The majority of people who have bought their first home are not saving to increase their buying power when they make their next step up the property ladder, according to new research from uSwitch.
The majority of people who have bought their first home are not saving to increase their buying power when they make their next step up the property ladder, according to new research from uSwitch.
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The majority of people who have bought their first home are not saving to increase their buying power when they make their next step up the property ladder, according to new research from uSwitch. Instead, more than six in ten people in their first home are relying on the growing equity stake in their property to fund their next deposit, and almost half (44%) of first-time home owners have no plans to save towards their next house move at all. But rising prices mean they could face a significant shortfall when they come to upgrade. Over the last ten years, prices for houses have increased 21%, rapidly outpacing flats, which have increased by just 15%, according to house price data from Zoopla. “Second steppers have been lulled into a false sense of security by rising house prices,” says Tashema Jackson, money expert at uSwitch. “In some parts of the country houses have far outstripped flats and so if you are looking to move up the property ladder you need to carefully plot your next steps.” Preston, Lancashire, has the biggest difference in price growth for homes and flats at 16.5%. Since 2006, house prices in the town rose by 8.5%, while the average price for a flat fell by 8%. Similarly, house prices in Colchester, Essex, increased by almost a quarter, while the value of a flat rose 13%. The trend isn’t universal though, and in many areas flat prices have grown faster than those for houses. In Aberdeen, for example, house prices have increased by a massive 47% - but they were still outstripped by 57% gains for flats. The research also found more than six in ten second time buyers haven’t made any savings to cover transactional costs when moving home, such as stamp duty, surveying costs, or removal fees, which typically total £12,000. “Whatever your situation, plan ahead to find out what you can afford and how much you need to save. Don’t just take the first mortgage offered to you – consult a range of providers to find the best deal for you as this will help prevent paying over the odds,” says Miss Jackson.
But, like most young Americans, she didn’t have the money to just pick up and go — nor the right qualifications to get afull-time jobabroad.
So she decided to find work in a field many of us have experience in:child care. She decided to become an au pair.
You might not have heard the word before, but an au pair is essentially an international nanny.
And if you’re young, open-minded and good with kids, it could be your key toliving abroad.
What’s an Au Pair?
An au pair is a young man or woman — usually between theages of 18-30— who works for a foreign family in exchange for room, board and cultural exchange.
The majority of au pair jobs are in Europe, making it an easy way to live in this expensive part of the world — without going broke.
Because Fleckenstein wanted to learn French, she worked for a family outside Paris.
Hours and duties vary depending on the country and family — but generally, you’d be responsible for child care and light housework forbetween 20 and 40 hours per week.
“Every family is different,”Fleckensteinexplains. “You might be in charge of anything from triplet infants to two teenage girls.”
Your stay abroad would be temporary, usually lasting a maximum ofone year. Depending on the country, you might be required to take a language course to maintain your visa.
In exchange for your work, you’ll receivefree accommodation, food and health insurance, as well as a small weekly stipend.
That’s in addition, of course, to the priceless experience ofliving abroadand immersing yourself in a new culture.
How Can You Find Au Pair Jobs Abroad?
Until recently, au pair agencies matched most au pairs with their families.
But these days, you can take matters into your own hands by searching online.
Here are a few resources:
AuPairWorld: This is the most popular site for finding au pair jobs. It has more than 8,000 families in its database and is FREE for au pairs to use. It also offers answers to all of your au-pairing FAQs.
AuPair.com: Though not as popular as AuPairWorld, this is still a solid choice for finding host families.
Work Abroad as an Au Pair or Nanny: This post gives a general overview of the au-pairing culture in different countries in Europe and is a good place to begin your research.
Au Pair Mom: This blog is from a host family’s point-of-view, but also has helpful information for aspiring au pairs.
Note: If you want to au pair in the United States (as a non-citizen), Switzerland or Norway, you can search for jobs online, but will eventually have to use an agency to arrange your paperwork and visas.
How Much Do Au Pairs Earn?
Working as an au pair isn’t a good way to get rich.
However, it’s a great way to spend a year living, working and learning abroad.
If you cultivate this perspective, you’ll have a much better chance of enjoying your experience.
That being said, all host families must provide lodging (often within their own homes), food, health insurance and “pocket money” for their au pairs.
Some families may pay for half of your plane ticket there, and others may also pay for your bus pass,cell phone billand language course.
