10 Tips to Follow When Searching for a Work-From-Home Opportunity

Sponsored by Cruise Planners Working from home can provide needed flexibility, additional income, and a better work-life balance, but it does not come without its challenges. Before diving into a new work-from-home opportunity, it is essential to do your research so you understand the benefits and challenges of working from home and can pick the opportunity […]

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Whole Life Insurance 101: A Simple Guide to These Complicated Policies

Aligning Health Goals with Personal Finance Goals

It’s no secret to anyone reading The Simple Dollar for very long that I’m a goal-oriented person. I find a great deal of power in setting goals for myself, developing plans for those goals, and working toward them by executing that plan as well as I can and revising it as needed.

I view my own life as a series of spheres (physical, mental, social, spiritual, financial, professional, marital, parental, avocational, intellectual) and, ideally, I want to always have some kind of goal going that provides a lot of value to each of those spheres. However, that doesn’t mean I always have nine or ten goals going at all times; in fact, I usually try to keep that number around five.

I do that by aiming to come up with goals that serve two or more spheres at the same time. Most of the big goals I come up with in life are ones that really hit two or more of those areas at once and usually have a secondary benefit for some of the other spheres.

Some of these spheres tend to have a lot of synergy. There are a lot of goals I can define that scratch both the “intellectual” and “avocational” goals at the same time, because I like hobbies that make me think. There are a lot of goals that scratch both the “parental” and “marital” goals if they’re focused on building a great home environment for my wife and my kids (and that often helps me with a few other spheres indirectly).

What I really wanted to focus on today is another pairing of spheres that seem to have a lot of synergy, and that’s “financial” and “physical.” I find that there are a lot of really powerful goals that touch on both the “financial” and “physical” spheres at the same time by encouraging both financial and physical fitness.

I covered some of that synergy in my post earlier this year on the connections between your physical life and your financial life, but I didn’t really delve into actually setting goals for yourself that took advantage of those extensive connections and overlap. Today, that’s exactly what we’re looking at: translating the extensive overlap between physical health and financial goals into meaningful goals for both spheres.

As I stated in the earlier article, the core of physical life, for me, is whether or not I feel good and energetic and relatively pain-free each day such that I feel like I can take on life’s challenges, and am I doing what I can to keep that state going forward, both in the short term and the long term. I want to feel good enough to do the things I want to do for as long as I possibly can, and the better I feel, the better.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, the core of one’s financial life, for me, is having the financial resources to live a contented life, to protect that life as much as possible from unexpected events, and to improve one’s financial state so that one no longer is required to work for a living to sustain their contented life.

Let’s start by making a list of areas where these two elements overlap meaningfully, drawing at least in part from that previous article.

Paying attention to your physical health and taking action in positive ways reduces both your short term and long term health care costs. You’re simply going to avoid a lot of health issues if you do the things you should be doing in terms of your personal health, and that directly benefits your pocket in terms of lower health care costs, both now and in the future.

Your food, beverage, and vice costs are lower if you’re consuming a healthy diet and minimizing vices, both of which contribute to a healthier life. Your beverage costs are going to decline if you switch to almost exclusively drinking water, which is one of the best health moves you can make. If you give up consumption vices that are bad for your health, such as alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, or hard drugs, that’s an expense that disappears out of your life. Even eating a healthier diet with a high proportion of fruits and vegetables prepared at home is going to be a significant money saver over the typical American diet. Most of the consumption choices you make for your health are also going to help your financial situation as well.

Your insurance costs are lower if you can demonstrate a higher level of health. This is particularly true for health insurance and life insurance, but there’s a smaller effect for other kinds of insurance as well. Both life insurance and health insurance are quoted based on data that includes some of your vital statistics, and thus the better those statistics, the better off you are.

The healthier and more energetic you feel, the more you feel ready to take on challenges and projects, many of which can be enormous money savers. Trust me, I’ve been there – the less healthy and less energetic you feel, the harder it is to motivate yourself to do anything. This is key, because many of the things you need to do to cut your spending require at least some energy output. When you feel completely unenergetic, it’s hard to convince yourself to get up and go to the grocery store or to make a healthy meal.

The healthier and more energetic you feel, the easier it is to raise your income level. This also applies to income. The healthier and more energetic you feel, the easier it is to be productive at work and to build the kinds of professional and client relationships that will help you earn more money.

Of course, investing money into your health in unnecessary ways undoes some of these financial benefits, so there is enormous benefit in finding cost-effective ways to keep your health in line. That’s why a great goal that straddles the line between health and finances seek out low cost and highly effective strategies for achieving that goal. For example, opening the wallet to buy a gym membership or a bunch of exercise equipment or a bunch of kitchen gear are definitely not in line with financial success and may have marginal success for your health as well.

Goals That Benefit Both Health and Finances

What we want are goals that produce significant health benefits – and thus the cost savings described above – without significant financial input (at least, not to get started). Here are four specific types of goals that will help you see real gains with improving your health, and within each we’ll look at some specific goal examples and how to implement them without spending a lot of money.

Physical activity goals are ones that aim to increase your physical activity and thus physical fitness. Physical activity helps to reduce your heart rate, reduce your resting blood pressure, raises your overall energy levels… it’s just good for you in pretty much every dimension.

Of course, there are many ways to make a physical activity goal very expensive, like buying a gym membership or buying lots of exercise gear. We want to focus on free or very low cost physical activity goals.

