Yeah…it’s the “D” word, you know, Discipline. It’s a beautiful day in Denver, Colorado and on my way to Starbucks I drove by Washington Park. I love Wash Park because it’s a piece of heaven in an asphalt jungle. Huge trees, great flowers, manicured grass and some of the best looking and fit men and women to be found in Denver! As I’m driving by I can’t help but notice that 98% of the men and women out running are mean and lean-where are all the Chubbies? I know Denver has them, cause I’ve seen them come into my office, Starbucks, in the morning and order the largest drinks with extra Carmel and whip cream! What I like about all the joggers in Wash Park is the fact that their work out is free and you can see and feel the comradery of the folks-they are all sharing the pain!

As I drive by Wash Park I feel so damn good-almost like I’m getting a great work out by osmosis; then I pinch myself and go to my gym for swimming. Same thing, most of the folks I see there are pretty fit-maybe the fat folks work out at different times?

It reminded me of an earlier blog post I wrote about Weight loss and Saving Money and Motivational Tips to Exercise-Save.  I think there may be a correlation between the two and it starts with that discipline thing! Specifically, think of all the people that have been in your life, starting in college, who were always dead broke! Fast forward-they now work with you and are in the lunch room complaining about being broke.

Here is my take away for those who truly want to break this cycle:

• Read Personal Finance Blogs for tips and or motivation
• Join an investment club at work or outside of work
• Start with any investment plan that may be offered at your work
• Open an online investment account
• Make a budget
• Put together a game plan to pay off your credit card debt-I know you have some
• Make a list before you go grocery shopping and stick to it
• Never go grocery shopping when you’re starving- that’s why your butt is BIG and you’re broke!
• Use coupons-there is absolutely no shame-it makes you look brilliant
• Meet new people who share your new found passion for saving and being fit
• Quit buying junk-email me if you need a clarification of junk
• Quit thinking about yourself all the time-go volunteer at Children’s Hospital or one of my favorite charities, Ronald McDonald House Charities.
• Start going to your Washington Park!

For all of my Personal Finance Blog buddies please comment and tell me what I’ve forgotten-except you Crystal. When Crystal tries to leave a comment, it gets “eaten”. Anyone else having this issue? What is causing this??

Last thing to all of you obese folks…you don’t look good! You are not going to live long and prosper. Ditto for all of those of you who choose to be broke!

Amazon, Yelp and similar sites rely on customer reviews to help users with their purchases. A nagging concern of shoppers, however, is how reliable these critiques are. I’m sure, you too, have wondered this-Right?

Bundle,  is a New York City based start-up and has turned to a source it deems more objective: credit card data. Bundle receives data on credit card transactions from Citi, one of its investors. The data is stripped of personal details, but every cardholder is tagged with a unique identifier so spending can be tracked.  Read more »

I always enjoy the writing of Crystal over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff! She’s a much more engaging writer than me-I’m not too jealous! Her post today was Yes, I am a Hunger Games Fan. As a matter of fact, she is such a fan that she wrote about it in December 2010-Crystal just knew this was going to be a BLOCKBUSTER!!

She goes on in her post, on a serious note giving her readers some very good take aways from the movie. Me, on the other hand just have one question-Did you buy the stock of the company that made this great movie-Lions Gate, symbol LGF? Read more »

Earlier in the week I wrote a post about Employers Demanding Facebook Passwords as a condition of employment. Today Facebook’s chief privacy officer cautions that if an employer discovers  that a  job applicant is a member of a protected group, the employer may open itself up to claims of discrimination if it doesn’t hire that person.

If you are a Facebook user, you should never have to share your password, Erin Egan wrote

My take, this is the perfect storm for lawyers to litigate the bejesus out of employers who are moronic enough to continue the practice of demanding Facebook passwords as a condition of employment.

Where do you stand?

Hartford Financial Services Group Inc.unveiled a radical overhaul of its business in an effort to revive its share price, according to the Wall Street Journal. The hedge fund manager, John Paulson, has been calling for drastic changes at the 200 year old insurer. The biggest surprise-Hartford said it would stop selling variable annuities, the retirement savings product the company had helped revolutionize.

The company put its life insurance arm up for sale to focus on its property and casualty insurance business. I’m mildly surprised because I was under the impression that their insurance sales were profitable.

I do know this, many a financial consultant made lots of money selling those front loaded and expense ridden annuities. Variable annuities were a pretty expensive vehicle for retirement purposes and with the advent of more “no load” variable annuities; Hartford was probably feeling the competition.  I’ve seen spectacular long term returns from variable annuities but they tended to be the exception rather than the rule.

RIP Hartford variable annuities! Have you ever owned a variable annuity-what have been your results?

I ran across an interesting article from Syracuse University-School of Information Studies. It is called Librarians: Get a Job in Data Science, Make Lots of Money.   Here are some of the pearls from the article:

There’s been lots of talk of whether a master’s degree in library and information science is worth the cost. Only time will tell if this MLIS (Masters in Library and Information Science) student’s investment pays off. In the meantime, I’m continuing my survey of job opportunities in this field. This week, I’ve been thinking about data science.

