photo by e-diot

I was always interested in seeing people go to a currency exchange booth and notice that they trade their money freely into the currency that they needed at that moment. They freely accepted the current trade amount without thinking that they lost or won a few more bucks during that time. Since then, the Forex has become one of my dream investments.

If you are like me and would want to know the different ways on how to start an investment, you could pick a choice or try to read a book guide on investing. One of the books I’ve read so far is from Robert Kiyosaki entitled “Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing”. And also, you could find a good review on this book from Roger at The Amateur Financier. He has a detailed outline on what you’ll expect to learn and would also help you decide if this book’s worth your buy.

I’m glad to say that I have finally started out my venture into the forex market. Now I know that it would usually take a lot of money to invest in getting started, but I have finally found a great tool or I think that you would call it as a trading platform. You get to create your own account and it automatically comes with a demo or virtual account. What’s good about this is you get to have a feel on how it is to start trading in real time without risking real money.

For a beginner like me, this provides a great way to test out the waters by getting my feet wet and not drowning. An additional plus to this is I get a $5 real money bonus just for signing up and I could already use it as well to trade.

I know that it’s not a lot of money to get started with but hey, I’m just a beginner and starting out. So if you are interested in getting this tool, you register at Marketiva.com and download the software. Once you have signed up successfully, you’ll receive your free virtual account and your $5 bonus as well. I do hope that you register with the link that I have provided as they would give me credit for sharing you this information.

Now, having that tool is not enough. You also need to have a good knowledge of the forex market, and that’s why I also recommend going to babypips.com. In my opinion, this is a good site for starting to learn the basics until the advanced skills that you will need to become a successful trader.

So what do you think? Is Forex an interesting investment option for you? Have you ever tried going into this kind of investment? Was my article a good step in introducing you this type market?

I appreciate your comments and suggestions, feel free to write them here.

photo by Marco Bellucci

It’s been more than 3 weeks now since I couldn’t use my iPhone app for my financial budget. The software developers proposed a 2 weeks testing and debugging on their software as the problem came from a low version upgrade to their most recent release. Well, I couldn’t really put the blame on them as I didn’t regularly update my apps as I was quite happy using the current versions. So this could be one of those problems with the software as there seems to be a missing link or you just need to directly update your software.

Now I’ve come across this article that I could use as a solution or even a replacement for my paid software. The author’s quite an expert in excel and he shared his technique on his blog post entitled “Easy Way to Add Up Expenses in Your Spreadsheets” from couplemoney.com. He shows you how you could add colors to your list of expenses, each color representing a category or even a mixed budget for you and your partner. Then easily add up the expenses based on each color.

I would say that it’s really a great idea and you could visually see and pinpoint which ones are good and need-to-cut expenses. He also provided the code and macros on how to set it up yourself, a detailed instruction and some images so I think that it’s not that difficult to accomplish. Try it out yourself and you’ll see that it really does make wonders.

This is another way on how we could maximize on the features that excel is able to provide us. So what do you think? Has it changed the way you look on how to use Excel? I do hope that you enjoy it as I did. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

photo by Angel-13

If you are someone like me who’s been looking for a stable way on how to make money online, then look no further. I recommend you to try out GDI (Global Domains International) as I am a member myself and I can guarantee that this company could provide you with a steady source of residual income for life.

You might be thinking about the requirements into getting to this system. But first, let’s talk about what they have to offer.

• Domain Name – you automatically get your personal domain name of your choice with a .ws extension. This means that you could choose your own domain name like “website.ws” that personally belongs to you.
• Free Web Hosting – you could have your site online in just a few clicks. Once you register, your site could be automatically seen in the internet as your site is hosted on their servers.
• Site Builder – they also provide an easy to walk-through point-and-click site builder with a wizard and a lot of templates to choose from. If you need a simple site that has a good design, you could choose from their collection of beautiful templates.
• 10 email addresses – you also get them for free when you start your account. Share them with your family and friends. It’s cool to have an email address with your name and the name of your site.
• 7-Days Free Trial – you get to try out the system for a complete 7days or 1 week period. If you decide to continue with your membership, you pay a small amount of $10 a month or that’s equivalent to 34¢ a day, not expensive.
• Risk-FREE – no contracts means that you could cancel your account at any time you may want to.

I definitely think that this company is a good choice if you plan to have a good source of income online. For every person who would join using your personal affiliate link, you earn a continuous $1 for every month that person stays in your team.

Promoting your affiliate link

There are a number of ways on how you could promote your affiliate link, here are the methods I would recommend you to use.

