Here is a look at PennDOT roadwork plans in Monroe County for the weeks ahead:Delaware Water Gap BoroughInterstate 80 at Exit 310 (Delaware Water Gap); bridge construction; nighttime lane restriction in both directions. This work is related to the ongoing I-80 Exit 310 project. Aug. 20-24; 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.; rain will not cause delays.Stroud TownshipState Route 191 between state Route 611 and Northampton County line; spray [...]
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الجمعة، 17 أغسطس 2018
Hire Heroes Salutes Military Members and Vets With Virtual Job Fair Aug. 23
Hire Heroes USA is holding a free virtual career fair on Aug. 23 between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. EDT — aka between 1000 and 1500 hours.
According to the site’s FAQ page, participants only need a computer and internet access, as employers will communicate via onlinechats. Updated versions of Google Chrome or Firefox are recommended for viewing and hearing presentations from employers.
Attendees can register for the event on the site and upload their resumes, then search the 38 participating employers by location and positions available.
When they find a company of interest, job seekers can apply for a position or sign up for chat sessions to ask questions and learn more about the company.
Employers and attendees can also request private chats to discuss specific opportunities. Employers may offer video one-on-one chats, but these sessions are not required if job seekers don’t have access to video conferencing.
The site encourages job seekers to prepare questions to ask in the chat room and develop an elevator pitch for private interactions with potential employers. We have additional tips from veterans about finding a civilian career.
If this virtual fair isn’t for you, check out our list of other employment resources for veterans.
Tiffany Wendeln Connors is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
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Follow in Phileas Fogg’s Footsteps Around the World With This Gin Dream Job
For example, I’m sure there’s a fair amount of people — myself included — who think that jet-setting around the world on someone else’s dime is a pipe dream. But two companies have come together to make that dream a reality.
The gin brand Bombay Sapphire and Mr. Fogg’s, a group of Victorian-themed bars inspired by Verne’s novel “Around the World in 80 Days,” have joined forces to organize a competition fit for the bravest of gin-loving adventurers.
One lucky winner will be chosen to serve as an ambassador for the two brands. The mission?
Go on an all-expenses paid, 80-day journey around the world, following in fictional explorer Phileas Fogg’s footsteps and hitting locations such as Hong Kong, Paris, New York, Bombay and more. And all the while, you’ll be sipping on as many gin and tonics as your heart desires.
And if that doesn’t sound awesome enough on its own, here’s even more good news: You get to bring a companion on your travels. Huzzah!
Alas, this is technically a job, which means they aren’t just paying you to have a good time.
Along the way, you and your traveling buddy will be responsible for documenting the trip through social media and blog posts.
On top of recording your exploits, you’ll also collect various ingredients such as herbs, botanicals and spices. At the end of your 80 days, you’ll return to the soon-to-be opened addition to Mr. Fogg’s bar collection: Society of Exploration. There you’ll use the gathered ingredients to create your very own “Around the World” cocktail.
All flights, alternative travel methods and accommodation will be paid for, a spokesperson confirmed to me through email. And on top of that, you’ll be given spending money throughout the trip. Bombay Sapphire ambassadors will also organize various “once in a lifetime experiences.”
The overall value of the trip isn’t specified on the job listing, but the spokesperson informed me that the rough estimate is $20,000.
How to Become the Gin-Drinkin’, Globe-Trottin’ Ambassador
So, what does one have to do to snag this all-expenses-paid adventure?
For starters, the candidate should be “courageous, lionhearted and valiant.” And if that doesn’t quite clear it up for you, here’s a few more qualifications:
- At least 21 years old
- Social media savvy and a strong online presence
- Good photography skills
- Superb writing skills
- Brand awareness of Mr. Fogg’s and Bombay Sapphire
- A valid passport
Applicants should also be familiar with “Around the World in 80 Days,” have a passion for adventure and be available to travel between August and November of 2018.
Sounds pretty great, right? Go ahead, mix yourself a Tom Collins for some gin-spiration and fill out this application. But make sure you submit it by the deadline, August 27.
Kaitlyn Blount is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder. She is suddenly feeling quite thirsty. Hey, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere, right?
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
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Jobs, Jobs, Jobs! It's a Good Time to Find Work in America
Are you looking for a job? Americans who want one are discovering there are plenty of employment opportunities."What we're seeing is really for the first time also in history we're seeing that there are more jobs available than there are actually people to fill them," said Alfredo Ortiz, CEO of Job Creators Network.
