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Entrepreneurs 3/30/2014 @ 8:43PM 367 views

How Your Self Image Determines Your Wealth

I’ve been reading an interesting book lately.

It’s called “Identity Economics. How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, And Well Being.”
It raises some pertinent points for anyone who wants to achieve great wealth in their life. The authors show that how you see yourself plays a huge part in how much you earn, and indeed how much wealth you believe you deserve.

Identity affects how you dress., what wages you ask for or what prices you charge your clients. It even affects how much money you save or spend. With self identity being so critical to financial success, it is truly amazing that people don’t spend time daily developing their self image so that it supports them, rather than pulls them down.

Do you do anything at all to maintain a healthy self identity?

Most people don’t, for two reasons:

1. They have no idea that their identity is affecting how much they earn.
2. Even if they do know, they don’t know what they can do to change their identity.

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10 Cars mechanics love

By Steven Lang March 28, 2014 3:30 PM Motoramic

 

Quality. Everybody wants it. But how do you get it in a car without having to pay more money?

This is a question I have dealt with for nearly 15 years of my life as a car dealer, auto auctioneer, and part-owner of an auto auction. My life revolves around trying to "hit em' where they ain't" when it comes to used cars.

Over the years I've seen certain distinct patterns as to which older used cars last, and which ones become rolling money pits. To figure this all out in a statistical way, I co-developed a long-term reliability study that gathers data from the inspectors who rate used vehicles trade-ins at dealerships and auto auctions around the country, and ranks models for their long-term mechanical integrity.

The use of independent professionals, instead of car owners, was done for two important reasons.

First, owners can often look at their vehicles 

through rose-colored glasses. A car that shifts funny or has upper engine noise may seem to be perfectly fine to a person who has driven it every day for years on end. Independent professionals and dealers who inspect thousands of vehicles are often easily able to see the very things that these types of owners overlook.

Second, my partners and I wanted to eliminate all forms of brand bias from the study. Owners tend to be more forgiving of vehicles that come from an automaker that has satisfied them in the past. Even if their car is now cheap and trouble prone, their prior car they owned from the same manufacturer may have been a high-quality masterpiece. 

The goal of this study was to provide honest and detailed information to the millions of people who buy older used cars. At the moment we now have over 330,000 data samples spread throughout the United States.

The findings?

The most important ingredient in the recipe is still the prior owners. However, it turns out that some cars that are unpopular, or discontinued, can last well beyond their peers at a price thousands less than popular alternatives:

Saturn L200: Do you know what this is? Neither do the majority of Americans. The L-Series was a one-generation wonder that never caught on. In our study the four cylinder automatic models are proving to be more reliable than their Honda Accord peers, and still offer a steep discount in the retail car market.


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Target, security auditor Trustwave are sued over data breach

By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - Target Corp and Trustwave Holdings Inc, which provides credit card security services, have been sued by two banks for "monumental" losses they say card issuers will face because of the retailer's holiday season data breach.

In a complaint filed on Monday in Chicago federal court, Trustmark National Bank and Green Bank NA accused the defendants of failing to properly secure customer data, enabling the theft of about 40 million payment card records plus 70 million other records, including addresses and phone numbers.

The banks said they lost money from alerting customers to the breach, reimbursing fraudulent charges and reissuing cards. These losses could increase, they said, if criminals ultimately use several million stolen cards as some analysts project.

While the complaint seeks unspecified damages of at least $5 million, New York-based Trustmark and Houston-based Green Bank said losses could top $1 billion for card issuers they hope to represent in a class action, and $18 billion for banks and retailers combined.

Target already faces dozen of lawsuits over the breach. Monday's case may be the first to focus on Trustwave, a privately held Chicago-based company to which the banks said Target had outsourced some data security services.

Molly Snyder, a Target spokeswoman, said the retailer did not discuss pending litigation. Trustwave spokeswoman Abby Ross said that company had a policy of not confirming its customers' identities or discussing pending legal matters.

The data breach occurred from November 27, the big shopping day known as Black Friday, to roughly December 15.

In a Tuesday report issued ahead of a U.S. Senate committee hearing on protecting consumer data from cyber attacks, Senate staffers said Target "missed a number of opportunities" to stop the breach.

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6 Moves For Strong, Toned Abs

You've probably heard it before, but you really don't have to do another crunch. (No, really -- don't. They're bad for your posture, among a host of other ills.) Instead, use these exercises to firm, flatten, and contour your waistline by training your abs, obliques, and back muscles to resist bending motions and stabilize your core, which is what they're designed to do.

