Since you’re reading this article, it can safely be said that you’re privy to how much potential there is to learn something new by consulting the World Wide Web. Yet millions of people seemingly bypass amazing online resources for bettering themselves, simply because they either do not know they exist or never bother to look. If you’re befuddled over strained finances and anxious over which investment option to choose, you most likely consult an online opinion or blog. But what about tools to help you? The web is more than just advice – the web is full of free instruments at your disposal that you can use to improve your finances and invest smarter. Just need to know where to look.

For instance, how many of those reading this right now are stressing over retirement? Don’t know which is going to pay off more for you down the line? Before visiting a paid consultant, have you checked out the endless array of retirement calculators that exist on the Internet? You can plug in your variables and get a reasonably accurate projection just like that. Chances are a human you pay to give you advice will end up utilizing a similar tool to come to his or her conclusions – and charge you for it.

Speaking of calculators, the Federal Reserve website includes one for figuring out the optimum credit card debt repayment plan for you to follow to avoid owing on your lack of responsibility in college for the rest of your life. This is just one of several such instruments the government provides the public for free that help individuals come up with better assessments about their futures. Even if the United States government isn’t providing the exact tool you need, other English-speaking nations provide mortgage and other loan repayment calculators you can use – just convert the currency and adjust interest.

But let’s avoid not giving credit where credit is due. Despite the seemingly aforementioned sidelining of financial and investment advice found on blogs, it’s be both hypocritical and inaccurate to see these resources are not adequate in finding the tools you need. Not only is this very article an example of this, but financial and investment agencies tend to always inform clients and potential clientele about the free tools they have that can be found online. For instance, the Twitter page of Cavalry Portfolio Services includes a link to the FTC’s free credit report offering provided to American citizens.

It’s obvious that countless resources exist online that can help you take control of your finances and position yourself for a smarter investment future. What’s even more obvious is the importance of taking advantage of these instruments. Squeezing something out of nothing is the beginning of the path to responsible finances.

Rarely seen on the road, classically crafted and utterly beautiful, the historic car is representative of something much bigger than an investment and is the pride and joy to any owner. Those lucky enough to own a piece of antique automotive art will know that car insurance is an important purchase and necessary to the protection of it. Car insurance is tailor-made to both the owner and car as these insurance brokers understand that a special car deserves a special insurance policy.

It is often the case that a vast amount of money has been spent on buying a historic car so it seems logical that car insurance be purchased to protect it from any damage. In years gone by, the largest number of insurance claims on historic vehicles has come from either theft or fire. Evidently, these are two of the most obvious reasons for needing car insurance along with damage in traffic accidents.

Various factors are taken into account when quoting a price on car insurance. With over 30 years experience in arranging policies, the insurance broker company understands the particular needs that historic car owners have and would need from their car insurance.
The competition for car insurance companies is fierce which is why knowledge and research are essential. For those with a homeowner’s insurance policy, the chances are that historic cars will be covered to a certain extent. Considering the amount spent on a historic car, it is usually worthwhile to insure it with a policy which will protect it fully, along with the garage it is stored in to ensure your investment is covered entirely.

By implementing a few security measures, car owners can keep the cost of their insurance policy at a minimum. The installation of fire and burglar alarms for obvious reasons as well as climate control systems which monitor temperature and humidity are ideal for historic car owners looking for a low-cost car insurance policy.

For those who own a historic car, insurance is a necessity. Car owners contemplating leaving their historic cars unprotected should not take the risk. Most car insurance companies now adapt their insurance policies for historic cars so that they can guarantee great cover at competitive rates.

The world of investment can be really hard to understand; particularly if you are new to investing. However, thanks to modern technology you can benefit from a number of helpful apps. The apps mentioned below are some of the best investment apps available on the market and you can find them all on the Seeking Alpha website.

Who Are Seeking Alpha?

If you are looking for all things stock related then Seeking Alpha is the site for you. It is a blog which provides free information, advice and tools on everything to do with the stock market.

The company was started in 2004 and it has more than 50 employees. David Jackson was the founder of the business and he has been ranked number 2 in a list of Global market movers that have the most influence in 2009 by the U.S News & World Report.
In short this is a company that you can trust when you are looking for stock market information. It also has a great range of investment apps too.

