Debt is the curse of our time. We owe so much it would make our ancestors’ heads spin. For some their income can cope with the repayments. For others their income simply does not cover all the outgoing and those debts are rising to ever more unsustainable levels.
The current world financial woes have just heightened the problem and raised the spectra of collapsing economies and the resultant pain and poverty that will inevitably follow. There is no time to be lost. You simply have to set your house in order. Firstly, grab all the family credit cards and lock them away or destroy them. They are way too easy to get into trouble with. Next make a complete list of all your debts. Put them in order of amount borrowed and by the highest interest rate charges. Determine the lowest amount that is required to be paid collectively each month.
Now you need to work out your new budget. List all your monthly expenditures. Do not forget to make a monthly allowance for those periodic payments like rates and insurances. Go through the budget and delete all unnecessary items like membership subscriptions and cable TV subscriptions. Delete everything that is not necessary to everyday living. If there is money left over after this analysis you can look at reinstating those things again later on.
Now work out outgoing compared to income. Hopefully, this will now show a surplus. If this proves to be the case use this surplus to commence paying off the debt with the highest interest rate. Get the first one paid off and then work on the one with the next highest debt. You will now have a higher surplus each month so maybe you can reward yourself with reinstating cable TV or the gym membership, but take it slowly.
If, after doing your budget you are still behind the eight ball you will need to look at reorganizing your debt into one single loan at a better over all interest rate. Shop around to find the best deal. This may prove difficult but keep trying. If all else fails, try getting a better job that pays more or look at moonlighting in a part time job. Maybe you could live with relatives until you get back on your feet.
There are always alternatives but you must make a start on killing off the debt. Nothing will improve if you do not take action. Remember to break the credit card habit and write out and commit to a budget.
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Believe
Believe, in yourself and your abilities. You don’t need to impress anyone. You don’t even need to share your dreams at the beginning, you just need to allow yourself to dream. Even if you don’t have a clue about how you will achieve your dream, believe, relax, act and let it happen. It is the journey which is the achievement.
Find Your Compelling Moment
What’s affecting your life today? Are your time poor? Do you feel your life lacks meaning? Do you want to leave a legacy? You can be sure you’re not alone. What have you seen, heard or read about lately which really grabbed your interest? Not necessarily the overwhelming “bad news”, but something where you can make a difference. Something you would be proud to share with Oprah on her show, something important to you, something which makes you feel empowered.
Discover Your Passion
Whether you love painting, cooking, knitting, beading, jewelry making, scrap booking, woodworking, home decorating, gardening, sewing, writing or any of the other many arts, crafts, hobbies or pursuits, you can weave it into your lifestyle in some way. Perhaps you can make gifts for your family and friends. Your passion can be a solitary activity aimed at personal satisfaction or something you can share.
Learn From The Experts
While you don’t want to copy anyone, and you need to express your own originality, you can get lots of ideas, techniques and motivation from others. Who are the experts in your passion? Google them, read up on what they are doing, find out about the next big trend. Be inspired to adapt your skills to a hot new project.
Easy Research
Use the best research tool ever created. The internet. The volume of knowledge at your fingertips is astounding, whole libraries, personal experiences, technical data, ideas, opinions, facts, instructions and misinformation. It’s all there to be used as you see fit.
Can It Change Your Life (Or Someone Elses)?
Many a small project has taken on a life of it’s own and grown into something the originator never dreamed was possible. Can you use your skills to develop a community project or your own small business? Remember that shared experiences grow exponentially.
Blend and Twist
No, this is not a knitting pattern. It’s a way of thinking. Your experiences don’t exist in isolation. Blend your life experiences, intertwine them through your actions. You may have an inspiration for a creative project, or have the desire to share your skills and knowledge with others, and in the process improve your own lifestyle as well as the lives of others.
Share Your Passion
Write about it or take a video to show how it’s done. Start your own blog. In the process you will learn new skills which you can further share. It’s a process without an end, but which is full of the satisfaction of achievement.
Decide, and Take Control
If things are moving too slowly for you, discuss your passion with someone close to you, someone supportive. Talking about it will make it real. Use life’s challenges to advance yourself. Indecision and inaction are decisions in themselves, and means that nothing changes. Decide and take action. This means you have taken control over your dreams.
Taking these steps can help you learn more and be more so your life can be more fulfilling, satisfying and happy.
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Stress can be good for you or it can be bad for you. There are both positive and negative stressors in life. Good or positive stressors can be things like going on vacation, putting on a party, a close baseball game, meeting a deadline, getting married, a job interview or winning a lottery. All of the former can cause stress, but usually you get feelings of increased energy and excitement. Good stress can pump you up and help get your creative juices going. Some stress is healthy and necessary.
Everyone has a different threshold for stress. One person may respond quite differently to the same situation than another. For example, someone being cut off in traffic can create a stressful response in one person and quite a different response in another. This depends on the attitudes and viewpoints we have taken on in our lifetime. One person may react with road rage shaking fists at the perpetrator; while another will rationalize that perhaps this person didn’t notice me or is in an extreme hurry and just slough it off. The latter is the healthier response.
Stress can either invigorate you or zap you of energy. Some symptoms of bad stress or “distress” are being tired all the time, always on edge with a short fuse, depression, change in sleeping patterns, frequent headaches, sore shoulders and neck, changes in weight patterns, relationship problems, diarrhea, dry mouth, sweaty palms and tight throat to name a few.
