S.S. Kresge legacy timeline

S.S. Kresge legacy timeline

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Kresge Foundation fulfills namesake's philanthropy

From its start with a donation of $1.3 million from Sebastian S. Kresge, the Kresge Foundation’s assets have snowballed into $3.5 billion, currently ranking it as the nation’s 18th largest foundation by asset size, according to the Foundation Center.Last year it issued awards totaling $242.5 million among 408 recipients. A major expansion to its Troy, Mich., headquarters to better accommodate the foundation’s 80-member staff and position it for the future, was [...]

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The face behind Adam's Jewelry name

“Oh, so you’re Adam.”That was heard at the table where Adam Salama sat and then by others after he got up to receive his family’s business’s award for Best Interior Design at the 10th annual Bizzy Awards on Thursday night at Pocono Palace in Marshalls Creek.Great Wolf Lodge received Best Overall Business award.Adam’s Jewelers could’ve swept interior and exterior awards as it also was nominated for Best Curbside [...]

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(No heading)

Chestnuthill TownshipRelocative Assets LLC to Christian R. Saldibar and Nichole McClure, Lot 78, Phase I, Whispering Woods, $235,000Hamilton TownshipVollie J. Jr. and Diane R. Wright to John J. and Terry L. Cronin, Lot 3, "Subdivision of Elmer J. Possinger," $200,000Stroudsburg BoroughRaymond J. Grochowski Jr. to Greg Tyler Little, 3 tracts, North Seventh Street, $229,000Tobyhanna [...]

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Robinhood Review: Free Is the New $7 Stock Trade

Did you ever think you could trade stocks for free? Before the dawn of the Internet, it might have cost $50 or $100 to trade a stock through a human broker over the phone. As the Internet took off, we saw the evolution of “$7 online trades” and instant quotes.

Now a technology company, Robinhood, is not only reducing stock transaction costs, but eliminating them altogether.

Catering to the tech-savvy millennial crowd, Robinhood broadens access to the U.S. financial markets for everybody by offering an investment platform that runs on smartphones and innovative applications. With their mobile app, investors can buy and sell individual stocks straight from their smartphones with only three clicks. Meanwhile, the company is targeting bargain hunters and convenience-hungry consumers by offering free trading and no minimum balance requirements.

Sounds like a great deal for investors — but can a brokerage company really survive using this model? Let’s take a look at how it all works.

Robinhood at a Glance

Robinhood is a technology-driven brokerage firm that is poised to become a disruptive force in the online investing world. By cutting their overhead and charging no commissions on trades through their smartphone app, Robinhood hopes to “democratize access to the financial markets.” So far, they have secured over $66 million in venture capital, allowing the company to focus on creating a flawless user experience rather than trying to drum up short-term profits.

Types of Accounts Supported

• Cash accounts
• Margin accounts (in testing phase)
• IRA accounts (coming soon)
• Custodial accounts (coming soon)
• Joint accounts (coming soon)

Features

• No commissions
• No minimum balance requirement
• Available on Apple iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch
• Available on Android devices
• Supports market orders, limit orders, stop limit orders, and stop loss orders

Fees

At the moment, use of the Robinhood app is completely free. While it may be hard to believe, they aren’t currently charging customers anything to make a trade.

That’s right; Robinhood doesn’t charge any fees for opening an account or funding it with a linked checking or savings account. And if you choose to receive electronic statements and trade confirmations, you can avoid fees altogether. If you prefer paper statements, on the other hand, you can pay just $5 and $2 per month for statements and confirmations, respectively. Robinhood charges $10 for broker-assisted trades made over the phone, but that service is optional.

How Robinhood Makes Money

With revenue from fees limited, how does Robinhood expect to make money? Most likely, it will be two ways: margin and float.

According to Robinhood’s founders, the company will be making margin accounts available to the public in late 2015. In simple terms, margin accounts allow investors to borrow money from the brokerage firm. Once investors invest the money they borrow, they are charged an interest rate for the loan, just like they would at any bank.

