Personal Finance Blog

Tips And Stories To Help You With Managing Money

20 Tips To Writing A Good Press Release

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writing a good press release
Trends For Interest in Writing Press Releases

Over the past two years, interest in writing press releases has decreased according to Google Insights for search. Prior to that there was a considerable amount of interest in press release writing. With the economy improving, interest has picked up a little. Learning how to write a good press release may be the key to whether you and your family dine at McDonald’s’  or at the Outback Steak House.

The benefits of writing a good press release and submitting it to press release websites are numerous. Widespread distribution of your announcements can build relationships, trust and hopefully more revenue. There are many sites that allow you to submit your release and the cost varies from free up to several hundred dollars.

If you follow these basic tips, you can get past writer’s block and start producing something people will want to read.

1. Research your topic.
2. Write professionally. Avoid exaggerations.
3. Answer the question, Why should anyone care?
4. Make your press release timely and unique.
5. Choose to highlight something unusual.
6. Discuss a study or real life example.
7. Clearly state the problem your company solves.
8. Highlight compelling industry trends.
9. Use real life examples.
10. Make the headline a summary.
11. The first paragraph should clarify your news.
12. Use the body of the press release to provide the details.
13. Tie your news release to current events, recent studies, trends and social issues.
14. How does your product or news satisfy desires?
15. If possible, provide a killer news hook for your story.
16. Attach images, videos, links, pdf document or any other materials that enhance your release.
17. Celebrate an anniversary, new president, or new employee.
18. Announce a new product line or service.
19. Promote community events.
20. Write it. Proofread it. Print it. Proof again.

According to www.prweb.com, a popular press release website, Amy Mauzy with Malibu Boats says:

“Thanks to PRWeb, we are leaving our mark on both mainstream and industry media… our Malibu Boats brand is getting the attention it deserves… and we are quantifying all of it. The true value of PRWeb is in the sales it has helped us generate.”

Janet Meiners Thaeler‘s new book, “I Need a Killer Press Release” provides a road map for you to use in establishing your company or brand name. It goes into further detail of exactly how you write press releases and submit them on the web.

Hopefully these tips will help you at least start thinking about your next press release might be. It is a good marketing strategy to use when building a small business online. Be sure to stop back and tell us how it went.

New Restraints On Debt Collectors To Aid Consumers

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Managing DebtIf you believe a debt collection company is not treating you right, who you gonna call?

As of Jan. 2, 2013, it should be the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency that is expanding its responsibilities to include oversight of debt collectors. Congress has authorized the agency to identify and prevent practices harmful to customers. Previously, the focus of CFPB was primarily on the financial strength of banks. Now, it will look beyond to non-bank companies. The intent of Congress is to provide a stronger tool to combat practices detrimental to those who use the services of these companies. Historically, debt collectors have not been subject to federal scrutiny. CFPB was created after the turn-of-the-century crises that had financial institutions in general in an uproar.

Many borrowers will look upon the added supervision as a good thing. Some debt collectors have used strong-arm tactics to get their due. Calls to the employers of debtors, filing of lawsuits against people who have small balances owing, credit-mangling reports to credit bureaus and other practices have sometimes left consumers feeling stymied. Some of the methods may violate federal disclosure rules, involve unfair fees or other practices not sanctioned by the government.

The new oversight authority will apply only to companies with more than $10 million in annual receipts — about 175 of which have been identified. These companies represent more than 60 percent of the industry’s annual receipts, agency representatives found. Where there are abuses, the agency can file civil charges or take other enforcement measures against those companies that violate consumer laws, even if the offending company is not part of the federal supervisory program.

Agency research shows that About 30 million Americans have, on average, $1,500 in debt that is handled by the debt-collection industry. This branch of the financial family joins mortgage companies, private student lenders and payday lenders who already are under the federal microscope. The 2010 remake of federal financial laws established the CFPB as part of a general move to get more accountability into the institutions that handle Americans’ money. Credit bureaus also preceded debt collectors in the move for oversight.

The new laws for debt collectors allow regulators to demand information even when there is no overt proof of wrong-doing. Supervisors can review marketing materials, phone scripts, consumer disclosures and other aspects of the businesses.

No one likes to be a debtor and no one likes to be pestered with nasty phone calls from creditors. To prevent getting yourself into these situations, make sure you stay on top of your cash flow management strategies.

For best practices concerning your cash flow follow these five steps.

1. Stop regarding your financial management with fear, anxiety, insecurity or some combination of the above. This will paralyze your cash management systems. Create a system that works for you so that you don’t experience these crippling emotions.

