Are you of the philosophy that playing dress-up should never have an age limit? Do you spend time and thought into picking out your outfits daily? Do you believe that the right handbag can help you take on the day? If yes to any (or all!) of these, you might be a fashionista. You may […]
The post Fashion Jobs: Work-at-Home Careers for Fashionistas appeared first on The Work at Home Woman.
What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to summaries of five or fewer words. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Using rewards card for everything
2. Thoughts on Monat
3. Work, motivation, and retirement
4. Campfire cooking advice
5. Using 403(b) loan for debt
6. Uses for old spices
7. Easy beginning investment book
8. Cast iron worth the work?
9. Libra?
10. David Bach
11. Usefulness of cookbooks
12. Privilege
Sometimes, the questions are plentiful and the answers are easy. Sometimes, it’s the intro that’s hard.
On with the questions.
What do you think of the idea of putting every possible expense on a rewards credit card and then paying it off in full each month? This not only gets me rewards but also gives me some protection on everything I buy and keeps my actual checking account safe.
– Jerry
This works if and only if you have a very, very firm grasp on your spending and aren’t spending more than you earn. This can be easy to lose track of with a credit card because it’s so easy to just swipe for everything.
I absolutely would not recommend this for anyone who has had any problems accumulating credit card debt in the last, say, decade or so.
If you have that kind of firm grasp, then running everything you can through a credit card with a good rewards program and then paying it off in full every month makes a good deal of sense. You’ll likely accumulate quite a lot of rewards points as time goes on and it makes financial management easier. Just watch very, very carefully for any sort of spending increases, as that’s a sign that this whole system is in danger of falling apart leaving you holding a bunch of credit card debt.
My sister has started selling this Monat shampoo and I think it’s a scam. She has convinced several of her friends to start using the shampoo and cut her hair way different supposedly to show off how great the shampoo his but her hair has always been shiny. She keeps trying to get me to sell it too but the whole thing seems like Mary Kay or Amway. Do you know anything about this?
– Audrey
You pegged it – it’s pretty much just like Mary Kay and Amway. Monat is a network marketing company with shampoo as the product this time around.
In short, Monat works like every other network marketing company. It requires people who sell it to pay a significant up-front fee to become a salesperson for the product. For that fee, Monat gives the individual salespeople a bunch of marketing material – in essence, the salespeople on the ground paid a ton for marketing material that they then use to sell Monat. They also get a commission for what they sell. They also get a cut of anything sold by anyone else they convince to be a Monat salesperson.
This is almost exactly how every other network marketing business works, with a few insignificant variations. It’s all about selling to your friends and family and trying to convince people to start selling it so you can get a cut of their sales.
It essentially functions like a pyramid scheme, where the only people who really make money are the people at the very top – the people who actually make the marketing materials and the handful of initial people who got a lot of people to sign up through them. Everyone else ends up with a bunch of overpriced marketing materials and rarely recoups their cost while often just annoying their friends by pushing products that their friends really don’t want to buy.
Stay away. There are far better ways to make money than this.
61 years old, set to retire with state pension and additional 403(b) at 63, don’t plan on touching SS until max benefits and then scale back 403(b) withdrawals. In short, I am set for retirement. The problem is that I have nineteen months to go and I just want to be retired. I have to force myself to go to work and I find myself counting the minutes and hours every day. This doesn’t appear to have really affected my work as of yet as I just had a positive performance review. I don’t want to be a deadbeat employee but I just hate going to work. I have to last out these last 19 months so just quitting now isn’t an option. What can I do?
– Otis
I don’t know exactly what your job entails, but there are a number of things you can do to make this time go better.
Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do is start transferring your domain knowledge to other workers who will be filling your role when you’re gone. What are the things that you know how to do really well that others may not know to do? What things do you just take care of and fix? What ordinary routines do you handle?
One thing you might want to start doing is thoroughly documenting all of that knowledge. I found that, as I was leaving my previous job, I very much couldn’t wait until my last day, but the one thing that really clicked with me was writing a ton of documentation for my replacement. I wrote out step-by-step operating procedures for all of my normal routines. I wrote out step-by-step explanations for how to solve a number of common problems. This filled up a lot of time at work as the clock ran out on my tenure.