Once Robinhood makes their margin accounts available, the interest rate could be between 3.5% and 5%, according to Barron’s. Keep in mind, however, that this interest rate applies only to margin accounts and won’t affect cash accounts.

Robinhood also makes money through the uninvested cash balances of their customers, or the “float.” Unlike many brokerages that pay investors interest on these balances, Robinhood invests this money into federal Treasury securities at the “risk-free” rate, earning a small return on investors’ money when it’s not in use.

Since the firm is clearly targeting investors with small starting balances, most investors will not have enough cash on hand to earn much interest anyway — but add it all up, and Robinhood can make a bit of money on those uninvested balances.

Registration/Regulation

Like all brokerage firms in the United States, Robinhood is a registered broker-dealer with FINRA & SIPC. APEX Clearing Corp. handles the trade confirmation, settlement, and securities delivery for Robinhood. They are also registered members of FINRA & SIPC.

Robinhood Details

What is Robinhood?

Robinhood is a U.S.-based stock brokerage firm that allows investors to buy and sell U.S. stocks and ETFs listed on U.S. markets with their smartphones. The company has been built with efficiency in mind, eliminating high overhead costs like storefronts, manual account management, and expensive advertising. Because of this, Robinhood is able to keep costs low with no commission fees on all trades.

Robinhood is not a financial advisor. Instead, they are merely a brokerage firm. All trades and transactions are user-directed through the Robinhood app.

Robinhood’s Main Features

Trade for Free

Yes, it is true. With Robinhood, you will never pay a commission fee for making trades. Ever. By default, this makes Robinhood the cheapest brokerage in the online marketplace for individual investors by far. Do note, however, that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA charge a $0.002-per-share fee on all trades. Those fees are passed through Robinhood to the regulatory agencies, but Robinhood does not gain any financial benefit.

No Minimum Balance Requirements

In addition to commission-free trades, Robinhood woos bargain hunters and frugal investors with no minimum balance requirements. Because of this, investors can open a cash account for free without any obligation to keep their cash balance above a certain threshold.

While this is a great feature for those starting out with small balances, this is also beneficial for new investors who want to dabble in day trading.

The Robinhood App

Investors wanting to trade through Robinhood will need to download the Robinhood mobile app. The app is easy to use and is available on both Apple- and Android-supported devices.

With just three clicks, investors can buy or sell securities directly from the app. Customers can also sign up to receive important notifications regarding their account balance or current trade details. Thanks to Robinhood’s app, you can buy, sell, or trade stocks from anywhere — as long as you have an Internet or cell connection.

Real-Time Market Data

While other brokerages may delay quotes, Robinhood is able to supply their customers with market data in real time. Like almost everything else with this app, access to real-time data is free. The company also claims to have built a “low-latency trading system” that executes trades quickly so you don’t miss out on rapidly changing market conditions.

Other Features

While Robinhood is only servicing cash accounts at the moment, they have plans to offer more features and investing options in the very near future.

By the end of 2015, Robinhood hopes to have its margin accounts open to the public. (They are currently in the beta testing stage.) Meanwhile, the company has also announced its intention to add custodial, joint, and IRA account support in the future.

What Robinhood Lacks

No Physical Location

Branch locations can be a huge cost to any brokerage firm, which is part of the reason Robinhood has taken these out of the equation. This is obviously a huge benefit, since low overhead is part of the reason Robinhood can offer no-commission trades. On the other hand, it also means that beginning or struggling investors won’t be able to walk into a branch to get advice on their investment strategy. With Robinhood, you’re on your own, which is definitely something to keep in mind.

Basic, No-Frills Website

Another way Robinhood is able to keep costs down is through their platform. Currently, the firm does not offer a full-service website. Because of this, all transactions must be completed through the app itself, and Robinhood is unable to provide detailed charts, graphs, or analysis. Essentially, this means Robinhood investors must do their research elsewhere before making trades through the app.