The amount of pocket money you earn varies widely, but does have to meeteach country’sminimum standards.
Much of your experience and compensation will depend on the family, so it’s essential you clarify everything before accepting a position.
Fleckenstein earned 125 euros per week (about $142 US), and her host family paid for her language school, plane ticket and cell phone — but not her subway pass.
On her blog, she’s featured a number of other au pairs. One earned 85 euros per week inFrance, while others earned 340 euros per month in theNetherlandsand 400 euros per month inGermany.
Here are the minimum wages in several popular countries:
Australia: $640 to $800 per month
France: $310 to $370 per month
Germany: $306 per month
Norway: $655 per month
Spain: $235 to $330 per month
“Always ask for a higher salary than they want to give you,” Fleckenstein advises. “Negotiation is key.”
What Should Au Pairs Expect?
Looking for more advice? Here’s what a few other former au pairs have to say.
On Realistic Expectations…
“The opportunity is less about making and saving a lot of money and much more about having an opportunity to immerse yourself in a different country and culture,”saysJanine Sobeck.
“I was comfortable in my family’s home, and the money I earned allowed me to explore surrounding areas, enjoy the food and acquire some cherished mementos.”
On Selecting a Family…
“Follow your gut,” urgesAlex Butts. “Your instincts are strong; you can tell which family you are going to love and is going to love you back.”
“I spent hours on Au Pair World. I’m talking HOURS. I exchanged emails with several families and Skyped with about five.Explore your options and your heart will lead you the right way.”
On Living Arrangements…
“If you live with the family, you’ll learn more of the language — but if you have your own apartment, you’ll be less stressed out and have a better social life,” Fleckenstein says.
On Negotiations…
“The family provides all room and board, food and health insurance for you,” saysHanley Russell. “I was responsible for my toiletries, food when out, cell phone bill and gym membership.”
“Some families provide train/bus passes — and I highly recommend asking for one of these when negotiating,” Russell explains.
“I would have saved so much money if I had one.If there’s something you want, ask in the beginning. It’s a whole lot less awkward than asking once you’re here.”
On Isolation…
“When choosing a family, location should be a primary factor,” explainsRachel Ward.
“You’ll be alone with children rather than working with other adults, limiting your networking opportunities…No matter where you move, understand that as an au pair you’ll undoubtedly spend a lot of time alone and must ask yourself how you handle solitude.”
For the young, adventurous and broke, working abroad as an au pair is a fantastic way to live in a foreign country and expand your horizons — and perhaps, gain a very special second family.
Your Turn: Would you like to work as an au pair abroad? Where would you most like to live?
Susan Shain, senior writer for The Penny Hoarder, is always seeking adventure on a budget. Visit her blog at susanshain.com, or say hi on Twitter @susan_shain.
Table games revenues from Mount Airy fell more than 9 percent in May despite the state’s almost 7 percent increase in the games.Mount Airy brought in $3,783,146 in May, compared with $4,168,703 in May 2015, a 9.25 percent drop, according to figures released by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board.The state’s 12 casinos generated $71,342,206 in revenues from table games in May. That was 6.9 percent higher than the $66,748,021 it brought in a year ago.The [...]
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You probably know what it’s like to use keyword research tools and come up with lists of keywords to track and rank for. I’ve done it dozens of times myself. Why? Because it’s one of those “standard practices” that we do in SEO and online marketing.
But search engines today aren’t looking only at keywords! Search engines are looking at hundreds of different factors. And keywords? They are only a small part of the big picture.
Don’t get me wrong. I think keyword research is still important.
But here’s the thing…
Keyword research isn’t the only aspect you need to be researching when optimizing a website or planning your content marketing.
I want you to go a level deeper—to the level that users are searching for and search engines are indexing for.
I’m going to share with you three ways to go beyond basic keyword research. Although keyword research should still be a part of your SEO, it’s only the start.
I’m confident that these advanced research methods will add rocket fuel to your marketing, attract targeted traffic, earn valuable links, and ultimately boost your revenue.
I will explain in detail how to use each of these powerful research methods.
First of all, let me preface this by revealing something you may not know about Google: the algorithm changes 500-600 times per year.
That’s a rate of nearly 1.5 changes a day!
Even with all the marketing ability I’ve developed running my various businesses, I can’t hope to keep up with the rapid pace of change in the Google search algorithm and its machine learning. Odds are, neither can you.