Another approach is to take on a mentee. Look for someone who’s an up and comer at work and take them under your wing, guiding them as to how to make the most out of their career. What things can they avoid? What help can you give them as you’re getting ready to leave? Choose someone who could really use the opportunities, who might remind you of yourself a little when you were younger.
Another good thing you can do is to make it your goal to leave a positive mark on the lives of the people you’re working with. Go in there with the aim of being friendly and kind and building up other people. Try to leave the workplace in a better state than it is right now.
These things can fill a lot of your time, so let them. Let such things be the focus of your last year and a half at this job, to leave the people there and the job in a better place than it is right now, and give the people you think are deserving of opportunity as much help and opportunity as you can give them.
Loved your recent post on camping basics. Do you have any advice on how to make anything other than sandwiches and hot dogs when camping?
– Mary
This could be a post all its own (and it might be someday soon), but here are the big tips that come to mind.
First of all, get a Dutch oven. A Dutch oven is a cast iron pot that you can put literally on your campfire and scoop some coals on top to cook pretty much anything. Just get a good campfire going with a bed of coals, then put your meal in the Dutch oven, set it on the campfire with a hook, then scoop a few coals on top with a long-handled spoon. When you first get started, follow some campfire Dutch oven recipes to the letter because cooking times are kind of finicky, but you’ll get used to it. You can cook all kinds of things in a Dutch oven over a campfire. We often make “stone soup,” which is basically just soup cooked in the Dutch oven with everyone choosing an ingredient to add that they like. It’s always a little different and there’s always something you like in it.
Another really good tip is to do a lot of the preparation steps for your meals at the campsite at home. Chop up your vegetables and prep any mixes beforehand and store them in Ziploc bags or small containers in your cooler. That way, you can usually just toss things in the Dutch oven when you’re ready to cook and have it on the fire pretty quickly with minimal campsite gear.
So, for example, you can easily make lasagna in a Dutch oven, but it’s a good idea to make the cheese mix at home before you go. Bring along a box of oven-ready noodles, a jar of sauce, and a container of your cheese mix and any other layers you might want in the cooler. Then, when it’s time to cook, just put together the layers in the Dutch oven and put it on the campfire with a few coals on top. Check it occasionally and when it looks close to being done, put some cheese on top and put it back on the fire for five or ten minutes. Yep, campfire lasagna.
When I first graduated from college, I didn’t know what I was doing and consolidated my student loans badly into a single loan with a 7.4% interest rate. I have been making payments on this for 3 years while working for [a university] and contributing to my 403(b) plan. I am wondering if it makes more sense to stop contributing to 403(b) and borrow against it to pay off this debt. I recently learned that you can take interest free loans from your 403(b) if you repay at a certain rate. So should I take that loan, pay off my student loans, then pay back the interest free loan?
– Maria
This one is honestly kind of a coin flip. Given that this is a loan from your 403(b), you’re not actually missing any contribution cycles, but you are missing out on growing that money during the period when you borrowed it. In effect, borrowing that money is “costing” you whatever the returns might have been on that money had you left it in your account.
So, the question is whether the returns on that money would be better than the 7.4% interest rate on your student loans.
My thought is that if you can strongly commit to paying back this loan as fast as you can, then it’s a wise move, but if you’re not able or willing to do so, then it’s not a good move. You should be making payments to your 403(b) loan at least as large as the payments on your student loan each and every month. If you can do that, you will have paid back the 403(b) loan much faster than you would have been able to pay off the student loan, which means that in theory you should be financially ahead at that point unless you miss an extreme uptick in the value of your retirement savings.
My recommendation is that once you pay off the loan, you seriously upgrade your 403(b) contributions going forward from that point, which shouldn’t be a big issue because you have neither the student loan or the 403(b) loan hanging around your neck.
What do you do with old spices that have lost most of their flavor? Can anything be done to get more out of them or are they headed for the trash?
