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5 Personal Safety Apps that Could Save Your Life
No one likes to think about the possibility of dying too young. But knowing that potential exists, you take the smart step of protecting those you love by carrying term life insurance. But what about preventing the worst? Did you know your iPhone or Android device can call for help or record vital information if you ever find yourself in a life-threatening situation? Here are five personal safety apps that could save your life.
1) myGuardianAngel
Once this app allows you to reach all of your emergency contacts with the push of one button. You enter the contact information for anyone you would want to get in touch with if you were in any sort of emergency as soon as you download it. If you are in an emergency, the app will call your contacts, send them an e-mail with your GPS location and immediately begin recording audio and video from your phone.
2) StaySafe
This app is good for anyone who works or travels alone. You can schedule the app to automatically notify friends or family after a certain period of time when your phone is inactive. For example, you can estimate how long you expect to drive from one location to another on your own and then the phone will contact someone automatically if you are out of contact longer than expected. That way your friends will know to send help because something is wrong, even if you aren’t in a position to contact them yourself. StaySafe sends your contacts a detailed GPS location for you so that they can easily find you and bring help.
3) RESCUE
This full-service app can help you on the scene as well as notify your emergency contacts for you. If you are in trouble, you can trigger the app to sound a loud alarm that might frighten off anyone who might be planning to do you harm. The alarm can also help someone find you if you are lost or unable to move from your current location. When the alarm is triggered, the app will also send immediate notifications to your emergency contact list so that they can begin to send help right away. Emergency services such as the police and fire department can also be set for notification through the RESCUE app.
4) Night Recorder
This is a good app to have when you need to make a quick recording of your surroundings for any reason. The app can be set to begin recording at a touch. If you are stranded, you could create a recording by speaking about the landmarks you can see and explaining how you got to your current location. The recorder can then send an email of your recording to anyone on your contact list.
5) iWitness
With this app, you can instantly make video or audio recordings of your situation so that there is a permanent first-hand record of everything that happens. It is a handy tool for anyone who has been in a car accident or involved in a medical emergency because you can go back and look at the video to see exactly what happened if there is any question about it later. The app will also contact emergency services or your personal emergency contacts if you are in trouble. The built-in GPS locator will transmit your exact location so that people can find you quickly and easily.
Post by Term Life Insurance News
10 Ways to Secure Your Kids Against Debt
Everybody wants their children to do well. I want my kids to grow up without making my mistakes. Here are a few ways to help them avoid debt.
- Talk to your kids about money. Your kids will never learn how to handle their finances if nobody teaches them how. This is important. The factor that contributes most to stress, divorce, long hours, and unhappiness can’t be left to chance.
- Set a good example. Spend less than you have and let them see you doing it. No matter what you tell your kids, if they see you doing otherwise, they will learn the bad lesson. Money, work, relationships. They all need attention, and your kids are watching you manage each of them. Make them proud.
- Open a savings account for them, and let them fill it. Teach them the value of their money by letting them work for it, watch it accumulate, and spend it on something they care about. I make my kids work to convince me to make a withdrawal, so they know it is only for the important things. I don’t, however, decide what is important for them.
- Start a college fund. $100 or $10, it doesn’t matter. Start putting something aside today. College costs keep rising. In 10 years, or 20, you can be sure that college will cost more than it does today. Last year, nearly two-thirds of students graduating with a four-year degree did so with an average debt of more than $23,000. Anything you can do to move your kids towards the debt-free 35% will help. They will thank you for it for the rest of their lives. Remember, they are in charge of choosing your nursing home.
- Teach delayed gratification. Don’t let them think that every whim needs to be satisfied…ever, let alone immediately. Sometimes, anticipation improves the act. When I am looking forward to a good meal for a few days or weeks, I really savor it when I finally do get the chance to eat it. If they want everything they see, make them figure out what they want most, and what it will take to get it.
- Teach them to balance a checkbook. This is one of life’s basic skills that far too many people are lacking. If you can’t balance your checkbook, how do you know what you have? If you don’t know what you have, how can you know what you’re able to spend on necessities, or even luxuries? Knowing where you are is at least as important as knowing where you are going.
- Give them control of money. This is the best time to learn how to manage money. Give them an allowance and make it big enough to cover school lunch and bus fare. Let them practice real-world skills and, more importantly…
- Let them make mistakes with it. This is their opportunity to make financial mistakes that won’t haunt them for years or decades. Let them have some money and let them screw it up. When they can’t buy the new game, or can’t fix their car, they will learn. It’s better to do that as teenagers living at home than as adults forced to move back home.