So, now that you understand the why, let’s dive into the how. This is how we do keyword research in today’s world.
1. User intent
One of the biggest mistakes I see many newbie online entrepreneurs make is that they focus too much on the specific keywords in their research without focusing enough on user intent behind those keywords.
You may be thinking, “Neil, what is user intent, and how do I use it to improve the traffic and conversions on my site?”
User intent is just what it sounds. User intent refers to the user’s ultimate goal in typing a search query.
Let me make a quick point about the terms I am using.
Keywords: A targeted phrase you’re trying to rank for. You do keyword research. You use this phrase in your content, making sure it appears in all the right places.
Query: The phrase or words that a user types into Google. This could be a short phrase, a question, or just a string of words the user is typing.
I try to keep those two terms—keywords and query—straight, but sometimes I use them interchangeably.
As SEOs, we tend to focus on keywords, right? That’s what we want to rank for, obviously.
But users don’t care about our keywords. They just want to get the best result for their query.
And that’s my point: every query has an intent. Every time someone types something into Google, they are trying to accomplish something. They have a goal.
For example, when I am up late at night watching Gossip Girls reruns and I Google “Chinese food,” my user intent is to order some Chinese food.
And guess what? Google knows this. And, voila, this is exactly what comes up!
However, if I change the wording ever so slightly, typing “great Chinese food” instead of “Chinese food,” what appears is quite different.
By simply changing one word, I shifted the intent of my search from ordering Chinese food to finding great Chinese meals and restaurants in a given area.
See the difference? Sure, the difference involves a change in wording. But the deeper change was one of intent.
Google gets it. The whole search engine is designed to deliver really good results based on the user’s intent.
Check out this video from Google. User intent is the whole reason why Google spends hundreds of millions of dollars to refine its algorithms and enhance its machine learning process.
If the search engine is that focused on user intent, we should be as well.
You have to take advantage of user intent to understand which keywords you should try to rank for.
Basically, you need to understand the user’s goal when they input certain queries.
Let me give you another example.
See if you can figure out the intent behind this query: “order a birthday cake”
Pretty straightforward, right?
If this “order a birthday cake” was one of your target keyword phrases, you should understand that the user’s intent is to order a birthday cake.
The great thing about user intent is that it becomes far easier to figure it out as the query becomes longer.
Long queries are really valuable for two reasons:
We can identify exactly what the user wants and give it to them.
We can gain targeted organic traffic for super-specific long-tail keywords.
Double whammy!
Let me show you exactly what I mean by expanding that “order a birthday cake” query.
Most users don’t simply want to order a birthday cake. They want to order a specific type of cake, for a specific type of person, in a specific location, for a specific purpose, and at a specific time.
See where this is going?
Take a look at this doozy of a query:
How’s that for user intent?
You can use this super-focused intent to create super-focused content!
For this query, you know that:
Someone wants to order a cake…
for a girl…
who is probably between 4 and 10 years old.
They don’t want to make the cake themselves.
They want it delivered to their venue.
And they live in the Atlanta, Georgia, area.
Most likely, it’s a mom, dad, or party planner who’s typing in this query.
They probably have a limited amount of time on their hands. They’re busy.
They live with or know about children and understand what children like.
I could go on and on.
This is the level of keyword research that you want to do. You’re not just spinning a bunch of variations from some keyword tool. Instead, you’re diving into the reasons, the motivations, and the desires of the user.
We could even sketch a persona based on that keyword and then target that persona in our marketing efforts.
Kelly is a 33-year-old working mom. She has a 3-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter who turns 6 on August 2. Kelly loves her kids but isn’t able to spend much time with them because of her demanding job as a paralegal in downtown Atlanta. Kelly wants to surprise her daughter with a special birthday party with a princess theme.
You might not be able to achieve this level of research for every keyword, but you can at least get a general idea of the general intent of your target audience.
Basically, if you know why a user is looking up a certain keyword, you will be able to determine what keywords you want to use on your website and in your content.
Using my first example, if you were a Chinese takeout restaurant, you would want to rank for “Chinese food,” “order Chinese food,” or “Chinese takeout.” Ideally, you would also try to rank for local terms such as “Chinese takeout downtown Las Vegas.”