• Email signature – whenever you send an email to somebody that you know, you could always include a link in your signature.
• Forum signature – same concept as your email, but this one is included in your posts on the forum that you have joined. Just make sure that your posting is valid and also has good content related to your forum’s topic.
• Ebook with your link – you could create an online product that includes your links and pass it on as a bonus or free product for people to download. This is a sure way to get people to be in your team.
• PPC, PPV and Advertise on sites (Optional) – you could pay for advertisements to get people to sign-up with you.
• Create an Article – it is also a good idea to create an article that contains your affiliate link to your GDI account.

These are just a few of the ways on how you could become successful online with starting as an affiliate of GDI. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to post them here.

photo by wolfpix

You might have noticed that there are animated movies about bees. And if you have watched the movie yourself, you would have an idea and also understand that they are very important in our world’s ecosystem to survive. You might also be asking how? Well, you could take a look into this article entitled “The Butterfly Effect, Bees and Money”, from Downturn Living.com.

It gives a good detail of how the colony of bees helps out in nature’s pollination of seeds and pollens that helps out greatly in populating the plantation and farms. I know that you might say, “so what does it has to do with me?” Well we need food to survive and it comes from farms of vegetables, fruits and much more.

There are businesses counting on the production of these products in farms and if the population of the bees keeps on decreasing every year, doesn’t that mean that the pollination process also decreases? Absolutely, the lesser bees there are, the lesser pollination occurs, the lesser products produced and it also means lesser income for businesses.

And when that happens, with the increasing number of demand, and having a lower amount of supply, you guessed it right, prices starts to go up. Inflation occurs, and now tell me that it doesn’t affect you. Everything that is in our world matters and greatly affects each other. That’s why we should help in maintaining the balance of nature or else, we’ll be the one who will suffer in the end.

So what should we do? You’ll find in the bottom of the article I mentioned above a few ways to help, click on those two links. And you could also start by looking at your environment and use your resources wisely. If you don’t need to buy more stock of food, then don’t. It’s better not to waste it. Lesser demand of items could help keep the prices low.

Do you have any other ways on how to help our environment and especially the bees? Write your comments and suggestions down. We need as much help as we could.

With the current technology that we have, it is good to utilize them as they make life easier for us. But when the time comes that it malfunctions (come on, technology has its bugs), just remember that you always should have a back-up plan, or in short – push the red button on emergency exit.

Here’s a real-life story of how a stay at home mom managed to save $576 in NSF fees. I’m glad that she was able to incredibly cancel all of the automated payments for 16 bills. Now that’s a lot of transactions and to remember lots of logins and passwords, dealing with technical difficulties and try back later messages, she was still able to save the day. Wow, you deserve a pat on your back for doing a terrific job on saving your budget from the penalties.

Moral of the story: I think that this is a very good example that we should not depend on technology and especially put all of our transactions automated. Who knows when there would be a sudden general power surge or even a black out. Though it is good to make a few transactions automatically get paid, you must always have a backup amount of money in your account.

Especially if you have it fixed every month, it would be wise to have an untouched balance to assure you that your bills get paid on time even though your paycheck gets delayed.

What about you? Got any interesting stories to say? Comments and suggestions are also welcome.

Ever heard or even watched “The Deadliest Catch” on TV? If your answer is yes, then you know how horrifying the scene is out there in the wild oceans. People out there are risking their lives for a living on a boat each day, in order to put food on the tables of their families.

Now an article, “The Deadliest Catch: Should You Mortgage Your Health For Wealth?” from My Money Minute, talks about one of the real life participants who just passed away. It just goes to show that anything could happen, especially if you risk putting your life on the line of danger. It is really amazing how most of them could survive those frightening waves out there.

So, just what is a Health Mortgage?

Basically, a “Health Mortgage” is like going to the bank and loaning for some money to buy your house. Then you agree to pay the bank an installment coupled with an interest to the amount that you have borrowed. Hence mortgage, when you use your health as your loan, it means that you are using up your lifespan to pay for the extra work or amount of time to accomplish a task.

In order to make your mortgage work, it is wise to setup a plan of how long you are going to carry on with the mortgage. Having a specific goal greatly helps in measuring your progress. Stick to the plan and the amount of time that you think is best for you. Better yet is to setup a good schedule that is not strict and is flexible. Also make sure that you are always in control.

Adjust the plan; what’s great about this is you could modify the amount of time that you put into each task wherein you are comfortable with. And you could also insert additional days off if you feel that you’re body’s getting weak.

I recommend doing the task every other day as this gives your body some time to take a full rest before starting the following day. Unless your extra work is a 3-4 days straight shift, then we couldn’t adjust it. Try looking for a better one then?