- Let them see your pride in their good decisions. If they do well, tell them. Let their endorphin rush come from your praise instead of their purchase. You aren’t helping them by getting them hooked on the latest gadget. You are helping them by making them feel good about making the right decisions.
- Beat them with a stick.
How do you protect your kids’ future finances from the kids themselves?
https://liverealnow.net/tag/budget/
Budget Lesson, Part 1
budget” width=”300″ height=”185″ />Over the next few weeks, I will be going over my budget in detail.
The first section is income, but that’s straightforward. A line for each income source, bi-weekly, monthly and annual totals. Simple.
Before we start, a word on the organization. There are five columns:
- Category – This is the description of the line item.
- Cost – How much do you pay for this item?
- Time – What is the frequency of the payment? Valid values are ‘m’, ‘q’, ‘y’, ‘w’ for ‘Monthly’, ‘Quarterly’, ‘Yearly’ and ‘Weekly’.
- Monthly – Cost and Time are combined to calculate the monthly expense, to make it possibly to budget. If this is $100, I need to set aside a C-Note each and every month to make the payment when it comes due.
- Yearly – This column is mostly informative. It’s helpful to see this in comparison to my annual pay.
The first section I am actually going to address is discretionary spending.
- Groceries/Dining $475.00 – We don’t budget heavily for groceries, which would be a surprise if you saw me. At the smallest I have ever been, fit, I was never small. We shop smart, buy in bulk when it makes sense, and rarely eat out. We also keep cooked rice and beans in containers in the refrigerator as a cheap and healthy way to stretch almost everything we eat.
- Discretionary $250.00 – This gets used for household items, like toilet paper and soap. It also get used for the odd book or movie, or to cover the gaps between the other categories and reality.
- Baby stuff $60.00 – We have two children in diapers. ‘Nuff said. This category does get progressively smaller as the baby items are outgrown and the children get potty-trained.
- Gas/oil $200.00 – Gas and auto-maintenance. This is actually higher than monthly costs, allowing us to set some aside for larger maintenance issues.
- Clothes $15.00 – All of our dressers are overflowing, so this is strictly replacement cost for the time being. Our kids wear a lot of hand-me-downs.
- Blow Money $50.00 – Occasionally, habitual shoppers need to shop. If they don’t do it on-budget, they will do it off-budget and kill the whole idea.
Initially, we used a “virtual envelope” system. We had a spreadsheet and every time something was spent in this category, we entered the amount and stopped when the category was spent. Didn’t work. We are going on a pure, cash-only system as of the first of the year. No money, no spendy.
Budget Lesson, Part 7
It’s been a month(again!) since I’ve written a post for the budget series, so I’ll be continuing that today. See these posts for the history of this series.
This time, I’m looking at how to reduce my “set aside” funds. These are the categories that don’t have specific payout amounts and happen at irregular intervals. One of the convenient features of our set-aside funds–also a feature of our non-monthly bills–is that the money sits in our checking account, providing a buffer against overdrafts. The buffer is big enough that I can withdraw our entire month’s discretionary budget on the first of the month.
- Parties – Twice a year, we have large parties. We have a barbecue(not necessarily low and slow, I’m in the midwest) and a Halloween party. We also have three kids with birthdays. Each year, we try to do something exotic at the barbecue. One year, it was a turducken. This year, we’ll be skipping the show-off portion of the show. The Halloween party is never expensive. I don’t drink much, so the bar stays well-stocked without frequent expensive shopping trips. We throw two large parties for less than $300 combined, and our guests start RSVPing a year in advance. We’re fun. The kids are getting gypped this year. I am over my addiction to expensive birthday parties for my kids. There will be a small party for one, a sleepover for another, and a party combined with some cousins’ birthday parties for the third. It sound horrible but all of them will have fun.
- Gifts – We set aside money for presents, but we don’t feel we need to spend all of the money we have set aside. Anything left over stays here. Eventually, it will be something nice for all of us.
- Pet Care – We have 4 cats and a dog. Cat litter and food are expenses that we can’t make disappear. We don’t buy the fancy food, but we also don’t buy the stuff that uses cardboard as filler. We have set a new limit at 3 pets, but that limit will only be reached through attrition. There’s nothing to cut here for a few years.