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13 Ways to Improve Your Engagement Rates on Your Instagram Posts
Social media marketing has become a necessity for brand survival in today’s day and age.
But simply creating profiles on these platforms and hoping the rest will take care of itself is not an effective strategy. You need to be active on social media.
While you may have already recognized the importance of social sites such as Facebook, it’s time for you to focus on other platforms—specifcally, Instagram.
Instagram, with its features and benefits, was part of the top social media trends of 2018 I wrote about.
Instagram has more than 1 billion users. Of those users, 500 million use the platform on a daily basis.
Only Facebook and YouTube have more active users.
For the most part, Instagram users are younger. Nearly 60% of Instagram users in the United States are under the age of 30.
This is important to recognize if you’re segmenting your target audience with generational marketing.
How can you use Instagram to promote your brand effectively?
Your content might be great, but if nobody sees what you’re posting, you won’t have results. That’s why you need to focus on engagement metrics:
- likes
- comments
- views
- interactions
- clicks
You need to measure all these to determine the success of your Instagram marketing campaigns.
If you need some help with this, I can steer you in the right direction. I’ve identified and explained the top 13 ways to improve your engagement rates on Instagram.
Review the tips I’ve explained in this guide, and apply the tactics to your brand’s page.
1. Utilize hashtags
Do you remember the days when we used to refer to the tic-tac-toe board as a pound sign?
Well, social media changed that symbol forever. Now the symbol (#) at the bottom right-hand side of your telephone keypad is more commonly referred to as a hashtag.
As a social media marketer, you need to incorporate hashtags into your Instagram strategy.
Research shows that the majority of posts by the top brands on social media only use a few hashtags:
If the top brands are using them, your brand needs to as well.
Furthermore, 70% of Instagram hashtags are branded. Posts with only one hashtag receive 12.6% greater engagement than posts without hashtags.
When deciding what hashtags to use, you want to be broad to appeal to the widest possible audience.
However, hashtags that are too broad will not stand out. On the other hand, if your hashtag is extremely unique, nobody will search for it.
You need to find some middle ground for your hashtag.
Even though the top brands aren’t using many hashtags, research shows that engagement rates reach their peak when a post has nine hashtags.
It’s also worth noting that hashtags with 21 characters have the highest engagement rates. And 24-character hashtags were second on this list.
You don’t need to be shy with the number of hashtags or characters you’re using. Just don’t go overboard, or you’ll appear too spammy.
2. Promote your Instagram posts on all your distribution channels
To have higher and more valuable engagement rates, you need to increase your social following.
If your social media marketing strategy is effective, you can convert your Instagram followers into customers. This needs to be your ultimate goal.
To get more followers, you need to promote your Instagram profile on all your distribution channels:
- include a follow link in your marketing emails
- share information about your Instagram posts on your website
- blog about it
- use your other social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to promote content you posted on Instagram.
As a result, you’ll get more traffic to your Instagram page. Because of this increased traffic more people will follow your page.
Even if people don’t follow you right away, at least they are exposed to your brand. Now your content may appear on their page, and they might engage with your posts in the future.
3. Run a contest
Contests are another great way to gain exposure for your brand.
In addition to the increased brand awareness, contests run on Instagram have been proven to dramatically boost engagement rates.
It’s because contests encourage user-generated content.
Plus, the fact that you’re giving something away to the winner entices people to participate. Overall, it’s a winning strategy.
The best contests incorporate hashtags, which is something I discussed earlier.
Set up a unique hashtag for each contest you run.
It will allow you to track all participants’ submissions.
Further, this will make it easier for you to judge the winner.
And this unique hashtag will also be a way through which other people can see your brand and its popularity.
Instagram users who may have never heard of your brand might see posts from contest participants.
As a result, these users may be enticed to follow your page. Once they start following you, they will be more likely to engage with your content.
4. Add emojis to your captions
Emojis.
These little animations are no longer just for your personal messages. Brands are starting to use them as well to drive engagements.
In fact, 56% of Instagram profiles use emojis.
In the last year, emoji usage on Instagram went up by 19%. Adding emojis to your post increases engagement by 2.07%.
This makes sense. Emojis in captions add a personal touch to your posts.
Users will feel as if they’re looking at posts from a friend as opposed to some giant corporation. The added comfort your followers will feel when seeing posts with emojis will encourage them to engage with your posts.
