped from the search engine results panic may set in. Life becomes frantic and you begin to picture your business coming to a screaching halt. You will certainly understand how scary it is to watch your website disappear in the SERP’s (search enine result pages) for the keyword phrase that brings you the most traffic.

webmaster-toolsThat is the dilema I faced this past week and it was one I hope doesn’t happen again. It made me realize how totally reliant an Internet business is on search engines and unfortunately sometimes there is nothing you can do about it but wait and see if your good website ranking comes back.

To help you live through a traumatic experience like this, I have a few suggestions for you in keeping your website running smoothly.

    1. Review all the files on your site to see if there are any files that shouldn’t be there. Look carefully at the ones that raise any questions in your mind.
    2. Use Google webmaster tools.  There is a tool there that you can use that will delete undesirable pages from their index. So any unwanted pages that are indexed by Google can be removed.  I did that for a lot of pages that were reporting 404 errors because of what I had done to reorganize my blog pages.

 

    1. In Google webmaster tools there is a blog that you can post questions, complaints, etc. and read about what others have experienced. Many people have experienced the same problems you have had.

 

    1. Review the page in question that is not being included in Google’s index. Go through the page with a fine tooth comb and get rid of any unnecessary coding, make sure you are using your keyword phrase in all of your alt tags. Rename some of your photos with the name of your keyword phrase.

 

  1. You can always pay a SEO specialist to take a look at your site. Let them see if they can spot anything unusual.

Hopefully your website business won’t go through this, but because it is on the internet, it is vulnerable to that. Use these tips to help you keep your search engine rankings.

Would Oprah Make a Good Senator?

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What do you think of Oprah being appointed President Obama’s old senate seat?

On the first day of Blagojevich’s impeachment  trial for conspiracy and bribery charges, Blagojevich announces that he’s considering nominating Oprah Winfrey to fill the empty U.S. Senate seat left by President Barack Obama. Is there anything else he could do to draw more attention to himself than that?

USA Today reports: 

 “She was obviously someone with a much broader bully pulpit than other senators,” Blagojevich said. But the Democrat said appointing Winfrey might have been perceived as a gimmick — and that Winfrey probably would not have accepted the appointment anyway.”

What was Oprah’s response?

Oprah said that she was pretty amused by the whole thing and that she would have fallen off her treadmill if she had been working out on it.

She is definitely, not interested.


CNN conducted a phone in survey and here is what several people said:

James from Brooklyn, New York,  says that Oprah may not be bi-partisan. Her opinions may not reflect the opinions of the rest of the country.

Sharese from Seattle, Washington says that she would be the perfect Senator because she understands poverty, she’s totally involved in the community and she can definitely handle it.

Larry, from Louisiana said that Blagojevich is a cynical and evil person and that by considering Oprah as a Senator because he ultimately wants someone in the position to help him get his own way.

What do you think?