Aridni

When It’s Time to Sell Your House

Guest Writer — Sat, 30 May 2009 13:42:42 +0000

There’s no denying that selling your house can be a stressful decision. Many factors may have led you to this point. You might be ready for something bigger or need something smaller. You might have an amazing new job in an amazing new city. If it’s a question of sizing up or sizing down, you won’t be pressured to sell within a set amount of time. On the other hand, if you need to start your new job in three months, the pressure will be on to sell as quickly as possible. Knowing how to navigate the ins and outs of the real estate market takes a little ingenuity, but with the right resources – including a competent real estate agent – you’re sure to be looking at a “SOLD” sign in your front yard before too long.

Timing Is Everything

Well, timing may not be everything, but it’s important. If you’re not pressured to sell your house quickly, consider yourself lucky. Feel free to skip ahead to the next section. If, on the other hand, you’re faced with a pressing situation, like a new job that requires you to relocate, you’ll need to act quickly and efficiently to get the ball rolling.

As soon as you even suspect that a transfer or relocation may be possible, get in touch with a real estate agent and hammer out details like what a reasonable asking price might be. If the relocation does, indeed, happen, you’ll be that much further along in the process, and listing your house will just mean filling out some paperwork and keeping the place picked up for showings.

As a new employee about to relocate, you’re well within your right to contact your new employer to request a deferment of your start date by a few months. If your new job is set to start in the middle of the winter, for example, you’d be much better off waiting a few months to relocate to try to sell your home when the real estate market is at its peak in the warmer months.

Wait for the Warm Months

People buy houses when it’s nice out, not when there’s snow and ice on the ground. Showing a house with a lush, green front yard and trees full of leaves is a boon to real estate agents everywhere. When the sun is shining and the grass is green, potential buyers have an easier time imagining their new life in the house.

There’s no getting around the fact that winter is a terrible time to put your house up for sale. Viewers will traipse in and out with slush covered boots, the trees are bare, and everything is gray and overcast. If you can wait for the warmer months, you absolutely should. Also, potential buyers are much more open to discussing how much things like property taxes, home insurance policies, and general upkeep will cost them when they can hear birds chirping and brooks babbling.

A Special Note About the Current Real Estate Market

If you can avoid selling your house right now, you should. With property values at record lows, the current market is nowhere close to being in the seller’s favor. Upside-down mortgages (when the balance of the mortgage exceeds the value of the property), short sales (when a seller is forced to sell the house for less than the balance of the mortgage), and foreclosures are an increasing reality. Buyers certainly have the upper hand in the current real estate market, and can make demands that, even just four or five years ago, would have been considered insulting to the seller.

This doesn’t mean that all hope is lost, though. If you still decide that you want to sell your home, prepare yourself to be patient, and hold off listing until the weather and time of year are on your side. Needless to say, the best time to sell is when you can, at the very least, recoup your initial investment on the property. Give yourself as much time as possible, which will prove to be the most important factor to selling successfully.

Make Kids Happier without Spending More

Katie — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:09:31 +0000

Birthday cards are expensive. There’s no question about it.

The problem is that a fancy card doesn’t hold a whole lot of value for the person receiving the card – especially if that person is a child. Every year, we’ll spend a couple of dollars to buy kids a card. Why not make them a simple little card and put the $3 you would have paid for a commercial card into the envelope instead?

I know that $3 doesn’t seem like much for an adult. But to a kid, money is money. They can do a lot with $3 that they can’t do with a card, especially if everyone who usually buys them a birthday card hands them a handmade card and $3 instead.

It’s just something to think about.

Make it easy for me to give you money

Todd — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:01:00 +0000

I buy most of my things online. Books, boardgames, an ipod, a replacement car door handle, a dvd, a pdf download, and of course more books are just some of the items from the last six months. In the next six months, I’m sure that I’ll have more online dealings. Perhaps not quite as much given that Christmas fell into the last six.

Most of those items came from one place, Amazon. I’ve also ordered from Barnes and Noble online, the Apple store, and a couple specialty shops. The specialty shops unfortunately didn’t do an excellent job and won’t be named.

Amazon remembers who I am. It’s not hard to grab my email address and set a cookie on my computer. When I go to Amazon, I see all kinds of different things. I see what is recommended based on previous purchases. I can see what is in my shopping cart from last time. I can even check out the recently viewed books and other items.

At Barnes and Noble’s online site, I can log in and there is nothing. Nothing is unique to me. There is ‘My B&N’ their social network. It is completely blank for me. You can add your favorite books, or what you’re currently reading. But it is absolutely blank. Why not add suggestions based on my recent purchases. Instead I can add new titles by searching for them in a sea of millions of books.

