Please email me at:
![Jason [at] LiveRealNow [dot] net](https://liverealnow.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/email.jpg "Jason [at] LiveRealNow [dot] net"){kind=small}
Or use the form below.
[contact-form 1 “Contact form 1”]
First Steps – Ramsey was Wrong
Baby Steps” width=”180″ height=”240″ />- Image by bonnie-brown via Flickr
Fixing a lifetime of financial mistakes can be an intimidating process. Scratch that. It’s always an intimidating process. Where do you start? You’ve got a pile of bills, a dozen messages from bill collectors and two bi-weekly paystubs. What next?
Traditionally, and according to Dave Ramsey, the first step to fixing your finances is to make a budget, but he and tradition are wrong. The first step is to get everybody involved in your finances on the same page. If your spouse isn’t on board with paying off the debt and spending responsibly, nothing else will work.
Once you have that out of the way, you can move on to the traditional first step, making a budget. I’ve gone over my process to build a personal financial plan in quite a bit of detail, so I’ll just hit the highlights this time.
First, make a list of all of your expenses. Include all of your utilities, debt payments, tax payments and absolutely everything else. You need to know the amount of the payment and the frequency. If a bill is due quarterly, divide it by three and you’ll know what you need to set aside each month. Round up in all cases so you can build an automatic cushion.
Next, make a list of your income sources. For most people, this is far easier than tracking their expenses. Figure out your monthly income. If you get paid weekly, that that amount times 52, then divide by 12 to get your monthly income.
Finally, subtract your expenses from your income. If your total is a positive number then you are golden. If you total is negative, you have been a bad monkey. You need to make some cuts, and they may be painful. If your outgoing money is more than your incoming money, it is not possible to get ahead.
Once you have your income and expenses recorded, and you have made the cuts necessary to have a positive balance at the end of the month, you have a successful budget. Congratulations!
Hayden Panettiere Gets Engaged – Crazy Wedding or Not?
Hayden Panettiere has formally announced her engagement! The starlet will be marrying Vladimir Klitschko, who is a world renowned boxer that has won an Olympic gold medal. The unexpected public revelation has sparked rumor trails regarding glitzy wedding plans. While no date has been set, and nothing has been confirmed, there is widespread speculation that the event is going to be glamorously over-the-top.
A decadent gala may very well be in the planning stages. The “Nashville” actress, age 24, is one of America’s most idolized entertainers. She appeared on “Live with Kelly & Michael” to declare her commitment. During the show, she flaunted an extravagantly oversized engagement ring. This fancy display could be the precursor to an expensively ostentatious wedding.
Although Panettiere’s fiance is 13 years older than her, it is the first marriage for both partners. This may instill extra incentive for the couple to make their officiation an extremely flashy occasion. Because Klitschko is a famous Ukrainian athlete, he will also be anticipating a magnificently choreographed wedding. Both individuals could invest fortunes in perfecting their walk down the aisle together.
Of course, one of the biggest decisions that Panettiere faces is the selection of her gown. All eyes will be on the fabric that she chooses for this special day. If they go through with a public wedding, the dress will be permanently immortalized in global media. She is going to want to show off flawless class, glimmering austerity and sizzling sultriness. Fashion critics are eagerly anticipating her selection. The high-end designer that she picks will receive a tremendous boost in popularity, especially if she pulls off a beautiful presentation.
A crazy wedding would be completely in character for the young television star. Her most known role was a bubbly cheerleader on the long-running series, “Heroes.” With vivacious charm, she became a sex symbol across the country. Explosiveness is simply a part of her personality, so a bombastic celebration is to be expected. Furthermore, Ukrainian wedding parties have a tendency to be more raucous than American traditions. If they follow any of the groom’s cultural practices, the event could become out of control.
The massive ring on Panettiere’s finger indicates no desire for privacy regarding this affair. In fact, it was an invitation for the mainstream media to cover the entire ordeal. This hints that the couple might be planning a gigantic wedding event. They can easily afford it, and the public celebrations will rapidly enhance the star’s critical acclaim.
In contrast, a private exchange of vows would disappoint her legions of fans. Furthermore, paparazzi could still infiltrate the wedding to snap pictures. To avoid any uninvited intrusions, the couple should be open to media coverage during their nupital arrangements. This will let them control the event, and allow them to recoup some of the expenses through lucrative network contracts. Regardless of how they conduct the wedding, it is certain that the whole world will be diligently watching with admiration, and perhaps a slight tinge of jealousy.
Related articles
Does Money Make Miley Cyrus Act Crazy?
