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	<title>My Link 2 Cash - Money,Finance,Debt,Mortgages</title>
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		<title>30 Steps to Great Finances: Steps 7 and 8</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Today we are going to continue talking about how to improve your finances in 30 steps. We are going to talk about the final piece of growing your career as well as how to make more money outside your day job.  If you want to see where we've been so far, start with step #1 and work your way through the series. But for now, let's proceed with today's tips. Step 7:  Grow Your Career – Other Opportunities In addition to the career-related tips we've already suggested (over-delivering, networking, being likeable), there are several other ways to advance your career (and thus increase your income.) Here are three of the best ones IMO: Apply for awards. Don’t sit around waiting for recognition, awards and praise to come to you—look for the opportunities yourself. You may be surprised how few people do this, and if you are the best of those who applied, you get recognition by winning the award. Awards look great on a resume and also reinforce to your current employer what a great asset you are. For specifics, see my post on how to get a career award . Get educated. Take classes to learn more about your field or to become a better manager (or potential manager).  Showing the initiative to learn more says a lot to your supervisors about your dedication to the job. Get certified in a skill important to your field.   This may set you up to be a specialist in your department, which makes you more valuable. The more you can gain recognition and experience in your field, the faster your career can grow, and, often the more money you can make. Step 8:  Develop a Side Business Using the Skills You Already Have Once you take steps to make the most of your day job, it is time to focus on additional income streams. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to use the skills you've developed over your career and freelance at night and on weekends. A few examples of how you might be able to do this: If you are a teacher, you can tutor students on the side. As a homeschool parent, I hire teachers all the time to teach my kids subjects my wife and I can't (Spanish, chemistry, etc.) If you are a computer engineer, you might offer consulting. Know anyone who needs their computer fixed? Me too. If you are a business executive, you could advise small businesses on how to grow their sales, market their services, save money in operations, etc. Any way, you get the idea. Take what you already do/know and turn it into an extra money-maker. And who knows? You might find that you enjoy your side gig so much that you can eventually quit your day job and run your side gig full-time. Stay tuned for the next two steps coming up soon.  If you have been following along in this series so far, what success have you had following the steps I’ve given?  Share them in the comments.  I’d love to hear them! ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/30-steps-to-great-finances-steps-7-and-8</link>
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		<title>The Most Important Part of the Budgeting Process</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ The following is an excerpt from Securing Your Financial Future: Complete Personal Finance for Beginners courtesy of Rowman &#38; Littlefield Publishers. All Rights Reserved. Get ready: here comes one of the most important recommendations in the whole book . It is a trick that makes your left brain happy by getting the power of compounding working in your favor but slips right by your right brain’s bag of tricks. This recommendation guarantees that you will follow the First Rule, month after month and year after year. It is called Pay Yourself First. Here’s how it works: the First Rule requires that you save 10%—minimum—of everything that you ever earn. So first you decide what percentage you are going to save and then convert that into a dollar amount. Next, make that amount the very first line item in your monthly budget. Think of this savings as a bill that comes to you every month—a completely nonoptional bill that you can’t ignore or delay. Then as soon as the month begins, pay that “bill” first, before you spend any other money whatsoever. The way that you pay the bill is by transferring that amount from your checking account into your savings account. It’s like saying “I know I have to pay my landlord, the electric bill, my phone bill, etc., every month, and of course I will. But I am going to pay myself first.” This changes your mentality about spending and saving in a subtle but extremely powerful way: you no longer save what is left after spending. Instead you spend what is left after saving. The difference may sound subtle, but its power is profound. It works even better if you can make it automatic, which I highly recommend. Do this by preauthorizing an automatic monthly transfer, from checking to savings, in the amount that satisfies the First Rule (at least), on the same day that your paycheck is deposited. Your right brain’s preference for the path of least resistance usually hurts you financially, but paying yourself first turns the tables and allows you to use this tendency to powerfully help you instead. The money is out of your account (and your mind!) before you even realize that it was ever there. You’ll never miss it, so it won’t feel like a