However, if you ran a Chinese recipe niche site, you might try to rank for “great Chinese food,” “awesome Chinese recipes,” or something similar.
2. Search query type
Another important element of diving deeper into keyword research is understanding search queries and search query type.
As I explained above, a query is what a user types into Google. A keyword is what you’re trying to rank for.
Let me show you a keyword and a query example so you can clearly see the difference.
Keyword: Men’s skinny jeans
Query: Where to buy men’s skinny jeans
Do you see the difference?
The keyword is a relatively straightforward term. The query, however, is more specific because the user wants to accomplish something (user intent—as discussed above).
But there’s another remarkable thing about those queries.
Whenever you are doing keyword research, try to understand what kind of queries lend themselves to people hitting the “buy now” button.
It’s really important because if you could figure out the types of queries that lead people to purchase immediately, you would be able to get more sales.
And if you could figure out the queries that pulled people into the top of your funnel, you’d be able to structure an amazing content marketing campaign.
Here is the good news: you can find that out, and you can structure your content marketing around those types of queries.
Let me explain each of these so we can get clear on how to target each one:
Informational searches are pretty easy to figure out. The user wants to get information on a certain topic. For example, “how to structure a content marketing campaign” is an informational query.
Transactional searches mean that the user is trying to buy something or transact in some way. “Buy skinny jeans online,” “order flowers las vegas,” or “whole foods coupon” are all transactional queries.
Navigational searches take place when the user is trying to get to a specific website but doesn’t remember or doesn’t want to type in the URL. For example, if I wanted to visit the Men’s Health website, I would search for “mens health” or “mens health mag” rather than typing “http://ift.tt/xr10Oq” into my search bar.
In other words, you’ll be gaining most of your leads in the top of the funnel through informational queries.
Informational queries build awareness and aid the user’s consideration, just like the marketing funnel predicts.
Let me share an example now so you can see how to apply this information to your content marketing and SEO strategies.
Say you are selling men’s skinny jeans and trying to decide which keywords to try to rank for.
Some possibilities:
Men’s skinny jeans
Top men’s skinny jeans
Skinny jeans men’s style
Best men’s skinny jeans
Distressed men’s skinny jeans
Hipster men’s skinny jeans
Now comes the important part of understanding the search query.
If you were an e-commerce store that sold men’s skinny jeans, the keywords you would try to rank for would be very different from the ones you would target if you were running a blog on men’s fashion and writing an article on why skinny jeans are appalling.
This is the difference between informational and transactional search queries.
Basically, you want to research search queries related to your industry to discover new keywords you can try to rank for.
Let’s say you are selling men’s skinny jeans. You want transactional queries. Looking at the different search queries, you will notice that common keywords that pop up are:
Men’s skinny jeans sale
Men’s skinny jeans online shopping
Men’s stretch skinny jeans
Within an e-commerce environment, it’s important to understand the specific nature of a user’s transactional query. They might be looking for sizes, features, and specific product types.
By enhancing keyword support in the most relevant areas of your e-commerce website, you’ll be able to gain organic traffic to those internal pages where the user is prepared to transact.
If, on the other hand, you run a fashion blog and are writing that article on men’s skinny jeans, you might find search queries like these:
Fashion blog men’s skinny jeans and boots
Men’s skinny jeans outfits
Men’s skinny jeans
Spring outfits men’s skinny jeans
As you can see, all these queries contain the keyword phrase “men’s skinny jeans,” but the secondary keywords you should try to rank for will change based on the user intent behind the search query.
By knowing which queries you are targeting, you will be able to come up with a more targeted list of keywords to try to rank for.
Plus, the keywords will result in greater conversions of your visitors into either blog subscribers or buyers.
3. Demographic research
The third and final part of keyword research is demographic keyword research.
You know about demographics, right?
Demographic research is a powerful marketing tool. You can use the information you gain in your demographic research to target specific types of people.
Let’s say your target demographic is men ages 18-35 looking to lose weight.
However, you’ve chosen to target the keyword “easy fat loss.”
What you may find is that the majority of people searching for “easy fat loss” are women 30-45. (I’m just using this as an example, so this assumption may or may not be true.)
Some of these tools, such as Keyword Discovery, are particularly structured to enable demographic keyword research.
The more you can segment and analyze your data, the better you will become at identifying demographic keyword trends.