No News Feeds

The Robinhood app also steers clear of the latest Wall Street news, which presents a huge downside for many investors. While this may not be a deal-breaker — and in fact, ignoring the financial media hysteria can be beneficial to long-term investors — it shows you are truly on your own when it comes to researching stock market trends and figuring out which moves to make.

Who Would Benefit From Using Robinhood?

• Day traders and other high-volume traders. Investors who enjoy making multiple trades a day can save a lot of money by taking advantage of Robinhood’s commission-free trading structure. Over the course of a few weeks, this could add up to hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars in commission savings for investors who make a lot of transactions.
• Millennials and other tech-savvy investors. Robinhood is clearly targeting young investors. The app is geared toward demographic groups who not only know how to use the technology, but also those who are comfortable making large purchases and transactions online or with their phones. If you want to buy and sell securities directly from your mobile device, Robinhood may be your best option.
• Investors with low cash balances or those looking to dabble in individual stocks. For investors who may not have a lot of cash on hand, Robinhood is a great place to get started. Customers will enjoy no minimum balance requirements, which is another enticing option for the 18-29 crowd. The no-minimum-balance requirement is also attractive for investors who just want to dip their toe into investing in individual stocks.

Who Is Robinhood Not Good For?

• Investors who want to fund their retirement accounts. At the moment, Robinhood does not support individual retirement accounts of any kind. While they plan to offer this service in the future, the company currently only supports cash accounts and the soon-to-be-released margin accounts.
• People who want investing advice. Robinhood is a brokerage firm, but not a financial advisor. If you are looking for financial planning advice, you should look elsewhere. There are plenty of online financial advisors available, and we have reviewed quite a few of them already, such as Personal Capital, Wealthfront, and Betterment.
• Hands-off investors. The beauty of Robinhood is the fact that it doesn’t charge individuals for their trades. While it is a great resource for do-it-yourself day traders, investors who need some help might be better off using a firm that offers assistance and advice to its investors. Furthermore, Robinhood requires you to make all trades yourself. So, if you like to keep your hands free from the mechanics of trading, Robinhood may not be for you.

Getting Started With Robinhood

Registering your account with Robinhood is easy. Just head to Robinhood.com and click the green “Sign up” button in the top right corner of the page. Then:

• Create your profile.
• Enter your contact info.
• Use your Social Security number to verify your identity.
• Add funds to your new account.

With only a handful of steps to complete, the entire registration process should take less than 10 minutes.

Wrapping Up With Robinhood

Will Robinhood be able to survive and thrive with their current pricing model? Only time will tell. With that being said, it might make sense to try the service if you’re young, tech-savvy, and planned to invest anyway.

Personally, I look forward to exploring how it compares to other day trading sites on my own, and finding out how it’s no-fee structure might affect the industry overall. Once again, we’ll have to wait and see.

Related Articles: 

• Building a Nest Egg Out of Acorns
• Three Apps for America’s Money Management Woes

Had you heard of Robinhood? What do you think about no-fee investing? Is it sustainable?

The post Robinhood Review: Free Is the New $7 Stock Trade appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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Sales in utes are going gangbusters

BLAME divorced dads, men who never grow up and defacto couples but the workman’s ute is now the second most popular vehicle on our roads.

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What To Do With $1,000 Now? Figuring Out If Personal Finance Advice Makes Sense

If you caught yesterday’s post, you know that my daughter recently had surgery and I’ve been spending time at the hospital with her. Today, while sitting in a waiting room, I found an issue of Money magazine that had an article entitled “What to Do with $1,000 Now!” (October 2015, p. 52 and 53).

I have mixed feelings when it comes to Money. Some of their advice is spot-on, but at the same time the magazine devotes a large amount of time to investments that aren’t very good for the average investor (like individual stock picks) along with some advice that just encourages wasteful spending. This article was a perfect example of both – some of the ideas were great, while others were… strange, to say the least.

Since I didn’t actually steal the magazine from the waiting room, I had to look up an approximate online equivalent of the article from Money’s website, entitled
30 Smart Things to Do With $1,000 Now.