sacrifice. You’ll be consistently doing the right thing financially, in such a way that it doesn’t hurt a bit. In fact, after you set it up, you won’t even notice that it’s happening. The only time that you’ll notice it at all is when you happen to notice your savings account balance and are surprised by how big it is getting. By the way, paying yourself first isn’t a secret, and it isn’t new—it’s been around for generations. It’s so well known for its rock-solid effectiveness that it’s the primary technique used by the U.S. government for its own revenue collection. When you get a paycheck from your employer, you’ll notice that an estimated amount for U.S. income tax has already been taken out before you get your hands on your pay. If the IRS doesn’t want to take the chance that it won’t get paid, why should you? Paying yourself first takes the chance out of increasing your net worth and makes it a sure thing. It’s like money in the bank. Wait . . . it is money in the bank! Getting the Most for Your Money So far, all of our emphasis in this chapter has been on keeping your total amount of monthly spending under control by using the budgeting process. As long as you do that, you’ll be following the First Rule and your net worth will grow. In addition, the learn step in the budget process will increase your spending skills, and this is important.  Two people can spend the same amount of money in a month, but the one with the superior spending skills will be able to afford more (or better) goods and services for the same amount spent. Alternatively, two people can buy an identical set of goods and services in a month, but the one with superior spending skills will buy them for less, and therefore will be able to save faster. People who have mastered the art of spending waste less money and get more for the money that they do spend. You’ll learn how to do this yourself as you continue to repeat the learn step in the budget process, but I’d like to give you a head start by outlining some of the key elements of spending skills. Here are seven of them. 1.  Don’t make individual yes/no decisions—prioritize.   The most basic level of prioritization is separating needs from wants. There is no debate that you need a basic level of food, clothing, shelter, and health care. But everything beyond that is a want. What prioritization is all about is ensuring that your needs are paid for before any wants and deciding which of your wants you want the most. Because you are committed to staying within a fixed amount of spending each month, every time you say yes to a want, you’re saying no to other ones. Your goal at the end of the month is to look back and be satisfied that you got the most for your money—that you spent it only on your needs and your very highest-priority wants. The worst possible way to get that result is to make your spending decisions one at a time, as they come up or as they occur to you, as if every spending decision were completely independent of every other one. Decisions will come at you at disjointed, random times—so you’ll get disjointed, random results. Without prioritization you just spend your way through the month, saying yes when it seems like a good idea, and you run the risk of spending your monthly total before the month is over. (The technical phrase for this is “running out of money before you run out of month.”) The only possible way to end up close to a good prioritization is to look at all of your possible spending alternatives together, at the same time, so that you can compare them against one another. The wrong question to ask is “Should I buy X, yes or no?” The right question to ask is “I can afford to buy X, Y, or Z, but only one of the three. Which one of them makes the most sense for me right now?” The budget process forces you to prioritize your spending in just this way, in advance.  This kind of “advance comparative thinking” will become a habit and will give you a much higher level of satisfaction with your spending decisions than the “serial yes/no” approach. You’ll become much less tempted to make spontaneous exceptions to your budget, because you’ll know from your own experience that you’ll have to pay for them by doing without something else that you wanted even more. 2.  Be a smart, well-informed consumer. We’re all bombarded by advertising around the clock. This virtually guarantees that we get a constant, unrelenting view of exactly one side of the story. Everybody knows what this side of the story looks like: the benefits of buying are mind-bogglingly wonderful, the price is unbelievably low, you’ll be admired by everyone you know, and unless you act now, you’ll really be missing out. Is that all you need to know, or is there another side to the story? Of course there is—but you’ll have to do some of your own homework in order to get it. If you put some effort into this kind of homework, I’ll promise this: you’ll be amazed by how much you can save, easily. Become familiar with consumer-oriented publications and forums. Check out user reviews on the Internet. Get educated about the real trade-offs between new vs. used, and about branded vs. not. Ask friends or colleagues who have made similar purchases what they learned in the process. Spend a few minutes looking at coupons in the mail before throwing them out as junk. Learn which things you should never pay the full asking price for. Understand why Homer Simpson says, “Extended warranty? How can I lose?” If you’ve never done this kind of research before, it might sound like a lot of work. But like many other areas that we’ve been talking about, the key is to establish a habit. There is no real shortcut to becoming a smart, well- informed consumer. It takes a commitment to doing the homework, but the payoff for doing so begins early and is well worth it. 3.  