A daily step count goal This simply encourages you to walk more. Setting a goal of “I will walk 6,000 steps each day” or “I will walk 10,000 steps each day” or “I will walk 20,000 steps each day” is a very clear goal that doesn’t have any additional costs and is easy to achieve. You’ll likely want to slowly ramp this goal up over time, starting with a level that’s easy to achieve and then ticking it upwards. I recommend aiming for at least 10,000 steps.

How do you track this? Your smartphone can easily do it. There are a number of pedometer (step count) apps for Android, and on iOS the built-in Health app functions as a pedometer. You just have to have your phone with you.

A daily (or “X times a week”) home exercise routine The variety of home exercise routines is endless. It really depends on your goals. Do you want flexibility? Core strength? Balance? Cardio health? There are different home exercise routines that can help with each. For example, my home exercise routine is mostly oriented toward flexibility and mobility and balance (which inherently helps with core strength), with a little bit of cardio mixed in.

You can find tons and tons and tons of great routines on Youtube for home exercise without equipment that helps you with whatever goal you have and at whatever level of fitness you desire. The key is to make sure that you’re doing something that’s not way above your level of fitness (rendering you miserable – you can work up to that over time) and something you at least mildly enjoy. I never, ever stick with fitness routines that I dread or make me feel miserable.

A daily deliberate practice goal is a great option if you’re trying to build up a particular physical skill. For example, I have a daily deliberate practice goal of doing a series of taekwondo kicks very slowly (I do community taekwondo classes with my entire family, and the slow kicks are a great form of deliberate practice). This is all about the things you’re doing in your life already and may not be applicable to you at all, but if you’re involved in any kind of regular physical activity or sport, there’s almost always some sort of specific deliberate practice you can do at home to get better at it.

Food consumption goals are all about getting a better grip on the food you put into your body. This is often done to combat obesity and ideally move people toward a more optimal body weight for their height, which reduces the likelihood of many, many health conditions from heart disease and various types of cancer to diabetes.

Food consumption goals can take all kinds of forms depending on your goals.

A daily calorie goal basically means that you’re aiming to only consume a certain number of calories in a day, however you choose to do it. For most people, this is a reduction in calorie intake and thus should result in reduced food costs.

There are many smartphone apps that do a great job of counting and recording calories. You simply set a daily calorie goal and log the food you eat as you go along and the app will tell you how many of your daily calories you’ve consumed and how many you have left.

It’s worth noting that such goals are far more valuable if they represent a gradual permanent change rather than a radical and unsustainable change. A good way to start is to set a calorie goal that’s just a little lower than what you need to maintain your current weight, then nudge it slowly downward if you so choose. This won’t mean rapid weight loss, but it does mean lifestyle changes that you can actually sustain.

A daily increase in fruit and vegetable consumption and/or a reduction in meat and dairy consumption is a goal that can easily be achieved with a rule like “Eat vegan before dinner” or “Accompany all meals with a fruit” or “Eat a serving of vegetables at the start of every meal.” It really depends on how you want to approach it.

These kinds of changes work best when you’re consuming things you actually like. If you only like certain vegetables, stick to those and avoid ones you don’t like (and try a few new ones here and there).

A reduction in meals eaten outside the home is a goal that orients you toward home food preparation, which can save a great deal of money over the long term. This also can improve your health because, for the most part, meals prepared at home are typically healthier than meals at restaurants (where the aim is usually fast and delicious with little consideration of health).

A good way to do this is to simply set a numerical goal for each week. “This week, I will only eat out twice” could be a great goal if you eat out on a daily basis.

Vice-related goals are aims to reduce or eliminate particular vices from your life – alcohol consumption, cigarettes, drug use, soda, unhealthy snacks, and so on. Such a goal aims for long term health, though cutting out the vice can be difficult. This type of goal has a great short term benefit – the reduction or elimination of the cost of a vice – and a great long term benefit – the reduction in health care costs from the vice.

Complete elimination of the vice is a great goal, of course, but it can be a challenging goal for many people and can have other unexpected consequences. The best first step toward this goal is to simply get rid of that vice in your home (and office and car) and then not purchase any more of it, making it rather difficult to acquire more.

Elimination of the vice outside of specific circumstances is another good goal. For example, people may want to eliminate all alcohol consumption except for social situations outside the home where you drink a maximum of two drinks. This means that you have no alcohol at home and only drink when you’re at a social situation where it’s the norm.

Sleep goals focus on improving the quality of your sleep by ensuring that you get enough hours in bed and that you wake up as naturally as possible. Getting adequate rest drastically boosts energy levels and mental clarity and reduces the chance of illness. There are a number of ways to achieve these benefits through straightforward goals.

Setting an earlier bedtime simply comes down to a goal like “going to bed at 9 PM each weeknight” or something to that effect. In general, on any day when you have to get up at a specific time, you should aim to go to sleep seven to eight hours before you have to arise. Ideally, this enables you to start arising naturally without an alarm forcing you to be awake.

Eliminating sleep-interrupting distractions leading up to bedtime enables you to get to sleep much easier upon going to bed. For example, you might set a goal of “no looking at screens for 30 minutes before going to bed” along with “no devices in the bedroom.” This eliminates the effect that many screens have in terms of keeping your mind fully awake and thus keeping sleep at bay.