As with the print article, some of the ideas are good ones…

For about $1,000 you can have a will, durable power of attorney, and health care directive written up. Find an estate planner at naepc.org.

and

If you’re 50 or older, you can put in $1,000 more in an IRA (above the $5,500 normal limit) each year. Do so from 50 to 65, and you’ll have $27,000 more in retirement assuming you get a 6% annual return, per T. Rowe Price.

Some are bad ones…

With only 10 C-notes, your mutual fund choices are limited by minimum investment requirements. Besides simply letting you in the door, these actively managed funds have relatively low fees and beat more than half their peers over three, five, and 10 years:
Oakmark Select large blend; 1.01% expenses
Schwab Dividend Equity large value, 0.89% expenses
Nicholas large growth, 0.73% expenses

and

Would getting behind the wheel of your dream vehicle make you feel a teensy bit better about reporting to a 30-year-old boss? Then sow your oats—for 24 hours. Both Hertz and Enterprise offer luxury rentals; you can find local outfits by searching for “exotic car rental” and your city. Gotham Dream Cars’ Boston-area location rents an Aston Martin Vantage Roadster for $895 a day.

And some are just strange…

For a safer and cheaper alternative to going under the knife, try an injectable dermal filler. Dr. Michael Edwards, president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, recommends Juvéderm Voluma XC, which consists of natural hyalu­ronic acid that helps smooth out deep lines and adds volume to cheeks and the jaw area. It lasts up to two years and costs near $1,000 per injection.

About a year ago, I wrote an article entitled 25 Smart Ways to Handle a $1,000 Windfall. In it, I outlined a lot of smart ways to actually use $1,000. Here’s a quick recap:

Idea #1 – Eliminate (or Greatly Reduce) a Debt
Idea #2 – Launch Your Emergency Fund
Idea #3 – Kick Up Your 401(k) Contributions
Idea #4 – Open Up a Roth IRA
Idea #5 – Kickstart College Savings
Idea #6 – Launch (or Add to) Your Personal Investments
Idea #7 – Invest in a High-Efficiency Water Heater
Idea #8 – Replace Old Windows
Idea #9 – Attend a Professional Conference or Convention
Idea #10 – Get a Professional Certification
Idea #11 – Replace Worn Out Items with Long-Lasting Ones
Idea #12 – Replace All Lightbulbs with LEDs
Idea #13 – Make a Will and/or Durable Power of Attorney
Idea #14 – Buy a Good Bicycle and Use It
Idea #15 – Improve Your Home
Idea #16 – Launch a Small Business
Idea #17 – Get a Home Energy Audit and Follow the Recommendations
Idea #18 – Get a Term Life Insurance Policy
Idea #19 – Donate
Idea #20 – Pay for Next Christmas
Idea #21 – Pay for (Part of) Your Next Vacation
Idea #22 – Insulate Your Attic
Idea #23 – Take a Class or Two
Idea #24 – Start Saving for a Big Future Goal
Idea #25 – Maintain Your Home and Automobile

I’m not going to say my ideas are better than Money’s… actually, wait, I am going to say it. Any of those 25 ideas is a better use of your $1,000 than “injectable dermal filler.” (I mean, seriously? Injectable dermal filler? What kind of life situation do you have to be in where that’s even in the top ten list of smart choices for spending $1,000?)

My point is this: some ways of spending money are smarter than other ones. Obviously, building an emergency fund if you don’t have one is a better choice for using $1,000 than “injectable dermal filler.”

The thing is that it gets tricky to evaluate which financial solution is the best one when they seem kind of similar. For example, if you have $1,000, is it better to put it in your own Roth IRA or a 529 for your child? What about putting it in your 401(k) at work? Those are the kinds of questions that it becomes very easy to get bogged down in.

On top of that, you have financial media sometimes giving you really strange suggestions about what to do with your money. Injectable dermal filler? Nope. Random individual stocks? Not really a good idea, either.

How, then, do you separate the good financial advice from the bad? For me, I apply a set of eight rules to any financial advice that I read or hear or see. Good financial advice has to be strong on at least one of these points and not violate any of the others; if it doesn’t meet that threshold, I don’t trust the advice.