A report like the one below, for example, alerts you to the fact that men and women between the ages of 35 to 54 search for “oscars” at specific times of day.
The demographic information behind some queries is obvious.
Men’s skinny jeans. The demographic is most likely young men.
Amazon books for teenage girls. This demographic could be either a teenage girl or the parent of a teenage girl.
Best foods for pregnancy. Probably a mom-to-be.
By using the right research tools and figuring out which queries your ideal demographic is typing, you’ll be able to be more precise about the keywords you try to rank for.
Here’s a parting word of advice about demographics: narrow it down.
We would all like to think that our product is good for everybody. However, if you can identify your ideal client and demographic and really capitalize on this, making sure every keyword you rank for is something that demographic is searching for, you’ll have a higher conversion rate than if you went too broad with your keywords.
Specific, long-tail queries will draw in the specific and eager customers you want to attract.
Conclusion
Here is what you need to know: Keyword research still matters. It is an integral part of any successful online business.
But basic keyword research on its own will not get your as far as you need to go with your online marketing! Your standard practice of typing a few phrases into Google Keyword Planner and exporting the list into your tracking software isn’t how it’s done anymore.
You have to be willing to dive deeper into your research to uncover the who, what, and why of each of your keywords.
If you can go beyond the basics, you will improve your marketing success.
I’d love to hear about any innovative strategies you know that take keyword research to an advanced level. What methods do you use to go beyond basic keyword research?
Tropical Smoothie Café is giving away free smoothies this afternoon!
Stop into your local Tropical Smoothie Café TODAY between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. to receive afree Jetty Punch Smoothie, a classic strawberry-banana combo.
But there’s one catch.
This Footwear Choice Will Earn You a Free Smoothie
To get your free smoothie, you must wear a pair of flip-flops.That’s because today is National Flip-Flop Day.
The celebration also benefits a good cause: While you get a free drink, Tropical Smoothie Café is collecting donations for Camp Sunshine.
The smoothie chain supports the Maine camp, where children with life-threatening illnesses and their families can enjoy the outdoors while receiving emotional and physical support.
Tropical Smoothie Café has a fundraising goal of $1 million this year, but you don’t have to donate to take advantage of this footwear-inspired freebie.
With more than 400 locations in 40 states, you’re bound to find a free smoothie near you.
Your Turn: Are you wearing flip-flops today? Will you be stopping by your local Tropical Smoothie Café?
Lisa Rowan is a writer, editor and podcaster living in Washington, D.C. She used to wear flip-flops all the time until she had an unfortunate biking incident.
Quite often, I talk about the concept of “financial independence” on The Simple Dollar. Financial independence, as I define it, is having the financial means to be able to survive for the foreseeable future without having to work for money. In other words, you’re living off of investment income (or a very slow withdrawal rate from those investment) and/or proceeds from previous work, like book or album royalties.
That is one audacious goal. It’s not an impossible goal by any means, but it’s a goal that the vast majority of Americans would really have to work hard to achieve. For anyone outside of the top percent or two of earners, it would take many years of spending far less than you earn to be able to make it there.
The thing is, however, that the journey to financial independence doesn’t have to end at financial independence. It can end at other stops along the road. The same exact path can take you to many different places in life.
Let’s roll back the clock on my own story to early 2008.
At that time, Sarah and I were free from debt with the exception of our home mortgage. We had around a year’s worth of living expenses saved up and we had been contributing to our retirement accounts appropriately.
It’s worth noting that over the previous two years, we had seriously cut back on our living expenses. We went from having no children in 2005 to having two children in 2007 and we actually spent substantially less in 2007, mostly due to really cutting back to the things that mattered most.
Aside from that home mortgage, we really were on the road to financial independence at that point. We had a healthy emergency fund. We had a healthy income. We had a lifestyle that didn’t stretch our income. We only had a single mortgage as our debt and it was already starting to shrink pretty rapidly. We were in good shape.
At the same time, however, there were two big things going on in my professional life. One, The Simple Dollar had really taken off and become successful. It was earning some income from advertisements, but it wasn’t nearly as much as I was making from my main job. However, I knew that if I devoted more time to the feeding and care of the site, it would become much bigger and open other doors for me.
At the same time, I was very frustrated with my main job. I liked the people I worked with and I liked the actual work tasks that I did, but those work tasks took up only a handful of hours per week. The rest of the time was filled with bureaucracy and meetings and jumping through hoops. This had been a gradual change from my first year or so in that position, where I barely had any bureaucracy at all – during those years, I loved the job. I could feel my passion dwindling and my frustration growing by the day.