Why no “weight loss goals”? It’s easy: your weight is a “result” number, not an “effort” number. Actual weight loss is the result of effort you put into other areas, mostly related to food intake but also somewhat related to physical activity. However, it’s very difficult to predict the rate at which you will lose weight. You can’t actually control that exact number with any precision, and your weight will sometimes be unchanged or even go up after a week or even a month of effort in terms of losing weight (due to things like water retention, salt intake, your body’s unique chemistry, and so on).

If you’re absolutely insistent on using weight as a metric for your health, do not rely solely on the number you see when you step on the scale. Instead, use a weighted average, which smooths out the day-to-day variations in your weight. I highly recommend using the smartphone app Happy Scale for doing this, as it does all of that automatically. You just enter your weight each day and don’t really worry about your day-in day-out number. Rather, if you’re actually doing the steps in your goal, you should see a gradual change in your weight toward your target number.

Tracking Goals

If a goal clearly has a daily or weekly number attached to it (or a daily or weekly “yes I did this/no I did not” attached to it), I find a lot of value in tracking those numbers on a grid, where I fill in a box for each day where I achieved that number. A wall calendar is a great way to do this. For example, if your daily goal is to walk 10,000 steps, use a wall calendar and put a huge red checkmark on each day where you did it and a huge black X on days where you didn’t. It’s subtle, but it really encourages you to fill up the spaces with the positive marks rather than the negative marks. Most fitness goals are easy to break down into this type of numerical or yes/no evaluation.

Beyond that, for all goals, I also like to use the method described in the book Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith, where he identifies a very strong method for reinforcing good behavior in our mind. At the end of each day, you simply do a “check-in” for each of your goals by asking yourself whether or not you did your best today to achieve that goal and scoring your effort on a scale of 1 to 10. As with the previous “check box” method, you’ll find yourself wanting to have a series of high numbers for any goal that you create and thus you will find yourself continually trying to reinforce that good behavior. Over time, the behavior slowly becomes natural.

Final Thoughts

The health goals described in this article not only produce positive results in terms of how good you feel and how your body appears and the long term health of your body, but the goals themselves and the results of those goals have a strong positive impact on your finances by reducing food, insurance, health care, and vice costs both in the short term and in the long term while also boosting your energy and readiness for personal and professional tasks.

A well-designed and well-considered health-related goal is one that benefits the financial sphere of your life. Improve your health and you’re likely to improve your finances, too.

Good luck!

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Would Ditching Your Smartphone Save You Money? 3 Questions to Ask Yourself

‘Shark Tank’ Contestants Share What It Takes to Get on the Show — and Nail it

This week's best current accounts

This week's best current accounts Stephen Little Fri, 07/19/2019 - 08:00

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First published on 8 May 2013

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Twenty Common Items That See a Second Life in Our Home

We make an effort to minimize the trash we throw away, for a number of reasons. Obviously, it’s beneficial for the environment to recycle as much as possible and find other uses for things (reduce, reuse, recycle), but the truth is that a lot of stuff that might otherwise find their way into the trash actually has some good second-time-around uses.

Here are twenty (or so) common items from around our house that you might expect to get thrown away but often finds a pretty useful second life in our home.

Glass bottles If these have easily resealable caps, we’ll use them to store homemade beverages like cider or kombucha. I have an array of different bottles that we use for these purposes. If it’s a nice bottle without a resealable cap, we’ll often save it and use it as a vase for a while.

Dryer lint, egg cartons, and candle remnants We take these three items and turn them into fire starters. They’re really great at getting a campfire or a small fire in our backyard fire pit going.

Just take the empty egg carton and stuff a bunch of dryer lint into each well. Melt the remnant candle wax together, then pour it into each well in the egg carton until there’s a sufficient amount to hold the dryer lint firmly in place. Let it dry.

Then, when you need to get a fire going, tear off one of the wells from the carton and light the paper end of it with your lighter or match of choice. This little ball of paper, wax, and lint will burn very hot for several minutes, giving you plenty of time to get twigs or kindling burning and thus giving you a nice start on your fire.

Cereal boxes This doesn’t happen nearly as often as it once did now that Sarah and I aren’t subscribed to any magazines, but we would often take cereal boxes, cut off the top and a bit of the sides, and convert them into magazine holders. It’s a great way to keep magazines organized on a shelf and makes it easy to pull out issues when you need them, as you can grab a box with the issue you want (or even the individual issue) without disrupting a full shelf of magazines.

Food-safe squeeze bottles As I mentioned in my condiment article earlier this week, food safe squeeze bottles are perfect for storing homemade condiment mixes like mayochup or fry sauce. Just thoroughly clean the container, then make your preferred condiment mix in a bowl and put that mix into the clean container. It can easily be labeled with a piece of masking tape.

Shoe boxes We find infinite uses for these! We use them to store craft items, old photos, board game prototype components, small games, art supplies, old notebooks, and all manner of other things. Shoeboxes do not get thrown away around here until they’re literally falling apart.

Spray bottles Bottles that previously contained things like Windex usually wind up with some kind of homemade cleaner in them. In a typical Windex bottle, if I’m making window cleaner, I’ll put in 1/4 cup white vinegar, 1/8 cup rubbing alcohol, two drops of dish soap, and fill it the rest of the way with water. This does a really good job of cleaning up the handprints and fingerprints of children off of windows.

Plastic milk jugs have a lot of uses. One particularly great use for them is to use them as a funnel with a “stopper” by cutting off the bottom of the jug and turning it upside down. You can put the cap on to keep stuff from flowing out of the hole and then remove the cap as needed. That makes old milk jugs perfect for tasks like refilling bird feeders, spreading grass seed, or spreading salt on a slick driveway. With the cap on, you can use it as a pet food scoop. I also sometimes save the caps for board game prototype pieces, as they’re basically like checkers.

