Saving Money Made Easy

Americans are known for saving very little of their income. Many think they just can't do it; others think that saving just a little bit would be insignificant. The truth is that the best thing about saving is that it gets you into the habit. Try this approach: Open up two accounts at the bank. One should be a savings or money market account. The other should be a checking account. Every time you get paid, deposit the whole amount into the savings or money market account. This account becomes your capital formation resource. Every time you receive any payment, deposit all of it into your capital account, and transfer only what you need for immediate expenses and current bill payments into your checking account. Some weeks you may even have to transfer out more than you put in that week, but the important thing is that you get into the habit of following the deposit-and-transfer procedure. After a while you will start to see the residue amounts that you left in your capital formation account increase significantly. Save just a little, but do it over a long period of time, and it pays off. Even if your bank account for capital accumulation doesn't pay much interest, it will soon let you start to pay some bills from cash instead of charge cards, and that will save you plenty of interest. You may even find that you will be able to reduce or eliminate your past balances on those cards.

Ready, Set, Upset!

Whenever things are getting to be too boring or routine for you, it's time to shake things up. If your business is lagging, do something differently. If your employees aren't enthusiastic about their working conditions, do something radically different. If you don't receive as much non-spam e-mail as you would like, start writing to contacts. Almost any innovation has its greatest impact during the period immediately following its implementation. As time passes, its effectiveness falls off, usually exponentially (which is a pretty drastic falloff). The way to keep interested in what you are doing and to make it the most effective, is to periodically introduce something new. Each new thing, process, or innovation will cause a spike of interest and/or business which will be followed by the usual drop-off. You create excitement when you keep those innovation spikes coming. Brainstorm with yourself or a few friends, and you'll come up with changes that are easy and a lot more fun that doing things the same way forever.

Everything's Relative

It's hard to believe that it's late spring or meteorological summer, with a long string of temperatures of 60 degrees F or less. It feels quite chilly even though it's June. However, I have to remind myself that most people around here (Illinois) would have given almost anything to get temperatures this warm a few months ago. Our bodies and brains adjust their expectations so that we notice significant deviations from the normal temperature, even as that normal temperature varies over the course of the year. Similarly, a day is longer for a young child than it is for an older person because it is a larger percentage of the life experienced up to that point. This is why time seems to accelerate and whiz by as you grow older. A day, week, month, or year becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of your life. The allure of travelling to exotic places decreases as the number of those trips increase. A tourist and a traveling salesperson have different impressions of the same trip.
All of this is to say that there are very few absolute goals in life. You might as well be satisfied with what you have, because the value of looking for more decreases as you keep seeking additions to what you already have. Enjoy the journey. It's more interesting than accumulating destinations just for the sake of saying you've been there.

Local News vs. World News

I have a relative who only watches and listens to local news. He isn't at all concerned with what happens on the larger world scene. I tend to closely monitor the national and international news while only briefly reviewing the local news. Who is correct? The answer is probably that we are both correct because we have different points of view. My relative is more concerned with his day-to-day costs, taxes, and laws that impact his lifestyle. I am more focused on long-term trends and national/international developments that will have impact on my personal life in the future. The fact that different people have varying viewpoints and priorities is a good thing. Because of this sort of situation, you can have negotiations and family plans where both parties are satisfied with the outcome. If we both wanted exactly the same thing, one would come out of a negotiation the winner and the other the loser. Progress is made when you can satisfy all parties without having winners and losers. To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, people and countries all act in their own enlightened self-interest. We will have coexistence, peace, and prosperity to the extent that those self-interests are not mutually exclusive.

Sounding Off!

That last Blog Post in which I lambasted Google for their lack of service sure felt good! There are times when you get so frustrated with a situation that it is positively therapeutic to sound off and vent your hostilities. It may or may not do anything to solve the problem. I have no hope for better dealings with Google, but it actually made me feel better to let it out. There was a time when I was working as an engineer for Bell & Howell Company, when I had such a showdown with the Purchasing Department. They were very upset that Engineering was treading on their turf by placing direct Purchase Orders. Without getting into the details, I read them the riot act about maintaining schedules and having sufficient technical knowledge to purchase the proper components in a timely manner. I don't ordinarily sound off, and my confrontation so surprised them that they went out of their way to be courteous and apologetic from then on. It almost approached friendship. For best results, however, you should save your sounding off for a very special situation, like Google.

Google Adsense Customer Disdain

I'd like to sue Google Adsense for Non-Support. I have spent several months trying to make contact with them to find out how to test my account to see whether it is even working. When you try to contact customer support, they tell you to ask a question in their forum first. When you ask a question, you run into so many other questions from people who are having problems that you can't even find your posted question again to see if you have received any answers or suggestions. If you give up and say that you have to contact Customer Support, they tell you that you can only check off one of a few topics they will answer, and they won't let you write a word about your case. Well Google, I don't think that you really exist. If you do, tell me why I have been on both your Adsense Content and Adsense Search Programs for more than a year on two websites and two Blogs (one more recent), and there has been absolutely no change in my account statistics for many months. I don't think you ever check to see whether sites are functioning properly. It just lets you post ads without ever having to pay off. Google Analytics is even worse. I had one site on there, and then I added three more sites only to find that the system claims that all four sites get exactly the same number of hits. Does anyone else have a better ad system available? Google is too big to know what it is doing.

Happy Birthday

The biggest thing in the news for the last couple of weeks has been the Swine Flu, more formally called H1N1. One of the more interesting points in all of the news coverage is that your first line of defense against this previously unknown virus strain is to wash your hands frequently and thoroughly. The best way to avoid getting sick and to keep this contagion from spreading is to carry on your normal activities, but keep your hands clean after touching anyone or anything that comes into contact with other people. Dr. Tim Johnson, consultant to the ABC broadcast network has suggested that when washing your hands, you should scrub them together with soap for as long as it takes to sing "Happy Birthday". This advice gives me the picture of people at side-by-side sinks in public restrooms all washing and singing "Happy Birthday to you..." The singing would probably help them cheer each other up, but the danger is that in their enthusiasm, they would give each other hand slap high fives, which would mean that they would have to wash their hands all over again.