Perform 12 reps of each move, moving from one to the next with as little rest as you can handle (hey, I said they weren't crunches -- not that they were easy). Take a minute break between circuits, and do three sets total.

1. Half-Kneeling Diagonal Chops

Next

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5 Dick Moves Your Bank Pulls (You Won't Believe Are Legal)

By Spencer Lowe March 24, 2014

Some institutions get more hate than they deserve. Most lawyers and police officers are just doing their jobs, and most businesses really are simply trying to make a profit. But banks ... well, banks make it really hard to defend them. They are the middleman in every transaction (you simply can't function in modern society keeping your cash in a coffee can buried in your yard), and goddamn do they exploit their position in the shadiest ways imaginable. Let's take a moment to examine some of the perfectly legal ways these guys screw us on a daily basis:
(And if you think banks are sleazy, wait till you see the dating website in Cracked's new Rom.Com series.)

#5. They Can Arbitrarily Manipulate Your Payments to Create Overdraft Fees

 

Fuse/Fuse/Getty Images

We understand that banks aren't kindly rich uncles who can dole out money when they feel sorry for us. They have to charge some kind of fine when we try to take out more money than is actually in our accounts, otherwise it'd be a free money festival forever (or until the whole system came crashing down hours later). But where banks take it to the next level is when they carefully arrange things so that, with one mistake, they can keep stomping you with what amounts to a 1,000 percent interest rate. They can charge anywhere from $20 to $35 for every transaction you make while over the limit -- even if that transaction is itself for only a few dollars. But hey, it's all about teaching the customer not to make that mistake in the future, right?

hjalmeida/iStock/Getty Images
So they're like that other uncle then. The one with the belt.

Nope! Once the banks saw how much cash they could make from the fees, the next step was to carefully trick their customers into overdrawing their accounts more often. They do this by quietly manipulating the order in which your purchases are charged to your account to nail you with the maximum number of overdraft charges. We're talking "half of your goddamn money straight to the bank" numbers here.
Here's how it works. Let's say you have $100 in your checking account and you purchase the following items over the course of the day:
A pack of gum: $1
Two dildos (one for each ear): $15
Food: $20
Some gas: $10
The "Best Actor" Academy Award Steven Seagal won for Under Siege, bought from a street vendor named Handless Bob: $25
That still leaves you with $29. Hooray, you can manage your money!

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_21009_5-dick-moves-your-bank-pulls-you-wont-believe-are-legal.html#ixzz2wzeuLnjk

The most debt-free states in America

By Christine DiGangi 6 hours ago

 

Credit card spending typically spikes in the fourth quarter, and 2013 was no different, but it seems Americans were a little more conservative with their credit card spending than they were at the end of 2012. The average balance per cardholder declined in nearly every state, according to fourth-quarter data from the past two years.

Nationwide, credit cardholders had an average balance of $3,799 at the end of 2013, which is down from the $3,852 average in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data from Experian-Oliver Wyman Market Intelligence Reports and Experian’s IntelliView tool.

Keeping a low credit card balance is an important factor in maintaining or improving your credit score .

 Keep in mind this data looks only at average balances, not how those balances compare to the overall available credit these consumers have, so high average balances don’t necessarily mean the cardholders have high credit utilization rates .

 It’s a good idea to keep that balance as small a portion of your available credit as possible, ideally less than 30%, but lower is even better.

Still, high credit card balances can be both expensive and stressful, particularly if you can’t pay the balance immediately. With a 16% interest rate, a $4,000 balance will cost a consumer roughly $640 a year in interest. If the consumer pays only the minimum payment each month, it can take 20 years to pay off, and cost nearly $4,800 in interest.

There wasn’t much change in credit card debt levels year over year, but Michigan moved into the top 10 (and West Virginia moved out, from No. 9 to No. 13). Here are the states with the lowest average credit card balances, the most debt-free states:

 

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Woman charged $787.33 for two-mile cab ride

The 4 Types of Men

There are 4 types of men in life you have a choice in each of these men from the worst to the least.

I got this from a religious lecture years ago but its universal in many regards. 

The 1^st Man The Dummy with no money- He doesn’t know anything he just knows what money can buy and that if you have more money you can buy mostly whatever you want. He looks up to the man with riches as the only example of what should be followed an avoids the man with knowledge but no money.

He also thinks the man with knowledge an no money is an idiot because these types only look at money for value an reputation everything to them is dollar signs, Which is rather shallow but a survival mechanism as well.