When I go over to the Apple store, it doesn’t matter if I have ever bought anything. It doesn’t matter if I am logged in or not. At their site I’m going to be looking at the same thing either way. Nothing is linked together and there are no recommendations for me. They could easily say, ‘we see you’re using Windows, isn’t it time to upgade to a Mac? Here are a few suggestions…’, or how about ‘Upgrade your iPod shuffle to an iPod Touch and get -some incentive-’ They know what products I have purchased and they know what I am using to check the site.

As for now, I’m going to keep shopping at Amazon. They may be a big giant evil company (or something) but even more importantly they know who I am. They know what I want to buy and they help me do it. Most of the time, Amazon knows what I want before I even do. They are not cramming merchandise down my throat. Instead they are giving me suggestions based on my browsing and spending habits.

While it might be hard to do as well as Amazon for you and your company. The competition is very clear. You can easily tell what they are doing and honestly it’s not a big secret.

Great Service = Loyal Customers

Whereas mediocre products and services leads to
Mediocre Service = Indifferent Bargain Shopping Customers

When you do a better job of knowing me, I’ll spend my money with you.

Outliers: The Story of Success

Todd — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 05:14:07 +0000

Malcom Gladwell’s latest book has been out for a couple of months now, and I’ve got to tell you that it’s great. He has a really easy to read writing style. He mixes ideas with stories so seamlessly that really build and support his conclusions.

One important part of the book is having 10,000 hours of any activity to become truely proficiant at it. It doesn’t matter if it is writing programs and designing software all throughout software like Bill Gates, or if it is playing night after night nonstop in seedy establisments like the Beatles did.

Getting in that many hours would mean that whatever you wanted to completely master would have to be something that you absolutly loved doing. It would have to be a complete passion of yours.

Malcom Gladwell is very good at making things interesting, even if they normally wouldn’t be appealing to you he is great at crafting his words together.

This is a great book and I highly reccommend it; however I do believe that his previous two books Blink and The Tipping Point were better reads overall. They had more information that could be applied to life situations. In this book there are a lot of moments that will make you think “Oh, that’s cool.”

I haven’t been dissappointed by any of Malcolm’s books yet, and this one certainly lived up. I would also reccommend the audio versions of his books, you can load them up on your ipod and listen to them. Being read by the author, they have the inflections and dramatizations added to them percicly where Gladwell wanted to emphisize.

Pick up either Blink or Tipping Point first, and then don’t let this one go by.

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How the Credit Crisis Works

Todd — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:03:30 +0000

Here is a simple, yet thorough, explanation of the current credit crisis. If you had any questions about what was going on in the economy right now, this is a big player. Why is the economy so bad right now? Watch this video and find out.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Canadian Dollar Suffers from U.S. Slowdown!

Guest Writer — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:35:30 +0000

You see, most of last year, you could say that the Canadian dollar was falling because of falling commodity prices. Since Canada exports so many widely used commodities like oil and lumber, when prices fall, so do their profit margins. It costs them about the same amount to produce the product but what they can get for it in the market is determined by where those commodities are trading at the time.

USD/CAD Pushes Towards 1.30 Once Again!

Last Year the Commodities Crash Killed the Canadian dollar. This Year it’s the U.S. Economic Crash that’s Killing Them!

So that was what hurt them much of last year. Now we roll into 2009, and they get killed by another dynamic: the increasing slowdown of the U.S. economy!

For three months in a row now, the U.S. economy has shed around 600,000 jobs or more back to back! The unemployment rate seems to be going somewhat parabolic at this point. It jumped from 7.6% previously to 8.1% now.

On top of this, to buffer the blow of the slowdown, Canada’s central bank had to lower interest rates once again (to 0.50%) which put it at the lowest their interest rates have EVER been!

While this is a dynamic that will eventually be good for their economy, it hurts their currency right now for sure.

They also stated that they may implore “Quantitative Easing”. What the heck is that? Well, in simple terms it means that they will print money out of thin air and load up the banks with so much excess cash that they are more likely to lend money and thus spur economic growth.

While that may eventually give their economy a boost, it kills their currency. Why? Look at it this way. Anytime something becomes more abundant, it becomes worth less. Anytime something becomes scarce, it becomes more valuable. (This is why a Corvette in the 1960’s may have gone for $3,000 then and would sell for $30,000 to $60,000 today. These days, they are scarce…yet they weren’t back then).

So when the market is flooded with more money (Canadian dollars), that money gets devalued and is worth less. Therefore it takes more (Canadian) dollars to buy the same amount of goods.

The U.S. is Printing Money too, but Right Now they are Saved Because they are the World’s Reserve Currency (and thus a “Safe Haven”).