– Susanna
Honestly, if a spice is getting old, I usually just start using it in larger quantities until it’s all used up. If a soup recipe calls for a teaspoon of basil, I’ll put in a tablespoon of old basil, or even more. It still has some flavor, just not as much as recently dried basil.
This is very dependent on taste, so I really only do this with recipes where I know what I want it to taste like, like vegetable soup (which I’ve made a thousand times) or black beans for burritos or tacos. I know the flavor I’m aiming for, so I trust my tongue.
If it appears to just be flavorless dust, I usually sprinkle it in the yard, as at least it’ll provide a bit of nutrients to the soil.
Do you have a book for beginning investors that’s easy to understand? Tried reading The Intelligent Investor and then The Bogleheads Guide to Investing and they both went rapidly from making sense into insider lingo that was unreadable. What’s a more basic intro?
– Dennis
I wouldn’t recommend The Intelligent Investor to anyone outside of those purely academically curious. I think Bogleheads is pretty approachable, but it does lay on the terminology thick in places.
The Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins is probably the book I’d point at for you. I’d describe it as being a notch or two simpler than Bogleheads but covering much of the same material.
Another good book on investing that I think would work for you is The Four Pillars of Investing by William Bernstein. This book is more of an introduction to semi-professional investing in layman’s terms rather than what individual investors saving for retirement might want to be doing, but it’s written in a very approachable style.
I’d give those two a try. Check them out from your local library.
Thinking about getting a cast iron skillet because of how you can cook everything on it, but it seems like a ton of work to get it in good shape.
– Amy
It can take some time to really season a cast iron skillet so that the surface is very low stick, much like Teflon except without the potential risk of cancer if the coating starts to flake. It’s not difficult work, though, and it’s pretty hard to mess it up.
Basically, when you first get a new cast iron pan, you need to bake it a few times with the insides coated in oil or Crisco or some other fat. Just coat the insides, put it in the oven for a while, and then wipe it out thoroughly and repeat.
After that, you can cook foods in it that have a high fat content with no problem for the next several months. Anything that involves oil in the pan is going to be fine.
Once the surface seems smooth, you can pretty much cook anything in them with minimal sticking. Cleaning them is easy, too, but you can’t run them through the dishwasher. You just run water over the pan and scrub it a little with a pad and it’s done.
I really like cast iron skillets with double handles, like this one. If you need to adjust it, just put a hot pad on your hand(s) and move it where you want. Most of the time, it just sits in place while you’re cooking. When you’re done, you can carry it to the table easily with two hands if you wish, and then just let it cool down and wash it with some running water and a scrub brush to get out any debris, which comes right out in a few seconds for almost everything.
Do you think Libra is a worthwhile investment to get in on early?
– Barry
If you have some extra money that isn’t allocated toward a goal that you don’t mind losing, then sure, why not? I’d never object to someone using entertainment money or “fun” money for it. However, I wouldn’t put a dime of money that I was counting on into Libra.
For those aware, Libra is a online currency introduced by Facebook that appears to be a mix of a Bitcoin competitor and a PayPal competitor. From what I can tell, it’s probably going to be much more stable than Bitcoin, but at the same time, I don’t think it makes a particularly good investment. I actually think it will just hold steady value for a long time and be used as a pretty stable way to make online transactions rather than as a fluctuating investment on its own.
So, if you want to put a bunch of money into Libra, do so, but make sure that it isn’t money that you actually need for your future. I don’t have any idea what it will do, but what I suspect is that it will end up being like money sitting in your PayPal account.
What are your thoughts on David Bach? It seems to me that his books just take the same two or three ideas and remix them over and over again, never saying anything new. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.
– Brian
I largely agree with you. I think it’s worthwhile for most people to read a David Bach book, one that matches their own personal interests the best, and then there’s much less need to read other ones.
Bach’s big idea is that there is a ton of power in the multiplicative effect of making little changes to frequent routines. His big one is what he calls the “latte factor” – if you simply move from a $5 daily latte to a $0.50 cup of coffee at home or work, you’re saving $4.50 a day. Over the course of a year, that’s $1,642.50. Sock that away at a 7% return and do it for a decade and you have roughly $25,000 in cash in your hand, tax free.
