One essential financial decision every smart and money-conscious person must make, asides from how to make money, is how to save their money. Of course, you have endured all the hustles and bustles involved in gathering wealth, and you finally have some money to your name. 

One essential financial decision every smart and money-conscious person must make, asides from how to make money, is how to save their money. Of course, you have endured all the hustles and bustles involved in gathering wealth, and you finally have some money to your name. You deserve some congratulations. But then, you should also know that the hustle does not end there. If you wish to sustain your accumulated wealth for a longer time, you must also consider saving up your wealth. 

In the old days, people considered safety deposit boxes as their best option for saving their wealth, and they used to put jewelry, cash, and other valuable items in such boxes. Indeed, these boxes were efficient in keeping valuables in those days, except for the government who wielded the right to come in when a person dies. Nowadays, however, the government can use any flimsy excuse to freeze your safety deposit box.  

A couple of years ago, the UK government froze people’s safe deposit boxes across various financial institutions. Their excuse for such action was that there were in search of terrorist ties. The accounts were frozen for three months, and no one could access valuables during this time. Many people could not travel during this period because their passports were held in the safe deposit box. Everyone was agitated by the fact that they couldn’t access their valuables for that long. But then, there was nothing tangible they could do. 

More smart people are recently looking for better ways of saving their precious belongings and avoiding these occurrences. This article will highlight some saving options and techniques that might prove to be better for you. 

Safe deposit boxes are still considered amongst the best options for saving valuables in recent times. However, people are becoming smarter in their decisions to save their money, jewelry, papers, etc., through this saving method. Many people prefer to split their precious items amongst different banks or financial institutions for safety these days. This is so that a problem in one of the banks does not affect the whole of their assets. 

You can adopt this strategy for saving your money or other items too. It is even better to split the belongings across countries if you can afford that. 

Suppose you decide to save up your valuables in banks and other financial institutions. In that case, it is best to always read through the terms of the contract agreement very carefully before signing. This is so that you can fully understand all their terms of partnership and ensure it suits your requirements and situation before signing. Also, watch out for any hidden charges before you sign. It would be best if you hired a lawyer to guide you through the agreement processes too. 

Because currencies are sometimes unstable, saving your investments in them might not be the best financial decision for you. This is because the currency you are saving in might begin to devalue after you have deposited your savings. Instead of saving up in cash, it is better to keep your valuables in more stable investments like gold, River, etc. 

Conclusion 

It has already been established that saving your wealth is as important as making wealth. In this article, we have discussed some of the best ways to keep your money safe in turbulent times.

Google has become a major element of the modern Internet world. They are constantly coming out with revolutionary products and methods to help any Internet small business to succeed.

Two items that have greatly contributed to the success of Google, namely Adsense and Adwords, are the subject of this article as they are an important addition to any Internet small business.

1. First, let’s talk about Google Adwords. This is a pay per click advertising platform and you can use it to get instant traffic coming into your website.

You don’t want to just jump into using Adwords without doing some learning first. Initially, you will need to learn things such as, how to find the right keywords to bid on, how much to bid on each keyword and how many clicks it will take you to generate a sale.

Very often, people will just start using Google Adwords without learning how it works first and they just end up throwing away money. What you want to do is proceed with the learning, then start with a small campaign and finally increase your campaign as it becomes more profitable.

If you want to succeed with Adwords, you will need to learn how to bid on the right keyword phrases. Online, you can find lots of free tutorials, videos and ebooks that will show you how to find keywords which are less competitive and are likely to convert well. Ultimately, you want your bidding to be as low as possible.

2. The other Google related item to discuss is Google Adsense. When you put Adsense on your site, ads are generated by Google that are relevant to your site content. Whenever anyone clicks on any of those ads, you will automatically get paid for the click.

Each year, millions are paid out to webmasters by Google for hosting Adsense on their sites. Many of the most popular blogs online today have Google Adsense running on their blogs.

There are several easy to follow tutorials on Google’s site which show you how to upload Adsense to you website. It is actually very easy to do and it is free too. If you check out your competitors, you will find that many of them are running Google Adsense ads on their website.

A good strategy for increasing your Adsense revenue is to keep adding extra pages to your site and make sure that Adsense is on these pages as well. As your website keeps growing in size, your Adsense revenue potential will grow with it.

These are 2 ways that you can use Google to earn extra money with your Internet small business. Both Google Adwords and Google Adsense have already proven their reliability and worth online, and a large percentage of Internet marketers use them today.

Spring is the perfect time to transform the things that may not be working in the home. With every change that you make in the household, there is a distinct change to your mental well-being that not only promotes positive and healthy growth within the home, but in all that you set out to do.

