Thursday, December 30, 2010

budgeting personal finances

Consumerist Budget Spreadsheet Balances Your Money, Encourages Your Nest Egg

The saving-savvy folks at The Consumerist blog have put together a template Excel spreadsheet for managing personal finances. It's the kind of thing you always say you're going to do, but they went ahead and did it for you, and it's free.

It's not a new thing, but Consumerist's budget spreadsheet, crafted during the days the site was one of our blog network brethren, has come back, after being lost to the vagaries of server maintenance. The site has instructions on setting it up, including tips on thinking through your monthly expenses and advice on how much you should plan on socking away for a rainy day, retirement, and other expenses.

Maybe you use Mint or another automated spending/saving tracker instead—but then again, maybe those tools are so automatic that you don't get a good look at your real money situation.

Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

Despite how simple the process can be, most of us are terrible at saving and paying bills. Here's a strategy to effectively automate most of your finances to keep you saving and out of late fee trouble.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich.com has put together a system for managing your personal finances that only takes about an hour of your time each week. The video above fully explains the process in detail, but here's the gist. First, you want to set up your bills and other payments so they're all happening on the day you get your first paycheck of the month (the first of the month for most people). Once you have that in place, you want to set up automatic savings plans (Sethi suggests using Ing Direct) with sub-savings accounts that let you organize your savings into specific categories (vacation, wedding, etc.). You'll also want to send a percentage of your paycheck to your 401k, and have all of this happen immediately so that the money you see when you get paid is the money left when everything has already been saved. From there, you automatically pay as many bills as you can with your credit card (and then pay the credit card bill on pay day). For the bills you can't pay with your credit card (like rent, in most cases), you can use your online banking to automatically issue a check. This will leave a little money leftover in your checking account that you can use to budget for guilt-free spending and cash withdrawals.

As someone who's often fallen victim to the faults of automatic payments systems (despite frequently using them), definitely do not forget to stay on top of your bills nonetheless. Make sure you set some time aside at least once a month to do a little maintenance and make sure there are no bugs causing your automated finance system to break down. Sethi isn't suggesting a set-it-and-forget-it automated finance system by any means, but as someone who hates paying bills I know how easy it can be to procrastinate and ignore the task. If you set up a good automated system like this one, you'll be at a point where all you have to do is watch and fix the occasional problem as the most important things are being taken care of for you.

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News - Queen Elizabeth Welcomes First Great-Grandchild! - Moms ...

Peter Phillips' wife Autumn gave birth to a baby girl Wednesday.

2010 News Quotes Quiz: Who Said It?

Here are 10 quotes that capture some of the spirit of 2010. Do you know who said each one?

Keith Olbermann: 'Fox News Is 100% Bullshit'

Keith Olbermann is anything but hesitant when it comes to a battle with Fox News, and the MSNBC anchor took to Twitter Wednesday to share his views on the TV network he probably wouldn't even call a rival.

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Making Money Ebay

by BBG

Broken Bells (more by Amanda Hatfield)

Broken Bells who recently lauched a 3D interactive video for "October", kick off a string of dates tonight (12/1) at Irving Plaza. The NYC show is part of the 101.9 RXP "Yule Rock Holiday Concert Series". The band will hit select cities from coast-to-coast, eventually landing in LA by the middle of the month. Updated tour dates are below.

And Broken Bells member Danger Mouse just wouldn't be himself if he didn't have his hand in another 10000 projects. His latest is "Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi present: ROME":

Brian Burton [Danger Mouse] and Daniele Luppi met in Los Angeles in 2004... Luppi, a composer from Italy, was receiving acclaim for his album An Italian Story, which revisited the cinematic sounds of his childhood. (He has also written music for the screen - Sex and the City, Nine - and later worked with Burton on arrangements for Gnarls Barkley, Dark Night of the Soul and Broken Bells.)

United by their shared passion for classic Italian film music, ... after an intense songwriting period - writing separately at first, and then together as the songs evolved - they travelled to Rome in October 2006. Luppi made some calls and they assembled the original musicians from films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West - including the legendary Marc 4 backing band and Alessandro Alessandroni's 'I Cantori Moderni' choir. Most of the musicians were in their seventies and hadn't worked together for several decades.

They booked time in Rome's cavernous Forum Studios - formerly Ortophonic Studios, founded, amongst others, by the great Ennio Morricone... Every effort was made to replicate the recording practices of the 1960s/70s golden age, recording live and straight to tape, with overdubs but no electronics, computers, 21st-century effects or studio trickery.

In addition, Jack White and Norah Jones each lend their voices to three tracks on the forthcoming LP, due in March 2011 via Capitol Records.

In other Jack White news, the White Stripes frontman/Third Man Records honcho is taking some fire for deciding to put up some limited edition Third Man material up for auction on ebay:

Paid subscribers of Third Man Records' The Vault were directed to an eBay page with open auctions for copies of the limited edition vinyl version of the self-titled White Stripes reissue. Within an hour, all 5 auctions were above $100 each, and a small shitstorm of comments began to erupt on The Vault, when, suddenly, Jack White joined the site's chatroom with a handbasket-gripping introduction of "See you in hell?" and explained, quite simply, why the hell there were people paying 500 bucks for a record you have to crack open to listen to: "Supply & demand.... nobody told them to buy it with a gun to their head."

...When a fan tried to argue that people with "more money than sense" were to blame, Jack retorted: "Or are they just paying what the going rate is?" White explained: "We sell a Wanda Jackson split record for 10 bucks, the eBay flipper turns around and sells it for 300. If 300 is what it's worth, then why doesn't Third Man Records sell it for 300? If we sell them for more, the artist gets more, the flipper gets nothing. We're not in the business of making flippers a living. We're in the business of giving fans what they want." -

Reggie Watts auction coming soon? And the attack on the eBay record microeconomy is on. All Broken Bells dates and a video is below.

If you are already selling on eBay; have you ever thought about selling on Amazon, you get different rates between the two depending on what you’re selling? Read on and I’ll explain the differences between the selling platforms.

If you have ever bought anything on Amazon, you may have seen the item offered by sellers too. There are individuals and businesses selling all kinds of goods on Amazon in the same way.

If you are selling on eBay it may be worth considering if you should also be selling on Amazon. It is safe to say that some items are better listed with eBay however Amazon might be the best choice for a different type of product. But there are many similarities between products selling well on both platforms.

What’s the difference?

The main difference between the sites is that eBay focuses mainly on the auction format whilst the Amazon Associates platform relies on a fixed price arrangement, although eBay also offers buy-it-now as a fixed price listing option.

Undoubtedly if you’re eager to shift something quick then the auction option is the best, although you may be disappointed with the end result if you haven’t set a reserve at the beginning of the sale.

For some businesses, especially those looking for a fixed price sale Amazon may be the preferred way forward especially if they are using this method on all their products. Even thought eBay is typically an auction site they’re moving more towards fixed price listings to compete more with the rise in Amazon’s market share in this area.

What are the Advantages?

There are some differences in the type of shoppers that use Amazon & eBay. eBayers tend to be the bargain hunters who will go to any lengths to find what they’re looking for cheaper, whilst Amazon shoppers tend to be more conventional, albeit looking for good value but at a fixed price. By selling on both sites you can take advantage of larger number of buyers that could potentially view and buy your products, giving you advantage over a number of your competitors and increasing your coverage.

Continued on the next page

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