Now, you may say but isn’t the U.S. doing the same thing? After all, their economy is slowing down. They are printing money too.

I would say, while I won’t deny that point, the U.S. dollar presently benefits from what is called the “safe haven bid”. What does that mean? It means that investors all over the globe are running to the safety of the U.S. dollar because it’s the world’s reserve currency right now.

In other words, if there’s one currency on the face of the earth that you are most likely to keep and continue to use, it’s the one that most of the goods are priced in all over the world. For example, gold, oil, wheat, soybeans, lumber, etc. are all priced in U.S. dollars.

Therefore in crazy times like this, it enjoys the benefit of being the world’s reserve currency. However, once the global economy finally does return to normal, then this “benefit” will suddenly go away and the dollar will just have to stand on its own fundamentals once again. We all know that once that happens, the buck doesn’t have that much to stand on. Therefore, the “dollar party” may come to an end ONCE the global economy normalizes.

In the mean time, Canada’s currency (and economy) will continue to suffer as the U.S. lays off more workers and continues to slow down. Remember, they derive about 79% of their exports from the U.S. That’s huge! In fact, it’s so huge…it’s the largest trading relationship between two countries according to Canada’s trade department.

This really is huge, because the U.S. hasn’t had three back to back months of layoffs this big since they started keeping records on it back in 1939. So from at least as far as our records go back, this has never happened on this scale before!

So when you add all of this up, you come up with the fact that the U.S. dollar has a high probability of continuing to rise against the Canadian dollar. So with that said, I think you may find the USD/CAD rate to break the 1.30 barrier in the coming weeks to months.

Therefore, if you would like to take advantage of this situation and profit from the pressure on the Canadian dollar, then take these three steps:

Get Educated about Currencies and What Makes them go up and down: You can get your an online education here that comes with live instructors that are there to answer your questions.

Get a FREE demo account here that comes with REAL TIME quotes and charts. This way you can learn how to place trades before risking one cent of your money in the currency market.

Then once you’ve gotten educated over the course of 8-10 days in your course and you are familiar with your demo trading station, then open up your live trading account here. If you start with a micro account, then I would suggest putting in $300 to $2,000 in the account. Start small. If you choose to start with a mini account, then you might fund your live account with $2,000 to $10,000. Start with enough capital to be practical while trading only 1-2 lots per trade at first.

Sean Hyman is today’s guest writer, he is the head instructor at MyWealth.com

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120 Billion Reasons to Sell the Yen!

Guest Writer — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:39:18 +0000

This past year, one of the few financial instruments in the world was headed to the moon. Which one was that? The yen!

Yeah, the carry trade unwound which caused money to flow away from high yielding currencies and back into low yielding currencies like the yen.

Investors became risk adverse with their money. They poured it into things that had been beaten down for years because it seemed to be a safe place to run to. Thus the yen was a huge beneficiary during this ultimate “fear factor”.

However, recently I started talking to you about a possible turn coming in the yen and that the yen party was about to come to an end soon.

Things go from “Bad to Worse” in Japan

Since then, things in Japan have continued to unravel. They’ve had a 12 percent slide off in their GDP. The yen has risen 23 percent against the dollar which is killing their exporters. Toyota, Sony and Honda are all either doing layoffs or are about to do layoffs. In fact, Honda has even mentioned that if the yen stays at 100 to the dollar or under, that they may be forced to move some of their operations out of Japan. So this is serious stuff!

If that we’re enough, when the Japanese Finance Minister showed up at the latest G-7 meeting in Rome, he was accused of being drunk and unable to properly participate due to his inability to understand the questions being posed to him.

This caused him to have to step down from power just days later. This makes several finance ministers that Japan has gone through in just a short time. Governmental instability is never good for a currency. So these were all of the reasons lately that have surfaced as to why the party may be ending for the yen (in particularly against the U.S. dollar).

120 Billion Reasons to Sell Short the Yen and Stop Shorting Other Asian Currencies!

But now there’s a new reason to close out any long positions in the yen and to reverse course by shorting it. Why? 13 Asian nations announced on the 22^nd of this month that they were forming a $120 billion currency pool in order to defend their currencies.

This is a powerful alliance as these countries team up together. This should send a building wave of confidence across these Asian countries as they see governments teaming up and banding together for the support of their own currencies.

Japan, China and South Korea will provide about 80 percent of the funds for the pool and the other 10 countries will fund the remainder.

While many of these currencies have weakened significantly and funds may have to be used to buy their currencies, the Japanese could always use any extra resources to sell their strong currency.

With these countries banding together in such a strong, united way…it shows that the story may be about to change. Formerly in 2008 and up until now, you’ve had most of these currencies across Asia weakening unduly and the yen having an unreasonably high strength.