In most homes there are places that accumulate mess, piles of paper or objects that cause clutter and chaos. This can be a reflection of an area of your mind that needs uncluttering so to speak, and can often be attributed to having a lazy mental habit in a particular area. This mess is a great reminder and prompt towards positive action and change.

For many Australians – around 1.1 million – the mess becomes much more than just a pile or two of old newspapers, bordering on the much more serious habit of hoarding. The larger the mess, the bigger the underlying issues. Dr Paul Cullen advises, “ for extreme cases, relief can be found through medication, but it needs to coincide with counselling to be of any effect in the long run. Healing the emotional difficulties and isolation caused by hoarding is really important”. Control can play a large part, and hoarding becomes the only thing that they feel they have any control over. There are areas that they feel they cannot actively participate in and therefore decision making becomes next to impossible. “Attachment to objects can cloud judgement and makes parting with them very painful and difficult”. In this way, nothing is ever decided upon, piles of paper get bigger and nothing is recycled or thrown out.

Naturopath Tammy Safi has found with many patients over the years that the long-term outcome of hoarding or leaving rooms as they are can lead to depression. “It can also bring about apathy, lethargy and loss of hygiene. Using hoarding as a means to coping with situations that are otherwise too difficult for them to deal with, even though, it can end up being messy and ridiculous. I encourage my patients to look inward as a way to begin the healing process and in clinic I use the Bach flower “walnut” to begin the first stages towards movement, to help with becoming unstuck”.

One of the best ways to work out what the underlying problem might be is to actually get physical and set upon the task of cleaning the area of the house that is crying out for attention. You will find that throughout the process, or indeed soon after, you are able to see more clearly what it is that has been holding you back and in the place of a clouded mind, there will be a clear indication of what is you need to do in order to instil change in the area that needs it.

It can feel a little overwhelming at first, but with help closer and easier to find than ever before you don’t need to do it alone.

Eco Organiser and Home Styling director Tanya Lewis works with the emphasis on responsible living and has over time developed the ten R’s. Refuse, rethink, responsible, restyle, research, reorganise, reduce, reuse, recycle and reward. “My main goal is to reduce the amount that we send to landfill, to rethink – do you need it, do you love it, how would you feel without it? And more importantly how do you dispose of a product when your finished with it? Life is too short to be looking for stuff, I believe that people shouldn’t be wasting their time looking for things when their time could be better spent on more important things” she says.

With careful consideration and planning you need never again look upon an ‘accumulated mess’ with dread, not only enabling you to spend more time with your family and friends, but with a clearer mind and a stronger sense of focus. Spring helps to prepare you for the next six months. It rejuvenates your thought process and readies you by clearing away any old habits that might have settled in over winter.

Living Room

Ideally the living room should meet the needs of all family members equally. This is a great way to check to see if your family life is in balance. Too much clutter here is suggestive of an imbalance in the amount of quality time your family shares. The room needs to be free to create an inviting atmosphere to talk and engage as a family. Keep in mind, schoolwork and other similar items should be kept to a minimum and have their allotted cubby-hole or area. This room provides the greatest benefit when it is not too cluttered with children’s toys; this in itself constructs an unhealthy balance for parents and older siblings. With winter over, couch cushions and throw rugs would have collected a lot more dust than usual in last 3 months. Giving them a good airing in the sun is akin to shaking off any remanets of old thoughts and habits linked to winter to mentally prepare you for what lays ahead.

Kitchen

Where the lounge can sum up the needs of the whole family, it is the Kitchen that goes one step further in the balance stakes by representing your own personal inner order. You will find that the underlying cause of clutter is attributed to poor time management. An untidy bench is showing you in more ways than one that discipline and structure is missing from your daily routine. Begin by compartmentalising everything in the cupboards; there should be nothing that is not stored correctly, from cans to open packets of pasta through to pots and pans. The cleaner the kitchen, the greater your time management skills will be in the other areas of your life.

Bedroom

General untidiness in the bedroom is largely linked towards personal relationships with partners. If clothes are jumbled and there appears to be no obvious division of space, you may want to look at each others personal needs and if they are being met. Are you giving each other enough space to pursue personal goals? By giving each other space in the bedroom, and by separating clothes, shoes and personal items, you are acknowledging that you respect and support their choices in their chosen career and interests. Untidy clothes indicate a need to look towards your own personal drive and commitment to projects. The underlying issue tends to be career oriented. You need to recycle or give away any clothes that you no longer wear, by holding on to them you are holding onto old thought patterns connected to your career choices. By reorganising this area you can then turn your attention towards other achievements. Order in this area shows that you have great personal strength in achieving your own set goals.