2. Cash-flow management is a critical element in every home. When it’s done poorly or not at all, you may find yourself short of cash when it’s time to pay your bills and other crucial expenses. This leads to the use of credit cards and adds to your debt.

3. Keep up with your changing financial needs. Every stage of life will require different types of budgeting and planning. Be flexible and yet keep your long term financial goals in mind. Charles Darwin reminds us that “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

4. Avoid spending money you don’t have. Betting on future income is never a good idea. This will only dig you deeper into a financial hole.

5. If you are in debt now, then set the date you will be debt free. Remember Napolean Hill’s words: “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

Banking Goes Way Back

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Banks are such a staple of modern life that it’s hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t one on every corner or checking accounts. And in fact, the history of banking does go back a long way — to thousands of years BCE.

Finding a way to safeguard one’s resources has been a priority from the time when barter emerged as a way to do business. The history of banking parallels that of the history of money (or the goods that were traded before there were coins and other forms of money.) Some 9,000 years before the current calendar became a world standard, folks were trading in obsidian, the prime building material for tools. And rudimentary banking grew up along with trade. Ancient bankers loaned grain to clients who were active in trade. Among the first “coins” to be discovered were clay “tokens” found in the Near East that dated back to 8000 BCE.

When one of the early traders received pay for his goods, he went to the local temple to store his gains, trusting to the god to whom the temple was dedicated to protect his assets. The ruling class used the temples to protect the funds they amassed to finance festivals and community building projects.

Ancient bankers in Egypt, Babylonia ad Greece made loans, at very high interest, underwritten by the gold and silver deposited with them.

Any banking service has always come at a cost. In Babylonia circa 2000 BCE, depositors paid as much as a sixth of their deposit in charges. And regulation was also an early issue. The Code of Hammurabi, an important source of information about the Babylonian civilization, refers to banking regulations.

New ways of counting evolved as the number and the value of the goods trusted to the temples grew. The abacus was one of the first “adding machines” used by “accountants.” Its origin is lost in history. Counting tables with special apparatus to divide and number coins followed.

By about 2000 BCE, banks had taken on some of the character of today’s institutions. In Assyria and Babylonia, bankers innovated by accepting deposits and making loans. In China and India, archaeological remains show evidence of the same activities.

Bankers in northern Italy led developments in Europe, with Amsterdam soon stepping up as a leader in the business in the 16th century. London caught on and began offering banking services in the 1700s. Even earlier, in the 14th century, two families in Florence, Italy, the Bardis and Peruzzis, dominated the banking business, opening branch offices in many large European cities. The Medici family, which is noted for its involvement in the arts and sciences of the era, also had a finger in the banking pie. Giovanni Medici established a bank in 1397.

In the Medieval world, bankers often were Jews. Christians, based on strict reading of laws against usury that were set out in the Bible, left the industry to the Jews, who were happy to have the privilege, since many other occupations were denied them.

The first bank in the American colonies was the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, chartered in the mid-1700s. Many notable families have made their names and vast fortunes in banking, among them the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds and the Morgans.

Inevitable in any business that is steeped in the care and keeping of valuables, there have been incidences throughout history of misuse of funds, frauds, robberies and failures. Even with the modern technology that facilitates the care and keeping of assets, it still happens. The most recent in the United States occurred in 2000, when some of the country’s largest financial institutions came upon hard times.

But historically, the need for safe places to keep one’s assets has been proved. Banks are here to stay.

Using Checks Is Part Of The Earliest American Traditions

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When the first emigrants from England began settling along the eastern seaboard of what would become America, they brought with them some of the banking practices they had enjoyed in their homeland.

Making payments and conducting business with checks had become a firmly established part of European economics by the 18th century. From 1760 to 1800, the number of banks in London, for instance, doubled. Parliament finally gave permission for new corporate banks in the city in 1833, increasing the number of options available to residents, according to a history of check use, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

When the American colonies began flexing their financial muscles, British political leaders began to impose difficult policies on the upstart new country, suppressing banks so that the colonists could use neither checks nor banknotes. The colonies were prohibited from issuing paper money, adding to the grievances that ultimately led to the Revolutionary War. But what followed the successful fight for independence was a hodge-podge of financial schemes developed independently by the individual colonies. The new country wrestled with the notions of central monetary control vs. the rights of the states to conduct their own economic affairs.

The U.S. Constitution was finally accepted by the colonies, denied the individual states the right to issue paper money, but gave them the ability to charter banks. Over the first few decades, the central government created some oversight authority by creating the First Bank of the United States, followed by the Second Bank of the United States. They failed to survive when early presidents saw them as symbols of British-style concentration of moneyed power.

