Personal Finance Advice

When you set out to choose your occupation, should you choose a higher paying job or work that you love? I never questioned it myself. I couldn’t imagine spending eight to ten hours a day for thirty years doing work that I hated or merely tolerated. I looked for work that if I didn’t love [...]

This month, I have the pleasure of bringing you the wisdom of Stephan Iscoe, the visionary behind Big City Coffee. Stephan is a Renaissance man — musician, author, business consultant, serial entrepreneur and CEO. His story is fascinating and his advice well worth learning. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Stephan about his [...]

I don’t need a lot of sleep. That does not surprise me because my father does not need a lot of sleep either. Usually about 5.5 hours is enough for me. If I go to sleep at midnight or 1am, I am usually wide awake at 6 or 6:30am and I start my day with [...]

Sometimes I hear advice along the following lines: “If you want to be wealthy, you need to wear and drive the status symbols of wealth. That’s the only way anyone will take you seriously.” In other words, fake it till you make it. I can sort of understand where this advice comes from. It is [...]

Charles Baudelaire once said, “Anybody, as long as he knows how to be amusing, has a right to talk about himself”. Orson Welles advised that “Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest”. Anti-tax agitator Vivien Kellems was quick to proclaim, “Of course I’m a publicity hound. Aren’t all crusaders? [...]

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the best learning experiences are not usually found in classrooms. Experience is by far a better teacher than any textbook, but books and classrooms can make us better prepared to make the most of our experience. Among the best learning experiences that I have had in my [...]

I see a lot of people these days working for very little money. I’m not talking about minimum wage work; that pays a fortune compared to the work I’m talking about. I’m talking about people who write blog articles for content aggregator sites for a dollar for 400 words, take hour-long surveys for $0.50, or [...]

As the USA seeks to recover from its recession and to add jobs to a contracting economy, many political and civic leaders have invested energy and resources in an effort to develop jobs. Cities offer incentives to businesses to hire and to bring jobs. State and federal agencies offer incentives to preserve and increase jobs. [...]

Last night I met up with a crowd of restaurant reviewers from the local Yelp community. Yelp, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a community of on-line reviewers who contribute reviews of restaurants and other businesses. Over time, visitors to the site can get an increasingly accurate perception of how [...]

The other day, I was headed to our local dog park with my wife and our puppy. We were already in the car and actually backing out of the driveway when I realized that I had forgotten my business cards. I stopped the car and told my wife that I was headed back into the [...]

One of the things that I hated when I worked in an office was the constant drain on my finances. There were collections for birthdays, coffee supplies, and solicitations for every charity and school fund raiser. It got so bad that I seriously considered putting a, “No Soliciting” sign on my cubicle. It’s not that [...]

My business definitely qualifies as a small business. I hope that it will someday grow into a bigger business but, for now, it is just me doing what I do. That is fine because my clients know that they will get quality service from me even though I am not backed by an army of [...]

Over the years, I’ve met a lot of people. If you were to look at my Facebook and Linked-In directories, you would find professionals and artisans, white collar and blue collar, stay at home parents and people who have chosen careers over families. Some have been clients. Others have been service providers. I’ve known some [...]

I love this idea as a way to physical show what it’s like to earn minimum wage in the US today. Blake Fall-Conroy put together a machine that dispenses pennies and allows any person to work for minimum wage. The concept is simple. An individual cranks a handle on the machine and pennies drop out [...]

I’m always a little surprised at how much everything in our society is measured in terms of money. We measure our worth by our salaries, not by how much we love our work. We measure our remodeling projects by how much we can get back when we sell and not on how much we love [...]

My last “real job” where I worked full-time for someone else was a mess. There was sexual harassment, bullying, unfair hours and demands, and all sorts of other foolishness going on. I was young and hadn’t yet saved up a large emergency fund, so leaving wasn’t possible unless I had another job lined up. Not [...]

I am tired. I have been up for the past two nights until about 1 am trying to finish projects for clients and writing content for my website. I am also a bit under the weather, as I seem to have a sore throat and headache that just won’t go away. I can tell you [...]

Now that I have made the decision to start a business, what next? Doing a good job in one’s chosen field usually requires entirely different skill sets and knowledge than running a business. Accounting software? Tracking time? Building a website? Forming a corporation? The list of tasks is lengthy and can be more than a [...]

After close to thirty years of working for other people, I have finally decided to hang out a shingle on my own. For some people, self-employment is a natural extension of who they are. For me, as I insist on the possibility of great success in anything I undertake, the decision to go into business [...]

When people find out that I’m a professional blogger, they either ask me what the hell that means or how is it possible to make enough money to live on by blogging. Many people seem to think that there must be some hidden secret to easy success that only a few know and that is [...]