Pickle jars and other glass jars I love making homemade pickles, homemade sauerkraut, and things of that nature. Used pickle jars are perfect for storing these in the fridge after making them. Again, simply slapping a piece of masking tape on the jar and writing what the contents are solves the labeling issue, and you can get many dozens of uses out of those jars before the lids stop working well. I also like storing leftover pasta sauce or pizza sauce or salsa in them.

Newspaper We rarely wind up with used newspaper these days, but when we do, I like to roll it into a super-tight bundle and then put masking tape around it in three or four places. This turns it into fantastic kindling for a fire, especially if you roll it super tight. You can build a small arrangement of these little newspaper “logs” and then start a fire with them using one of the egg carton fire starters mentioned earlier. Another thing you can do is cut the bundles into smaller pieces, with each piece held together by masking tape, and then dip the whole thing into excess candle wax (if you have extra from the process above). This kind of “waterproofs” the logs and makes it much easier to start a campfire when things are wet.

Shakers I often pick up interesting spice mixes while traveling, but I rarely discard the jar when it’s empty. Instead, I use those bottles to store common spices I buy in bulk from the local food co-op (or a rare visit to a spice store). I also sometimes use them to store my own homemade spice mixes. As I mentioned, a bit of masking tape and a Sharpie provides a super-inexpensive label so you know what the contents are.

Small pill bottles We often buy aspirin and ibuprofen in larger jumbo-sized containers, then distribute them into smaller pill bottles for keeping in various homemade first aid kits. For example, I keep a small bottle of ibuprofen in my backpack, there’s one with our camping supplies, and there’s another in each of the glove boxes in our cars. Again, a masking tape label never hurts.

T-shirts and highly worn clothing Used clothing items that are just too worn out for Goodwill make for a great rag bag for cleaning up nasty messes. Old t-shirts make for great kitchen/liquid rags and can actually be reused a bunch of times if you spend a few minutes putting an edge on them with a sewing machine. Most of our old clothes wind up in a literal rag bag, though, useful for all kinds of messes and situations indoor and out.

Children’s pools We’ve taken used children’s pools, flipped them over, cut a few small holes in them and cut them to size, and used them to cover our garden in the spring. This keeps the weeds from competing with our little seedlings and also keeps a lot of weeding effort at bay. They won’t last forever but they’ll certainly do the job for a couple of growing cycles, and it gets a lot of additional use out of a kiddie pool with a few leaks in it. Another good use is to use it as the bottom layer in the trunk of a car or the back of a minivan so you can carry around potentially messy things like wood or mulch, drastically minimizing the mess. You can do the same things with an old shower curtain.

Plastic grocery bags Although we usually take reusable bags to the store, sometimes we wind up with plastic grocery bags. Those usually wind up as the lining for small trash cans (with a few empty bags stuffed in the bottom of the can so that there’s always a replacement bag right there) or else used to help clean up pet waste (just invert the bag over your hand to form a “glove,” then pick up the waste and revert the bag, then tie it off… easy as can be).

Children’s wagons Our children have a wagon that they’ve long outgrown, but we keep it around for several reasons. It’s really useful for toting gardening tools and yard tools around the yard and back to the garage after we’re done. It’s useful for carrying heavy bags of seed or mulch or soil to the place where they’re needed. Basically, if there’s something heavy or bulky that needs to be moved around the yard, we just grab the old wagon.

Toothbrushes and electric toothbrush heads When those items start to get really worn out from use, they get relegated to a box of cleaning supplies. They’re perfect for cleaning small, hard-to-reach spots, like the edges of faucets or around the back of the toilet or in grout.

There are many things that seem like they’re used up and ready to be thrown away, but in reality they have many more uses still left in them. Don’t give into your instinct to just toss stuff in the trash or the recycling bin. Instead, ask yourself if there’s not a second use for this item. Do it with everything you might throw away for a few weeks and see what you figure out. Not only will you reduce the volume of materials you’re putting into landfills or even into the recycling system, you might find uses that keep you from spending money on a useful item (like a funnel or a bottle of Windex).

Good luck!

The post Twenty Common Items That See a Second Life in Our Home appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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Dear Penny: Did Co-Signing My Daughter’s Student Loan Kill My Chance of Retiring?

Dear S.,

The fact that you haven’t been able to find resources for student loan co-signers isn’t surprising, because there aren’t many options in this situation.

When you co-signed your daughter’s student loans, you and your daughter became equally responsible for repaying them. And since your daughter can’t make the payments, the burden falls on you. You’re just as obligated to pay back these loans as you would be had you taken them out for your own education.

Because federal student loans rarely require a co-signer, I’m assuming these are private student loans. So unfortunately, your options for lowering your monthly payments will pretty much be at the discretion of your lender.

I say all that not to scare you. I can only imagine how the financial pressures you’re feeling are compounded by the heartache over being estranged from your daughter.

But it’s important to approach this situation realistically. As you probably know, student loans are almost never discharged in bankruptcy. So your only options are to pay them off or go into default.

The latter will destroy your credit and could result in your wages being garnished. But the option you suggest — of using your retirement funds to pay off your debt — would put your finances in seriously shaky territory.