If you’re like millions of people who saw Miley Cyrus’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards recently, you’ve probably wondered what the effect of massive success on the music and acting star. Cyrus seems to be
doing everything possible to remake her image in the exact opposite of her squeaky clean mold that Disney and other companies have created for her over the last several years. (A rumor has it that Disney even created a contractual obligation for Cyrus to maintain a certain haircut during her “Hannah Montana” television show.) There’s a sense of someone taking on their first sense of independence, and running with it — the star seemed to be sending the message to the audience that she was not going to live according to the expectations of others anymore, and from the look of it, they got that message loud and clear.
The horrified looks of Rihanna, Drake, and Will Smith aside, the real question people had is whether the massive financial rewards of Cyrus’ singing career can explain her crazy behavior. Cyrus is said to be worth about $100,000,000 — certainly a fortune by any standards. And since she is still struggling with the problems of young adulthood — forming an identity, understanding her values and taking a place in society, it’s very likely that her finances contribute to at least some of her behavior.This effect of money can come from many different areas of life. For one, many people who become wealthy at a young age are suddenly struck with the fact that they have no need to work, but who often want to develop a career and contribute to society. Take Steve Jobs for example, who at 31 years old was fired from Apple Inc. by the company’s board of directors. Jobs had in fact started the company himself, and was worth well over a hundred million dollars by that time. And yet, feeling like contributing to society was more important to his life than resting on his laurels, Jobs started a new company, NeXT, where he hoped to contribute inexpensive computers to universities.
The fact that Cyrus is barely into her 20s should tell you something about how much time she has to develop her career. She has enough to retire at an age when most people are just starting their first real job. And that is a tough position to be in. If she is hoping to push her singing and acting career well into adulthood — as most artists would like to — it may be that she is trying to make her mark now. Think of it a bit like Bob Dylan in 1964, releasing electric music for the first time, when before that point he was primarily known as a folk singer making gentle acoustic music.
Dylan’s idea may have been a bit like what Cyrus’ is. That is to say, maybe Miley Cyrus is trying to avoid becoming a has-been, a relic of the 2000’s who burned out playing inoffensive pop music. If this is the case, Cyrus may be able to shift her career into a different mode by showing herself to be an uncompromising artist. Remember that even the greats of the past — Frank Sinatra for example — were once viewed as essentially music for teenagers, and not serious artists. Sinatra even suffered career failure in his 20’s when his audience grew up and moved on to other things. But he came back to record success when he began allowing his music to mature and his ideas to gain focus. If Cyrus can pull such a move, she may not be remembered as a teeny-bopper, but as a serious artist.
Related articles
Making Extra Money Part 3: Product Selection
When you’re setting up a niche site, you need to monetize it. You need to have a way to make money, or it’s a waste of time.
There are two main ways to do that: AdSense or product promotion. To set up an AdSense site, you write a bunch of articles, post them on a website with some Google ads, and wait for the money to roll in.
I don’t do that.
I don’t own a single AdSense site and have never set one up. This article is not about setting up an Adsense site.
My niches site are all product-promotion sites. I pick a product–generally an e-book or video course–and set up a site dedicated to it.
Naturally, picking a good product is an important part of the equation.
The most important part of product selection is that the product has an affiliate program. Without that, there’s no money to be made. There are a lot of places to find affiliate programs. Here are a few:
- Amazon. If you don’t live in one of the states that Amazon has dropped in retaliation for passing laws that attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling on collecting sales tax, you can sign up as an associate and collect a commission on every referral you send that turns into a purchase. That means you have a lot of product to choose from. Unfortunately, your commission is small, so you need to promote fairly expensive products to get a decent return. On the other hand, people trust Amazon, so that’s one less hurdle to making a sale.
- Commission Junction. These are the people managing affiliate programs for a large number of credit cards and banks. If you’ve opened an account with INGDirect through one of my links, I got a commission for the referral. (Thank you!) They have a lot of other products, too.
- e-Junkie. This one is a popular distribution system for bloggers. It’s likely that, if you’ve bought an ebook from a blogger, e-Junkie handled the fulfillment process. A lot of the products available there have an affiliate program, but that is up to the owner of the product.
- ClickBank. My favorite. This is one of the largest affiliate networks specializing in electronic products, whether that’s membership sites, ebooks, or video courses. Commissions are good, often 50-75%. They also offer a 60 day guarantee of every product sold through their site, which helps soothe the wary customer. This is the site I’ll be using for this series.
The first thing you need to do is sign up for whichever program you intend to use.
If you’re not going with Clickbank, feel free to skip ahead to the section on keyword research.
Once you are signed up and logged in, click on the “Marketplace” link at the top of the screen.
From here, it’s just a matter of finding a good product to sell. Here are the niches we’re going to be looking for:
- Back pain
- Bankruptcy
- Conflict resolution at work
- Detox diets
- Fat kids
- Foreclosure avoidance
- Job hunting
- Weddings
- Writing sales copy
I’m going to look for one or two good products in each niche. When that’s done we’ll narrow it down by consumer demand.
For now, go to advanced search.