Understanding Investment Tools

The goal of investment tools is to help you to manage your investments. There are many different types of investment apps available. You will find ones that give stock ratings and analysis, create financial modelling and forecasting, give portfolio analytics and breakdowns and show you ETF portfolio risk management and balancing. These are just some of the functions that you can expect to find in the Investment tools section of the site.

The Best Investment Apps Available

As there are quite a lot of investment apps available, you may be wondering which ones are worth trying out. One which has had quite a good reception so far is the Earnings Event Desktop – Lite.

This app is free to use and it gives you all of the latest news briefs, EPS history, earnings calendars and tradable forecasts. You can choose to receive only the information that you want and you can register multiple portfolios. It is really easy to use and the best thing is – it’s free!

Another great app that you may want to try out is the ETF research app. This is free for 14 days but then you will need to pay $33 a month to keep using it. The features that you receive do make up for the monthly cost. You will be able to view comprehensive ETF ratings and you will have access to investment decision support tools. It is by far one of the most powerful investment apps available on the market. The heat maps provided are also particularly good according to user reviews.

If you are interested in minimizing your investment risk then the Vimaa portfolio risk manager is a good free app to try out. The great thing about this app is that it gives you the same financial risk models that are used by professional money managers. You will get to learn more about how your risk affects your potential for loss or gain. It will also show you where your risks lie in the investment.

Finally another great app to try out is the MarketGrader Movers and Shakers. This shows you the stocks and shares that have had the biggest changes each day. It allows you to see quite early on which stocks are worth investing in. It keeps you ahead of the game and it is completely free to use.

These are just a few of the best investment apps available. Using them will help you to increase your chances of making profit and help you to avoid potential risks.

This was a post by Lior Levin who is an online consultant for an MA in Israel program from tel aviv university and also works with an applicant tracking software company.

This is a guest post written by Lauren Dzuris. Lauren runs FindMyCarSeat, a car seat website that has several brands from Graco Car Seats to Evenflo Car Seats, as well as having several tips and advice on everything from pregnancy to caring for your baby.

When we were children, we often had to ask our parents for money. We were fascinated by it, and realized it could buy us a whole lot of things once we got our hands on it. Whether you did chores around the house, saved your birthday money or you got paid for good grades, money has been something we’ve enjoyed since a young age.
If you now have children of your own, I’m sure they have the same thoughts about money. It’s important to teach your children from a young age to spend wisely and to save frequently. In order for your child to be financially independent, they need to learn these key things from the beginning.

Allowance vs. chores: Your children should have some type of responsibility once they reach elementary school. This responsibility could range from keeping their own room clean, cleaning up after themselves, putting their toys away when they’re done, or even making their bed in the morning.

It’s important that you don’t confuse this with what they do for allowance. Allowance money should be given to them weekly for going above and beyond. Whether they helped you clean up sticks and leaves in the yard, put the dishes away all week, or they vacuumed and mopped all the floors, this is money they’ve earned. They can learn the concept that hard work pays, and you can also explain to them that you work for money too.

Save: Every week when they earn their allowance, they should always know to put at least 10% of it in their bank account. Explain to them the importance of saving, and teach them to be disciplined in not spending every penny; as this is important for future life as well.
Interest: Since interest grows when you save money, it’s important you teach your child this as well. Explain to them that the more you save and the longer you save it, the more money they will have down the road, and also the more money they will have for more toys.
Some parents go as far as doubling whatever their child puts in the bank. It’s a great way for them to want to put more money in the bank.

Downside of borrowing: You want to teach your children the importance of avoiding over spending and staying out of debt. So, if they ask you for money because they already spent all theirs, tell them they can have it, but they won’t get allowance for two weeks or however long. Explain to them that they should only spend money they already have. This will teach them to spend more wisely. Also explain how when you borrow money, you end up paying more in the long run.
Having good spending habits at a young age is important, and can get you on the right path when it comes to money. Avoiding debt, saving money by being disciplined, and having money to spend when we really want to is a great feeling for anyone; so teach your child from a young age!