The 2^nd Man Is The Rich Fool- This guy has money an for the moment knows how to add a dollar to make 2 dollars, he is lacking of wisdom but brags about how he can make a buck. He doesn’t know Shakespeare, he won’t quote you Niche nor Aristotle. But he can tell you what he made last month and what car he is about to pick up at the dealership. He has some common sense but lacking in understanding complex procedures and philosophical differences. He also looks at the man with knowledge and no money as a fool, because at one time he was the dummy with no money. 

The only thing that has changed for him is that he has more money. He will turn his head at the man with no knowledge as he pulls off with his fancy car to try to spark some envy at the the man with knowledge an no money. He respects the man with Knowledge an money but he doesn’t respect his knowledge only his money, he will often say that guy is one lucky guy. He Diminishes the hard work and logical moves and time and resources the rich guy with knowledge has put implemented.

Prisoners at the palace: Saudi princesses plead for help as they claim they are being held by the king against their will

By Damien Gayle
PUBLISHED: 21:09 EST, 8 March 2014 | UPDATED: 08:49 EST, 9 March 2014

Whenever you see this image, tap to view all the images in a gallery

Ok

+4

King Abdullah: Two daughters of the Saudi leader say that they and their sisters are being held against their will in the royal compound in Jeddah

Two daughters of the King of Saudi Arabia claim they and their sisters have been held prisoner in the royal palace for 13 years.
Princesses Sahar, 42, and Jawaher, 38, said that they are being kept against their will in a guarded villa in the royal compound in Jeddah.
Their claims shed light into the usually secret world of royal family of a country where women are effectively treated as second-class citizens.
Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that prohibits women from driving. It scored 130th out of 134 countries analysed by the World Economic forum in a 2009 report on gender parity.
But the restrictions allegedly placed on Sahar and Jawaher go well beyond what is allowed under Saudi law.
In emails and phonecalls to a Sunday newspaper, Sahar and Jawaher claimed that their sisters Hala, 39, and Maha, 41, are also being held, incommunicado, in separate villas in the Jeddah compound.
Their mother Alanoud Alfayez, who is divorced from Saudi King Abdullah, has reportedly written to the UN's human rights agency to intervene on their behalf.
She told the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) that her daughters are 'imprisoned, held against their will, cut off from the world', according to a report in The Sunday Times.
Sahar and Jawaher told the newspaper in an email that they are kept alone in a house most of which they have closed off as they have been left to fend for themselves with nobody to help them with the housework.

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Royal visit: King Abdullah, who has 38 children by many wives, is pictured with the Queen in London in 2007

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2576600/Prisoners-palace-Saudi-princesses-plead-help-claim-held-king-against-will.html#ixzz2vVqP6UAD
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Kevin Bacon Explains the '80s to Millennials

Chicago Wealth Inequality, In Two Animated GIFs

What if you could actually see wealth inequality in Chicago -- to visually see where those of us doing better than others lived relative to the rest of us?
Nickolay Lamm was wondering exactly that question as it pertained to a number of major U.S. cities and, via his Wealth Inequality Project, accomplished a dramatic means of visualizing wealth inequality by overlaying net worth data represented in bar graphs over shots of the city.
Below are his Chicago images, which show -- surprise! -- the city's Near North Side is where the rainbow ends and the city's South and West Sides are mere anthills when compared to the lakeshore communities from the South Loop or so north and the suburbs.


Check out how New York and Los Angeles compared when it came to Lamm's visual displays of wealth inequality.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/09/chicago-wealth-inequality_n_4072339.html

Big Gym Fight Has Police Hoping LA Fitness Beefs Up Security

Why the widening wealth gap is no big surprise to Chicago

By MeganCottrell, July 27, 2011 at 3:21 pm

Big and terrible news yesterday: the wealth gap between white people and minorities is widening. It was already wide - enormous, in fact. But it's gotten worse.
Take a look at the graph at the top. Every group has taken a hit since 2005 because of the recession. But the net worth of Hispanic and black households has been more than cut in half - from $18,359 to $6,325 for Hispanics and from $12,124 to $5,677 for black families. Meanwhile, the incomes of white people have dropped about 16%.

The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times larger than Hispanic households.
Not that we don't appreciate landmark research like this from the Pew Research Center, but we've been talking about this for awhile when it comes to our city. A few months ago, our publisher and data-whiz, Alden Loury, whipped up some pretty shocking statistics about the gap between minorities and white people in Chicago. Our five part series, Second City or Dead Last?, revealed some pretty glaring inequalities between racial groups here:
- The average black person in Chicago makes 45 cents for every dollar a white person makes.
- Chicago has the third highest poverty rate of the 10 largest cities in America, and the highest black poverty rate, with one of three black citizens living in poverty. We also have the highest racial disparity when we compare poverty between white and black people.
- In Chicago, more white people have graduate degrees than African Americans have associates degrees. Chicago is the only one of the 10 largest cities where this is true. The percentage of Latinos who have a high school diploma is just slightly higher than the percentage of white people with a bachelors degree.
- Out of the largest U.S. cities, Chicago is number one when it comes to the unemployment rate for African Americans. That's more than two and a half times the average for white people living in the same 10 cities. Chicago came in third highest for Latino poverty, with Phoenix beating us by only one-tenth of one percent.

