Search Results for “ignore-your-budget/573/contact-me/medical-costs-and-choices” — Page 6

Does a Gay Marriage Cost more than a straight marriage?

The costs of a wedding will depend on what state you live in. For gay couples this is even more important as only a few states allow gay marriage. These states are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Maine, Maryland,

Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington D.C.

Recent political events have reduced some of these costs by revoking Proposition 8 and returning gay marriage to California. Additionally, by removing the Defense of Marriage Act federal benefits are now available to all married couples gay or straight.

The biggest difference in the cost of the essential part of the marriage (the license) and any travel costs for those who do not live in states that allow gay marriage. The most expensive is Maryland which costs $85. Most marriage licenses seem to cost about $50 such as California’s $68, and Delaware’s $50. However in Connecticut and Iowa the license is only $30.

If you do not live in a state that allows gay marriage, there may be options including domestic partnerships. These states are Oregon, Nevada, New Jersey, Illinois, and Hawaii. Be careful considering these states however, as many domestic partnership benefits do not apply when traveling out of state. These are also not eligible for over 1000 federal benefits of marriage. In fact, domestic partnerships can act differently from zip code to zip code. Carefully read any agreement, as some do not provide any legal rights or protections but are simply a written commitment of a couple.

Also some states may recognize same sex marriages performed in other states though they do not allow the marriage to take place there. If you live in one of these states it may be worth the travel costs to go to a nearby state that allows gay marriage.

According to market watch, average spending on a ceremony is $25,000 however it varies depending on personal preferences and resources. Costs can depend on what season you get married in, real simple reports venue costs being reduced up to 20% if a wedding is in the winter, and not on a Saturday (the most common day for a wedding). Brides and grooms can consider renting their outfit to reduce costs. You can also consider cheaper alternatives such as having a family member doing the catering, or decorating your cake yourself. Party favors can be made by family members who like crafts.

Your Budget is Worthless

Finance

When you realize that you’ve buried yourself in debt and decide to get out from under that terrible burden, the first thing you’ve got to do is build a budget because, without that, you’ve got no way to know how much money you have or need. After you’ve got a budget, you’ll start spending according to whatever it says. Hopefully, you’ll stay on budget, but what happens when an emergency does come up? What do you do when your car dies? When you suddenly find out your kids needs vision therapy? How do you manage when your job suddenly gets shipped off to East De Moines?

Your budget isn’t going to help you meet those expenses. Most people don’t have enough money in their bank account to make it all the way to the next payday, let alone enough to keep the lights on and food on the table. How can you possibly hope to deal with even the little things that come up?

You whip out your emergency fund.

The problem with a budget is that it does a poor job of accounting for the unexpected. That’s where an emergency fund comes in. An emergency fund is money that you have set aside in an available-but-not-too-accessible account. Its sole purpose is to give you a line of defense when life rears up and kicks you in the butt. Without an emergency fund, everything that comes unexpectedly is automatically an emergency. With an emergency fund, the things that come up are merely minor setbacks. Without an emergency fund, your budget is nothing but a good intention waiting to get shattered by the next thing that comes along. With an emergency fund, you are managing money. Without it, it’s managing you.

How much money do you need in an emergency fund?

Every “expert” has their own opinion on this. Dave Ramsey recommends $1000 to start. Suze Orman says 8 months. The average time spent looking for work after losing your job is 24.5 weeks(roughly 6 months), so I recommend 7 months of expenses. That’s enough to carry you through an average bout of unemployment and a little more, but that’s not a goal for your first steps toward financial perfection. To start with, get $1000 in a savings account. That’s enough to manage most run-of-the-mill emergencies, without unduly delaying the rest of your debt repayment and savings goals.

How do you build an emergency fund?