The first thing I want you to do is repeat after me: “I will not use my retirement savings to pay off debt.” Repeat if necessary. That money’s purpose is to support you during your golden years, not to pay off debt. And unlike a bank account, a retirement fund is protected from creditors if you’re sued or file bankruptcy.

Your best option is to get rid of your other debt so you can free up money to put toward your student loan balance. Doing so, you’ll also lower your debt-to-income ratio, which your bank will probably require to be at 43% or lower to approve you for a mortgage or home equity loan.

Based on what you’ve told me, your best option might be to sell the RV and car, then downsize to a cheaper used car. A more radical approach would be to sell your house now and live out of the RV.

If you’re not willing to part with your house or your vehicles now, you could try earning extra income to pay down the loans by renting out the RV and part of your house.

As for your plans to retire: You say you plan to retire in four years, but you also say you don’t know if you can ever retire. Maybe the realistic plan falls somewhere between four years and forever. You may have to retire a few years later than you’d hoped, but you will get to retire eventually.

Regardless of when that day comes, you’ll be a lot more comfortable if you bring as little debt as possible into your retirement years.

Robin Hartill is a senior editor at The Penny Hoarder and the voice behind Dear Penny. Send your questions about student loans to AskPenny@thepennyhoarder.com.

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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Millions of households could see energy bills soar up to £439 as fixed priced deals end in July

Teachers who bring money lessons alive

Over-50s insurance: all you need to know about specialist cover

Over-50s insurance: all you need to know about specialist cover Stephen Little Fri, 07/19/2019 - 11:31

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First published on 15 July 2019

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Care costs beyond the school gates

Care costs beyond the school gates Lily Canter Fri, 07/19/2019 - 11:31

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First published on 15 July 2019

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BBC and ITV launch Britbox streaming service to rival Netflix and Amazon

London mayor Sadiq Khan unveils rent control proposals – without the power to implement them

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11 Reasons to Use WordPress For Your Website

If you’re starting to build your first website, WordPress is inevitably a name that you’ve come across. I’d recommend it to nearly anyone who has any type of website.

But before I get into the reasons why WordPress is so great, I want to clear up any misconceptions about the platform.

What exactly is what WordPress?

You don’t host your website with WordPress. You’ll still need to find a web hosting provider for that service.

WordPress is a content management system (CMS for short). It’s a robust tool for creating and managing your website. Blogs, business websites, personal sites, and ecommerce stores alike can benefit from using WordPress.

This platform is run online, meaning you don’t need to download any desktop software to use it.

So now that you have a better understanding of what WordPress is and what it does, it’s time to talk about why it’s so great. I’ve come up with 11 reasons why you should be using this platform for your website.

By the end of this post, I’m sure you’ll be convinced that WordPress is the best CMS for you.

1. Reliability

You don’t want to take any chances when it comes to managing your website. Sometimes, looking at how many people use a platform is the best way to determine its reliability.

According a recent study from Kinsta, WordPress dominates the CMS market share.

WordPress controls 60% of the CMS market. Joomla is second on the list, with a percentage that’s 12 times smaller than WordPress.

Furthermore, WordPress powers 34% of all websites worldwide. Numbers like this are simply staggering, to say the least.

If the platform wasn’t reliable, it wouldn’t be so widely used. Big-name sites like TED, TechCrunch, UPS, and CNN all use WordPress.

Each month roughly 70 million new posts are published on WordPress. Those posts generate about 77 million new comments over the same period of time.

Considering the fact that WordPress is used by about one-third of websites across the globe, it’s safe to say that your site will be in good hands if you use it as well.

2. Great support

Since WordPress is used by so many people all over the world, there are countless guides, tutorials, and resources that can be found online. You can take advantage of WordPress forums where you can communicate with others who use the planet’s most popular CMS.

Aside from those options, you can also get help and support directly from the WordPress support team.

If you have a paid WordPress plan, you’ll have access to live chat support 24 hours per day, Monday to Friday. For those of you who have business or ecommerce plans, you can even reach live chat agents on the weekends.

With that said, it’s worth noting that this resource won’t be able to help you any third-party applications that you’re using on your WordPress site.

But as I mentioned before, you can easily find help with this on a community forum or guide on another site. There is definitely no shortage of WordPress “how-to” resources on the Internet.

3. SEO-friendly

SEO can make or break the success of your website. So it’s something that you need to start focusing on from the inception of your site.

WordPress makes this easy by having some built-in tools that tell you how SEO-friendly your content is. Although most of you will want to upgrade from the basic SEO tools and install a WordPress SEO plugin.

If you’re interested in this, Yoast SEO will be a top option for you to consider.

This plugin is great because there’s a free version that you can try out to get familiar with how it works. But I strongly recommend getting Yoast SEO Premium.

The paid version of this plugin gives you access to more keywords, phrases, and related terms. It will also automatically monitor your most important pages and send you a notification if too much time has passed between updates.

Upgrading to the premium plugin will give you content insights, internal link suggestions, and an ad-free experience, among dozens of other benefits.

4. Flexibility

WordPress can as in-depth and complex or as simple as you want it to be.

You have the option to just use the basic version of the platform to publish blog posts. Or on the other side of the spectrum, you can use it for your business website and add widgets and plugins to add functionality.

Nearly anything that you want to do with your website can be accomplished with WordPress.

Again, you may need to install a plugin or third-party application for that to happen, but the possibilities are still there.

The flexibility of WordPress also applies to the type of people who use it. No, I’m not talking about if you can touch your toes or not. I’m referring to your level of technical experience.