Consider what Mike Loukides of O’Reilly Media Inc. wrote in 2010:

The question facing every company today, every startup, every non-profit, every project site that wants to attract a community, is how to use data effectively — not just their own data, but all the data that’s available and relevant. Using data effectively requires something different from traditional statistics, where actuaries in business suits perform arcane but fairly well-defined kinds of analysis. What differentiates data science from statistics is that data science is a holistic approach. We’re increasingly finding data in the wild, and data scientists are involved with gathering data, massaging it into a tractable form, making it tell its story, and presenting that story to others.

You can imagine the surprise Justin Bassett, a New York Statistician felt when in the course of his job interview; he was asked for his Facebook username and password. This is happening with more frequency according to an article in the Associated Press. Here is a summary of the key points:

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn’t want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no.

“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it “an egregious privacy violation.”

Since the rise of social networking, it has become common for managers to review publically available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates. But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks.

Companies that don’t ask for passwords have taken other steps — such as asking applicants to friend human resource managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview. Once employed, some workers have been required to sign non-disparagement agreements that ban them from talking negatively about an employer on social media.

E. Chandlee Bryan, a career coach and co-author of the book “The Twitter Job Search Guide,” said job seekers should always be aware of what’s on their social media sites and assume someone is going to look at it.

Wow, I’m shocked to hear such invasive practices are going on but now I know why  more people are blogging full time-they won’t give up their Facebook passwords! Where do you come down on this issue-would you give it up? My answer-Hell No!!

Digg It

Credit to: Job Seekers Getting asked for Facebook Passwords

You can double the traffic to your blog-but give yourself 30 days. This post is meant mostly for Personal Finance bloggers who have not yet made the A list of traffic and revenue blogs. Let’s assume you blog for one of the following reasons:

• Your Ego
• Your Desire to Help Individuals
• You want/need income

Whatever your reason, these tips will help you!

• Start with a key word rich title. In this example my title is How to Double the Traffic to Your Blog, people do search for terms like this. For those of you who are more SEO advanced, the title bar in WordPress is an H2 headline. Simply put, Google pays attention to the headline.  I’ve noticed that many Personal Finance bloggers have become lax about their titles.
• Have great copy in your posts. You don’t want to key word stuff but it’s a great idea to support your title in the body of the post with relevant copy-make that unique and authoritative copy!
• If you have other blog posts that are relevant, link to them. Internal links are very good. Please note, it’s stronger to use keywords when you link to your post. For example: Great titles will help double the traffic to your blog.  vs You may also be interested in this post:
• How to increase your blog traffic 50%
• WordPress has a great plug in called All in One SEO. This is a great SEO tool because it allows you to title each post, write a keyword rich description and use keywords for each post. Your reader doesn’t notice it but Google does! Please note, don’t keyword stuff here either. For example, if you haven’t used the phrase top personal fiance blog in your post; it’s a waste of time to put it in your keywords list.

For me personally, increased traffic will help my PR, my Moz Rank and help increase revenues from advertisers. Another great reason to increase traffic to your site is if you ever decide to sell your personal finance blog, you may get a substantially higher price. Whatever your reasons for wanting to double the traffic to your site-try this for 30 days and see if you don’t notice a huge influx of traffic!!

This is by no means the complete and authoritative list but it’s a great starting point. I am happy to include all of my readers great suggestions as well. Please let me know if these simple tips do help increase Google search traffic to your site-here’s to 100,000 visitors a month

Here’s how my Sunday started out:

ATT Free Msg: Your data usage has reached 3GB this month. Using more than 3GB in future billing cycles will result in reduced speeds. You can use Wi-Fi to help avoid reduced speeds. Visit www.att.com/datainfo or call 866-344-7584 for more info.

What’s ironic about this message is just a few weeks ago I wrote a post called Using Small Claims Court. Come to find out, I have the same plan as the guy I wrote about and the judge said:

Pro-term Judge Russell Nadel found in favor of Spaccarelli in Ventura Superior Court in Simi Valley on Friday, saying it wasn’t fair for the company to purposely slow down his iPhone, when it had sold him an “unlimited data” plan

Who says the little guy can’t get justice? Have you heard of similar experiences?

6 Reasons Why You Should Never Retire is a recent article for US News and World Report.

Here is their short list:

1. There is no physical reason to retire.

2. Continued work can support healthy aging, including better physical and mental health.

3. Well-being and happiness are boosted when people are engaged in challenging and meaningful activities. Work is a major place to find such activities in our society.

4. Older people have rich experience and mentoring skills to help enrich the workplace experiences of younger colleagues.

5. Declining numbers of younger workers, courtesy of lower fertility rates, will raise the need to retain older employees in the workforce.

6. We need and like the money, and shorter retirements sharply cut the risk we will outlive our assets.

My take is most people don’t really have a working definition of “retirement”. For some, they have spent 30 years of complaining about a job they hated-sometimes they have not been very proactive in seeking a remedy. Retirement today is such a nebulous term-retire to what? My personal experience has been as humans, we need, passion, goals and a sense of accomplishment. Without this-we die!

What are your thoughts-will you just “retire” someday!