Given all of that, I made the decision to quit my job. It took a huge psychic load off my shoulders and allowed me to focus on building The Simple Dollar into something great. Yes, our income dropped like crazy, especially at first, but our reduced spending and our emergency fund made it possible for us.
This choice was only possible because we had committed strongly to spending less than we earned and we stuck with that for two years before making that leap. In other words, we rode the path to financial independence for two years, but we made an earlier stop than we expected.
That’s the beautiful part about the road to financial independence: it doesn’t have to just lead directly to financial independence. It has many, many potential stops along the way, stops that are available to you because you were practicing smart personal finance in your day to day life.
Things like quitting your job to take on a new challenge, starting a side business without taking on a loan, taking a career risk that might not necessarily pay off but has some incredible upside, moving abruptly to follow love, or adopting a special needs child are the types of life challenges that can be very difficult when you’re living a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle, but are quite doable if you’ve been walking along the path to financial independence.
These kinds of things can even represent your big final goal if that’s what you prefer. The specific tactics might shift a bit – you might not put all of your savings into the stock market if your goal is more short term, for example – but the big principle of saving far less than you earn and doing something productive with the difference still holds absolutely true.
So, how can you do this? What are the key initial steps for getting on the path to financial independence – or whatever goal you might have in mind?
First of all, you absolutely have to commit to spending less than you earn – a lot less. For many people, that sounds painful and miserable. If you’re like almost anyone who has considered that kind of change in life, your mind immediately flew straight to the small handful of nonessential expenses that are the most important to you and you rightfully think that it would be miserable to give those things up.
The thing is, the vast majority of ways to cut back on your spending are connected to the things that you don’t care much about. This is truly one of the keys of personal finance, in my opinion. If you’re honest enough with yourself to identify the small handful of expenses that you truly do care about versus the very large number of expenses that are of lesser importance, it becomes easy to save for the future.
I mean, is buying name brand items at the store really part of your identity if the store brands are functionally identical? If it’s not, buy store brands and you’ll start saving 30% or so of your grocery bill. If you kept the services needed to watch your two or three favorite television programs and didn’t worry about the rest, how much would you trim off of your cable/satellite/Netflix bill? Is there any drawback to your life whatsoever in finding ways to trim your energy bill through improving the energy efficiency of your home with better light bulbs, air sealing, and so on? If you’re hardly ever at home, why have a big home? You could just move to a much smaller home or a small apartment and save a bundle.
Just apply this kind of critical eye to everything that you spend and keep track of all of the ways you cut back on that spending. Total it all up and set up automatic weekly transfers from your checking account to slurp out all of those savings and put them elsewhere, out of sight and out of mind.
Notice that none of this involves giving up anything you really, truly care about. I’m pretty picky about the foods I buy, for example, and I didn’t have to give that up one little bit. I have some hobbies that I dearly love and I can still support those quite well, too. I just gave up a lot of lesser things, things that weren’t nearly as important to me.
At first, your goal should be to wipe out debts. If you’re holding on to any debts – and especially anything besides a mortgage – you need to get rid of those as quickly as possible. Take the money you’re saving and apply it as an extra payment each month to your highest interest debt and keep it up until your debts are all gone.
The big benefit of this is that you’ll no longer have those minimum monthly payments, which means that your monthly expenses are far lower than before. That makes it even easier to save a lot for the future and to tolerate a drop in income if you decide to switch careers.
Another key part of this is automation. Once your debts are paid off, you need to set things up so that you don’t have to think about it to start saving for these goals. There’s nothing more tempting than a lot of money sitting in your checking account, after all.
The best method is to sign up for an account at another bank or, better, an investment house like Vanguard, and set up an automatic transfer on a weekly basis at an amount that eats up the money you used to be spending on relatively unimportant things and debt payments. Then just sit back and watch the money build.
This puts you on a path where you can do those things you dream of. You can quit your job if you’re unhappy – trust me, I did it. You can chase your dreams. You can do pretty much anything. It just requires giving up a bunch of things that, in all honesty, you don’t really care about, and that’s harder than you think.