Smooth out nonrecurring expenses.   Most of the expenses in your budget come to you in relatively predictable monthly amounts. But some of your expenses won’t follow this kind of monthly pattern. You might have some that are once a year, like membership fees, holiday gifts, or annual vacations. Others might be one-time expenses, like purchasing a major appliance, a new computer, or a training course. This is where your emerging habit of long-term thinking can come into play to improve your financial life. The idea is to begin planning for these expenses early, well before you need the money to pay for them. How do you do that? By including them in your budget, in small, regular monthly amounts. Similar to paying yourself first, you simply transfer these amounts to savings each month, where they’ll earn interest in the meantime. Financially speaking, not every month is the same. But the trick is to use your budget to make every month seem roughly the same. When it’s time to pay the nonrecurring expense, since you’ve saved for it in advance, your monthly process won’t skip a beat. For those without budgets—or who don’t use their budgets to anticipate these kinds of expenses—financial life can be a chaotic series of up- and-down months. Smoothing out your nonrecurring but perfectly predictable expenses frees you up from all of this unnecessary stress. This feeling of being in control of your monthly expenses is one of the more immediate benefits of budgeting; you’ll be surprised by how easy it is once you’ve gotten the hang of it. 4.  Plan for unplanned expenses.   Your car needs new brakes much sooner than expected, your doctor prescribes some new and expensive medication, or your microwave blows up and needs to be replaced. All kinds of things like this invariably pop up, and the one thing that they have in common is that they weren’t in the budget. We’re not talking about huge financial emergencies here—we’ll cover those in a later chapter. Instead we’re talking about those bothersome, unplanned expenses just big enough to put a painful dent in this month’s budget. That means that you’ll have to scramble to find the money by doing without some other things that you’d been planning on. Unless, that is, you’ve taken some precautions. Look at it this way. Even though events like these are rarely planned, what is the probability that your car will never need an unexpected repair, that you’ll never get sick, or that a household appliance will never need replacing? What to do? Build a contingency fund into your budget, that’s what. Let’s say that your goal is to do a little better than the First Rule minimum, and you intend to save 15% of everything you ever earn. The way that you plan for unplanned expenses is to put a line item in your budget called “contingency fund.” If you budget for 3% of your earnings on that line, all of your other—planned—spending will be set as if you were planning on saving 18%. The difference between the 15% and the 18% is a pool of excess savings that you can draw on when these unplanned expenses occur. At the end of the year, if it turned out that you needed the 3%, you’ve got it—and you still achieved your goal of saving 15%. If it turned out that you didn’t need the 3%, then you’ve saved more than you planned and your net worth is increasing faster than you’d planned—oh, darn! 5.  Avoid using currency.   There are many forms of what economists call cash and cash equivalents—we’ll learn more about them in upcoming chapters. But probably the most familiar of all the forms of cash is currency—coins and bills—whether in your pocket, purse, wallet, piggy bank, or between the cushions on your couch. Do you understand now what I mean by currency? Good. Now, stop using it. When you spend coins and bills, they leave no trail. Unless you want to collect paper receipts all month, or keep some kind of transaction-by-transaction record, using currency short-circuits the compare and learn steps in the budget process. It’s like mystery spending—who knows where, when, or how it was used? All you know is that it’s gone. When you spend with a debit card, a credit card, or by check, you leave a specific record of what the purchase was for, which greatly facilitates the budgeting process. The best approach of all is to select just one of those three (debit card, credit card, or check), and use that for every transaction. (We’ll cover which one of the three is best a few chapters from now.) That way, the results for the entire month are available online, all in one convenient place, in downloadable form. This makes the compare step a snap, and you can spend more time in the learn step. Yes, there are exceptions. It may not work particularly well to pass your debit card down the aisle at a baseball game to a hot dog vendor or to write a check at an automated turnpike toll booth. But the more you can avoid using currency, the smoother your budget cycle will be. 6.  Small transactions repeated a large number of times add up. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But this is one of the most common spending traps that those who don’t budget fall into. Why go to the trouble of bringing your lunch to work? It’s always easier to go out; bringing your lunch might only save $5 or $10. The key is to understand that it is not a $5 or $10 decision—multiplied by 200 lunches a year, it is a $1,000 or $2,000 annual habit. Maybe those lunches are worth that much to you, or maybe they’re not, but the point is to make the decision consciously, prioritizing the lunches against other things that you could spend that same amount of money on. Budgeting forces you to look at the small-dollar, high-volume transactions and see them realistically. Operating without a budget, or letting these kinds of expenses escape scrutiny by using currency to pay for them, will allow you to be lulled into thinking they’re much smaller than they really are. 7.  Beware of the subscription effect. Many service providers charge for their services on a regular monthly basis. Often it is convenient for both you and the service provider to set up an automated payment scheme, which calls for you to preauthorize payment from either your bank account or a credit card. Examples include services like cell phones, cable or satellite television, club memberships, and insurance coverage. If you are completely certain that the monthly amounts will never change and that the duration of the agreement cannot be extended without your explicit permission, then you are on safe ground. But if the monthly charges are subject to variation, or if the agreement can be automatically extended or renewed automatically, then watch out! This situation leaves you vulnerable to what is sometimes called the subscription effect, and it is financially dangerous; you might end up paying much more, and/or for a longer period of time, than what you had originally preauthorized. Here’s how it works. It starts with highly visible advertising for a very low monthly rate for a certain set of services. (The rates are often especially low if you are switching over from a competitor.) These low rates are only temporary, but you will only find that out in the fine print. These temporary low rates are called teaser rates. Before long, the teaser rates go up—sometimes very substantially. The seller heavily encourages you to preauthorize an automatic monthly payment, allegedly for your convenience. But the seller’s real motivation is to encourage an “out of sight, out of mind” situation so that you (hopefully) won’t notice when the teaser rates expire and the higher rate takes effect. After several more months, the seller may implement yet another price increase. If you’re notified at all, the communication is usually in the tiniest print available and specifically designed to encourage you to ignore it. A similar tactic may be used when it’s time to renew your agreement; it isn’t uncommon for service providers to automatically assume that you want to renew unless you specifically notify them to the contrary. Here’s another twist. Let’s say that the seller has three levels of service: red, white, or blue. You sign up for blue. A year or so later, the seller redesigns all their service packages and now has four levels: bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. The seller notifies you of this exciting new development and advises you that “gold” is the closest to what your current “blue” service level is. So, supposedly for your convenience, they offer to make the assumption that your choice is to switch to gold, and if you agree, you don’t have to do anything—they’ll take care of everything automatically! Well, gold may be the closest to blue, but it is a safe bet that gold has a higher price than blue. Unless you are the type to read every line of fine print in what looks like a routine piece of mail, you’ve just “agreed” to pay a higher price—by doing nothing. Suffice it to say that these sellers know all about the paths of least resistance. The idea is that they’ve got a little hidden drain in your financial bathtub, and they want to steadily open that drain up as wide as possible without your noticing a thing. Your budget process stops this tactic cold. They’re hoping you won’t notice the steady increases, but your budget forces you to notice every increase. Each increase is a trigger for you to reprioritize the spending against all of your other spending and make conscious decisions about whether to accept the increase, downgrade your service level, or cancel it altogether. If it sounds like I’m making a big deal out of one small part of your spending, wait until you set up your first budget. If you’re like most people, you will be surprised by the large percentage of your total spending in the automatic monthly billing category. It is a big deal! Decision Time Earlier in this chapter, I noted that many people choose not to adopt a budget process at all because it doesn’t seem like much fun. And even though I’ve done my best to convince you, point by point, of the many advantages of a basic budget process, I’m sure that some of you still aren’t ready to commit to it. I won’t sugarcoat it; even though the budget process eventually becomes a breeze, the first few cycles are likely to be time consuming and maybe a little bit frustrating. That’s because you’re learning lots of very valuable lessons in a concentrated period of time, and I highly recommend that you begin right away. But for those of you who just can’t stand the idea, let me offer this alternative. Strictly speaking, you don’t have to use a monthly budget process, but if—and only if—you faithfully follow the First Rule (which, as you’ll remember, precludes any form of borrowing whatsoever) and pay yourself first every month without exception. If you