Let’s not kid ourselves, $1000 is a lot of money when can barely make it from one check to the next. Unfortunately, this vital first step can’t get ignored. If you really work at it, you should be able to come up with $1000 in a month or so. Here are some ideas on how to manage that:

Cut. Drop every possible expense. If you drop cable, your cell phone, Netflix, and a weekly dinner out, you will already be saving $400 that month. You’d be almost halfway there.
Sell. How much stuff do you have that you don’t need, want, or use? I’d be willing to be there’s more than you realize. Last spring, I had a garage sale that brought in about $1300. Everything we sold was just crap we don’t use any more. We sold candles and candle-holders, DVDs, books, clothes, toys, electronics, games, and anything else we could find. I spent a month going through every room in my house to find my inventory. Craigslist is a good way to sell just one or two things at a time.
Work. Have you thought about delivering pizza or working weekends in a gas station? If you have some technical or writing ability, you could pick up some part time work on oDesk or eLance. Your opportunities are only limited by what you are willing to do.

Stop at a grand?

Dave Ramsey’s advice is to get your fund up to $1000 and then leave it alone until your debt is paid off. Screw that. I’ve got money going into my fund every month. It’s only $25 per month, but over the last two years, it has almost doubled my fund. Don’t dedicate so much money that you can’t meet your other goals, but don’t be afraid to keep some money flowing in .

Using the fund?

When can you pull the money out? That is entirely up to you. I have ju st two points to make about withdrawing from your emergency fund:

Don’t keep the money in an easy-to-access account. If your fund is in the savings account that serves as your overdraft protection account, it’s too easy to spend it, and it will go away. I keep it in my INGDirect account. I don’t use the checking account for anything in person, so I don’t carry the card. If I want to spend that money, it will take 2-3 days to transfer into my main bank account.
Never decide to spend the money on the spur of the moment. There are very few major financial decisions that can’t wait until morning to be answered. Sleep on it. If it’s still necessary tomorrow, you can spend it without guilt.

An emergency fund makes your life easier and your budget possible when the unexpectable happens. Don’t forget to fund yours.

How much money do you keep in your emergency fund? What would it take to get you to spend it?

Three Alternatives to a Budget

Finance

the envelope system: day one — Image by J. McPherskesen via Flickr

Budgets aren’t for everyone. For some people, the very idea of trying to track where their money going is painful. And that’s just the idea of tracking the money. It gets far worse when you’ve got $10 budgeted for coffee, $12 for fast food, $66.50 for gas, and $0.75 for entertainment. It’s can be hard to follow a strict budget for long.

If you know you need to track your money, and you also know that a strict, zero-based budget won’t work for you, what can you do? Luckily, there are alternatives.

1. Hope and Pray. This is otherwise known as the “Call my bank everyday and see how close I am to over-drafting” system. To fully embrace this system, you need to not only abandon a written–or even organized–budget, but you should also throw your checkbook register in the garbage. Make sure you’ve got a good overdraft protection account attached to your checking account and let your money take care of itself. This is the ultimate zen of personal finance. Don’t stress or worry, just hope for the best. This system works best if you make more money than Oprah and have modest tastes. For those of us who have to watch our money a bit to make sure the month outlasts our money, this probably isn’t a great plan.

2. The Envelope System. To implement this system, you do need to create a basic budget so know what you are obligated to pay. Once you have that done, take a stack of envelopes and label them for each item you have to pay. Add another envelope for food, another for entertainment, and another for miscellaneous because there is always a miscellaneous. Divide the money among the envelopes. Now for the magic. When you have to spend something, take the money out of the appropriate envelope and spend it. That’s it. If, however, there isn’t enough money in the right envelope, but you still need to spend the money, you have to take it out of a different envelope and spend less on the category that lost money.

3. Percentages. This is the simplest of the non-budget budgets. Take 50% of your money and spend it on necessities, like the mortgage, food, and utilities. The next 30% goes to savings and retirement. The last 20% is for fun or any other thing you want to spend it on. This naturally works best if you are out of debt, but if not, just make sure most of the 20% fun money goes to repaying debt. This system works best if your bills are automated and you will need to set up a basic budget first, so you can make sure your necessities come in under 50% of your income.

Not every budget plan will work for everyone, but there are always alternatives that can still help you manage your money.

How do you track your money?

Make Extra Money Part 4: Keyword Research

Finance

In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to show you how I do keyword research.