Besides that, you need to learn how to write Instagram captions that drive engagement.
Ask your followers to comment on your posts with their favorite emoji or an emoji that best describes the reaction to your content.
I expect the trends related to emoji usage to continue rising in the foreseeable future.
5. Share videos
While Instagram may have started as a platform for sharing photos, the social network has adapted to the new trends and made appropriate changes.
Initially, Instagram had a 15-second limit on videos when the feature was first made available in 2013. But that number jumped to 60 seconds a few years later.
As a result, the amount of time users spent watching videos increased by 40% in the first six months of the change.
It’s no secret that consumers want to see more video content.
But how will videos affect your engagement rates? Let’s take a look:
As you can see, videos on Instagram typically get more than double the number of comments compared to photos.
While photos get more likes than videos, your Instagram videos will still get plenty of views, even if users aren’t liking them.
Mix up your content, and start posting more videos. I’m not saying you need to shy away from photos completely, but try to find a balance between the two.
6. Don’t be boring
As I just finished saying, you need to change up your content strategy on Instagram.
Posting similar photos from different angles and just changing the caption slightly will bore your followers. Nobody wants to follow accounts like that, and people certainly won’t engage with your posts.
Post funny content. If you make people laugh, they’ll be more likely to tag their friends in the comments.
This will help increase your engagement metrics.
If it fits with your brand image, you can even post content that’s edgy, controversial, or even somewhat sexual in nature—anything that’s going to raise some eyebrows and grab the attention of users.
Share crazy news. Be provocative.
Post surprising or shocking photos and videos.
Just don’t do anything that might damage your brand reputation.
But try to make sure you’re not posting the same thing over and over again. That’s boring and won’t drive engagement.
7. Know the best times to post
To get high engagement on your posts, you need to make sure your audience sees your content.
That’s why you need to determine the best times to post.
I’m referring to the time of day in addition to the best days of the week.
There are lots of different answers to this question, depending on whom you ask. That said, I like these results from CoSchedule:
Their research shows that Mondays and Thursdays are the best days of the week to post although, for the most part, your metrics on weekdays will be pretty similar.
Engagement on Sundays is the lowest.
That’s probably because people are out and about doing things on the weekend. If they’re busy, they won’t be active on social media as much.
The times you post will also be determined by your target audience.
For example, let’s say your brand is targeting consumers who live in the United States. It’s worth noting that 80% of the US population is located in the Eastern and Central Time Zones.
These are the types of things you need to take into consideration before you post something.
8. Form relationships with social influencers
In addition to sharing your Instagram content on your distribution channels, you can leverage your relationships with social influencers to expose your profile to a wider audience.
These people can promote your brand, products, and profile to their followers. Since social influencers have great engagement rates with their audiences, those results will translate to your page.
That’s because users trust social influencers.
If they endorse your brand, it will increase the chances of more people viewing your page. Now that they’ve landed on your page, they’ll engage with your content.
You can combine this strategy with one of the other tips I’ve discussed, such as contests.
Let a social influencer give away one of your products as a promotional campaign for your Instagram page.
Influencers are also great options for account takeovers, but we’ll discuss this strategy in greater detail shortly.
9. Post pictures of faces
You know you need to post content on a regular basis. But what type of photos should you be posting?
I highly recommend posting images with faces.
That’s because photos with faces receive 38% more likes than photos without faces.
Look at how Nike used this concept on its Instagram profile:
As you can see, eight of these nine consecutive posts contain faces.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the only type of content you should be posting. But when in doubt, share a picture that shows someone’s face.
10. Add subtitles to your videos
We already established you need to share video content on Instagram to drive engagement.
But I’ve got a way for you to make your video strategy even better. Add subtitles.
Video subtitles increase view times by 12%.
It’s worth noting that on Facebook, 85% of videos are watched without sound.
Since Facebook owns Instagram, we can safely assume those numbers translate to Instagram as well.
11. Tag your location
You posted a picture of someone’s face and added a hashtag to your caption. It’s time to post, right?
Not so fast.
Before you post your photos, you should tag their locations. Research shows that posts with tagged locations have 79% higher engagement rates.
You can add a location tag even if you aren’t actually there. If your office is in San Francisco but you’re trying to promote something in Miami, you can still add Miami to the tag.
Just don’t get caught with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background of your photo, or users will know you’re not in Miami.