1. Good financial advice results in a strong likelihood of a positive return

In other words, if you use your money and time in this manner, it is rather likely that you will wind up with more money than if you didn’t take this advice.

This is the category in which frugal advice is pretty strong. Simple things, like buying a generic product instead of a name brand product or learning to make your own meals, are pretty much guaranteed to cause you to spend less money, thus causing you to have more money in your wallet after following that advice than you would if you didn’t follow it. There may be other reasons for not following a specific frugal tactic, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good suggestion.

This is also where things like highly risky investments completely fail unless they’re supplemented with something else. Someone telling you to invest all of your money into Bitcoin or precious metals is guiding you down a path where there is a really strong chance you’re going to lose money. Investing in those things can still be good advice as long as they consist of a small part of your overall investments, meaning that if you do lose out on those kinds of investments, it doesn’t sink your whole ship and it’s buoyed by safer investments.

Note that this doesn’t guarantee a positive return, but that over most time periods, you’re going to end up with more money than you had before. Investing in stock index funds is pretty good advice, although they do carry some risk of having a down year. However, the historical record shows a clear positive growth rate for almost every stock index fund.

2. Good financial advice doesn’t ignore well-known options that are probably better in most situations

This is what I think about when I think about insurance advice. Quite often, I’ll find glowing reports about the wonders of universal or whole life insurance. Certainly, if you look at such packages through a particular lens, they look like a real bargain.

However, if you sit that same investment down next to, say, a similar term life policy with the money you saved going into a stock-based index fund returning 7% a year on average, it quickly doesn’t look like that good of a deal. Even very optimistic projections from such an insurance policy usually don’t stand up against a term life insurance policy and a good investment option with the remaining money.

On the surface, a whole life insurance policy might be good financial advice, but if you dig in much at all, it quickly becomes mediocre advice because there are better options out there.

For financial advice to be good, there must be a significant reason why that particular piece of advice is better than other options for the same situation. If you don’t have that reason – or the advice is intentionally excluding a pretty obvious alternative option – then the advice is questionable at best and advertising at worst.

3. Good financial advice looks at long-lasting things, not temporary things

Most of the time, buying things in general is pretty awful financial advice, except for when you have a very clear use case for that item that can’t really be fulfilled by anything else. Spending some money on forks if you don’t have any is probably a good idea, but buying a $300 handbag when you have several already? Probably not such a good idea.

If the advice does center around buying things, the question shouldn’t be how it will affect your life today. The question should be whether it will have a positive effect on your life a year from now or five years from now. If you can’t make that case at all – or if that case is a real stretch – then it’s bad advice.

Naturally, there are specific pieces of advice that are good for people in very specific situations and bad for others. If you are in a career like acting or modeling where physical beauty writes the checks for you (at least in part), then cosmetic surgery might be a good temporary choice as it will extend your career and more than pay for itself. For the rest of us? It’s pretty bad advice.

4. Good financial advice spreads out your risk rather than concentrating it

In general, the more you actually know about something, the more sense it can make to concentrate your money in that area. If you have a ton of specialized knowledge, for example, you might be able to make a killing buying and selling specific items. However, if you don’t have a ton of specific knowledge and you’re just relying on tips from others, you’re just concentrating your money in one place without the knowledge to back it up and you’re begging to go broke.

This is where things like specific stock picks fail. Whenever a magazine article gives a one-paragraph reason for why you should invest all of your cash in the stocks of Allied Amalgamated Sprockets, that’s not nearly enough knowledge to actually know whether to invest in that company. Sure, it might be a starting point for doing a lot of research into Allied Amalgamated Sprockets, but on its own, that information could be junk. You don’t know enough about Allied Amalgamated Sprockets to know the difference.

That’s why the best advice for investing in things like stocks is to diversify as much as possible. Rather than investing in one or five companies, you should invest in hundreds or thousands at once. That’s exactly what an index fund does – it just buys a little bit of a lot of different companies, so when you invest in a stock-based index fund, you’re already diversified (at least within stocks).