Too often people who want to start a startup or any kind of small business do a major mistake from the beginning. They try to play big hoping that this will make their business big.

What do I mean? You probably have friends who have gone this route. They want to start a small consulting company and rent an office, buy expensive furniture, cars, hire people and pay a top designer for company logo.

Photo by fugm10 at Flickr

Spending big is not going to make you big

The only use of starting with so much expenses is to force yourself to work harder because you need to pay the bills and salaries every month. This is to some extend a positive thing but it’s not worth it. There are plenty of cheaper ways to motivate yourself. And the truth is people don’t do this because they are seeking for motivation.

They just believe that starting with an office and staff will automatically make their business big enough to cover the expenses and bring profits. In most cases it won’t happen. Having employees or shiny office is unlikely to help you get more business except maybe in some niches like advertising.

When starting a business this way you are turning yourself into a slave from the beginning. Running a business that started with expenses is not better than being a desperate employee who can’t refuse his boss’ orders because he has a family to feed. This is exactly what most people are running away from – being a slave for your bills. When you start big, you are forced to get more work so you can pay the bills – this decreases your ability to choose clients and in most cases you just take every order that comes to you. How is this different than having a boss?

Why don’t you try natural grow?

Instead of playing it big, why don’t you start like a teenager? Imagine you don’t have any money or just have few hundred bucks. Imagine you can’t get any loan. What are you going to do? Give up? Did all those guys in garages gave up or did they create Microsoft and Google?

When I was starting a software services business, I had no office (and I still don’t have one), no employees and not even a company. Even the provider’s fee for Guru.com was looking too high for me so I started with free account. This frugal start allowed me build a business slowly but freely with the time – without worrying about making more money than I needed to live. This freedom allowed me work on my own products and sites building income generators instead of being forced to work on customer projects all the time. This is exactly what was going to happen if I started big – I would have too much bills to pay and wouldn’t be able to trade current income for passive income in the future.

If you start your business small and follow the natural grow you will always have more freedom to choose its future directions.

Hire employers when you need them, instead of first hiring employees and then searching work for them with the hope to grow this way. Growth must come as a response to the need to execute more coming orders or realize new projects rather than to be a target by itself.

Rent office after you need it – not before that. There are conference rooms and virtual offices that can do the work before you reach the moment. How will know when you have reached it? When the bills to rent conference rooms exceed the fees you would pay for having an office, only then you really need to own one.

When do you need a dedicated server? When the costs to host your sites on a shared server are higher than the cost of owning a dedicated server.

When does your business need machines? When the monthly expenses to get your production outsourced or to rent machines start exceeding the expenses of owning the machines yourself.

Keep asking questions like this and you’ll figure out how to grow naturally. Sure, sometimes you may lose few bucks and some time due to the fact you didn’t started with the optimal infrastructure from the beginning, but that’s much better than turning to a slave of your business bills because you try to cover every possible need.

Here is a little schema that may help you figure out how to improve your finances and your life in general. I hope you’ll manage through all the arrows 8-). For at least 90% of the people the problems and solutions lie in the below chart. If you believe you are from the other 10%, I’ll be glad to hear what important branches might be missing.

Earning alternative income is getting quite popular at recession time. For some people the only income source in the next few months or years will be alternative anyway – no matter if they want that or not. So it’s especially useful to explore various opportunities for earning alternative income and be prepared now in case you get laid off in the hard times. Don’t worry if that happens – you may even realize that having different sources of income is far more secure and probably more fun than having a job.

Photo by
The BrassPotato at Flickr

The alternative income method I am going to present you now is one of the very few methods that can be used by just everyone. That’s true – even if freelancing, writing, making photos or drawing pictures is something you can’t do, there is at least one other thing that you can do well. Most people can do well more than one thing, but even one is enough, because there are always other people who want to do the same thing as well as you, but don’t have the knowledge, experience and skills for it. Here comes your chance to earn money by tutoring such people (and why not even turn it into a small business).