Properly done–unless you get lucky–this is the single most time-consuming part of making a niche site. If you aren’t targeting search terms that people use, you are wasting your time. If you are targeting terms that everybody else is targeting, it will take forever to get to the top of the search results.

Spend the extra time now to do proper keyword research. It will save you a ton of time and hassle later. This is time well-spent.

If you remember from the last installment, when we researched products to promote, we narrowed our choices down to a few products.

What I’ve done is create a spreadsheet to score the products. You can see the spreadsheet here. I’ll explain the columns as we populate them.

The first column contains the name of the product. Easy. We’ve got 10 products. I’m going to walk through scoring 1 product, then, through the magic of the internet, I’ll populate the rest, and you’ll get to see the results instantly. Wow.

The second column is the global search volume for the exact search term. I base my product niche sites primarily on the demand for a given product. Everything else is a secondary consideration.

To find the demand for a product, go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. In the “word or phrase” box, enter your product name, exactly. In this case, it’s “X-Pain Method”. When the search results come up, change the match type to “Exact”. You should have something like this:

Enter the global search volume in column 2. In this case, it’s 73. Keep this window open, because we’ll be coming back to it.

Column 3 is the search competition. Go to google and enter your product name, in quotes. In this case, “X-Pain Method”. Put the total number of search results in column 3: 223000.

Column 4 is the search competition, but only what appears in a page’s title. Your search query is intitle:”X-Pain Method”, which yields 4400 results.

The next column is for the average PageRank of the first page of search results. For this, I use Traffic Travis. I use the 4th edition, which is paid software, but you can get the free version of version 3, instead. I’ll use version 3 for this example. Open the software and click on “SEO Analysis” on the bottom left of the screen. Put your search term (“X-Pain Method”) in the “phrase to analyze” and set the “Analyze Top” to 10, then hit “Analyze”. When it’s done running, just add up all of the PRs and divide by 10. Ignore Travis’s difficulty rating.

Now, for the rest of the columns, we’re going to look at the keyword tool again. We’re going to pick 3 alternate search terms. Here are the criteria:

At least 1000 global monthly searches. We want terms that people are searching for.
Competition bar at medium or less. This bar is just a rough guess on competition, so it’s really an arbitrary exclusion factor, but it helps narrow down the choices.
A “buying” keyword is preferred, but not necessary. This is a term that indicates people are looking to spend money. “Back pain doctor” is a buying keyword, but it’s not an indicator that someone wants to buy a product, so we’ll skip it. A buying keyword isn’t absolutely necessary, because these will also be the terms we’ll use to generate content later.
It has to be related to our product.

Once we pick the keywords, we’ll throw them into google to get the competition, just like we did to populate column 2.

“Exercises for back pain” has medium competition and 1900 monthly searches. It also has an estimated cost-per-click of $3.02, which means people are paying for this.

“Lower back pain exercises” has 6600 searches and medium competition. It’s actually on the lower end of medium, so it looks really promising.

“Lower back” has 4400 searches and low competition, with a CPC of $6.24. This should be a good one. Scratch that. It has 40 million search results, but only 4400 searches. That’s a lot of competition for a small market.

Instead, I’m going to search for “cure back pain” in the keyword tool and see what I get. “Upper back pain” is better. Low competition, 18000 searches each month, and only 2000000 competing search results. Now, I’ll score it.

You really want at least 500 searches per month for the product name. More than 2500 is better. I’m going to assign 1 point per 500 monthly searches.

You also want a lower number of search results. Less than 10,000 is ideal. Less than 100,000 is still decent. More than 250,000, I’d walk. So, under 10,000 gets 5 points. Under 50,001 gets 4. Under 100,001 gets 3. Under 200,001 gets 2. Under 250,001 gets 1. Any higher gets 0.

The ideal intitle search will have less than 2000 results. More than 100,000 is too time-consuming to deal with. 0-2000: 5 points; 2001-10,000: 4 points; 10001-25000: 3 points; 25001-50000: 2 points; 50001 to 100000: 1 point.