Your body will let you know that you are under too much stress. Pay attention to what your body is telling you. Consistent distress (bad stress) can lead to physical illness such as high blood pressure, heart disease and anxiety. Stress is like a guitar string, if you have the right amount of tension you can play beautiful music, but too tight a string and it can snap! This is when people have nervous breakdowns. They overload with distress and have no way to cope with all the bad stress in their life.
Remember stressors are the situations that happen to you on a daily basis i.e.: being cut off in traffic. The degree of stress you experience is your own response to that stressor. You must adapt to the stressors of daily life. There are many demands to life that we have to deal with on a daily basis such as working, raising children, getting along with our spouses and the people around us, finances, illness, ageing, isolation, lack of friends, everyday events in the world, etc. It can be tough, but we must deal with it or it will deal with us. If you are over stressed you must get support from your doctor, friends and family or a psychologist. It is healthy to reach out! You may think that this is just simple common sense, but sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees and the obvious is not always visible, when someone is in the middle of distress or a crisis in ones life.
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The traditional Halloween celebrations come round every October 31st, and these days those who enjoy the festivities the most are the children. Halloween is a time to dress up in fancy dress and take to the streets trick or treating. Some families go to a lot of trouble decorating their homes and front yards in a ghostly and eerie Halloween theme.
Halloween is a traditional Celtic festival, and has survived through the ages most strongly in the Celtic communities in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. From there, with emigration, Halloween has spread around the world, most notably to America. In recent years, the spread of popular American culture has introduced a further expansion of interest in Halloween to fresh places, such as Asia and Western Europe.
The original Celtic celebrations were pagan festivities related to the changing seasons as winter approached. Traditionally it was a time when the living could communicate with the dead, and magic was abroad. The early Christian church, as with many pagan festivals, absorbed these celebrations into the Christian calendar. All Saints Day, also known as All Hallows Day, was set down for November 1st. All Hallows Evening, the night of October 31st, became known as Hallow E’en, later just Halloween, and the time for the traditional celebrations.
Halloween celebrations were a community event, and there was usually a bonfire and fun games. The apple harvest was in full swing, and games such as trying to eat an apple on a string or floating in a barrel of water without using your hands, were popular. Children would go from door to door to gather fruit, nuts and other goodies for the festivities, which was the origin of the “treating” visits of today. In most places, especially in Scotland, the children would sing or put on a performance in return for the treats they collected. Today the treats collected are more likely to be candies and sweets, and sometimes money.
Halloween “tricks” were originally secret and often witty pranks played on some adults by children, with the blame being placed on the mischievous spirits that were said to be abroad on Halloween. This practice was especially popular in Ireland. At some stage long in the past, tricks and treating merged into a choice: give a treat or become the victim of a trick. This unfortunate development led to such practices as throwing eggs at houses and soaping windows, and worse. Today these excesses are rare.
Halloween parties are often held with a haunted house theme decoration. To the delight of children, Halloween menu items often include tomato soup renamed as vampire soup, spaghetti dishes renamed with cemetery humor as worms, and the ever-popular breadsticks tipped with sliced almonds and known as witches’ fingers. With so many pumpkins being made into carved jack-o-lanterns, pumpkin dishes such as pumpkin pie are often a feature of Halloween menus.
Over the last few years, the magical themes of the popular Harry Potter books have added fresh fun to costumes and decorations for children’s Halloween parties.
Halloween costume parties have also become popular events for adults as well in recent years. They are a great excuse to dress up and have fun. It seems the trend today is for any costume to be acceptable, not necessarily just the traditional witches, vampires and ghosts of Halloween. Costume design inspirations are now drawn from many sources, such as recent movies and television series. Some costumes are just witty, such as the seasonally appropriate theme of a leaf blower, consisting just of a leaf suspended from the brim of a cap where it can be blown.
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You want to go back to school. No, you need to go back to school, and you think an online degree program is the best way to fit an education into your busy life. Once you have made that huge, life-altering decision, the big challenge is to find the right online degree program for your future plans. There are a number of important factors that you must consider when choosing an online degree program.
First, and foremost, you must pay careful attention to the program’s accreditation and standards. Some programs are purely online with no bricks-and-mortar location. many of these online programs are reputable and properly accredited, but not all, so be a careful consumer and check this out thoroughly. Also, make sure the program is credible in the field you want to enter. It would be a terrible thing to spend a lot of time and money investing in a degree that will not let you fulfill your dreams. Of course online version of traditional programs can also be problematic. While there isn’t the problem of accreditation and status, not all traditional programs “do” online well. Creating an online class or program requires a different pedagogy and planning than the more traditional counterpart. Make sure your program gets the difference between online and traditional instruction.
It is also important to find out before you choose a program how supportive the online degree program is that you are considering. On campus there are a number of readily available sources to support your education, but what if you are not on a campus? Is there somewhere to turn for technical assistance? How can you contact your instructors and are they readily available to offer help and guidance? Is there library support? Is there a way to develop relationships with faculty and students? While what you learn in class is important, it is also important to remember that the sum of those classes is not the total of your education. Can this program offer the ability to develop a support network for after graduation?
Last, but not least, how expensive will your online degree program be? Some institutions charge more for online programs. Some institutions do not offer financial aid for online programs. Find out the facts ahead of time and plan how you will support your educational plans.
The best source of information about a program are students of the online degree program you are considering, especially graduates of that program. Students can tell you about the level of support the program offers students and how well designed the classes are for distance learning. Graduates can tell you about how well received the online degree is in the field. Do not forget to ask those students if they would choose this program again knowing what they know now. Ask the program for referrals but also seek out your own. Harness the power of the internet and do searches for the degree to find those graduates. Many people post their resumes and vitas to the web so you should be able to find some students. If you cannot then that might also be telling.
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