Storage

Storage areas can easily become the dumping ground for any unused or broken items around the house and can too easily equate to an unnecessary burden. It is equivalent to holding on to all the things that may have upset you in the past, things that you can’t let go of. Alleviate the unwanted stress that you probably never knew was there by making the most out of hard rubbish days. Re-organise the area by adding extra shelves and hanging things on hooks. Order here shows that you are not sweeping issues under the carpet that you are willing as an individual to deal with problems as they arise. It shows that you do not hold onto to old issues or problems, but let them go. The sense of satisfaction and mental clarity derived from spring cleaning will be reward enough. It provides you with the impetus for a new and improved way of living, because deep down you know that things can no longer go on the way that they have and you yourself are ready for a change. Spring is just the right season.

Written by writer and psychic medium Tammy Moir.

For any aspiring entrepreneur, building a successful business plan can seem daunting. Many small businesses ask themselves: Do we really need a plan? Well, if you have a business or want to start a business, you NEED a business plan! “Winging it” never worked for any successful business. Even well-established businesses need a business plan, or need to drastically modify their business plan when the situation changes.

The first step to building your business plan is determining your goals and objectives for your business. Imagine where you want to be in a few years. Do you want to remain a small business, or are you more adventurous? Also, consider your personal goals and objectives. How much work are you willing to put into your business? Is this a business that will provide a livable income, or more of a hobby? What tasks and jobs are you willing to delegate to your employees?

Second, determine what you bring to the customer. What distinguishes your business from your competitor? You must come up with the key attributes of your business that will draw customers to you again and again. Without proper brand development and recognition, your customers will glaze over your website and you won’t have appropriate levels of business to sustain.

Third, consider your budget. How much money will you need to start up your business? Are you going to take out a business loan, or find investors? Do you want to allow investors in on your important business decisions? Also, consider what happens as your business changes and grows. How are you going to spend income? Are you going to re-invest in your business? Finally, how much income do you need to support your personal lifestyle?

When you have these essential elements, you can consider your business strategy. Basically, this is a plan of how you’re going to market, design, and operate your business. In any business plan, you will usually open with an Executive Summary and Business Description. After that, you get to the “meat” of your plan.

The third section of your business plan is your Marketing section. Consider your target audience and how large your customer base may become. Then, consider how you will reach your market (how feasible it is to actually contact your customer base). Will you use website only? Or perhaps television and paper mediums? This will help define your pricing, distribution, promotion and marketing methods. Once you have this section completed, you can see how you measure up with your competitors. You should aim to outperform and outlast your competitors, and draw their customers to your base.

The next two sections are the overall design and operations plan of your business. How will you design your business’ brand? What are your most visible attributes? Also, how many employees do you want, and how will your business flow? Will you delegate tasks or handle most of it yourself? A lot of this section is highly personal and gives you a chance to show your passion about your product or service.

Finally, you must come back to your finances and determine what is feasible for your business. Also, try to examine what your future financial goals will be as the market changes and your business grows.

With a business plan, you can ensure your business has a solid foundation in reality and what you can feasibly expect from your venture. This is essential to business success and will maximize your profits!

Some of my proposal lessons learned that I began to take for granted include Adapt the process to serve you – do not be slave to the process, Always carefully read everything that’s related to your proposal, Triple-check everything. Do not trust what you cannot see.

I am in foggy San Jose in Silicon Valley, teaching a course for Stevens at NASA Ames. It is an intense, inquisitive, and exceedingly bright group of students. Some of their questions got me to remember some truths in the proposal profession that I began to take for granted – so I am sharing them with you after quickly jotting them down at 4 am (I am still on the East Coast time). Here are some of my proposal lessons learned:

1.       Adapt the process to serve you – do not be slave to the process. Every proposal is unique in duration, events that take place during the scheduled proposal time, quality, and availability of proposal resources, and so on. If you need to cancel a review or two because they would be meaningless or would take too much time, do. But don’t cancel all of them – have at least one. And, make sure you stay out of trouble – we are all fallible and human and make mistakes – if you involve your management in a review early, you can prevent some mistakes or share the responsibility.

2.       Always carefully read everything that’s related to your proposal: the whole RFP with all its appendices; the documents that fly around such as templates, background, and boilerplate; and especially draft sections. You can course-correct earlier.

3.       Triple-check everything. It means after you have read the final copies, made sure you have included everything you need to include, you have checked compliance, do it again, even if it feels unnecessary. You will be shocked and grateful more often than you can imagine.

4.       Do not trust what you cannot see: if you are told section is in progress, you need to see the section in progress. If you haven’t seen it, it does not exist. Procrastination has deep roots – and the most professional and trustworthy of people suffer from it – if you don’t believe me, check out proposal procrastination flowchart.

5.       Do not back yourself into the corner with your schedule. It does not matter how tight it may be – always leave a contingency. Murphy lives inside printers, PDF generators, email transmission speed, and other accouterments of the final days or hours of proposal delivery. Plan to be early so that you are on time. If you plan to be on time, you may be late.