Archive for January, 2010

Multiple Income Streams to replace One Man-One Job?

By Kevin M

You may be employed at the moment; in fact you may even be well-employed. But look at many others around you and what do you see? With millions unemployed, millions more under-employed, and hundreds of thousands of jobs being outsourced to lower wage countries, what does the future of employment hold? Is it possible that the sun is setting on the traditional one man/one job model of employment and income?

Before dismissing the possibility, consider that only 40 years ago tens of millions of workers were employed in largely high paying, mostly unionized factory jobs. Just over 100 years ago the majority of Americans were employed in agriculture. Where are all of those jobs now? And if one man/one job is going the way of the factory job, what are our options?

Developing multiple income streams may become a necessary reaction to an environment where the unemployed often return to the work force in lower paying jobs.

What TV REALLY Costs Us

By Kevin M

We’re not going to talk today about the best deals on widescreen TVs or the most cost effective cable packages. Instead, I want to focus on what I’m certain are the far larger affects of TV on our finances in the form of time, opportunity cost, and influence.

Time. According to Adweek adults in America average 309.1 minutes watching TV each day. That works out to be more than five hours per day! If we spend eight hours each day sleeping, another eight working, plus five hours watching TV, that eats up 21 of our 24 hours, leaving just three hours each day for virtually everything else we have going on!

Buying vs Renting a Home – Its Not All About Money

And other questions you should ask before buying a home!

By Kevin M

Many articles have been written on the buy-verses-rent question, but most of the analysis tends to center on the dollars and cents side of the question. We read about tax advantages, investment potential, home buyer tax credits, income ratios—all important considerations, but all essentially monetary in nature.

Rather than crunching numbers, I’d like to consider the question from a mostly non-monetary angle, and discuss factors which are of at least equal importance in making the decision to buy or rent a home. Most have to do with lifestyles, attitudes and future prospects.

Secret Life of the American Teenager – Exactly What is the Message?

By Kevin M

I’m a bit, shall we say, long-in-the-tooth to be watching a teen-oriented program, but since my wife and I have teenage kids, we often watch what they watch. At a minimum, we want to know what kind of entertainment they’re taking in.

About 18 months ago, ABC Family rolled out the teen series, The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Centering on the storyline of a 15 year old high school student becoming pregnant as a result of a one time affair with a 16 year old boy, the original plot looked to have a solid message, one that we felt our kids needed to see—our daughter especially.

The show seemed to have all the potential to deliver a powerful message on the consequences of teen sex and the need for responsibility. Perfect–IF it had stayed on message! But just as the Brady Bunch mostly ignored its original plot of the trials of a blended family, morphing instead into the perfect family with hardly a mention of its blended status past the third or fourth episode, so Secret Life moved past the initial struggles of a pregnant teen, and into the realm of a runaway teen soap opera well before the end of its first season.

Radical Self Reliance in the New Economy

By Kevin M

What if the economy isn’t turning the corner? What if the “Great Recession” isn’t a recession at all, but the early stage of a longer term economic devolution?

I consider this as more than a reasonable possibility. As much as we might cling to the notion of “business as usual”, the history books tell us that long term cycles are periodically broken by the onset of a new eras. The fall of the Roman Empire was one such turn; the onset of the Industrial Revolution was another. Closer to our own time and place were the Civil War and the Great Depression. All of these events changed not only the rules of the game, but also the way the majority of people lived. And they were hardly isolated incidents.

I’m reading Survival+, Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation, where author and website host Charles Hugh Smith spells out the “Great Transformation” that we may well have entered already. The evidence to support his claim isn’t hard to find.

The High Cost of Convenience

IS CONVENIENCE OUR SERVANT OR HAS IT BECOME OUR MASTER?

By Kevin M

For most of the 20th Century convenience was pursued as a means to make life easier and to eliminate undesirable chores from daily life. To the World War II generation, the 1950s brought a surge in time saving devices that were a welcome relief to the difficulty they knew well from earlier in life.

Today’s generations however know little of the hardships faced by that generation. Worse, most of us don’t know life before convenience. In our world today, convenience is a given; the only real issues are how much of it we incorporate into our lives and which specific methods we choose among the many options.