Check out this example from Lululemon.
This image was shared on July 28, 2018.
The date corresponds with the Hermosa Beach Open, which is an AVP beach volleyball tournament.
Was this photo actually taken on this day at this location? Maybe. But maybe not.
Either way, it’s promoting beach volleyball gear during a beach volleyball tournament at that location. So the location fits the post.
12. Announce a new post in your story
You need to learn how to use Instagram story to promote your business.
When you add a new post to your profile, announce it on your story. This will double your engagement metrics.
First, you’ll get a view and impression on your story.
Then, users will be enticed to view the new post. After that, you can encourage them to like and comment on the post by implementing the other strategies I’ve discussed so far.
13. Leverage takeovers
This relates to the discussion about social influencers.
An influencer may allow you to take over their account for a period of time. You can post content to their story or even broadcast a live video.
On the flip side, you can let an influencer take over your account. Here’s an example from Shopify:
Amber Mac not only took over the Shopify account but also promoted it on her profile as well.
Now her followers have a reason to visit the Shopify profile to see what she’s up to over there. This will boost the engagement metrics during that time period.
Furthermore, if those users like the content you post as a guest of another account, they may end up following your page, which increases your chances of having additional engagements with those users moving forward.
Conclusion
Your Instagram profile is a valuable marketing tool. But you’ll be successful only if you know how to use this tool correctly.
Ultimately, your content needs to drive engagements.
Getting users to like, comment, view, share, and click on your posts will increase your brand exposure and help you generate more leads.
As a result, your business will be more profitable.
If you’re unhappy with your current engagement rates or if you think there’s room for improvement, refer to this guide.
Implement the tactics listed above to boost your Instagram engagement rates.
How is your brand using Instagram to focus on user engagement?
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How Does a Target Retirement Fund Actually Work?
Tim writes in:
Question for the Mailbag: how exactly does a target retirement fund actually work? Every time I read about it it makes less sense.
This did start off as a question in the mailbag, but the answer became so long that it seemed sensible to give Tim’s question its own article.
Let’s start off talking about risk and reward.
There are a ton of different investment options out there. They differentiate themselves in a bunch of different ways. Some are really low risk, but don’t offer much return, like a savings account. Even in the best online savings account, you’re going to earn only 1% to 2% a year, but there is essentially zero chance of losing money.
Over the course of 10 years, an investment like this might see returns each year of 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, and 1.5%, giving an average of (you guessed it) 1.5%. While the average is pretty low, notice that there is no individual year where money is lost. There is no time in which it is “bad” to have to rely on your investment, because this investment is as reliable as can be.
As you start adding risk, you generally start adding more return, like, say, VBTLX (the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund), which offers a better average annual return (around 4%), but has a chance of losing money in a particular given year.
Over the course of 10 years, an investment like this might see returns each year of 4.5%, 3.3%, 4.8%, 4.9%, 4.5%, 4.3%, -0.5%, 4.7%, 4.8%, and 4.7%, giving an average of 4%. The annual returns are fairly consistent, but note that -0.5% year. In that year, the investment lost money, and there will definitely be years like that over the long haul.
Those lower-than-average years – and particularly those losing years – are problematic. Let’s say you’ve had a run of above average years and you’ve decided you have just enough money in your investment to make retirement work. Then, as soon as you retire, that investment spends the next year losing money, throwing off your math entirely and making retirement look real dicey. While it’s not too bad in the case of this investment, the riskier you get, the more likely this scenario is to happen. Those year-to-year variations are often referred to as volatility – an investment is volatile if it has a lot of those variations.
Let’s add some more risk and look at the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (VTSMX). It has an average annual return since inception of 9.72%, which seems sweet, right? Let’s look closer.
Let’s look at the last 10 years of annual returns for it in reverse order: 21.05%, 12.53%, 0.29%, 12.43%, 33.35%, 16.25%, 0.96%, 17.09%, 28.70%, and -37.04%. Three of those ten years are worse than a savings account. One of them involves losing more than 37% of your investment.
This investment is even more volatile. Consider that you’re just starting your retirement and you have your money all in this investment and you hit one of those 40% loss years. That’s going to change the math of your retirement drastically. You’ll be pulling money out to live on as the market drops, which means that you will have depleted a much higher percentage of your retirement savings than you should in a single year and you’ll probably have to do that for the next two or three years while you wait for the market to rebound. This leaves you with a permanently depleted retirement savings, which either means very lean living late in life or a return to the workforce.