Enter your keyword, pick the category and set the advanced search stats. Gravity is the number of affiliates who have made sales in the last month. I don’t like super-high numbers, but I also want to make sure that the item is sellable. Over 10 and under 50 or so seems to be a good balance.
The average sale just ensures that I’ll make a decent amount of money when someone buys the product. I usually aim for $25 or more in commissions per sale. Also, further down, check the affiliate tools box. That means the seller will have some resources for you to use.
This combination will give us 36 products to check out for back pain, unfortunately, none of the results are for back pain products. After unchecking the affiliate tools and setting the gravity to greater than 1, I’ve got 211 results. Sorting by keyword relevance, I see three products, two of which look like something I’d be interested in promoting. One has a 45% commission, the other is 55%. The X-Pain Method has an initial commission of $34 and claims a 5% refund rate. Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief pays $16, which will make it a potentially easier sale. I’ll add both to the list for further research.
I’m not going to detail the search for the rest of the niches. That would be repetitive. You can see my selections here:
- Back pain – X-Pain Method; Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief
- Bankruptcy – I’m dropping this one from the list. It’s too complicated and deserves an attorney. I don’t know enough about the topic to make sure it is up to date.
- Conflict resolution at work – Management Training: By the Book; Anger Management for the 21st Century
- Detox diets – Master Cleanse Secrets: 10 Day Diet; Master Cleanse Insider; Eating for Energy: Raw Food Diet for Weight Loss
- Fat kids – I’m dropping this one, too. A kid’s health is too important. I don’t want to sell a dangerous or unethical product.
- Foreclosure avoidance – How to Stop Foreclosure in 7 Days Flat; Foreclosure Defense Secrets
- Job hunting – Guerrilla Resumes; Amazing Cover Letters
- Weddings – All Types of Wedding Speeches; The Master Wedding Planning Guide; Amazing Wedding Planning
- Writing sales copy – Instant Swipe File; Ad Copy Creator Pro; How to Write Killer Copy
Now we’re going to go through a few steps for each of these products.
The Sales Page
We need to make sure the sales page doesn’t suck. If the site doesn’t work, is hard to read or navigate, has a hard-to-find order button, or just doesn’t look professional, it’s getting cut.
- Raw Foods is eliminated. The sales video is horrible and the order link is at the bottom of several screens worth of nothing. It’s a crap site.
- The 7 day foreclosure-avoidance product is out. Site’s down today. I want reliability.
- Management Training By The Book is out. I don’t like typos on the sales page, especially in the page title.
The Email List
If it has an email subscription form, we’ll need to subscribe, then double-check to make sure our affiliate information isn’t getting dropped in the emails. If it is, the seller is effectively stealing commissions. In the interest of time and laziness, I’m going to eliminate anyone pushing for an email subscription. It’s harder–and time-consuming–to monitor that. On of my niche site had a seller completely drop their product. Instead, they pushed for email subscriptions so they could promote other products as an affiliate. Absolutely unethical.
- Wedding speeches is eliminated for throwing a mandatory email entry into the order process. There’s no guarantee they are up to anything shady, but I’m taking the simple route.
Checkout and Credit
Finally, we’re going to visit the checkout page. You need to do this from every links in the newsletter and the links on the sales page, just to make sure you’ll get your money.
The way to tell who’s being credited is to look at the bottom of the order page, under the payment information. It should say [affiliate = xxx] where xxxis your ClickBank ID. Anything else, and the product gets cut from the list.
When you are checking these, don’t click on every possible link at once. That confuses the cookies. Do one at a time. I tried to do it in one batch for this post and lost half of the cookies. If it weren’t for the fact that I already own one of the products and bought it through my own link and got credited, I would have been talking undeserved trash about thieving companies.
Other Factors
Sometimes, when you’re examining a product, it just doesn’t feel right. When that happens, drop it. There are millions of other products you can promote. In this case, I’m dropping the anger management program because, in my experience, angry people don’t think they are the problem. Here’s a life tip: If everyone else is a jerk, the problem probably isn’t everyone else.
- Another important factor is the sales page itself. If it doesn’t make you want to buy the product, why would anyone else?
- Amazing Cover Letters is eliminated because it’s too easy to overlook the buy link. If I have to hunt for it, it’s losing customers.
- Amazing Wedding Planning is getting eliminated because I don’t like the sales page. The buy link is easy to overlook, and it doesn’t compel me to buy.
Now we’re down to 10 products in 6 niches. At this point, we’re comfortable with the sales pages and we know that they are crediting commissions. As it stands right now, all of the products are worth promoting.
- Back pain – X-Pain Method; Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief
- Detox diets – Master Cleanse Secrets: 10 Day Diet; Master Cleanse Insider
- Foreclosure avoidance – Foreclosure Defense Secrets
- Job hunting – Guerrilla Resumes
- Weddings – The Master Wedding Planning Guide;
- Writing sales copy – Instant Swipe File; Ad Copy Creator Pro; How to Write Killer Copy
We’ll make the final determination after doing some heavy keyword research in the next installment. That’s where we’ll find out how hard it is to compete.