follow these two rules, you can just spend each month until you run out of money—and then stop. If you choose this alternative, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that your net worth will continuously grow—maybe even as fast as it would if you were doing monthly budgeting. You’ll also be able to use every other tool and recommendation in the book; none of them are dependent on your doing a monthly budget. Now here is the bad news: your financial life will be quite chaotic. Especially when you are in any kind of transition (a move, adding a spouse or partner, new dependents, new job, etc.), you’ll find yourself running out of money before you run out of month and having to scramble. And you definitely won’t get as much for your money as if you’d budgeted. Once you’ve had enough of this bad news, you can always change your mind—when it comes to budgeting, better late than never! The choice is yours: implement the monthly budget process as was just described, or skip it and instead rely only on the First Rule (which precludes any form of borrowing) and Pay Yourself First shortcut. Before you decide, consider this: would you invest in a company that doesn’t budget, when there is overwhelming evidence that most successful companies do? Isn’t investing in your own financial future at least as important? ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/the-most-important-part-of-the-budgeting-process</link>
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		<title>Does Your Will Leave Money to Charity?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ For those of you new to Free Money Finance, I post on The Bible and Money every Sunday. Here's why . This recent Wall Street Journal article talks about how some people deal with their religious beliefs in estate planning . It spends most of its time on how people disinherit some relatives that don't follow in a specific religious path (like marrying within the faith), but I'm going to focus on another issue related to estate planning and religion -- leaving part of your estate to your church (or, for that matter, to any charitable organization.) There seems to be two primary thoughts on giving money (for those who want to give) as follows: Give while you're alive out of your income. Save and invest as much as you can while you're alive. Then, when you pass away, a good amount is given to your favorite charity. We prefer the first option as our primary means of giving. We like knowing where our money is going and how it's being used, and it's difficult to do that once you're dead (though there are ways you can direct it with at least some certainty.) That said, we do have a provision in our wills that once our kids are cared for financially, the rest will be given away to various charities. This implies that we have a set amount that we want to leave our kids, which is true. We want to leave them enough to both complete their education as well as get a good financial head start on their lives, but we don't want to have them swimming in wealth -- so much money that it's a detriment to them. Of course, this is a tricky thing to try and project -- just how much is "enough" but not "too much"? So we've probably erred a bit on the "too much" side. Even then, we'll have plenty left over to go to various charities. How about you? Does your will leave money to your church or favorite charity? ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/does-your-will-leave-money-to-charity</link>
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		<title>Using Dynamic Asset Allocation to Boost Returns</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ The following is a guest post from Marotta Wealth Management . In the last several columns, I have described the investment science that supports dynamic asset allocation. Think of static asset allocation as where to set your sails and dynamic asset allocation as a way to keep your balance as your boat glides and sometimes bounces through the waves. A static asset allocation, not the same as a buy-and-hold strategy, already has a dynamic component. Buy and hold sets an asset allocation and then allows the portfolio to drift. The portfolio generally moves in a more aggressive direction, increasingly overweighting whatever has done well. It's certainly a better strategy than jumping out of the markets after a drop and waiting to jump back in after a rally. But it isn't the optimum strategy. Asset allocation is a buy-and-rebalance strategy. Portfolio rebalancing boosts returns. And thanks to a rebalancing bonus, this strategy produces portfolios with either higher returns or lower volatility. By looking at the mean return and standard deviation of an asset class, you can gauge its distance from the efficient frontier. The correlation of an asset class to other asset categories determines the optimum ratios of those two indexes in your portfolio. We used a ratio of excess return to standard deviation called the Sharpe ratio to measure the efficiency of each asset category. Then we used a proportionally weighted allocation based on the square of each Sharpe ratio to create a portfolio asset allocation. I humbly call this the Marotta allocation method. Previously we've looked at the Shiller price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio . We took the current price and divided by the average inflation-adjusted earnings from the previous 10 years. This measurement is also known as the cyclically adjusted P/E ratio, or the Cape ratio, abbreviated as P/E 