There is no limit to what you can teach others do, neither to how old your audience can be. If you are a carpenter, there are many people who want to learn woodworking. If you know how to tell good jokes, be sure, there are many other people who want to know the same. Even if you are a professor in a very boring subject, there are at least the students who want to learn more about it (because they have to prepare for their exam). Don’t say that what you can do is useless unless it’s eating hamburgers (some will argue that even eating burgers is an useful skill to have).

Private One To One Tutoring

The most conventional and easy way to start making money is to do private one-to-one tutoring. You can find your customers by posting an ad in your local newspaper, Craiglist, some local web portal, or just pinch a sheet of paper on the classifieds wall in your local supermarket.

Eventually, you’ll need to test your tutoring skills on some friend for free. Sometimes people who are very good in their job are not at all good in teaching others to do it. It’s OK, teaching is a skill that you’ll learn along the way. If you know your subject, you should be able to transfer your knowledge to others.

Private one-on-one tutoring is easy because you can work from home and there is no investment required. The income potential however is limited, because there are only so many hours in the day that you can tutor. Even if your customers (yours students) are very happy and you have enough request, you just can’t work more than 6 – 12 hours per day.

Group Tutoring

One way to scale your tutoring business is to start teaching several people at the same time. Sometimes this will not be appropriate – for example if you teach how to date women (no kidding, that’s one of the most profitable niches), your students may feel uncomfortable to show themselves in front of the others. But for most professional subjects people will be even happier to meet others who learn the same and discuss the subject together.

Teaching a group of people instead of a single person lets you scale your business – whether you will teach one of five at the same time, you spend almost the same time and effort.

The main issue with group tutoring is that you will need a room for it. Inviting 2-3 persons at home may work fine, but if you want to teach 10 – 20 people together, you’ll probably need to rent a conference room at a comfortable place.

Usually group tutoring needs you to be incorporated and licensed. So chances are you’ll need some investment to earn alternative income by this method.

Online Tutoring

One way to avoid the room problem is to start tutoring online. Now it’s not that hard to set up online audio and video conferences through Skype, NetMeeting and other similar softwares. All you need is a good internet connection, and of course your students need to have it too.

Of course, many people still prefer face-to-face tutoring, but there are enough who will appreciate the lower price and the saved time and money they’ll have because they don’t need to travel.

You have good chances to succeed in areas that are not yet explored by the professional webmasters and the typical customers. Web designers for example will not be surprised if you offer online tutoring of web design, because there are many individuals and companies who already offer that. But if you offer to teach gardening online, many of your potential customers will find your proposal innovative and exciting.

Turn Your Tutoring Into Product

The main problem with tutoring is that it’s a service and is hard to scale. Of course you can teach 10 or 20 people at the same time (online), but hardly more. The best way to scale your tutoring service (and almost any service by the way) is to turn it into product. How?

First, and most popular option, is to write a book, e-book, audio book or record instructional videos. You can self-publish the book and sell it as many times as you wish (that’s even easier if it’s an e-book or audio/video distributed online). The downside is that you’ll usually work on your stuff in isolation only guessing whether it will be bought or not.

A more flexible option is to package your stuff as a membership site – online teaching program where people pay for access (recurring) rather than for a finished product. The second advantage (in addition to recurring payments) is that you can develop your tutoring program on the fly along with receiving customer’s feedback.

In both cases your teaching can turn into automated income generator which is far better than getting paid per hour.

Here’s a quick overview of the best 2008 posts on this blog along with the best from the other blogs in December. I have not written much recently for the reasons explained here, but there are plenty of interesting articles on other blogs.

Best of Shark 2008

In January I was still interested in Forex trading and researched tons of signal providers and information on trading by signals. As a result there is a three part tutorial – part one, part two, and part three – if you are interested in forex yourself, it may be quite useful.

In February one article got a great feedback and attracted a lot of interest – The Basics of Domain Investing. It’s a very important piece if you are interested in alternative investing strategies.

The Sexy Art Of Losing Money, published in March is there to remind you that fear is your worst enemy. Be more courageous not only with your money, but also with your life.

April came to contradict Passive investing and growing assets. My position is clear: putting more efforts usually results in getting better results. Completely passive investing is almost a dream.