I would like to hear from you, what are your thoughts about Health Mortgage? Do you think it is worth it to sacrifice your time in doing part-time or extra work? Write down your comments and suggestions.

Time and time again, we often forget that our most valuable resource that everybody has is Time. I know that you’ve heard of it, and I’m personally guilty myself for even using the excuse “I don’t have time”. When the truth is, the real problem is “not” managing your time wisely. So who ever invented that phrase of not having any time at all has really affected the way most people think. And I strongly believe that we should think first, before we answer not having any time at all.

So what motivated me to start this kind of thoughts? Well, since I’ve joined the Yakezie Group, (I’m still on probation, by the way) I have been slowly looking into each member’s blog site. And I am sure that these sites provide a treasure of information and resources that you wouldn’t want to miss out on reading. In other words, they are really worth your time.

And talking about time, have you ever thought that even though you are working that day job same as me and other employees, we get to have at least 132 days off? That’s a whopping more than 4 months of time a year that you could really do a lot of wonder with. Unlike Bytta of 151 Days Off, she was lucky enough to be able to have a lot of days for the year 2010 to spend her valuable time on.

I would like you to take a look on the way she sees the weekends, holidays and annual leaves in making you time’s worth really manageable and enjoy what life has to offer. Planning ahead of time for the entire year and managing your finances are really a good start and believe me, it does have its rewards.

Starting now, I recommend that we (yes, including myself) to plan in advance, make a list of how many days we have days off for this year, manage our finances, look for good opportunities to book traveling places early (to get some discounts for the low season), and of course, learn to add more information about financial matters each day to improve our knowledge and skills.

I do admit that it did change my view of time management and even inspired me a lot to know that actually, we don’t work 12 months a year, it’s more or less only 7 – 8 months actually. What a relief!

Have comments and suggestions? Write them down with a smile.

After reading through Nicole’s post “Prepare Your Finances For Vacation” at Rainy Day Saver, it gave me a good idea on being prepared with our finances. Most of the time we are compelled to travel and just get away from it all, but the moment that we return, we face headaches and forgotten bills that had already accumulated unwanted interest.

Though it is true that we do need to refresh ourselves and have a free-our-mind reboot from reality, planning our pre-trip finances should be on top of our list. If you know that you would not be back on time to pay for your bills, you could pay for them in advance if possible, or arrange for them to be paid by check. You could also check the resort or travel destination to see if they provide an internet connection, if they do you could also pay your bills online provided that the company has an online entity.

When you have checked your list of bills of which ones needs to be paid first and you are most certainly sure that you would not face any problems when you come back, then it’s time to move on to your traveling budget. Having an allotted amount of cash for spending is good and makes sure that your monthly budget is not affected. And if you also have a traveling fund saved, then you are ready and setup to go for a great time.

Once you have completed your preparations, all you need now to do is go ahead and enjoy yourself. Remember that all work without play, makes a person dull. So have a break and happy spending.

Interested in starting your own website? That is really cool, since most people nowadays are already able to come up with their own site as a means to tell the world about their personal opinions. It would be really great of course, to have people visit your site, see and read what you have got to say.

Now if you are just starting and are in need of assistance, I could help you out by recommending a good hosting company that I personally use. The company’s name is HostGator, and I assure you that their service is really top-notch. You could personally call them or have a chat online in case you are in need of support.

One of the main priorities of starting out a website is to have your own personal domain name. Names such as Google.com and Yahoo.com are examples of domain names. Now if you would like to get your own personal domain name, all you need to do is to register it through sites called registrars. I personally use two registrars, for what reason?

Reasons for having two registrars:

1)      When I was just starting out with building my site this company provided the domain name and also the hosting of my site, plus they also had a site builder that is really great for beginners who would want to start their site within only a few minutes of selecting through the pre-designed templates that they offer. The company that I’m talking about is GDI (Global Domains International) and the unique part about their company is they are providing a .ws (stands for WebSite) domain. So if you would want to have a unique website name, then this one is good for you.

2)      The other reason why I found another site to host my site is that I wanted to have a .com domain name. So I went and signed up with GoDaddy. Their services are also good and I find them as one of really good registrars out there. When it comes to customer support, you could also rely on their call center and also chat with them online.

Now you could go and visit their sites and see for yourself if they are really good, I personally use them and based on my experience, they are really good in providing service to their customers.

Got any other domain registrars or hosting servers that you might know? You could post them here to provide other people with more choices.

Tell us what you think and if you have comments and suggestions, you could write them here.