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Dave Ramsey The Seven Baby Steps

The Seven Baby Steps

Begin your journey to financial peace

New to Dave? Learn about Dave and his company.
Get out of debt the same way you learned to walk—one step at a time. Dave has taught these principles to millions via radio, books, Financial Peace University, live events and online.
Four quick ways to get started on Dave's Plan:
The Total Money Makeover Book - Dave's NY Times bestseller
Dave's Starter Pack - Two best-selling books, two DVD lessons and a starter envelope system
Online Tools - Budgeting, commercial-free mp3s, and more! Free 7-day trial to MyTotalMoneyMakeover.com.
The Getting Started Guide - A 7-part email series (one each day) on how to get a running start into Dave's plan.
Here's the process:

Baby Step 1

$1,000 to start an Emergency Fund

An emergency fund is for those unexpected events in life that you can’t plan for: the loss of a job, an unexpected pregnancy, a faulty car transmission, and the list goes on and on. It’s not a matter of if these events will happen; it’s simply a matter of when they will happen. Learn more

Baby Step 2

Pay off all debt using the Debt Snowball

List your debts, excluding the house, in order. The smallest balance should be your number one priority. Don’t worry about interest rates unless two debts have similar payoffs. If that’s the case, then list the higher interest rate debt first. Learn more

Baby Step 3

 

Mom, dad, daughter accused in $7M shoplift spree

How to Make a No. 1 App With $99 and Three Hours of Work

By Wired: Game|Life March 5, 2014 1:57 PM Plugged In

(Source: WIRED)

By Ryan Rigney, Wired: Game|Life
 

You don’t need to be a programmer to break into the App Store’s top charts. All you need is 100 bucks and a free afternoon.

You’ll need a halfway decent idea, of course, but once you’ve got that nailed down, you can easily buy the source code, get an online tutorial on how to use it and within hours have a game ready to play. That explains why 95 of the 300 or so new apps released on Apple’s iTunes store one day last week were riffs on Flappy Bird, the mega-hit its creator pulledat the height of its popularity.

There’s Flappy Wings, Splashy Fish, even Crappy Bird.

For some reason, a surprising number of these apps, like Flying Cyrus, Cyrus Flyer and Jumping Miley, feature the disembodied head of pop star Miley Cyrus. One of the most downloaded of this unlikely sub-genre is Flappy Miley Wrecking Ball Pro, created by Gregory Storm. He uploaded the game on February 12, just two days after Flappy Bird flew the coop. Never mind that he’d only heard of Flappy Bird the week before. “I had no idea what a Flappy Bird was,” Storm said. “Never played it. Hadn’t seen it.”

So how was he able to create Flappy Miley so quickly? Easy: He bought everything he needed.
The first step was purchasing the source code to Flappy Crocodile.
On sites like Chupamobile, billed as “a stock photo agency, but for app development,” programmers can sell their app’s source code to others. This is hardly a new idea in the videogame business, but just as the democratization of development has allowed people to create games with small budgets and sell them at low prices, so too has it created a market where middleware mavens can sell source code to would-be developers for next to nothing.

You need an app for your restaurant? Chupamobile has templates for $50 each. Want to create a match-three game like Bejeweled? A clone of Tiny Wings? The rights to the source code are just a few clicks and a few bucks away. Just $99 gets you an open-ended, royalty-free license to use the Flappy Crocodile code to create a single app and sell it in perpetuity. Even if you make a million bucks, you don’t owe another cent to the guy who did the heavy lifting.

In the case of Flappy Crocodile, that guy is Vojtech Svarc, a 26-year-old app developer from the Czech Republic. He’s spent the past six years jumping from one online business to another: website scripting, e-books, Google AdSense and practically everything else. Svarc got into the app business about a year ago, but quickly realized that investing large amounts of cash into a single app and hoping it would be discovered among the 1 million or so already on the App Store might not be the best use of his time. Then he thought, What if building an app could be more like building a website?

“When building a website, there is no need to start from scratch as there [are] plenty of templates out there to choose from,” Svarc said. “Using templates cuts the cost and time down, and it allows you to get your products out there quickly.”