In May many of the readers of this blog were happy to learn how to earn income by freelancing. It’s not easy but is far more reliable than trading forex.

Speaking about forex, the June article called 10 Reasons Not To Trade Forex is one of the most commented on this blog. Seems like you are more interested in producing real wealth rather than playing the numbers game.

The all time most read and commented article on this blog was published in July – Don’t Make Money Blogging. Is it that another “make money” myth have been stripped?

On the other side, people seem very interested to know How To Profit From Ideas. This article was published in August.

After the summer breaks, in September many returned back to their 9 to 5 jobs which attracted a lot of interest to the article about the 9 to 5 alternatives. Did you already find yours?

The fear, chaos and panic everywhere resonated in the post Is Investing A Big Fat Lie? published in October.

In November I made a little provocative and little funny post – How YOUR Saving Advice Caused The Financial Crisis. It attracted link from MSN Money and few other forums and a good traffic spike. If you are a blogger, you can read that post like “How to attract links” case study.

I didn’t write much in December (lazy and busy month at the same time). However if you have time to read just one post from this blog, read How To Outgrow The Self-Help Learning Stage. It’s not at all the most popular one, but in my opinion it’s one of the most useful articles ever published here.

Now, enough self-retrospection, let’s see what my fellow bloggers have published in December:

Best That Others Wrote In December

Tricia at Blogging Away Debt has collected a nice list of unusual ways to make money.

Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity shares the five reasons why he recycles.

I keep linking to lists: Patrick at Cash Money Life advices on 4 ways to not get stuck in the sandwich generation.

Harisson at Finandom Dot Com muses whether you can use a 100% working way to make money from Adsense. The article is good, just don’t limit your income streams to Adsense. Diversify.

Jeremy at FMF shares a quick example how a hobby can turn into a big income.

Gather Little By Little shares a touching story concluding that Your life is more important than your stuff.

Jeremy at Generation X Finance shares financial tips to make 2009 your best year ever.

Sadly the Lazy Man’s post giving some survival tips if you are laid off is quite actual. Let’s hope it won’t be for long.

Pinyo at Moolanomy has written a good tutorial about investing in commodities. Just be careful as these times commodities are quite risky.

David at My Two Dollars offers some inexpensive ways to stay warm in the winter. It’s -10 C here now, good tips *grin*.

David at MoneyNing helps you empower yourself to think that nothing is impossible. Let the power be with you.

Jacques at The Digerati Life shows how to stand out from the crowd when writing a resume.

Trent at The Simple Dollar always have more interesting stuff that I can read. This time I have chosen to share Overcoming Obstacles with you.

And this time the most important piece comes from Seth Godin – 10,000 hours. Have time to read only one post? Let it be Seth’s.

You probably want to improve your financial situation. But how much? How strong is your wish indeed?

I am asking this because most people claim they really really want to fix their finances and other areas in life. Yet, they spend most of their productive time reading hundreds of blogs, listening to self help audio tapes, watching “how to make money online” videos and going to self-help seminars.

Photo by
mckaysavage at Flickr

The Trap of Learning Procrastination

Look at your RSS reader. If you see a large number of “how to make money”, “how to save money”, “how to lose weight”, “how to improve your relationship”, “how to start a business” or “how to stop procrastination” blogs there, you are caught into the trap of learning procrastination.

If your RSS reader is full with such blogs, you are most likely spending some time in self-help forums too, listening to self-help tapes and probably reading paper self-help books. Good boy, you are such a thorough student!

Reading self-help advice is unlikely to help you grow much. And I can tell you why:

• Most of that advice is rehashed. It doesn’t matter whether you are reading blogs, mass media, forums or listening to podcasts or audio interviews. Most of what people write or tell is written or told million times before. There are probably trillions of terabytes of information available online. Do you really believe all of it can contain new information and original ideas?
• Most of that advice is crap. There is useless or plain wrong advice in any area of knowledge, but “self-help” with its subcategories is maybe the leading area. Making progress with money and life is not like doing math or physics, neither programming or even public relations – it’s a “science” which works different for different people in different situations. So if Warren Buffet’s tactics make him billions, they fail for many of his followers.
• Learning is not doing. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of learning procrastination: “I read 5 great blog posts, a half of XYZ’s book on starting a business and listened to that great podcast from XYZ. It was such a productive day”. Reading, listening and learning is actual work so it makes you feel like you are doing a lot, but in reality you are doing nothing. Self-help knowledge is absolutely useless unless you apply it in practice. Before that you have not done any progress.

