Home Business

Home Business

Anyone with determination and initiative can get started its business for as little as a couple of thousands of dollars. Thus a home business can work and give you job satisfaction.

The Success Lady formulates 10 important steps to start a business with very little capital or no capital at all:

• Think about products and services you can offer according to your skills and knowledge. Can you compete in the market offering your ideas?
• Define what in your offer is different from your competitors and gives you a clear edge. Find out who is going to buy your products and services.
• Calculate your start up costs, identify the sources of funding available. Calculate your break even point It is fundamental to your success, especially when your resources are scarce (capital can come from your savings, borrowings from banks or government grants). See what services or requirements you can outsource to cut down your start up costs.
• Write a Business Plan. Define in the plan your offerings and value proposition, product, market, customers, financial targets, network, supply chain, resources and so on. Do a basic SWOT assessment (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threats). Every Home business should have a well written, clear and concise Business plan prior to launching operations. The plan dramatically improves your chances of success by bringing in a sense of purpose and a deep focus to the whole business. Let your family members and your friends read the plan? Is everything clear? What questions do they ask after they have read it? Don’t forget to include a marketing plan.
• Find a good advice. Many people have done it, been there and know all the networks to gap into and the pitfalls to avoid. May be, someone from your own line of business is preferred, but be open for suggestions from other fields as well.
• Choose your legal form of business organisation and register it. Most registrations can be done online and most home business owners start as a Sole Proprietorship or Partnerships in Canada. As your business grows, you can change to an incorporated company.
• Assess the level of your immediate family’s support. Indeed, members of your family who are living with you will have to make lifestyle adjustments and even sacrifices. Make sure they understand the rigors involved in running a home business. The key is consensus, communication and everybody’s involvement. Don’t forget that any discord at home will affect your performance.
• Find out the programs where you can get training in various aspects of the business you are going to embark upon.
• If possible, set up home office in a separate area, away from the living space. See whether you need any addition storage space. Furnish the space comfortably, equip it with proper equipment.
• Abide by the local laws and regulations. Check out if your paper work, registrations and permissions are in compliance with local regulations. To avoid problems, consult with a tax consultant on the tax implications, find out if you need any extra insurance or professional accreditation from industry regulators. Don’t forget that any violations may invite a fine or other punitive action (and this is not a good way to start).

Well, the last and final advice: Believe in yourself, listen to your inner voice, never give up. Trust the power of your dreams and work to reach out to your destiny. You deserve success as do your loved ones.

Trust the power of your dreams and work to reach out to your destiny. You deserve sucess! Photo: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Teaching to the Test

Teaching to the Test

Educators and test-makers dislike exam prep courses, but they work

Sure they're expensive. And maybe it's true that the same time spent in other academic or extracurricular pursuits could be just as valuable, if not more so, in helping one get into college.

But SAT review courses by companies such as Princeton Review, Kaplan Educational Centers, Inc., and Sylvan Learning Centers do seem to raise test scores for many students. Independent audits conducted by two accounting firms, Price Waterhouse and Deloitte and Touche, concluded that students who took a preparation course raised their scores by approximately 125 points on average.

Even the test maker, Educational Testing service, concedes that a course may raise scores 30 to 50 points.

The premise of the test prep classes is that if students are familiar with the test and learn certain tricks, they can improve their scores substantially. The big commercial testing companies, like Princeton Review, Kaplan and Sylvan all offer group classes as well as individual tutoring for the SAT, the PSAT (the P in this case is for preliminary), and certain graduate school entrance exams.

We dislike test preps. Photo by Elena.

For the SAT, the cost of a course (generally 36 to 39 classroom hours), may be as high as $2000. Private tutoring runs about $100 or more per hour. All of the above are offered nationwide. You should consult a phone directory to find out if one or all operate in your area.

Before reaching into your wallet, however, you may want to investigate other possibilities that might fit your budget more easily. High schools, libraries, and community colleges increasingly offer their own versions of test prep courses for substantially less money. If you are trying to decide whether a $1500 course is worth the money, ask the company you're considering whether there is an information session you can attend or a class you can visit. This normally costs nothing and might enlighten you as to what you are getting into.

The Best Long-Term Care Policies

The Best Long-Term Care Policies

In the course of writing Long-Term Care: A dollar and Sense Guide, Susan Polniaszek examined nearly 1,000 policies. Here are her favorites:

Amex: The former Fireman’s Fund offers a traditional policy focusing on nursing home care with an option for home health care. It also offers an integrated policy, which means you can buy four years of care and apply it to either nursing home or home health care, with a managed care option that increases your benefits if you use the company’s providers.

Continental casualty company: The Classic plan lives up to its name as a traditional nursing home plan. A second, Premium plan allows you to buy a pool of days instead of the usual pool of money. Your benefits are limited by the number of days you need care instead of the care’s cost.

John Hancock: A higher standard of admittance than most. You need to have help with two of the five activities of daily living before receiving benefits. A policy debuting in late 1995 will allow spouses to draw on each other’s pool of funds.

Best Long-Term Care Policy. Photo by Elena (a park in down-town Toronto).

Lincoln National: This life insurance company offers a traditional policy as well as a policy that allows you combine your life insurance and long-term care policies. It is expensive, but guarantees you or your family will see some return on your investment.