The thing is, while those core ideas are good, most of his books are just remixes of those core ideas, tweaked to a specific readership.
Do you think that cookbooks are still useful in an era where there are infinite recipes online?
– Mary
Absolutely, for several reasons.
For one, cookbooks are available if the internet is down. If you don’t have the internet, you can’t access online recipes. You can always access a cookbook.
For another, cookbook recipes tend to be pretty reliable and high quality. A lot of recipes on websites are pretty dodgy, though there are some sites that I do implicitly trust (like Serious Eats). However, if a cookbook is well regarded, I generally trust everything in it.
For yet another, cookbooks often do a much better job of addressing techniques than online recipes – how exactly to do things in the kitchen. I often get more value out of techniques than I do out of the recipes, though I do often supplement the techniques with Youtube videos.
I also like the flexibility of using a cookbook in the kitchen. I can flop it out on the table, highlight it, move it around, and so on. I can do that with tablets and phones and laptops to an extent, but it often involves having to scroll and being worried that my device is near something messy in the kitchen, something I worry about a lot less with a cookbook.
I have a shelf full of cookbooks. I love them, and I add new ones every once in a while.
Have you ever considered that some of your financial success comes from the advantages you had in life and not because of your personal choices?
– Amelia
Absolutely. I had a number of advantages in life, not least of which was two loving parents who did everything they could to raise me with good values and a strong work ethic. On the other hand, I didn’t grow up with “every advantage.” My family was at the very best lower middle class, and I think that’s a stretch to even call it that. I spent much of my childhood sick and missed more than a year of school due to fifteen different childhood surgeries I went through. I am naturally very introverted and have to work hard just to do well in social situations when my strong, strong preference is to be quiet or leave.
The point is that the advantages I did have certainly gave me a boost in life. I like to think of it as being like a sprinter running a race with the wind at their back or starting at the ten yard line.
The issue is that I still had to run the race. For some, the race was easier than it was for me. For some, the race is harder. But we are all running that race. The vast majority of people that achieve success had to work and work hard to get it. Very few people are handed success in life. Sure, some people start out closer to the finish line than others, but they couldn’t just sit on their rear end all day and success just arrived in their mailbox.
I’m interested in helping people in their own run, whether they start off with the wind at their back and 50 yards past the starting line or whether they’re starting off at the back of the pack with the wind in their face. I can’t change anyone’s starting position, but I can certainly do my best to put a little bit of wind to everyone’s back. We’re all running, and we all want to make something more of our lives.
Got any questions? The best way to ask is to follow me on Facebook and ask questions directly there. I’ll attempt to answer them in a future mailbag (which, by way of full disclosure, may also get re-posted on other websites that pick up my blog). However, I do receive many, many questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.
The post Questions About Libra, Campfire Cooking, Investment Books, David Bach, and More! appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, building a website takes lots of hard work. This is even more so the case for those of you who are creating an ecommerce site.
In addition to your website design, architecture, and all of the standard website elements, you also need to figure out how you’re going to accept payments online.
If you’ve never done this before and you’re just starting some preliminary research, there’s a good chance that you’ll come across two names; PayPal and Stripe. These are both industry leaders in the online payment processing industry.
Both platforms will essentially let your customers buy products or services from your ecommerce shop, but the way that these services are provided are different from platform to platform.
So what’s the difference between PayPal and Stripe? Is PayPal or Stripe better for accepting payments online? These are questions that I hear all of the time when I’m consulting with ecommerce companies.
Truthfully, you probably can’t go wrong with either one. But with that said, I want to give you as much information as possible about each platform so you can decide which one is right for your ecommerce business.
Before we continue, I want to make sure you understand exactly how PayPal and Stripe work. There are two terms you need to know:
Payment gateways give ecommerce sites the capability to accept payments online. These gateways are like a middleman between a business payment processor and credit card network. PayPal and Stripe both have payment gateways, which you’ll need if you’re planning to authorize online payments.