So many people spend day after day searching for the next cool e-book and paying for the next cool e-course and after that doing nothing with what they learned. They are so much afraid not to miss someone’s insight or some new trend that they spend all their time learning.

The Learn-When-Doing and Learn-By-Doing Approach

This way of living won’t get you anywhere. You should stop being a student. People will not pay you for what you know. They don’t care. They don’t care how much time you spend learning or how hard you tried. All that people want is results. All that you want from yourself is results. And results are achieved by doing, not by learning.

I am not suggesting you should do something without having an idea how to do it, but to learn along with doing. The first step to that is to de-clutter your information channels. There are only few blog posts worth reading. If all that one blog is giving you is five minutes of entertainment every day, remove it from your RSS reader. It’s perfectly fine to spend some time for fun and entertainment but it’s very dangerous when you disguise this action as “learning”. Unless you understand that you are just entertaining yourself, remove all the blogs, forums, books and audio tapes that don’t have a significant impact on your life. You are likely to reduce the info-noise 10 times or more.

Once cleaned your channels, you are ready to start action. You will have a lot more time for that and much less excuses like “I have to read this book first and then will try to apply what I have learned”.

When you know what you want to do with your life and money, you can start with learn-when-doing and learn-by-doing approaches. This is the time when the blogs, forums and especially search engines come into action. Now go to your favorite blog, forum or search engine, type “How to [whatever you want to do]” in the search box or start a forum thread asking the question and go from there. Take the first few results, have a quick glance on them and see which ones seem to have the answer. Pick the one that appeals to you most and start reading. If it’s an article, read the entire article. If it’s a book, read just the beginning. Then immediately start doing what you want to do and have just learned and don’t read anything else unless you get stuck. When you get stuck, repeat the previous step with your new question. When you make a mistake, learn from it. It’s not that scary – the best way to learn is from your own mistakes.

Software developers know to use this approach very well. As a software developer I like to learn new technologies, but I avoid spending too much time at the learning stage. I sometimes read the entire books or tutorials on the technology, but I know very well this is more entertaining than making real progress. The most efficient way to write software, once you know the basics, is to start writing and ask questions (for example Google) when you don’t know how to do something. Some developers will argue that before working with some program language or framework you need to know everything about it. They might be right, except that in most cases their way of thinking made them lose 5 years in the university instead of writing software like Larry and Sergey or Bill Gates for example. The learn-by-doing approach works exceptionally well when you know how to do something similar to what you want to do. For example a Perl programmer can start writing a web application in Python almost immediately – by searching the web for Python alternatives of Perl features he knows to use. In the process of finding the answers he can learn a lot about the differences that both languages have and about the features that Python has and Perl has not. He will learn a lot and at the same time will have written some software as opposed to the student who will only learn.

You can use the same approach in real life. You can apply the knowledge you have in cooking chicken soup to cooking veg soup – just search what chicken should be replaced with. You can try to date women with the knowledge you gained in school when you had to talk in front of the entire class. If you were able to talk in front of 20 teenagers, why would you be shy to talk to a single woman? You can also apply the knowledge you have in your office work to starting your own business. Search the web, your favorite blogs, or ask in forums and find out how other people start business in your field. Get some results and start action.

A Quick Example

Let’s say you want to make more money, but are absolutely clueless what to do. Go to Google and type “How to make more money”. When I run this search now I am getting results with some purely motivational articles, advice on how to get a salary raise, links to how to invest and save money, advice on how to find a hotter job, how to make money with a website, how to make money blogging, how to make money freelancing online and even how to earn as English teacher in Taiwan. Have a quick glance at the results and pick one that looks good to you. Start reading the article. Does it sound like something you want to do? If not, stop reading and move to the next in the list.