10. The Shiller P/E ratio helps determine the expected forward-looking return of an investment or index, not if you should be in or out of the markets. Another measurement is the forward-looking P/E ratio. It uses projected earnings for the next 12 months. The projected P/E ratio can help us decide where to invest. If one index's projected P/E ratio implies it is relatively cheap and another that it is relatively expensive, overweighting the inexpensive index should boost investment returns. For example, take the projected P/E for the Russell 2000 small cap divided by the projected P/E ratio for the Russell 1000 large cap. This ratio of P/E ratios averages about 1.033. Small cap has a slightly higher P/E ratio because people are willing to pay a little more for a small-cap stock. Although the mean ratio of P/E ratios is close to 1, the standard deviation is 0.122. One standard deviation is a good measurement to use. When the ratio is as high as 1.155, the market is signaling that small cap is relatively expensive and large cap relatively cheap. An allocation tilted more toward large cap should do better. And when the ratio is as low as 0.911, one standard deviation, the market is signaling that small cap is relatively cheap and should outperform in the coming months. Tilting dynamically between asset categories can boost returns even more than asset allocation. Let's look at four concrete examples for the U.S. stock allocation of our gone-fishing portfolio. Our first two examples represent the extreme indexes of large-cap and small-cap value. First we put everything in the S&#38;P 500. Then we put everything in the Russell 2000 Value. Our third asset allocation is a static one with two thirds in the S&#38;P 500 and one third in the Russell 2000 Value. Normally an allocation that tilts toward small and value will have higher returns. (click chart to enlarge) The final asset allocation is done dynamically. One third is put into the S&#38;P 500. The remaining two thirds is divided between the S&#38;P 500 and the Russell 2000 Value. Normally the allocation is split evenly. This results in the same allocation as the static asset allocation with two thirds in the S&#38;P 500 and one third in the Russell 2000 Value. This normal allocation occurs when the ratio of the projected P/E ratios is at the mean of 1.033. But as the ratio of the Russell 2000 projected P/E to the Russell 1000 projected P/E rises, this dynamic allocation will tilt more toward the cheaper large cap. At 1.155, one standard deviation higher, the dynamic allocation will be all toward the S&#38;P 500. And as the ratio drops to 0.911, one standard deviation lower, it will approach the dynamic allocation being entirely in the Russell 2000 Value. Because one third is always in the S&#38;P 500, this results in two thirds in the Russell 2000 Value. We looked at the mean monthly return and standard deviation of these four portfolios from 1979 through 2011. The S&#38;P 500's monthly return was 0.97% versus the Russell 2000 Value's 1.13%. Annualized, that's the difference between 12.33% and 14.45%. (click chart to enlarge) The Static 2:1 asset allocation boosts returns by approximately the one-third higher returns of the Russell 2000 Value allocation. The only benefit of asset allocation is that this 0.70% annualized higher return (13.03%) could be gained without any additional increase in standard deviation. Amazingly, over this time period the dynamic allocation boosts returns another 1.19% over the static allocation, even though the average asset allocation was no different. The dynamic asset allocation has an annualized return of 14.22%, although the monthly standard deviation was no more than the S&#38;P 500. (click chart to enlarge) Boosting annualized returns by static and then dynamic asset allocation 1.89% without adding monthly standard deviation, you can reap the benefit of careful portfolio construction and dynamic changes based on the ratio of projected P/E ratios. (click chart to enlarge) We've been using the U.S. stock portion of our portfolio to illustrate how static portfolio construction using the Marotta allocation method gives us a starting target. Then a ratio of projected P/E ratios can be added to offer a dynamic component and boost returns even more. In our typical portfolios, the percentage allocated to a U.S. style box is usually less than a quarter of the total portfolio. But this same methodology can be used with any noncorrelated asset categories to provide a dynamic allocation model. ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/using-dynamic-asset-allocation-to-boost-returns</link>
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		<title>5 Fashion Challenges to Mix Up Your Wardrobe &amp; Save Money</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Have you ever heard of a fashion challenge? They&#8217;re tasks that bloggers, fashionistas, or anyone sick and tired of their wardrobe can use to stretch new limits, try new trends, and make old items look new again. When I first heard about fashion challenges, I loved the idea. It&#8217;s an amazing way to restyle the 5 Fashion Challenges to Mix Up Your Wardrobe &#038; Save Money is a post from the Money Crashers personal finance blog . ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/5-fashion-challenges-to-mix-up-your-wardrobe-save-money</link>