The perfect product will have the first page of search result all with a PageRank of 0. That’s a 5 point product. I’ll knock off half a point for every point of average PR.

The related terms are more relaxed. They are what’s known as “Latent Semantic Indexing” (LSI) terms. We will be creating articles to match those search terms, mostly to make our niche site look as natural and real as possible. Any actual traffic those pages drive is just gravy. Points for the related searches start at 10 and get 1 point knocked off for each 3 million results. We’ll be treating the 3 terms as one for this score.

That gives us a perfect score of about 25. There’s no actual upper limit, since the score for the search volume has no upper limit. X-Pain Method scored 18.22.

Now, excuse me a moment while I score the rest.

I’m back. Did you miss me?

I’ve finished scoring each of the products and sorted the results by score. The clear winner is the back pain product, but the lack of searches bothers me. The wedding guide looks much nicer, especially if I target the phrase “wedding planning guide” during the SEO phase of the project. That change alone brings the score almost to first place.

Frankly, I’d take either 2nd or 3rd place over the back pain product. The bare numbers don’t support it, but my judgement tells me they are better products to promote.

There is one final step before deciding on the product. I have to buy it. I can’t review the product without seeing it and I can’t promote it without approving of it.

That’s the secret to ethical niche marketing, you know. Only promote good products that you’ve personally read, watched, or used.

Budget Lesson, Part 1

Finance

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.

Olivia Wilde is Having a Baby: What are the first-month expenses?

Celebrities, Gossip

English: Olivia Wilde at a San Diego Comic-Con... — English: Olivia Wilde at a San Diego Comic-Con panel for Tron Legacy in July 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Olivia Wilde recently announced her pregnancy with fiance Jason Sudeikis as she’s due with her first child in the coming year. Although the couple have declined to reveal their due date, they likely are expecting to set aside a budget for their baby, even with their high incomes. With forty percent of moms saying that having a baby is more expensive than they initially assumed, it’s important to look at the overall costs in the first month for plenty of preparation and financial planning.

Food

The first-month’s expenses can slightly range, depending on if the mother is using formula to feed the baby or is breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding is free and will not cost a dime, besides the breastfeeding supplies that cost an average of $15 in the first month due to nursing pads and milk storage bags for freezing.

Name-brand formula can be expensive, an average cost of $25 a week as the baby will be feeding on it several times a day, totaling about $100 in the first month. Generic brands of formula cost half the amount, an average of $12 a week.

Medical

Health insurance is one of the most expensive costs for newborn babies with 39 percent of mothers paying $1,000 with their childbirth. Some even pay at least $5,000. Health insurance will also likely increase to $200 a month for the child with co-pays that range from $30 to $100 per visit. Some health insurance will refuse to cover certain costs, which include vaccines and immunizations.

Daycare

Paid maternity leave is considered a luxury in the U.S. and is often unavailable for mothers who are self-employeed or do freelance work, making daycare a necessity. Daycare for newborns averages to $100 a month, but can be at least $1,000 for celebrities that use an in-home nanny.

General Care

Wipes will cost an average of $13 in the first month with a $5 increase in the water bill for the baby’s laundry and baths.

Diapers are one of the scariest expenses that are priced at $80 for basic Pamper diapers for newborns. Using cloth diapers are a one-time expense, so if provided by a friend or relative at a baby shower, they are free to use consistently and do not require much water or detergent to wash every other day.

Bath soap, detergent, and baby-safe shampoo will cost $30 a month to maintain the hygiene of your baby.

Although Olivia Wilde’s baby will be unique in its feeding habits and the materials for diapers used, the average cost in the first month will likely total $200 and can go as high as $4,000 for a celebrity. Many of the costs simply depend on the baby and are determined by the type of diapers used, the amount of doctor visits, daycare that may be needed, and whether the baby prefers breastfeeding or feeding on formula.

Search Results for: ignore-your-budget/573/contact-me/medical-costs-and-choices

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How much money do you need in an emergency fund?

How do you build an emergency fund?

Stop at a grand?

Using the fund?

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