More often than not, we’ll pay extra for convenience—anything that will move us along faster, spare us from handling menial tasks or prevent us from being uncomfortable. Though people have always sought ways to avoid drudgery and make life easier, in our own day and time convenience has become an expectation, a norm, and even a right.

Will A Million Dollars be Enough to Retire On?

By Kevin M

A million dollars was a lot of money when I was a kid. Inflation notwithstanding, for most of us, it still is! It’s an amount the vast majority of people will never have in their bank accounts or anywhere else in their possession.

Yet it’s practically a MINIMUM if you plan on enjoying the textbook full retirement.

Think about all of the retirement scenarios laid out for us in the financial universe; at the heart of nearly every one of them is a big, fat 401k with a seven figure balance to keep us pampered and well provided for in our golden years.

Restaurant Tipping – How Much and When?

By Kevin M

This is just my opinion, but I think tipping is kind of a crappy set up. A restaurant relies on tips to pay the staff a decent wage, so the waiter/waitress is caught in the middle, working for a business that won’t pay them fully for what they do, but never certain the customer will either.

That’s why I don’t have a problem tipping, even though there should be a better way. But the reality is that there isn’t, so we work with what we have. It’s worth remembering too that if restaurants paid their staff living wages the menu prices would be substantially higher, so the upshot is that we have some flexibility on the price if we don’t like the service.

Everyone has their own ideas when it comes to tipping, and here are mine.

Save a Bundle By Repairing Your Eyeglasses

By Kevin M

Has this ever happened to you? The arms (technical term “temple arms”) of your eyeglasses break at the joint forcing you to purchase a brand new pair of glasses? It’s happened to me three times in the past five years!

OK, if you’re not an eyeglass wearer, and no one in your immediate family is either, this post will hold little interest for you. But looking around at the general population it seems that despite the acclaimed shift toward contact lenses and radial keratotomy, the number of the bespectacled in the population remains substantial.

Perhaps like me, millions of one time contact users were forced to abandon them either by choice or necessity. Or, again like me, they find one-in-a-thousand chance of surgical error in RK to be too high on a sense as precious as eyesight. Either way, millions of us remain eyeglass users, and a substantial industry has been built around us.

But back on topic…obviously I’m doing something wrong in the way I’m storing or handling my glasses. I’ve been told to remove and hold them by the bridge, not by the arms, which I’ve been doing mostly, but they still break in the same place. I’m beginning to sense a conspiracy by the optometry world as some sort of plot of planned obsolescence to force me and other eyeglass wearers to buy a new pair at regular intervals. From an economic standpoint it’s a brilliant plan.

7 Ways to Improve the Success of Your New Business

By Kevin M

Starting a new business is often a process of navigating a series of challenges. The greatest ideas can land in a ditch for unforeseen reasons. In fact it’s often not a bad concept that causes a new business to fail, but a lack of staying power. Starting a business should be thought of as a long term plan and not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Motivational author and speaker Robert Ringer provided a user-friendly re-definition of the concept of positive thinking as positive thinking through assumption of a negative result. You don’t assume failure, but you anticipate problems and prepare for them.

There is a constructive difference between true optimism and blind optimism. True optimism is based on solid planning—it springs from preparation and planning. The more common blind version rests on vague concepts like an idea that’s “too good to fail” or “I’ll succeed because I’m me, and I believe in me”. That kind of hype can quickly vaporize in the face of an empty bank account or a failed business deal.

So what kind of preparations will stack the deck in favor of your new business venture and generate a sense of true optimism?

Pages

Archive for January, 2010

Multiple Income Streams to replace One Man-One Job?

What TV REALLY Costs Us

Buying vs Renting a Home – Its Not All About Money

Secret Life of the American Teenager – Exactly What is the Message?

Radical Self Reliance in the New Economy

The High Cost of Convenience

Will A Million Dollars be Enough to Retire On?

Restaurant Tipping – How Much and When?

Save a Bundle By Repairing Your Eyeglasses

7 Ways to Improve the Success of Your New Business

Financial Management