Want to see what that looks like in numbers? Let’s say you have $1 million invested in this and you retire, deciding to withdraw $50,000 a year to live on. That’s 5% a year, which is pretty risky, but you believe in that long term average return. Well, during the first year, the investment loses 40% of its value. It drops to $600,000… but you took out $50,000 to live on, so it’s actually just $550,000. Going forward, if you take $50,000 a year out of that, you’re going to go bankrupt in about 15 years (if not sooner, depending on volatility).
You can keep adding more and more risk and get a higher average annual return, but the key word here is average. You can look at things like the VSIAX (the Vanguard Small-Cap Value Index Fund), which has a very high average annual return but is primed to take an absolute beating the next time the stock market declines, meaning it’ll lose a large percentage of its value as those businesses struggle during an economic downturn (causing some investors to sell) and other investors flee to safer investments. You eventually reach investments that are tantamount to gambling, like cryptocurrency, which is so volatile that you might triple your investment or lose half of it in a month or two.
So, what’s the message here? If you have a lot of years before you retire, you want your money in something pretty aggressive that has really good average annual returns, but might have a few individual years that are really rough. If you don’t need the money anytime soon, those individual bad years don’t really matter to you – in fact, they’re kind of a blessing for you because it’s cheaper to buy into an investment when the market is down.
As you start getting close to retirement and actually retiring, those individual years start to become much more important. Unless you have a very large amount in your retirement account, you can’t afford one of those big down years that are somewhat likely to eventually happen with an aggressive investment. If it happens, you’re going to be right back in the workforce.
The solution, then, is to be aggressive with your retirement investments when you’re young and then, when you approach retirement, move your investments to less aggressive and less volatile investments that you can rely on more.
The best way to start understanding what a target-date index fund does is to look at some people who are on the road to retirement.
Angie is 25 years old. She’s not intending to retire for 40 years. Because her retirement is so far off, she can afford quite a lot of risk in her retirement savings. She can afford to invest in things that have a pretty good average annual return that’s paired with the risk of enormous loss. She might put her money into the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index and/or the Vanguard Small-Cap Value Index Fund. Her goal is to build as much value as she can over the next 40 years and chasing a high average annual return is the best way to do that.
Brad is 45 years old. He’s not intending to retire for 20 years. He’s probably still going to be pretty aggressive, but the idea of going less volatile might start popping up in his head. He still wants a very high average annual return, but there will come a point soon where he needs to make some changes.
Connor is 60 years old. He’s thinking of retiring in five years. He’s got almost enough to retire in his retirement savings. At this point, he really can’t afford to have everything in an aggressive investment that might drop 40% of its value. So, he might leave some of it in stocks, but the rest might be moved to bonds. His average annual return might be lower, but he’s no longer running the risk of losing 40% of his entire retirement savings.
Dana is 70 years old. If her retirement savings keeps growing in a slow and stable fashion, returning just a few percent per year but not losing a bunch of value in any given year, she’ll be fine. She probably wants to be mostly in the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index and maybe even have some in a money market fund (akin to a savings account with very little risk).
As you can see from these stories, as you get older and closer to retirement, it makes a lot of sense to gradually shift your investments from highly aggressive investments to more conservative ones. The issue, though, is how does one know when to start making those transitions? Furthermore, will you remember to do it, and to do it right? Those aren’t easy questions for individuals saving for retirement. It’s not entirely clear when to do this or how to do this, and many individuals aren’t going to put in the research and time to do it. People just want to put away the money and then have money when it’s time to retire.
That’s where target retirement funds come in. They do this automatically.
Let’s look back at 25 year old Angie. She aims to retire in about 40 years. So, theoretically, she wants to choose a pretty aggressive investment to put her retirement savings into. However, when she’s in her late forties or early fifties, she might want to begin slowly making things more conservative, and this gets even more true as she reaches retirement age and then retires. She doesn’t want a nasty shock when she’s old.
That’s what a target retirement fund does automatically. If Angie is 25, she’s going to retire sometime around 2060, so she might buy into a Target Retirement 2060 fund with her retirement savings. Right now, that target retirement fund will be really aggressive, but as the decades pass and the 2040s arrive, it’s going to slowly become less aggressive, and in the 2050s, it becomes even less so. It cuts out the volatility in exchange for a lower average annual return as it gets closer to its target date.