The rapid expansion of the United States, with the frontier constantly moving farther west, created new challenges, particularly for those who wanted to conduct long-distance business. Newly established communities tended to be small and geographically isolated. Collecting on a check was difficult and costly. It was possible to negotiate a check, but no third parties were anxious to buy them because it was so tough to collect. “Documentary bills” became one method of expediting business from one area of the country to another. For instance, a cotton merchant in New Orleans could borrow money or make purchases in the southern city by drawing a documentary bill on his wholesaler in New York. A bill of lading would be attached to a shipment of goods to the north, indicating that the southern merchant had shipped cotton to New York of a value sufficient to cover the amount of the bill.

As some cities grew, their state–chartered banks created cooperative alliances with institutions in other cities, which facilitated the use of checks. Until the Civil War, however, checks functioned only as a local form of payment. Improvements in transportation and communication contributed to easing the difficulties and long-distance check payments gradually grew. Still, complications were rife. In one instance, a check drawn on a bank in Sag Harbor, New York, and received in Hoboken, N. J., changed hands ten times before its collection was finalized. The distance between the two communities was only about 100 miles. A remittance charge or exchange charge was often added to the costs of negotiating a check, to cover the cost incurred by the paying bank, which had to ship currency or coin or use some other means for settling the negotiation. One researcher referred to this era of check use in the United States as a “Haphazard arrangement riddled with inefficiencies.”

The National Banking Acts of 1863, 1864 and 1865 went a long way toward resolving the troublesome issues that surrounded use of checks. They allowed for federally chartered banks and took significant steps toward assuring that banks were fiscally sound by requiring that they hold reserves equal to the deposits they were receiving. The groundwork was laid for a national check clearing system and correspondent networks were created to simplify transfers of funds.

With more safeguards in place and fewer complications in successfully negotiating a check, the United States moved by degrees to its current situation in which check use is not for business only, but for the vast majority of individuals, who write checks with never a thought to how it all came about.

Use Of Checks Began In The Middle East

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Paying by check has been such a pervasive American custom that you might suppose the idea started here. Not so. The history of the use of checks to pay for goods or services goes back more some 2,000 years.

The word “check,” in fact, may have evolved from the Persian word “sakk,” according to a history of check use compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The report opens with a story of an Iranian traveler, Nasir-i Khosrau, who visited the ancient city of Basra (in present-day Iraq), in the early eleventh century. While in Basra, Khosrau, a merchant, gave written instructions to his bank to make a payment to a creditor out of his account.

Although this recorded story is one of the first substantial evidences of the use of checking, it had already been a well-established practice in the eastern Mediterranean area for hundreds of years. Crusaders who marched on the Middle East hoping to reclaim Christian sites became acquainted with the system and carried the notion back to Europe, which had extremely primitive monetary systems by contrast. The still-evolving nations of the Continent had few coins of reliable value, no banks and few notions of how to conduct long-distance transactions, let alone local trade.

Barcelona, Florence, Genoa and Venice — large commercial centers of the 13th Century — were among the bellwether communities to establish rudimentary banks to facilitate payments among local merchants. But the process was clumsy. It required that the payor and payee both walk to the payor’s bank, where an oral order was presented to the banker requesting that the required amount be paid to the payee. The banker then duly made a record of the transaction in his journal.

The payee was willing to go to the trouble, because the coinage of the era was very unreliable and large amounts of coins were heavy and awkward to deal with. Occasionally the banker would allow the client to overdraw the account, another innovation to facilitate commerce.

Written orders to transfer funds were viewed with distrust because of the possibility of fraud on the part of payor, payee or even the banker. When all three parties were required to be present, each had at least two eye witnesses to the deal.

In the Middle Ages, banks were locally chartered and could handle transactions only in their own towns. Bills of exchange became a common method of doing business, with the bill written in one city but paid in another through a cumbersome process of moving funds from one bank to the other. As the systems became more sophisticated, checks became more common.

Checks began to appear in Europe about 1400, but it took time for banks to accept that form of transaction. There was widespread distrust among banks in general, but over time, convenience trumped the lingering concerns and checking became more entrenched, despite fraud and abuses.

Use of checks was firmly established in England when the American colonies were established and — with many circuitous stops, starts and enactment of laws primarily aimed at oversight — the emergent United States took up, improved on and firmly adopted the custom. In 2006, according to the Federal Reserve System, Americans wrote some 33 billion checks.