Newbies, developers, and everyone in-between the two can use WordPress. How you use it and what features you want to take advantage of will be completely up to you.

5. Security

In general, WordPress is a safe and secure platform. But it doesn’t mean you’re completely vulnerable from malicious attacks, hackers, and malware on your website.

Fortunately, WordPress makes it easy for you to enhance your site’s security with features like password protection for folder contents.

Keeping your WordPress version up to date will also fight off bugs and potential security threats.

It’s also easy to enable an SSL certificate for your WordPress site. Most of the time you can just get this from your web hosting service.

This is a simple and effective way to enhance your WordPress website security.

Furthermore, there are additional steps you can take to beef up your site’s security. I’d recommend installing a WordPress security plugin.

Adding one of these to your site is like building a moat around your house. Sure, doors might be locked, but the added layer will make it even harder for intruders to penetrate your walls.

You can also take proactive steps by installing a WordPress backup plugin.

In the event that your site is somehow compromised, you don’t want to lose all of your content and data. A plugin will make it easy for you to recover your website if something goes wrong.

6. Simplified content creation

Starting a new WordPress site is so easy; anyone can do it. You can get everything set up with just a few clicks.

Once your site is live, all you need to do is navigate to the “posts” section of your dashboard menu. From here, you’ll be able to find everything you need to write and publish a new blog post.

You’ll find text editors, formatting tools, and ways to upload media files.

As you’ll quickly learn, the entire content creation process on WordPress is very straightforward. So you won’t have any excuse for lacking in that department.

After your content has been published, you won’t have to jump through hoops to edit it moving forward. All you need to do is search the post and make any changes or updates using the visual editor.

Once those changes have been made, just click on the “save” button and the new version of that content will be live instantly.

7. REST API

Most of what we talked about today has been geared toward WordPress beginners. But the platform has plenty of advanced features as well.

If you’re a developer, you’ll be happy to know that WordPress has a REST API, which allows you to build apps using the platform.

For example, you could create a custom plugin for a new administrative dashboard experience. Or maybe you want to make changes to the front-end.

With the WordPress REST API, you’re not forced to write apps in PHP. You can use any programming language that has the ability to make HTTP requests.

Even if you have no idea what I’m talking about here, it may be something that you learn or become interested in down the road. Or maybe you’ll eventually work with a developer to create an application.

Either way, it’s nice to know that this is an option at your disposal if you use WordPress.

8. Optimized for speed

Slow websites are useless. WordPress knows this, so it has specific features and elements that you can take advantage of that will speed up your website.

For example, you can install a lightweight theme that won’t weigh down your code. You could add a plugin to reduce the size of your image files.

Take advantage of options for Gzip compression, advanced caching, and minifying CSS and JS files.

If you use tools like the examples I just gave, you can drastically reduce your website page loading speed. This will ultimately reduce your bounce rates, improve the user experience, and increase conversions on your WordPress site.

9. Affordable pricing

WordPress is open-source and free to use. So you can get away without paying anything if you want.

But if you’re going to do more than just have a basic personal website, you’ll definitely want to upgrade to paid plan. The plan types and pricing are as follows:

As you can see, you’ve got a wide range of options to choose from.

Including the free version, there are six total subscription options. These range from $3 per month to $45 per month.

If you’re willing to pay for WordPress, I wouldn’t even bother using the blogger or personal plan. I’d go straight to Premium.

For just a few dollars more, the added benefits you’ll get are well worth the price.

But if you want additional features like integration with Google Analytics and custom plugins, you’ll need the business plan, at a minimum.

This relates back to what we discussed earlier in terms of flexibility. WordPress has plans that meet the needs of virtually any type of website. All of which are very affordable. Even the most expensive plan will only cost you $540 per year. But I’m assuming the majority of you will be able to get away with spending significantly less than that.

10. Multilingual

WordPress has a global reach. It supports more than 160 languages worldwide. So you’ll be able to create a website to reach your global audience as well.

With that said, it’s worth noting that English is the most popular language used on WordPress.

71% of all blogs published on the platform are written in English.

But it’s nice knowing that if you want to take advantage of other languages, WordPress makes that easy for you to do.

11. Simple integrations

As I’ve mentioned throughout this list, WordPress is compatible with tons of different third-party tools.

In addition to plugins and widgets, you can also integrate things like email marketing software, payment gateways, Google Analytics, and countless other components that you might need to run a fully functional and operational website.

Third-party tools are made with WordPress in mind. Since the CMS platform is so popular, those other companies know that their current and prospective customers might be using it to manage their websites.

So you won’t have to ditch the platforms and resources that you’re familiar with once you build a WordPress site.

Conclusion

WordPress is the most popular CMS platform in the world

As I’m sure you’ve learned from this guide, that didn’t happen by mistake. It doesn’t matter whether you’re building your first website without any experience, or if you’re a veteran developer—you should be using WordPress for your website.

There really isn’t any other content management system I would recommend as highly as WordPress.

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What You Need to Know If You’re Working While on Disability Benefits

Them: The Failure of the Blame Mindset in Financial Improvement

Before I started The Simple Dollar, I started a few other websites on different topics that I was passionate about at the time. I had a Magic: the Gathering website. I had a parenting website. I had a “how to learn data mining from scratch” website.

I had big dreams about these websites being huge successes. I invested what seemed like a lot of time into building these sites and creating great content.

Yet, for some reason, they didn’t take off. The parenting site did just a little bit and the data mining site became a bit popular a year or two after I stopped working on it (strange, I know), but none of them had any level of success.