If you’re talking about a very small amount of money, this isn’t that big of a deal. If the amount of money you’re looking at is trivial to you and it wouldn’t be a problem if you lost it, then feel free to take a big leap into this kind of advice. However, don’t concentrate your money into one specific investment unless you know exactly what you’re doing.

5. Good financial advice improves your life and/or the life of those you care about over the long term rather than the short term

A big vacation might improve your life for a week, but then you return to the same challenges and struggles that you already have. Often, you return to a life where your financial situation is worse, adding to your life’s stress level and making your choices more difficult than before.

On the other hand, if you instead take that money and use it to build an emergency fund or pay off debt, you make your life better for the foreseeable future. You lower your stress level and open up your choices a bit for the future.

That’s why it’s almost always better to take a windfall and invest most of it into improving your financial situation. Sure, you could use a little bit to do something fun and improve your life in the very short term, but if you use most of it for long-term improvements, your life will simply become better. There is nothing better that you can do with your money than genuinely minimizing and eliminating long-term worries and stresses.

6. Good financial advice doesn’t earn more money for the advice-giver than other advice he or she might give

This goes out to all of the unscrupulous salespeople out there.

Quite often, a sales pitch for a financial product extols the virtues for a particular financial option. You’ll hear about how great this particular mutual fund is or how amazing this life insurance package is.

However, what they don’t tell you is that these options almost always have alternatives available that provide the exact same thing – or something better – with lower fees and costs.

For example, a life insurance salesman is likely going to compare the policy they want you to buy to a generic term policy. Yeah, this term policy might be a little cheaper, but look at how much this whole life policy earns for you! What they don’t show you is what you could be doing with the money you save on that term policy.

Many financial advisors do the same thing when it comes to showing off investment options. They’ll show you the options that they sell and maybe one or two more carefully selected “loser” options that look awful in comparison. How does their investments compare to, say, an index fund like the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index?

I am always wary when I’m being pitched an investment by someone who stands to earn money from that investment. Where is that profit coming from? It’s coming out of the returns I could make.

7. Good financial advice is agreed upon by more than just one guy on a random website or television show or magazine article or radio show

I see and hear almost constant claims about how this investment product or that investment solution is amazing and will utterly transform your financial life. Those radio and television ads proclaiming some kind of magical solution to whatever your financial problem is, whether it’s debt or investments or anything else, are just unbelievable to me.

Here’s the truth: if a particular piece of financial advice is truly good advice, it won’t take long for it to enter the public arena. Most truly good ideas are like a genie in a bottle – they will eventually slip out and become ideas that everyone can try and test and evaluate, and the good ones (like spending less than you earn and diversifying your investments) stick around.

So what exactly are you being sold when you buy one of these financial information products? Usually, you’re being sold information that’s already publicly available – it’s just packaged in a different way. Occasionally, you instead get an idea that flat-out doesn’t work or has some kind of crazy requirement (like a bunch of money already in the bank) that most people can’t meet.

If you really want some good financial advice and strategies, the best place to go is your local library. Remember, the vast majority of people out there have never picked up a personal finance book. By doing that, you’re already ahead of the game.

8. Good advice doesn’t encourage you to buy things unless they strongly fulfill the previous rules

Rare is the financial advice that encourages you to spend your money on something that isn’t clearly a financial investment or an investment in your long-term future (like education). If a piece of financial advice is encouraging you to buy a specific material item, be very wary.

That’s not to say that such advice isn’t sometimes good. The advice to buy a late model used car from a reliable manufacturer is good. The advice to replace any well-worn items in your house with a quality reliable version of that item is good, too.

What isn’t good is spending a lot of money on a type of item you’ve never used because you’ve heard it will make your life easier or change your life in some other way. What isn’t good is spending a lot of money on something that won’t clearly have a regular use in your life. Those types of purchases rarely pay off.