I think you are going to see this tide turn. These things happen like ships turning and not like speed boats. However, I think the yen is starting its turn even now and it won’t be long before these other Asian currencies start to strengthen once again.

I also think this massive currency pool could help to prevent another Asian contagion like happened in 1997-1998 as many of the Asian countries used of most all of their foreign reserves trying to defend their currencies and had to finally turn to the IMF for help.

It was a horrid problem that ended up causing a ripple effect all around the world. So they are being very preemptive this time around in trying to stop something like this before it gets that far.

USD/JPY “Prepares for Takeoff” on Yen Weakness!

Therefore, I think the sentiment is going to shift away from a strong yen while other currencies finally start to strengthen. You will likely see the yen weaken across the board but I’m most confident in the prospects for the USD/JPY exchange rate going up overall throughout the remainder of the year due to this new vote of confidence and also due to all of the previous problems plaguing Japan.

At the end of the year, I think you will find that the USD/JPY is back up over 100 and headed higher. This will help Japan’s economy, especially its exporters that are such household names here in America.

So get ready for more yen weakness and dollar strength against it. Also, it won’t be long before other Asian currencies start to strengthen as the yen starts to weaken.

Today’s Guest Writer is Sean Hyman the head instructor over at www.mywealth.com

Quoth the Banker, “Watch Cash Flow”

Todd — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:51:23 +0000

Once upon a midnight dreary as I pondered weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume of accounting lore,
Seeking gimmicks (without scruple) to squeeze through
Some new tax loophole,
Suddenly I heard a knock upon my door,
Only this, and nothing more.

Then I felt a queasy tingling and I heard the cash a-jingling
As a fearsome banker entered whom I’d often seen before.
His face was money-green and in his eyes there could be seen
Dollar-signs that seemed to glitter as he reckoned up the score.
“Cash flow,” the banker said, and nothing more.

I had always thought it fine to show a jet black bottom line.
But the banker sounded a resounding, “No.
Your receivables are high, mounting upward toward the sky;
Write-offs loom. What matters is cash flow.”
He repeated, “Watch cash flow.”

Then I tried to tell the story of our lovely inventory
Which, though large, is full of most delightful stuff.
But the banker saw its growth, and with a might oath
He waved his arms and shouted, “Stop! Enough!
Pay the interest, and don’t give me any guff!”

Next I looked for noncash items which could add ad infinitum
To replace the ever-outward flow of cash,
But to keep my statement black I’d held depreciation back,
And my banker said that I’d done something rash.
He quivered, and his teeth began to gnash.

When I asked him for a loan, he responded, with a groan,
That the interest rate would be just prime plus eight,
And to guarantee my purity he’d insist on some security—
All my assets plus the scalp upon my pate.
Only this, a standard rate.

Though my bottom line is black, I am flat upon my back,
My cash flows out and customers pay slow.
The growth of my receivables is almost unbelievable:
The result is certain—unremitting woe!
And I hear the banker utter an ominous low mutter,
“Watch cash flow.”
Herbert S. Bailey, Jr.

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Joining the Blog Traffic King, Yaro Starak, and his program

Todd — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 19:06:22 +0000

Has anyone joined Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program? Katie and I were talking about joining it, but we just wanted to see if anyone has any thoughts on it.

There are two different options that he offers. Blog Mastermind runs at $497 and the second package is the Blog Mastermind as well as a newer program of his, ‘Membership Site Mastermind.’ The bigger package runs for $997.

I think that Yaro has done a great job in the past. He provides a tremendous amount of value on his sites and through his email newsletter.

Just wondering if anyone had any thoughts before we make the plunge here.

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Markets are down, potential growth is up!

Todd — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:02:05 +0000

Oil is cheap. Stocks are cheap. Have you been into a department store recently? They’re selling everything for cheap right now. You can bet that guys like Warren Buffet are out buying up stocks right now. And why not? Compared to the past five years we are seeing everything sold at rock bottom prices.

Although just because something was selling at $25 a share, does not mean that today’s sale at $15 per share is a good bargain. It might not make it back to it’s previous price point. Nothing is certain, especially when open markets are concerned, but the savvy investor can now pick up some great value deals.

Take a look at the PE ratio, take a look at the current asset holdings, study up on the industry a bit, do all the research that you normally do when buying stocks. When the economy recovers, and it will, the money will return. Credit will be extended, money will flow back into the stock market, and acquisitions will be made.

If you have money to invest, now is a great time to do it.

If you have a business to start, now is a great time to do it.

Times will be tough when you start off, but if you can make it now you will be able to soar when business picks up.

I am very optimistic about the future.