Svarc watched the App Store and noticed that any time an app made waves, similar apps would be buoyed to the top. Speed, he thought, was key to taking advantage of that. App templates would allow developers to build trendy apps in no time. “When I saw the media attention Flappy Bird was getting,” Svarc said, “I knew this [was] a ride I need to be on.”

So far, he says, about 100 developers have paid him $100 each to use Flappy Crocodile. Svarc says Tiny Flying Drizzy, which was the No. 1 free game on the App Store earlier this week, is based on his engine.

Anyone with a C-note and ten seconds can license the source code to a videogame. But what do you do then? Don’t you need programming skills to actually modify the code?

Nope. You don’t need any special skills at all. To prove it, I bought a license to use Flappy Crocodile.

Read More 

52 Week Saving Money Challange

Try this out if you want to challenge yourself to save you can change it to suit your challenge I started with $5, you can start with a $1, or $2 or $10 or more whatever meets your challenge. If all goes well this year next years $10.

52 Week Money Challenge

Date Week  Deposit Amount Balance Wednesday, January 01, 2014 1 $5.00 $5.00 Wednesday, January 08, 2014 2 $10.00 $15.00 Wednesday, January 15, 2014 3 $15.00 $30.00 Wednesday, January 22, 2014 4 $20.00 $50.00 Wednesday, January 29, 2014 5 $25.00 $75.00 Wednesday, February 05, 2014 6 $30.00 $105.00 Wednesday, February 12, 2014 7 $35.00 $140.00 Wednesday, February 19, 2014 8 $40.00 $180.00 Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9 $45.00 $225.00 Wednesday, March 05, 2014 10 $50.00 $275.00 Wednesday, March 12, 2014 11 $55.00 $330.00 Wednesday, March 19, 2014 12 $60.00 $390.00 Wednesday, March 26, 2014 13 $65.00 $455.00 Wednesday, April 02, 2014 14 $70.00 $525.00 Wednesday, April 09, 2014 15 $75.00 $600.00 Wednesday, April 16, 2014 16 $80.00 $680.00 Wednesday, April 23, 2014 17 $85.00 $765.00 Wednesday, April 30, 2014 18 $90.00 $855.00 Wednesday, May 07, 2014 19 $95.00 $950.00 Wednesday, May 14, 2014 20 $100.00 $1,050.00 Wednesday, May 21, 2014 21 $105.00 $1,155.00 Wednesday, May 28, 2014 22 $110.00 $1,265.00 Wednesday, June 04, 2014 23 $115.00 $1,380.00 Wednesday, June 11, 2014 24 $120.00 $1,500.00 Wednesday, June 18, 2014 25 $125.00 $1,625.00 Wednesday, June 25, 2014 26 $130.00 $1,755.00 Wednesday, July 02, 2014 27 $135.00 $1,890.00 Wednesday, July 09, 2014 28 $140.00 $2,030.00 Wednesday, July 16, 2014 29 $145.00 $2,175.00 Wednesday, July 23, 2014 30 $150.00 $2,325.00 Wednesday, July 30, 2014 31 $155.00 $2,480.00 Wednesday, August 06, 2014 32 $160.00 $2,640.00 Wednesday, August 13, 2014 33 $165.00 $2,805.00 Wednesday, August 20, 2014 34 $170.00 $2,975.00 Wednesday, August 27, 2014 35 $175.00 $3,150.00 Wednesday, September 03, 2014 36 $180.00 $3,330.00 Wednesday, September 10, 2014 37 $185.00 $3,515.00 Wednesday, September 17, 2014 38 $190.00 $3,705.00 Wednesday, September 24, 2014 39 $195.00 $3,900.00 Wednesday, October 01, 2014 40 $200.00 $4,100.00 Wednesday, October 08, 2014 41 $205.00 $4,305.00 Wednesday, October 15, 2014 42 $210.00 $4,515.00 Wednesday, October 22, 2014 43 $215.00 $4,730.00 Wednesday, October 29, 2014 44 $220.00 $4,950.00 Wednesday, November 05, 2014 45 $225.00 $5,175.00 Wednesday, November 12, 2014 46 $230.00 $5,405.00 Wednesday, November 19, 2014 47 $235.00 $5,640.00 Wednesday, November 26, 2014 48 $240.00 $5,880.00 Wednesday, December 03, 2014 49 $245.00 $6,125.00 Wednesday, December 10, 2014 50 $250.00 $6,375.00 Wednesday, December 17, 2014 51 $255.00 $6,630.00 Wednesday, December 24, 2014 52 $260.00 $6,890.00