The Bank of England announced on Thursday (16 June) that it would keep interest rates at their current record low of 0.5%. The Monetary Policy Committee repeated its warnings about the potential adverse effects on the economy of a Brexit.
The Bank of England announced on Thursday (16 June) that it would keep interest rates at their current record low of 0.5%. The Monetary Policy Committee repeated its warnings about the potential adverse effects on the economy of a Brexit.
Ordering the right-sized pizza is always a challenge.
With the phone in my hand, about to press the green button to call my favorite delivery chain, I freeze.
How hungry am I, really? Will I eat the leftovers? Do Ineedthe leftovers? (The answer is almost always ‘yes.’)
Or I’m at a restaurant, spastically throwing my hands around making a pizza shape as I ask the server just how big the 16-inch pie is.
Still, I always feel like I’m taking a blind guess.
But I don’t need to worry anymore — and neither do you — becauseNPR’s Planet Moneydid the math:To get the most pizza for your money, always order the biggest size.
How to Save Money on Pizza
Don’t worry about breaking out the protractor or trying to remember pi (only the pizza kind of pie) — the team at Planet Money did that part for us. Here’s what they found:
Although the 16-inch pizza might not look much bigger than the 8-incher, when you do the math, you’re getting a heck of a lot more pizza for each cent you spend.
Think back to your high school geometry class.
A circle’s area increases with itssquareradius. Remember the peskyπr2formula? So a 16-inch pizza is actuallyfour timesthe size of an 8-inch pizza.
That’s four times the amount of melty cheese and delicious Canadian bacon (or greasy pepperoni, if that’s your thing).
And buying the smaller size will cost you, found writer Quoctrung Bui, who analyzed 74,476 prices from 3,678 pizza restaurants nationwide.
“To get the same amount of pizza you get in a 16-inch pizza, you’d have to spend an extra $2.35 on 14-inch pizzas, or an extra $16.41 on 8-inch pizzas,” he concludes.Here’s what you’d spend on each size to get the same amount of pizza:
Who’s willing to spend an extra $16 on the same amount of pizza?!
So the answer to my weekly dilemma is pretty clear:Always order the bigger pizza, and welcome the leftovers with open arms.
Save Even More on Your Next Pizza Order
If you’re looking to strike more deals on yourlargepizza, trydeal-stacking.
Look for coupons and promo codes, and keep an eye out for special promotions likethis one.
Or stake out every store that sells Pepsi and search for the pizza emoji.
Finally, you’ll want to put a note on your calendar for February 9. It’sNational Pizza Day(of course it’s a holiday), which will guarantee us gobs of coupons and deals — and extra cheese, please.
Your Turn: What size pizza do you order? Have you ever done the math?
Carson Kohler (@CarsonKohler) is a junior writer at The Penny Hoarder. After recently completing grad school, she focuses her time and energy on saving money — and surviving the move back in with her parents.
Thougheveryone’s situation is different — and you should carefully assesswhat works for you— a Reddit user recently created aneasy-to-follow flowchartthat provides a great starting point.
This Flowchart is So Simple, It’s Brilliant
The flowchart presents a series of yes/no questions that explain exactly how you shouldprioritize your spendingand investing.
Instead of going into too much detail, I’ll just share the darn thing with you.
Then, below, I’ll share related posts that have tons of advice and tips to help you with each step.
Though the flowchart is undoubtedly straightforward and helpful, putting it into action is a whole other story.
But have no fear; that’s why I’ve included tons of links below.
Click on them to learn more about your options —no matter where you stand on the path tofinancial freedom, I guarantee you’ll learn something!
Susan Shain, senior writer for The Penny Hoarder, is always seeking adventure on a budget. Visit her blog at susanshain.com, or say hi on Twitter @susan_shain.
Hove is the place to be if you’re in a well-paid job and enjoy the urban lifestyle, a new survey has revealed.
Hove is the place to be if you’re in a well-paid job and enjoy the urban lifestyle, a new survey has revealed.
Research of Land Registry data by Lloyds Bank has found that the BN3 postcode in Hove is the most sought-after town in England to buy a property if you’re a young professional.
By Christy Schutz One of the benefits of being a Work at Home Woman is that most anything I need is at my fingertips. I have my home office, which is adequately outfitted with the technology and tools I need. And, naturally, since I work at home, any personal item I might need is a short […]
Source The Work at Home Woman http://ift.tt/1UCUU60