- Car Repair – This is another category with nothing to cut. If we don’t spend it, and something catastrophic happens to a car, we’ll be covered. If it doesn’t, we’ll have a bit more cushion in our checking account.
- Furnace Warranty – When we bought a new furnace and air conditioner, we got the extended warranty. This is an unlimited renewal warranty, so, in 5 years, we’ll have to buy it again to keep it. If we keep it forever, they will eventually replace our furnace when it dies.
- Medicine/Medical – It’s a sad fact that people get sick. We set aside a small amount to cover our costs. The costs rise and fall, but over any given quarter, I don’t think I’ve been off by more than $5.
I’ve taken a hard look at most of the bills over time, so there isn’t always a lot to cut. Next time, I’ll be addressing our discretionary spending.
Carnival Roundup: Bully Edition
My mother-in-law’s house is ready. The walls are painted, the hardwood floors have been sanded and polished, the carpets have been cleaned. Now, we just have to get the lease signed and let the renters in.
This week, we had our first real bullying incident on the school bus. I guess one of the benefits of having a kid who is the biggest in the school is that nobody punches him. My daughter doesn’t have that benefit. She was punched and pushed for being in the wrong seat on the bus a couple of days ago. Thankfully, the school dealt with it quickly. The bus is equipped with video and the little girl copped to it. She’s s off of the bus for a few days and her parents have been informed. Unfortunately, her twin sister seems to be the vengeful type. She came home yesterday lying about how my daughter behaved on the bus and got another little girl to lie about getting hit and bit by my daughter in school yesterday.
How do I know it’s all lies?
First, my daughter didn’t ride the bus yesterday afternoon. She was scared in the morning, so I promised to pick her up from school. Hard to misbehave on the bus when she was cuddling with her mother on the couch. The other little girl–who goes to daycare with the twins just up the street from our daycare provider (who happens to be the grandmother of the twins)–recanted once she was away from the vengeful twin. Her mother filled us in last night. I’m not a fan of a grandmother defending a kid’s lies. No kids are angels, but helping them lie doesn’t make them better people.
Live Real, Now was included in the following carnivals recently:
I’m aware that I’ve been a bit of a slacker about posting these links. My apologies to everyone who deserved a link but didn’t get it in a timely manner.
Yakezie Carnival hosted by Narrow Bridge
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Carnival of Money Pros hosted by See Debt Run
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Carnival of Retirement #52 hosted by Master the Art of Saving
Yakezie Carnival hosted by Your PF Pro
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Carnival of Financial Camaraderie #62 hosted by Savvy Scot
Carnival of Money Pros hosted by Debt Black Hole
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Finance Carnival for Young Adults #39 hosted by 20s Finances
Yakezie Carnival hosted by My Family Finances
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Carnival of Financial Camaraderie #57 hosted by My University Money
Money Mail Carnival #3 hosted by The Money Mail
Yakezie Carnival hosted by I Heart Budgets
Carnival of Retirement #46 hosted by Making Sense of Cents
Yakezie Carnival hosted by The Ultimate Juggle
Carnival of Money Pros hosted by My Multiple Incomes
Carnival of Financial Planning hosted by Master the Art of Saving
Money Mail Carnival #2 hosted by The Money Mail
Carnival of Financial Camaraderie #56 hosted by See Debt Run
Carnival of Money Pros hosted by Finance Product Reviews
Yakezie Carnival hosted by Parenting and Money
Lifestyle Carnival #27 hosted by Femme Frugality
Carnival of Financial Camaraderie #55 hosted by My University Money
Yakezie Carnival hosted by The Ultimate Juggle
Lifestyle Carnival #26 hosted by Mo Money Mo Houses
Carnival of Money Pros hosted by Debt Black Hole
Carnival of Financial Camaraderie #54 hosted by Cash Net USA
Carnival of Financial Planning hosted by Young Family Finances
Yakezie Carnival hosted by Portfolio Princess
Carnival of Money Pros hosted by Thirty Six Months
Carnival of Retirement #41 hosted by Financial Conflict Coach
Lifestyle Carnival hosted by Master the Art of Savings
Yakezie Carnival hosted by Cult of Money
Lifestyle Carnival hosted by Blue Collar Workman
Carnival of Money Pros hosted by Making Sense of Cents
Carnival of Retirement #41 hosted by The College Investor
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