The Travelers Insurance Company: Their pool of funds policy mostly follows the traditional model.

Unum: This life insurance company markets an expensive benefit that allows your family members to be paid for home health care. Most plans require a licensed professional to receive the benefits, but UNUM allows spouses or children to be compensated.

Investments

Investments

Due to the impossibility to cover all financial concepts in a couple of pages, the present selection underlines three theoretical constructs: the risk-return tradeoff, the dollar cost averaging and asset allocation.

Risk/Return Tradeoff. Some say that to be an investor one has to be relatively unemotional. The risk return tradeoff paradigm could be perceived as a test of one’s nerves. Risk in investing conveys the meaning of a return being different than expected and the traditional possibility than there may be a (total) loss of the funds invested.

In a financial time series analysis, Lundblad (2005) reviews two hundred years of the U.S. equity market history. A time-varying risk return tradeoff is at play, but in general risk return tradeoff is immune to temporal change.

Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA). Picking the tops and bottoms of the market can be a daunting task for an investor. Although DCA is a widely recommended strategy to purchase equity securities, Brennan et al. (2005) wonder if the occurrence might be influenced by irrational behaviour. The authors’ conclusion was that rational academic advice might be the worse alternative.

Asset Allocation. Asset preservation gains importance as a person gets closer to retirement. Theoretically, risk averse investors buy low risk securities such as bonds, while risk tolerance suggests high risk financial assets but also more exciting returns such as stocks. Hariharan et al. (2000) found that risk tolerant investors (as opposed to risk averse) maintained their more pronounced position in bonds than stock despite approaching retirement age.

The Capital Asset Management Model (CAMP) predicts that investment in risk-free assets is negatively correlated with risk tolerance and that agglomeration of risky securities would remain the same. Intuitively, one would tend towards a lesser investment in riskless obligations (Treasury Bills – United States government debt) with increasing risk tolerance, but the picture could be different. According to the writers, Wall Street is uncomfortable with the idea that risk tolerance fails to influence stock asset allocation.

In the European Union, Small to Midsized Enterprises (SMEs) are firms with yearly turnover of less than 50 million Euros and employing less than 250 people. In North America, the corresponding parameters are roughly 50 million dollars and 500 employees. Japan’s counterparts are less than 300 employees in manufacturing and other industries with capital of up to 300 million yen. The term Small to Midsized Businesses (SMBs) is also encountered.

Businessman Sitting Alone in Room. Illustration: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

References:

    Brennan, M. J., Li, F. & Touros, V. N. (2005). Dollar cost averaging. Review of Finance, 9 (4): 509-535.

    Hariharan, G., Chapman, K. C., & Domian, L. D. (2000). Risk tolerance and asset allocation for investors nearing retirement. Financial Services Review, 9: 159-170.

    Lundblad, C. (2005). The risk return tradeoff in the long run: 1836-2003. Journal of Financial Economics, 85 (1): 123-150.

Iceland: Videy and the Peace Tower

Iceland: Videy and the Peace Tower

Enjoy a short trip with the Elding ferry service to the lovely island of Videy, situated in Kollfjördur just off the coast of Reykjavík.

Apart from its ancient ruins and rich historical background, other attractions include impressive works of art by Yoko One (the Imagine Peace Tower) and Richard Serra (the Milestones project).

Fans of architecture will also be interested to learn that the church on Videy is one of the oldest in the country and that Videy House is the first building in the country to be constructed with stone.

With an extensive network of paths and a population of lovely resident horses, the island can be explored both on foot and on horseback. No matter which path you take, you'll be rewarded with spectacular views of the surrounding mainland, and on a clear day you'll be able to see the impressive outline of the Snaefellsnes peninsula.

In summertime, there are daily ferry departures both from Skarfabakki pier and Aegisgardur harbour, by the Harpa concert hall. The winter service runs on Saturdays and Sundays from Skarfabakki to Videy. Note that trips to Videy are free with the Reykjavík City Card.

Imagine Peace Tower

The Imaginge Peace Tower is a work of art that represents a beacon of world peace by the legendary artist, musician and peace advocate, Yoko Ono.

A typical neighborhood. Photo by Olga

The work is designed in the form of a wishing well from which a powerful tower of light beams. The words IMAGINE PEACE are inscribed on the well in 24 different languages. The light tower is composed of a number of individual lights that join together to form a single beam. Six of the lights travel through corridors across a platform that surrounds the well and are reflected upwards to the sky with mirrors. An additional nine lights shine straight up to the sky, strengthening the tower of light.

The strength, intensity and brilliance of the light tower continually change as particles in the air fluctuate with the changing weather and atmospheric conditions unique to Iceland.

The inauguration of the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER took place during a private ceremony on 9 October 2007 on Videy Island, Reykjavík, Iceland. The artwork was dedicated to the memory of John Lennon on what would have been his 67th birthday.

Since then, it lights up the evening sky annually from 9th October to 8th December. It is also lit during the winter solstice for one week, on New Year's Eve and on Spring Equinox for one week.

The electricity for the light comes entirely from Reykjavík Energy, which produces the electricity from geothermal power. The construction and installation of the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER was done by Yoko Ono, in collaboration with the City of Reykjavík, the Reykjavík Art Museum and Reykjavík Energy.