A payment service provider (or PSP for short) on the other hand is a bit more involved. PayPal and Stripe are both PSPs as well. They link businesses with merchant accounts by providing the technology required to process online payments, as well as other forms of payment.
PayPal and Stripe group all of their merchants into one account, as opposed to each business having a dedicated account.
Basically, both of these platforms have everything you need to authorize payments as an ecommerce website.
Even if you have no prior experience with running an ecommerce website, PayPal is definitely a name that you’ve heard before.
The company has always been known for payment processing. They have the reputation for being a safe and secure way for PayPal users to buy from merchants using a PayPal balance as well as a debit or credit account linked to their PayPal profile.
But PayPal offers much more features and services to accommodate ecommerce shops. So the days of PayPal only being suitable for things like eBay or other P2P payment situations are long behind us. Now they have a variety of plans for launching a business, whether you want to sell online, in person, or both.
You’ll be able to accept payments from credit cards, debit cards, PayPal credits, PayPal accounts, and Venmo as well.
With PayPal, you can design your own shopping cart. They have customizable solutions that are fully scalable for growing businesses.
PayPal offers three main plans for you to choose from. I’ll cover each one in greater detail below.
For those of you who already have an existing payment processor that you’re using to accept credit cards on your ecommerce site, PayPal Checkout might be a good option for you to consider.
Basically, you can just add the PayPal button to your current payments page with this supplemental plan. It’s easy to integrate with your existing ecommerce platform. Once the button is added, your customers will be able to use PayPal, PayPal credits, or Venmo to buy from your online store.
Conversion rates are up to 82% higher when PayPal Checkout is added to ecommerce sites. That’s because shoppers can complete the purchase in just a click or two, if they have PayPal on their phones or if they’re already logged into PayPal on their computers.
There is no setup fee or monthly fee for this plan. PayPal charges merchants 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction in the United States.
The PayPal Payments Standard plan is made for merchants who don’t have an existing payment processor or want to switch providers.
In addition to the PayPal payment options, you’ll also be able to accept Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover cards. Adding the button to your website is as simple as copying and pasting some code. The checkout pages will be hosted by PayPal.
This plan will cost you 2.9% + $0.30 per US transaction. There are no monthly fees or setup fees for the Payments Standard plan.
Payments Pro is the top-tier plan offered by PayPal. It allows you to create a fully customizable checkout experience on your ecommerce site.
Unlike the Payments Standard plan, website visitors won’t have to leave your site to complete the checkout process. It also has a mobile-optimized checkout process and easy shopping cart integration. Payments Pro gives you a virtual terminal, which makes it possible to accept payments over the phone as well.
With the added features, this plan costs $30 per month, plus the standard 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
Unlike PayPal, Stripe doesn’t have their services segmented into tiered plans. Stripe’s payment processing will be the same, regardless of what features you’re taking advantage of.
With that said, depending on which tools you want to use, it will cost more. But the nice part about this is that you’re only going to be charged for the features that you actually want, as opposed to paying for a plan that includes tools you don’t need.
You can easily add Stripe to your ecommerce site with just one simple integration.
Once that happens, the platform makes it easy for you to accept payments, process them, settle, and reconcile. You’ll be able to process credit cards and ACH transfers both online and via mobile app payments. In fact, big mobile app brands like Lyft are already using Stripe.
Stripe lets you build a checkout process from scratch, or select one of their pre-built templates.
The platform has features for invoicing and setting up recurring payments for subscriptions as well. Let’s take a look at some of those add-on features I was talking about earlier.
Stripe Connect is made so that marketplaces and platforms can accept money and pay it out to third parties. It supports ecommerce sites, crowdfunding, on-demand businesses, and travel or event platforms.
Take advantage of Stripe’s UI components that are pre-built, or use their tools to create and customize everything on your own.
Sigma helps businesses analyze data from stripe using SQL. It can help improve the efficiency of business operations, finance departments, data teams, and product management.