Any questions?
Money Problems – Day 7: Paying Off Debt
Today, I am continuing the series, Money Problems: 30 Days to Perfect Finances. The series will consist of 30 things you can do in one setting to perfect your finances. It’s not a system to magically make your debt disappear. Instead, it is a path to understanding where you are, where you want to be, and–most importantly–how to bridge the gap.
I’m not running the series in 30 consecutive days. That’s not my schedule. Also, I think that talking about the same thing for 30 days straight will bore both of us. Instead, it will run roughly once a week. To make sure you don’t miss a post, please take a moment to subscribe, either by email or rss.
On this, Day 7, we’re going to talk about paying off debt.
Until you pay off your debts, you are living with an anchor around your neck, keeping you from doing the things you love. Take a look at the amount you are paying to your debt-holders each month. How could you better use that money, now? A vacation, private school for your kids, a reliable car?
If you’ve got a ton of debt, the real cost is in missed opportunities. For example, with my son’s vision therapy being poorly covered by our insurance plan, we are planning a much smaller vacation this summer–a “staycation”–instead of a trip to the Black Hills. If we didn’t have a debt payment to worry about, we’d have a much larger savings and would have been able to absorb the cost without canceling other plans. The way it is, our poor planning and reliance on debt over the last 10 years have cost us the opportunity to go somewhere new.
The only way to regain the ability to take advantage of future opportunities is to get out of debt, which tends to be an intimidating thought. When we started on our journey out of debt, we were buried 6 figures deep, with a credit card balance that matched our mortgage. It looked like an impossible obstacle, but we’ve been making it happen. The secret is to make a plan and stick with it. Pick some kind of plan, and follow it until you are done. Don’t give up and don’t get discouraged.
What kind of plan should you pick? That’s a personal choice. What motivates you? Do you want to see quick progress or do you like seeing the effects of efficient, long-term planning? These are the most common options:
Debt Snowball
Popularized by Dave Ramsey, this is the plan with the greatest emotional effect. It’s bad math, but that doesn’t matter, if the people using it are motivated to keep at it long enough to get out of debt.
To prepare your debt snowball, take all of your debts–no matter how small–and arrange them in order of balance. Ignore the interest rate. You’re going to pay the minimum payment on each of your debts, except for the smallest balance. That one will get every spare cent you can throw at it. When the smallest debt is paid off, that payment and every spare cent you were throwing at it(your “snowball”) will go to the next smallest debt. As the smallest debts are paid off, your snowball will grow and each subsequent debt will be paid off faster that you will initially think possible. You will build up a momentum that will shrink your debts quickly.
This is the plan I am using.
Debt Avalanche
A debt avalanche is the most efficient repayment plan. It is the plan that will, in the long-term, involve paying the least amount of interest. It’s a good thing. The downside is that it may not come with the “easy wins” that you get with the debt snowball. It is the best math; you’ll get out of debt fastest using this plan, but it’s not the most emotionally motivating.
To set this one up, you’ll take all of your bills–again–and line them up, but this time, you’ll do it strictly by interest rate. You’re going to make every minimum payment, then you’ll focus on paying the bill with the highest interest rate, first, with every available penny.
DOLP
This is the plan promoted by David Bach. It stands for Done On Last Payment. With this plan, you’ll pay the minimum payment on each debt, except for bill that is scheduled to be paid off first. You calculate this by dividing the balance of each debt by the minimum payment. This gives you an estimate of the number of months it will take to pay off each debt.
This system is less efficient than the debt avalanche–by strict math–but is better than the snowball. It give you “quick wins” faster than the snowball, but will cost a bit more than the avalanche. It’s a compromise between the two, blending the emotional satisfaction of the snowball with the better math of the avalanche.
Snowflaking
For each of these plans, you can give them a little steroid injection by snowflaking. Snowflaking is the art of making some extra cash, and throwing it straight at your debt. If you hold a yard sale, use the proceeds to make an extra debt payment. Sell some movies at the pawn shop? Make an extra car payment. Every little payment you make means fewer dollars wasted on interest.
Paying interest means you are paying for everything you buy…again. Do whatever it takes to make debt go away, and you will find yourself able to take advantage of more opportunities and spend more time doing the things you want to do. Life will be less stressful and rainbows will follow you through your day. Unicorns will guard your home and leprechauns will chase away evil-doers. The sun will always shine and stoplights will never show red. Getting out of debt is powerful stuff.
Your task today is to pick a debt plan, and get on it. Whichever plan works best for you is the right one. Organize your bills, pick one to focus on, and go to it.
Assuming you are in debt, how are you paying it off?