If yes, finish the article, write a plan and try to apply what’s learned. Don’t read more at this point, you will learn when doing. Of course you may simply fail. It may happen that you simply don’t like to blog or are very bad writer (that’s usually too quick assumption however) so “make money blogging” wasn’t a good idea at all. That’s OK, at least you learned you don’t like this and aren’t going to lose more time reading advice on how to make money blogging. Then move on the next method until you find something that appeals to you and you seem to be making some early progress. Then, just like the software developers do, start to expand your knowledge while doing. That’s the way to get some real progress. Everything else is an excuse for procrastination.

Did you like this article? Do you think that it can really help you outgrow the state of endless reading and start doing some progress with your finances and life? If yes, please spread the word so others can also benefit from it. Link to the article, comment it on your blog, bookmark it at delicious.com or share it with the “ShareThis” link at the bottom.

If you did not gain anything from this article, you have lost some time. Maybe I will write something worth your attention soon – if that was true for some of the past articles here, it’s likely that it’s going to happen again. If you have never found anything more than 5 minutes of entertainment here, please unsubscribe from my blog. I want to change lives, not to be used as an excuse for procrastination.

Each year the mass media is irradiating you with ideas what else to buy on the holidays and how to spend more money (how could you not love the TV). Some websites and blogs give some good advice how to save money instead of spending it, which is generally better. I want to share some ideas how to earn more on the holidays which hopefully is going to be even more useful. Let’s see what you can do:

Photo by
pfala at Flickr

Take Some Extra Work Before The Holidays

Of course you can take extra work at any time, but the time right before holidays can be very rewarding. The simple reason is that most people are not willing to work too much at that time. They are already planning the celebrations and most would happily take a break earlier if there was someone to do their work. If you work in a company you could probably get good extra payment for working more hours right before the holidays. If you work for yourself or directly with clients, you may get more well paid purchases if you are willing to work hard when everyone else is pre-relaxing.

Work Exactly On The Holidays

If you badly need money, here is a harsher action to take – work exactly on Christmas night or New Year. No one wants to do that, even those whose jobs require it. If your business or job is especially important on the holiday, now it’s your time to make some good bucks.

I know it sucks to work when everyone is having fun, but is the timing really that important for you? Most probably not especially if you are a single or a couple with no kids.

Make A Holiday Sale

It’s no secret that the grocery stores make holiday promotions with the aim to sell more stuff. At that time of the year people are less strict to their money and are willing to spend it for items that are presented to them as hot deals. But why would only the stores offer this? Your products and services may also be packaged as hot holiday deal (really – even if you are selling your writing, programming, design or architecture skills). Offer discounts, different packaging, longer free support or anything that can make your stuff look festive.

This method works best if you own a business or sell your service directly on the markets – like a freelance professional for example. It would be unusual to offer a sale to your bosses in a regular company.

Help People Save Money

On the other side of the cake everyone tries to sell more around the holidays. Is that boring you? You are not alone – a lot of people hate the holiday shopping rush and would happily buy something that helps them save money from during it. It can be information, product or service – it doesn’t matter. Just present your stuff as saving money and make sure it actually helps people save – and voila, you will be making good money around the holidays.

Your solution could be a simple blog article on saving money on holidays shopping (that’s not going to make you rich, but may bring you some visitors and advertising income), a budget holiday trip package, a software helping people to organize their spends or why not economical holiday cake. You can do it regardless what business you are in.

Buy Assets

This isn’t an immediate way to make holiday money, but is one of the best long term. Maybe you are not desperate for cash right now or are not very keen on spending your money on holiday shopping, but many other people are. And as you know, the best time for buyers is when sellers are desperate (crisis 2008 and holidays 2008 – what a wonderful combination that could be?). Around the holidays you can buy cheap offline or web based business, property or anything else that makes money slowly over time. If you have the cash now, you are in excellent position to make wealth in the future.

There is nothing new in the idea to make more money on holidays- all those people who own bars and shops are doing it for year. Who knows why most other people assume they only have to spend. There is nothing wrong if you wish to have a break and enjoy, but hope in January you won’t complain that you haven’t had the chance to earn.