Archive for August, 2010

The Future of Stock Market Investing?

Valuation-Informed Indexing Is the Future of Investing

By Rob Bennett


You have recently been sent to Earth from your home planet of Mars and know nothing of what people here have for years been saying about stock investing in the papers and magazines and web sites. You have some money to invest. You have only had time to do enough research to learn a single important fact about stock investing: The average long-term return in the U.S. market is 6.5 percent real.

What do you do? You follow a Buy-and-Hold strategy. You put most of your money in stocks and count on the long-term realities to pay off for you. You make an effort to tune out the short-term noise. You stick with stocks for the long run.

That’s where most of us stand today. We know one important and true thing about stock investing: Stocks are unpredictable in the short term but they always do well for those willing to wait long enough.

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TweetDeck vs. Hootsuite – Which Do You Like Better?

By Kevin M

Using a tool to control the flow on the social media

One of the things that can make the social media seem a bit intimidating is the constant flow of messages. How do you get a handle on a flood tide of information, and channel it into a more limited form that will be of practical use? Or more specifically, how do you separate the relevant from the clutter? Doing it manually is beyond comprehension, but fortunately, we’re not without options.

To streamline Twitter or any other social media, there are applications that will simplify the process by separating and organizing incoming messages, as well as enable you to categorize your own messages. And best of all, you can get them for free.

A social media tool can make networking much easier. Hootsuite and TweetDeck are two of the most popular. I have both and use each at different times.

What I’ll describe here will pertain mostly to Twitter, since I’ve chosen to concentrate my efforts on one social media at a time. Both tools can work with multiple social media, including Facebook.

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Have Your Down Payment Ready Before You Buy a New Car

By Kevin M

Last week we talked about the importance of having your financing ready before going to a car dealer. Today I want to cover another form of advanced preparation that’s equally important—having your down payment in place.


When ever we go into a car dealership—or any business—a series of negations begins. While we might want to believe that buying a car is a single transaction, it’s really a composition of several sub-transactions, including obtaining financing (if necessary), negotiating options or setting a value on your trade-in.

The best chance we have at getting a good deal on the overall purchase then, is to handle as much of the deal before we get to the dealers store—and without his help!

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How We Ruined Our Economy – And How We Can Rebuild It

Beyond Buy-and-Hold

By Rob Bennett

Our economy is a mess.

The premise of this new column (you’ll see it in this space each Wednesday morning) is that Buy-and-Hold has failed. Each column entry will examine a different principle of Buy-and-Hold Investing, explain why we now know that things don’t work in the way that the Buy-and-Holders say they do, and describe what those of us who believe in the Valuation-Informed Indexing Model (the alternative to Buy-and-Hold) believe instead.

The focus of this first column entry is -- How Buy-and-Hold caused the economic crisis and how switching from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing will bring about a recovery.

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Nursing Your Career Back to Health

Guest post by Heather Green


A friend of mine recently graduated from college with a business degree and a few years into working for a large corporation, she decided that she wanted to start nursing school. Now, I would say she had lost her mind, but honestly, I don’t blame her one bit!

Nurses are in extremely high demand and the pay is phenomenal. Not to mention, you are helping to save and change lives everyday, how rewarding! So I asked her how she was going to transition from making great money to going back to school full time while paying her bills (including her previous school loans!). She smiled and said that she had a plan.

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You Are What You Tweet on Twitter

By Kevin M

Last week in What Twitter Can Do For You we discussed how Twitter can be used to generate activity, connections and traffic, as well as enable you to get your ideas out into the world.

Obviously, the more followers you have, the larger the potential market for your messages, or tweets. But equally important is the quality of your tweets. After all once you have a few followers, or a few thousand, the next critical step is generating a stream of tweets that will engage them enough to take the next step, either by responding to your message on the social media itself, or by clicking through to your site.

Despite the thousands of claims of expert status that populate Twitter, the fact that the network is just a few years old and in a constant state of evolution means that there are far more practitioners than experts. With that in mind, I humbly lay claim to the status of practitioner and disclose that I can’t make any guarantees as to your success.

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Why You Need to Get Your Car Loan BEFORE You Buy a Car

By Kevin M

Whenever it comes time to buy a car there’s a strong tendency to go with the one stop shopping dealerships offer. But take advantage of that perceived convenience, and you may very well pay far more for the car than you should.

Dealerships hawk ridiculously low interest rates on their financing, so low that it often looks like the preverbal no-brainer to just go with what ever their offering.

Why not just rely on apparently low dealer financing, and save the hassle of applying through a bank or credit union?

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11 Ways to Convince Your Boss to Give You a Raise

Guest post by Alban

Asking for a pay raise is not something which is taught and can be a contentious issue, especially when times are tough for many businesses and many families. However, successfully securing a pay raise can have little to do with economic conditions, and all to do with how you approach your boss.

Your boss is unlikely to actually be an ogre and if you don’t have a problem talking to them about a project deadline or scheduling your annual leave them you can approach them in the same respectful and calm manner to ask for a pay raise. It is still easy to feel you are jeopardizing your position with the company if you ask for more money and in down times you may be highlighting yourself as the next one to go in a job cut which is why you need to be aware of the best tactics to use and attitudes to adopt when asking for a pay raise.

And yes – you should still ask for a raise if you think you deserve one, if you like your job and your co-workers then you will be much better off asking for more money in your current position than trying to insert yourself into a new office environment with a higher paying position.

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What Twitter Can Do For You

By Kevin M

Twitter can seem daunting at times. It’s the preverbal “fire hose of information” coming at you so fast it’s almost incomprehensible–the information superhighway of the information superhighway. To the outside observer, it can seem as if there’s no logical purpose to it, as if everyone is sending out information that no one else is reading.

To a very large degree, that’s even true—but it doesn’t mean that Twitter doesn’t work, or that it won’t work for you. True, not nearly everyone will even pay attention to most of your messages, but you don’t need everyone—you just need a few at a time. Multiply that small response by several efforts each day and you’re beginning to talk about something significant.

The best way I can describe what Twitter can do for you is to tell you what it’s doing for me.

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Are You “Upside Down” on Your Car?

By Kevin M

A friend of mine spent several years working for a prominent local car dealership in the area, and though I’m not a “car guy”, I got a chance to learn about some of the inner workings of the business from a guy who was living it. And that’s what they do in the car business, by the way—they live it.

If they’re in sales or financing, they’re on the job from the moment the store opens until past closing (there’s always a lagging customer or paper work that needs to be cleaned up). If they’re serious about the business, they work at least six days a week, and rarely take vacations.

Looking at the schedule this guy kept, the first thing I learned about the business was that I didn’t want to work in it. I had a life, and I wanted to keep it.

But the second thing I learned was a curious phrase he often referred to: upside down. If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to a customer who owes more on his or her car than the vehicle is worth.

Now in my simple mind, this customer looks to be the worst type of prospect a salesman or finance manager can run into. It looks like a clear case of customer-dead-on-arrival, right?

Hardly. The car dealerships LOVE these people!

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