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		<title>Why Sitting Is Bad for You – 6 Tips to Move More &amp; Improve Health</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Think about how much time you spend each day sitting down. You may sit down throughout the entire working day at a desk in front of a computer. You sit during your commute to and from work. And you sit when you&#8217;re watching TV in the evening, or surfing the web. ABC News reports that Why Sitting Is Bad for You &#8211; 6 Tips to Move More &#038; Improve Health is a post from the Money Crashers personal finance blog . ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/why-sitting-is-bad-for-you-%e2%80%93-6-tips-to-move-more-improve-health</link>
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		<title>Carnivals for the Week of May 14</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Here are some of the carnivals Free Money Finance was in this week: EDITOR'S CHOICE! Festival of Frugality Carnival of Personal Finance Totally Money Blog Carnival Financial Simplicity Carnival Enjoy! P.S. Carnival Hosts -- If my post is in your carnival in a given week, please send me the URL to the carnival and I will include it in my weekly roundup. ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/carnivals-for-the-week-of-may-14</link>
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		<title>How to Save Money on Gas for Your Car – 20 Easy Ways</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ It&#8217;s no secret that the price of gas is continually rising. According to data from the Energy Information Administration, the national average for a gallon of regular gas in mid-January 2009 was $1.83. Three weeks later, the price was $3.44, and in 2012, the average price exceeds $4.00 in some areas. With no estimated date in How to Save Money on Gas for Your Car &#8211; 20 Easy Ways is a post from the Money Crashers personal finance blog . ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/how-to-save-money-on-gas-for-your-car-%e2%80%93-20-easy-ways</link>
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		<title>30 Steps to Great Finances: Steps 5 and 6</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ I have only shared the first few steps to great finances, but hopefully you are already feeling more in control of your money.  So far, we have covered the following: Step #1: Know your net worth step Step #2: Record your spending for a month Step #3: Develop a cash flow plan Step #4: Grow your career by over-delivering   If you haven’t completed any of those steps, do so before continuing on with this post's steps. Today we are going to continue to focus on your career and ways to make more money with it because, repeat after me, the more money you make, the more you can increase the all-important gap between what you spend and what you earn.  The greater the (positive) gap, the more potential you have to build wealth. While over-delivering is a key part of growing your career, it is only one piece of the puzzle.  Steps 5 and 6 include two more important pieces: Step 5: Grow Your Career – Develop and Expand Your Network Many people think about growing their network when they need something (like a job lead), but this approach isn’t productive.  Instead, you must grow your network before you need it -- so it's ready when you do need help.  This is what I did, and it landed me the best job of my career .  Here are some ways to grow your network: Take business contacts out to lunch once or twice a week and make time to connect.  Get involved in activities that you already enjoy and socialize while you are there ( examples : charity committees, church activities, recreational leagues, etc.)  Talk to people you meet every day while waiting in line for coffee or dropping your kid off at school.  The more people you can connect with, the bigger your network.  Don’t forget online resources such as LinkedIn , Facebook, Twitter, and maybe even your own blog. Approach your network with the intention of being a giver -- a resource that will help others out. Then when you're in need, your network will be there for you. Step 6:  Grow Your Career – Become Likeable Here is the hard truth—you may be doing a great job at work, but if you aren’t likeable, you may not be getting the raises and recognition you deserve .  The good news is that you can become more likeable . Yes, experts have developed a list of what makes a person likeable . So simply follow it and you'll be set. :) Ok, it isn't that easy. But let's face it, being likeable is pretty much common sense. We all know how we like to be treated, right? So simply act that way towards others and you should get most of the way home in the likeability category. That's it for this time around. I’ll be back with the next steps in a few days, so stay tuned... ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/30-steps-to-great-finances-steps-5-and-6</link>
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		<title>How to Stop Fighting About Money With Your Spouse</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Money is among the top reasons for martial strain and divorce, and those of us who are married understand why. Think about your single years: You had complete control over your finances and your bank account. Fast-forward to combining your finances with your spouse, and it&#8217;s easy to see why arguing about finances can put How to Stop Fighting About Money With Your Spouse is a post from the Money Crashers personal finance blog . ]]></description>
		<link>http://mylink2cash.com/how-to-stop-fighting-about-money-with-your-spouse</link>
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