My reaction at the time was to start throwing out blame.

I blamed big media companies for already starting popular sites that were hogging the audience in those genres.

I blamed Google for not sending people to my site in the search results.

I blamed my website host for various technical issues.

I blamed and blamed and blamed, and I failed and failed and failed.

In fact, I had basically given up on websites being successful and I started The Simple Dollar as a way to indirectly share financial tips with some friends.

What should I have done instead?

I should have asked how exactly independent sites became successful. What exactly were other independent small sites doing that I wasn’t?

I should have been more patient and given it more time and more sweat equity.

I should have worked harder to share my site with more real people rather than hoping that “Google magic” would make it popular.

More than anything, though, I shouldn’t have wasted my time and energy blaming other people, organizations, and larger events outside of my control for the failures.

Undoubtedly, some of those things made my path more difficult. On occasion, it might have even been intentional that they were making my path more difficult (usually, it’s without intention, as people are chasing their own goals and are trying to be the first to get to a resource). No matter the case, even if it was done with intent to keep me from succeeding, spending my energy blaming them is a waste of time because it excuses my own poor behavior.

That’s the real key here, so let me repeat it: when you fail at something (or don’t even try) and blame others for that failure, it’s nothing more than an excuse for your own poor behavior. It’s an excuse for you to not have to put out effort, because you’ll always have that convenient “them” to point at as the convenient “reason” for your failure.

Never mind the fact that people are constantly overcoming setbacks and obstacles and resistance from others to succeed at very similar goals to your own. You can just blame “them.” You can just complain how they stood in your way, how they ripped you off, how success is impossible with such insurmountable things in the way.

Every single bit of that is an excuse so that you don’t have to put forth the effort needed to actually succeed, because most success requires a lot of effort and a lot of missteps before it happens.

In reality, failure in most things comes down to one of a very small handful of explanations.

One, you simply didn’t execute on what you needed to execute. You didn’t put in the time, effort, and energy needed to actually succeed, and thus you didn’t succeed.

Two, you were facing competition in a competitive environment and your own skills, connections, efforts, and talents weren’t up to theirs. They put in more work, built more and better connections, and had more talents on display than you did, thus you didn’t succeed.

Three, unexpected setbacks completely outside of your control caused the derailment of your plan. That’s part of life. Sometimes unexpected events happen. They happen to everyone. Sometimes they can be planned for and anticipated to an extent; other times, they really can’t be. Often, when those setbacks are caused by other people, they’re caused by people chasing their own ambitions, not people trying to disrupt you, and fall more into the “competition” category. You’re often not really on their radar as anything more than a speed bump to their goals.

Almost every failure falls into at least one of those three categories, and none of them merit playing the blame game. Instead, all three merit looking at what went wrong, correcting it, and giving it another shot.

Let’s look at each of these three kinds of failure in terms of financial improvement.

Failure to Execute

This first type of failure crops up all the time in self-improvement goals. It simply refers to situations where you know what it is that you should do, but you simply didn’t do it. Maybe you came up with an unrealistic plan from the start, or maybe the plan was realistic and you just decided not to follow through with it. Whatever the case, you didn’t execute when you needed to do so because of your own choice and/or lack of effort.

In this situation, it is very tempting to fall into a downward spiral of blaming yourself. I’m a failure. I have no willpower. I have no self control.

In truth, failure to execute is often the result of a poor plan that you didn’t revise with the feedback from your own results along the way. Many people are taught that once you come up with a goal and a plan for achieving that goal, it shouldn’t be touched at all, or else they try to achieve a goal with little or no planning whatsoever.

It’s not a sign of some sort of grand personal failure. I’ve done it many times. Rather, it’s just a lack of understanding what it takes to define an achievable goal, plan sensibly for that goal, and modify it along the way as you begin to see results and rough spots.

Don’t blame yourself. Don’t call yourself a failure. You’re not. You just have a goal and a plan in need of revision. It’s like saying a writer is a failure because their first (or second or third) draft isn’t perfect.

A great example of this is a spending or budgeting goal. Many people fall into the trap of setting a very aggressive budget with a lot of money left over for debt repayment or saving for the future, only to find themselves falling short of achieving that budget because of a few spending missteps or an unexpected expense.

Does that mean that the person creating the budget is a failure? No. Does that mean that the budget is a failure? No. Does that mean that the goal is impossible? No.

It means that the budget needs revision. You now have more data that reveals that your original budget was perhaps too optimistic, and now you have data with which to develop a more realistic budget that’s still optimistic but within the reality of your life.

Don’t take a failed first (or second or third) stab at a budget as evidence that you’re a failure or that a budget is a failure. It’s not. I constantly fail at my first attempt at most kinds of self-improvement. I fail at second and third attempts, too. Yet, eventually, I often find success.

Recall that story at the start of this article. I made countless attempts at being a successful online writer, and I failed many times before I figured out how to make it work. That doesn’t make me a failure; it’s just the nature of any sufficiently challenging goal you set for yourself. If I viewed myself as a failure, I would have never kept trying and thus The Simple Dollar wouldn’t exist and I would be working in another field entirely.

This is all true of any goal that requires you to make personal changes in order to succeed. Sometimes, your goal is too aggressive and requires an unrealistic plan. Sometimes the plan for achieving that goal is unrealistic, or it doesn’t take into account some realities that you didn’t think about when you were first coming up with the plan. You probably won’t succeed at your first attempt, but that lack of success does not mean you’re a failure. It does not mean that you deserve blame. It does not mean that your weaknesses will keep you from ever succeeding.