Final Thoughts

A lot of the financial advice out there is good stuff. Spend less than you earn. Save for retirement in a tax-advantaged retirement account (like a 401(k) or Roth IRA). Buy a reliable late model used car if you need a car. Try generic products and see if they fit your needs. Those types of things are tried and true and it’s easy to see the benefits.

The problem is that good advice is often mixed in with strange and questionable advice. You’ll hear three pieces of good advice from someone, then they’ll toss in something that doesn’t make any sense. You’ll listen to a largely good financial radio show and then the commercial will want you to buy some financial advice package for just four easy payments of $49.95.

Be smart when you’re thinking about using your money. Be smart about where the advice is coming from and who it is coming from. When in doubt, do more homework and make sure that the idea makes sense from a lot of different perspectives and angles. When you have some money in your pocket, use it for something that will provide lasting positive impact on your life.

Here’s a final hint: injectable dermal filler is probably not the answer you’re looking for.

The post What To Do With $1,000 Now? Figuring Out If Personal Finance Advice Makes Sense appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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Like to Paint? Make Up to $4,000 per Wedding as a Live-Event Artist

Are you a talented painter who’s tired of selling prints on Etsy for $30 each? Well, you don’t have to be a starving artist any longer.

If you love weddings or other exclusive events, and don’t mind painting in front of hundreds of people, try your hand at being a live-event artist.

What Is a Live-Event Artist?

Exactly what it sounds like: You’ll paint at events, capturing special moments and scenes live.

The trend started in the wedding industry: Couples would hire an artist to come to their weddings and paint the scene in front of them as it happened. Live-event artists typically paint the couple, the gorgeous venue surrounding them and some of the guests, too.

Most of these paintings are not exact portraits of the bride and groom but, rather, an interpretation of the event as the artist sees it. These paintings are mostly abstract, and capture the movement and excitement of the scene.

Live-event artists also work other events, like galas and birthdays.

How Do You Become a Live-Event Artist?

If you’re interested in becoming one, here are some steps you can take:

Step 1: Hone Your Artistic Skills

Painting in front of an audience is much, much different than painting in a studio or your own home. You’ll need to interact with guests while you work, and you’ll also have to be able to concentrate and complete a painting in a short amount of time.

To prepare for this type of gig, try painting a landscape in your backyard or local park within a certain time frame.

You can also offer to paint a friend’s event for free to practice mingling with guests and see how your paintings evolve over the course of the occasion.

Step 2: Market, Market, Market

This is a relatively new job. It’s your job to educate the market on why they should hire one — and choose you.

You’ll need to create an incredible website, showcase your portfolio — remember all those events you worked for free? — and create social media accounts for your business. You should also attend wedding trade shows and network heavily with other members of the service community.

I would also recommend producing a video like this artist. That way, prospective clients will be able to see what it’s like to have you at their event.

How Much Do Live-Event Artists Get Paid?

Having a live-event artist at a wedding is a luxury for the couple, so you can usually charge a premium price.

Live-event artists typically get $2,000-$4,000 for an event. Some even get paid to go to various locations and get reimbursed for travel.

If you’re just starting out, see what other live event artists are charging in your city.

Pricing also varies depending on the type of materials you use and the size of the canvas. So, factor in your own costs to ensure you make a profit.

The live-event artist market is growing, and more brides are exploring this option as a unique way for their weddings to stand out. If you love to paint and don’t mind performing in front of an audience, this could be a fun and lucrative job for you!

Your Turn: Are you an artist? If so, would you be interested in live-painting at an event?

Catherine Alford is an award-winning personal finance writer, motivational speaker and mother to boy/girl twins. She shares her adventures at www.BudgetBlonde.com.

The post Like to Paint? Make Up to $4,000 per Wedding as a Live-Event Artist appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.

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The biggest corporate cover-ups

THE pollution cheating scandal that has rocked the world’s biggest car marker, Volkswagen, is just the latest in a long line of corporate frauds, cons and cover-ups.

Source NEWS.com.au | Business http://ift.tt/1Jv8PVu