How does it do that? A target retirement fund is just made up of a bunch of different funds, and as time passes, the people managing the target retirement fund slowly move money out of some of the funds inside of it and move it into other funds.
So, for example, a Target Retirement 2060 fund might today be made up of 50% VSIAX and 50% VTSMX – in other words, it’s really aggressive, entirely invested in stocks, and some of those stocks are small companies that will either grow like gangbusters (big returns) or flame out (big losses). That’s okay for now – volatility is completely fine when you’re that far from retirement. What you want is a big average annual return over the next 25 years or so.
However, at some point down the road, probably in the mid-2040s, that fund will start becoming less aggressive. The money within the fund will be moved by the fund managers into things like bond funds or real estate, things that don’t have quite so high of an average annual return but aren’t going to see years of big losses, either.
By the time 2060 rolls around, all of the money in that fund will be in pretty safe stuff, which means you can rely on that fund to be stable in retirement.
That’s what a retirement fund does: It’s made up of a bunch of different investments that are gradually moved from highly aggressive things to less aggressive things as the target date approaches. When the “target” year is many, many years in the future, the fund will be really aggressive and really volatile, aiming for big returns over the next two decades at the cost of some really rough individual years. As the “target” year gets closer and closer, the fund gets less and less aggressive and less and less volatile, becoming something you can rely on.
That’s why, for people who aren’t really involved in managing the nuances of their own retirement savings, a target retirement fund with a target year pretty close to their retirement year is a really solid choice. It just manages that gradual shift for you without you having to lift a finger.
Good luck!
More by Trent Hamm:
- Why ‘Beating the Stock Market’ Is a Lie
- Life Without Retirement Savings
- The Incredibly Valuable Role of Frugality in Investing
- How Do I Even Get Started Investing for Retirement?
The post How Does a Target Retirement Fund Actually Work? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
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My Husband Said He’d Pay Bills. He Lied. Now His Debt Secrets Haunt Me
You know that saying, “Things get worse before they get better”? Buckle in. Your already long journey isn’t over yet.
Emotionally, this is basically the worst. You have these debts looming over you, no confidence in your longtime spouse and fear about the best way to get out. Your first steps to extricate yourself need to be strategic. Businesslike. Not emotionless, but with your emotions put off to the side for a little while.
First, get a free credit report to take stock of what’s at stake here. What debts are in both your names instead of just yours or just his? Those will be the ones you need to worry about most. Divorce typically doesn’t free couples from shared debt obligations, which is part of the reason so many people get stuck communicating with their terrible exes for longer than they’d like.
The same goes for your home — if you want out from under it, you’re probably going to need to either sell it together (and take the loss for the work it needs) or strike a deal between you about who keeps the house.
Pulling a credit report and getting your finances (as much as you have access to) organized will help in the next step, which is getting some professional assistance. Based on what you noted about verbal abuse, I’m concerned about your safety. Consider contacting a victim advocate who can help you develop a plan to exit this relationship safely. Even if you think you’ve got this handled, it helps to have backup to support you, not just emotionally but with the logistics.
It may also be a good use of inheritance money to secure an attorney you trust. Because you have property and other shared assets with your husband, you’ll want some help with the nitty-gritty of the divorce proceedings.
Remember, you don’t have to mutually want a divorce to get out of this relationship. You can be the plaintiff who files against him.
Consider your safety first. You might lose money at the end of all this, either because you had to pay off debts to get rid of them or because you had to spend on legal counsel. But it’s money well-spent if it can provide peace of mind, safety and eventual financial freedom.
The inbox is open. Submit a question or send your worries to dearpenny@thepennyhoarder.com, and I’ll see what I can do to help.
Disclaimer: Chosen questions and featured answers will appear in The Penny Hoarder's “Dear Penny” column. I won't be able to answer every single letter (I can only type so fast!). We reserve the right to edit and publish your questions. Don’t worry — your identity will remain anonymous. I don’t have a psychology, accounting, finance or legal degree, so my advice is for general informational purposes only. I do, however, promise to give you honest advice based on my own insights and real-life experiences.
Lisa Rowan is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
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10 Fabulous Freebies for Bloggers
One of the most popular ways to earn money from home is through owning and operating your own blog. As a blogger, I can tell you one thing — you get out what you put in. Success doesn’t happen with writing a couple of good articles. It can be frustrating, depressing, and oddly enjoyable. There […]
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