All it means is that you need to take what you learned from this initial failure and use it to make a revised goal with a revised plan. That revised plan is somewhat more likely to succeed, but it’s still not a guarantee.

Blaming yourself and using that blame as a reason to give up is the only real mistake you can make here. Everything else is a step toward coming up with a plan that really works for you.

Competition

Many goals don’t exist entirely within a self-improvement bubble. Many goals, particularly professional and entrepreneurial and social goals, intimately involve other people who are often aiming for the same thing you are, and that will often create competition.

The competition you inevitably face with other people comes down to two types. In one type, there really is a limited number of spots. For example, if your goal is to play in the NBA, there are only about 450 spots for players in the league at any given time and millions of players who want those spots. They’re truly limited.

However, the more common type of competition is much less direct. It’s one where quality work increases the size of the pie for everyone and there’s room for everyone. This is true for many fields, ones that can grow as long as there are more skilled and talented people in the pool. There is always room for another good writer. There is always room for another good computer programmer.

In the first case, failure to achieve your goal of obtaining one of a limited number of spots doesn’t mean that all of your efforts are a waste. It just means that you need to figure out another goal that utilizes the skills you’re building up.

So, for example, the person who is aiming to play in the NBA might build a skill set that enables them to play in an overseas basketball league.

Another approach is to build up a pool of skills that can be used together to forge an adjacent career path. For example, that basketball player might add sports management to their resume and become an agent or a front office executive, or they might add communication skills and teaching to the mix and become a coach, or they might take video editing or audio editing skills and get involved in sports-related video or audio production.

In the second case, it’s not an available spot that’s the concern but the essential level of skill needed to do this for a living. Often, failure in this area means that you simply need to hone your own skills more or else complement them with other skills as noted above and take a slightly different angle on the goal you’re shooting for.

Again, in both of these cases, it comes back to the actions you take above all else. The fact that other people want to achieve the things you want should be taken as a given, not as a source of blame. They’re always going to be doing their thing. What really matters is that you don’t use their expected efforts as an excuse not to work toward goals yourself.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some skills that are useful in most career paths. The ability to communicate well is always valuable, as is the ability to build relationships. Those can often be a difference maker, and they are skills anyone can work on.

If you want to be, say, a great software developer and make a lot of money at it, for example, the only thing really holding you back from that is your own efforts. You won’t succeed immediately, but it won’t be because the others you’re competing with are holding you back. You have to build your own skills up to the point that they’re quite valuable and supplement them with transferable skills like communication and networking skills. The effort to do that is up to you, and that leads back to the more self-directed goals above. You’re not a failure if you don’t succeed immediately, but if you rely on blaming your own perceived inadequacies and use that as a reason not to put forth effort, then you will fail.

Unexpected Setbacks

Almost every goal that anyone attempts in life will have some kind of unexpected setback. Something will come along to disrupt your plans and either slow you down or send you right back to the drawing board.

An illness. An injury. An unreliable partner. An unexpected job loss. A broken promise. A car that doesn’t start. It goes on and on and on.

Is it unfair? Sure. However, it shouldn’t be altogether unexpected. It’s going to happen. Anything worth accomplishing is impressive not just because of what it took to get from the start to the finish, but because the person overcame the inevitable unexpected setbacks along the way.

I recall my father saying more than once that “if you go get the mail during the hailstorm, you can’t expect to come back without a bump on the head.” There’s always a hailstorm, even if you can’t see it coming.

It’s easy to blame these unexpected setbacks for your failure, but what you should really be asking yourself is what can you do so that you can still succeed even in the face of these unexpected events.

For example, you might have a wonderful budget in place that’s just ticking along perfectly as you knock down your credit card and student loan debts, but then all of a sudden your mother gets ill and you’re spending every weekend traveling to help take care of her and it’s draining your progress toward that goal.

Could you blame this unexpected event from keeping you from ever reaching your goal? Sure, but blaming that unexpected event does absolutely nothing to help you achieve debt freedom. Instead, it’s merely time to sit down and rebuild your plan given the new situation you find yourself in.

You should also be aware that although you can’t control unexpected events, you can always control how you respond to them. Something bad might happen, but that doesn’t mean it has to spawn you to anger-driven behavior. It might spawn the feeling of anger inside of you, but you have the power to choose how to respond to that feeling. Is it just blameful destructive anger, or is it an emotional source to draw on for your next attempt?

Final Thoughts

It’s simple: blame doesn’t help you achieve any goals you might have for yourself. In fact, it’s just a self-destructive tendency that keeps you from achieving things.

A much better response is to sit down with your goal and your plan and look at what went wrong. This isn’t a failure or something to blame – everyone has goals and plans that go wrong. Take what you learned and make a better plan.

This might not work on the first attempt or the second or the third. Keep trying. Life changes. You change. Situations change. Unexpected events happen. Over time, your changes will get you closer and closer to where you want to be.

The only thing that holds you back is blame. When you decide that you can’t succeed because of some element and you use that as a poor reason to discontinue any effort toward your goal, that’s the moment when you ensure failure. There are always elements that make success difficult; otherwise, everyone would be successful. The difference between those that succeed and those that do not is whether they let blame get in the way of actually continuing to make progress toward their goals.

Good luck!

The post Them: The Failure of the Blame Mindset in Financial Improvement appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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