It’s a great way for you to get to know your business better with data. Then you can make necessary adjustments based on your findings. Pricing for Stripe Sigma varies based on the volume of monthly charges.
Stripe Atlas is made for those of you who are starting an online business from scratch. The startup toolkit guides you through the process of forming a company, establishing IP ownership, filling out the right documents, and getting a tax ID number from the IRS.
Atlas also sets you up with a new bank account and debit card for your business.
There is a $500 one-time fee for using this service. Services like bank account maintenance, tax filing, and registered agents are not included in the setup fee. These are all billed individually at an annual rate.
Radar is Stripe’s fraud detection, prevention, and management tool. It’s designed to analyze your data and stop potential fraud cases before they are processed.
They take data from your checkout flows, payments, and financial partners to determine irregularities. Stripe’s partnership with major credit card companies and banks make it possible for them to identify fraudulent charges before you need to make a dispute.
Stripe Issuing is made for ecommerce businesses that want to create, distribute, and manage both physical and virtual cards for in-house purposes.
You can use these cards for things like employee expense accounts. It’s supported by Google Pay and Apple Pay as well. It’s also worth noting that Stripe Issuing is a beta program that’s only being offered in the United States.
For years, Stripe was better known for its online payment processing. But now they offer Stripe Terminal, which is a POS system for in-person payments.
This is a great option for those of you who have physical store locations in addition to your ecommerce shop. You can get everything you need both online and in-store from the same provider.
As you can see from everything that we’ve covered so far, these two payment service providers are very different from each other. But with that said, they have some things in common as well.
Deciding between PayPal and Stripe will mostly come down to personal preference and exactly what you’re looking for. Let’s take a look at some specific features to see how each platform stacks up against the other.
The pricing for PayPal is very straightforward. Only the Payments Pro plan has a monthly fee, while all three plans charge 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
Stripe also charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. But they do have custom pricing packages for things like volume discounts and multi-product discounts, which can be useful for those of you who want to take advantage of the products we looked at earlier.
According to research Value Penguin, Stripe is more expensive than PayPal.
It can be argued that Stripe has more to offer, which might justify that higher amount. But when you compare the cost per transaction rates head to head, both services are even.
Both PayPal and Stripe offer excellent customer service and technical support options. They each have their own variation of a help center, with different tools, guides, FAQ, and resources needed to troubleshoot on your own.
You can also get help using:
Based on all of this, I don’t think that I can definitively say that one platform has better support than the other, so this category is a tie.
Stripe and PayPal are both easy to use. But with that said, Stripe is definitely more developer-friendly, meaning it could present more of a challenge to ecommerce store owners who don’t have that type of technical knowledge.
PayPal is as simple as copying and pasting some code to get set up, which is about as straightforward as it gets. So I’d say PayPal is better for beginners, while Stripe has more customizable options for developers.
Both PayPal and Stripe offer pay as you go contracts. So you won’t get locked into anything long term and can cancel at any time. You also won’t be charged a cancellation fee by either service if you decide to do so.
This category is another tie.
PayPal always had a reputation for its P2P payments through third-party platforms like eBay. Although now they’re taking aim at providing more services for ecommerce sites. Stripe has always been known for ecommerce solutions, but not offers POS solutions as well.
Both of these companies have the tools, services, and resources you need to run an ecommerce shop. They both have exceptional online reviews as well.
PayPal is the most popular digital wallet in the United States and is the most popular mobile payment method in North America. There are more than 277 million PayPal users worldwide.
Based on these numbers, I’d have to give the edge to PayPal in terms of reputation. But by no means am I saying that Stripe doesn’t have an excellent reputation as well.
If you have an ecommerce shop and you’re trying to figure out the best payment service provider, both PayPal and Stripe are top options to consider.
At the end of the day, it’s going to come down to personal preference. Based on the information I gave you above, you can decide which plan meets your needs the most.
I can’t definitively give an edge to one platform over the other. I’d strongly recommend both options.
For those of you who still aren’t sold on PayPal or Stripe, you can review my guide on the best payment methods for your ecommerce site to find some alternative solutions.
