Fearless Money

Neo, over at Neo’s nest egg pointed out this interesting web applet which calculates how much your blog is worth, based on research done by Weblogs, Inc.Link: How Much is Your Blog Worth?

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I’ve already discussed why I need to change banks and some of the many reasons I rejected most. This article talks about why I chose USAA, and why I am really happy about my choice.I didn’t expect to be happyIn fact, I was depressed for quite a while during the selection process. It really seemed like there was no bank in the world that could make me happy.

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In part one of this series, I discussed why I need to change banks.

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As I detailed in my posts about debit fraud (here and here) I need to change banks.

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Due to my recent debit fraud experience, I no longer trust debit cards. The risk is simply not worth the reward to me.

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Over at Tapestry designs, they are discussing an idea for making your resume more memorable. I’m not too sure about it, to be honest.

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It is an odd thing, but repeatedly proven to be true, that setting constraints often sparks creativity.The way we did it this year was by budgeting “gift money” every month. The money, $50 each for Dustin and me, goes in envelopes marked “Dustin Gift Money” and “Bruce Gift Money” in the safe…. We use it to fund all gift giving throughout the year, supplemented by whatever we feel like kicking in from our personal “mad money” allowances. Since we started the formal budget in June last year, there were a total of $800 maximum dollars in the envelopes…. $500 really is not a lot to buy presents for the five people in the family, relatives, and close friends…. We did this by setting our limits up front, and by not really buying any “impulse gifts”…. I found myself thinking things like “that is a nice shirt, Dustin would love it, but if I buy it, I wont have enough left to get that bracelet I came here to buy.”… Temptation is just easier to avoid when you are using cash.Another big help was something I read on another personal finance blog (sorry I can’t recall which). It pointed out that young children really don’t have the attention to enjoy more than three or four presents.

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Steve Pavlina, one of my inspirations to get out and make my business a reality, has posted several times about the importance of planning. He suggests making a 90-day plan and I’ve been doing that. The process is very helpful to me as I start the new year. My primary focus over the next three months is going to be starting to develop an online income stream.Goal: $10/day from aggregate website income.I’ll reach that goal by experimenting with various forms of advertising on my blogs, as well as changing my Invisible Castle gaming site to begin converting its 100,000 hits a month into some money for me.Also, I will experiment with affiliate marketing, using my programming skills to serve great landing pages for my Google AdWords campaigns. I’m convinced that most advertisers do not know the first thing about programming, and that I have a large competitive advantage to leverage in that area.My secondary goal is to cut off the financial and time drain caused by the ongoing debit fraud I spoke about in a previous article.Goal: Change banks and close the Washington Mutual account by January 31.I’ve already done some research and I am fairly certain I will be moving to First Tech Credit Union. I’ve never heard a bad word about them, they provide everything I want, and they are neither Washington Mutual nor Bank of America, both of whom have thoroughly proven they don’t give a damn about “small time” credit fraud.Goal: Get $900K life insurance for me and $250K for my wife. The last attempt failed due to a missed deadline for medical records.

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Make Easy Money with Google is running a multi-category poll Best AdSense Resources of 2005. I don’t feel right voting since I haven’t seen many of the resources in the poll. Instead, I’m simply using it as a collection of links others find useful. Very helpful for this new AdSense publisher.
Already, I […]

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The subscription feed for this site was wrong and is corrected now. I had just read a great article at ProBlogger titled “A Story about the importance of Checking your Blog’s Stats”, and immediately checked mine. Argh! 12 requests for a bad feed link. Thank you, ProBlogger.

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