Weekly Round Up

Weekly Chit-Chat, Roundup and Gratitude

May 12, 2012
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Weekly Chit-Chat, Roundup and Gratitude

I finally sold off my broken car on Craigslist.  I wasn’t expecting more than $500 for it, but, just to taste the water I put an ad in Miami Craigslist, offering the car for $1,200. I described every problem the car had, including blown head gasket, needs for new radiator and battery. I also mentioned about two of the power windows which don’t work, a service light which needs attention along with a list of scratches and dents. I thought people would get scared off seeing the listing, so, I mentioned that this car is only useful for the mechanics, who can fix and resell for profit. Those words spread like wild-fire. Within next few hours I received nearly 50 calls and text messages. Finally the first guy who came-by to check bought it. It helped in negotiation that while he was inspecting the car, I received two consecutive calls from other interested buyers. The car was sold for $1,200 cash then and there. Why I think this is a good deal? The KBB market value for fair conditioned Hyundai 2002 Hyundai Elantra was $2,600. The head gasket replacement , along with radiator and battery was lowest quoted at $1,700. So, financially I didn’t

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Waiting for the Ultimate and Best Search Engine

April 29, 2012
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Waiting for the Ultimate and Best Search Engine

Welcome reader! Like all other weeks, today I will have another round of personal conversation with you. Strictly non personal finance. Today I wish to talk about search engines and our, bloggers, struggle to appear at the top of search results. Readers who are not yet familiar with the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEO is a technique which puts a particular site ahead of other sites in a search result. SEO technique essentially means cracking the algorithms that search engines like Google, Bing or yahoo use to rank search results. There are serious flaws in today’s search algorithms, better article often get placed after not-so-better articles. Throughout this article I would give reference to a search term “Best credit cards”. I would mostly mention Google, but it implies all search engines, not just Google. Searching Google for “Best credit card” brought me a 2008 and a 2009 article on the front page. They were from reputed financial newspapers, but their coverage is now outdated and the searchers will not get any benefit reading them in 2012. There are millions of other search terms for which search engines pull up totally irrelevant result. There is only one possible reason I could think of. Improper/inaccurate search algorithm. Most of the

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Weekly Chit-Chat Gratitude and Links

April 22, 2012
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This was an un-eventful week, kind of boring. Still the ticket for Summer Yellowstone trip is not booked. Another plan SMB is brewing with friends, to go out on a beach rental over the memorial day week-end. On the blog front, my income, which stagnated has return after a month gap. The worrying factor is the dwindling stock of pending articles. Once I had 8 articles in waiting, now I have only 3. Right after I finish with this, I am going to write a couple for OCAAT and at least one for Finance Product Review, my other blog. This Week’s Good Reads I will stick to mostly finance related articles this week. 58 Habits to increase wealth is a list of one-liner action items. Some of these one-liners are easier-said-than-done. But, many of the points are very important for managing your finances and accumulating wealth. Recently one of my blogger friend asked me a question saying first that he was sorry for being nosy, yes he was. I gave him the answer. He got what he wanted to know, although I wasn’t comfortable in sharing that info. Paula is saying the same thing, be nosy to get success, at the end

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Weekly Roundup, Thoughts and Gratitude

April 14, 2012
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Staying within my limit and not revealing company secrets, I can only share a little facts about my job. And let me do that today. I recently got involved in a project, which has to be delivered within this calendar year, and, with the complexity of the requirements, its near-impossible to achieve that. Hence, we are in a recruitment frenzy through our vendor partners. This is not an ordinary project, it is one that can make or break your career. As always I am up for this challenge and taking on this biggest-in-life-time project head-on. Over the last couple of years I have built a strong team. A few of the outsourced workers left but, came in stronger ones. I have faith in this team and my boss has faith too since this came our way. I am not saying I will not be involved in blogging much, I will be, like ever before. One of the benefits of building strong support system is you can delegate a lot of stuff without getting overwhelmed in demanding situation. I think I am now able to balance between the blog and the work. On any given day blogging is much more creative

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Employers Checking Facebook Profile Before Job Offer and Links

March 25, 2012
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Hello readers, welcome to weekend chit-chat. I was at a friend’s place last night and the conversation flowed towards social media. Somebody mentioned that companies are checking potential hire’s Facebook profile before the job offer. I was not so sure about it and decided to give it a check. This morning Google directed me to a post in PC world, where CareerBuilder.com revealed some number. 20% of companies admitted checking Facebook/MySpace profiles. And the number of rejection is more than number of acceptance, 33% vs 24%. “Use of drugs or drinking and the posting of photographs deemed ‘inappropriate’ or ‘provocative’ were identified as the most popular reasons why employers eliminated a candidate after viewing their social networking profile.” ~ Mentioned by PC World. Earlier I listed a few tips towards getting a job through social media. But, this one looks like “Losing a job because of social media”. Here’s the list of reasons for hiring and not hiring based on social media profile, published in a CareerBuilder survey. I quickly checked my Facebook profile once again, scrutinized my wall. Nah, there’s no picture of me drinking and dancing wild. I didn’t post any offensive comment on my wall or on anybody’s wall. My qualification on

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Weekly Update, Good Reads and Gratitude

March 18, 2012
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Another interesting week went by. At work my boss started  more work from us. The reason being he’s being bombarded with new projects and proof of concept initiatives. The year’s worth of budget is cleared and many big projects got a go and we are falling short of heads. Till the time we hire people (through outsourcing partners) we have to manage the increased work-load. See, I am not complaining about more work or my boss here. I did try to understand the situation behind his increasing demands. If you see the rationale behind your boss’s action, most of time, your work may turn out to be a better experience. I know many who start thinking about retirement the moment they are asked to do additional work. Talking about retirement, today GRS has a reader story, which covers leaving passion to work 9 -5 and liking it, do check the story and the comments out. Specially I advice early retirement seekers to read it. In home front, things normal. SMB’s job hunt continues, our wants and their needs are not matching. Roundup Let’s start with cute thing, here’s a photo slide show from Jai, a fellow yakezie blogger, where he

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Weekly Roundup, Link love and Gratitude

March 11, 2012
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This week was very hectic for me, spent two nights at work out of 7. When issues come, they come in bunches for sure. But that didn’t prevent me from sneaking at twitter stream and reading some of the great articles. Here they are Great articles of the week Finance My Money showed through the calculation how you can bring your tax liability to zero with $150,000 yearly self-employment income. Thirty-six Months wrote a good article Renting vs Buying in Your 20s Smart Money Hacks questions Rising Cost of Living Getting You Down? Here’s What to do About it! The Debt Myth shares Budgeting, The Cure for What Ails You Money Q and A warns against Car Salesman Tricks They Do Not Want You To Know Don’t let your retirement be the price of your care giving, an Women’s money week post from Bucksome Boomer. The Frugal Toad present 11 ways to save money on skiing. Well, I don’t ski! Jai Catalano Photography presents Photographer’s funny experiences Carnival Inclusion We are extremely grateful to the gracious carnival hosts below for including our articles. Carnival of Money pros at Passive Income to Retire and Sweating The Big Stuff. Yakezie Carnival at Miss Wall Street. Financial Simplicity Carnival at

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OCAAT Weekly Roundup and Gratitude, Yakezie Membership Edition

February 26, 2012
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Last week, Monday, brought me a sweet surprise.  I was formally inducted in Yakezie Network, if you have missed my introduction, I would request you to head over and read my member post, none of my posts ever saw comments go above 100 before this post. I am thankful to all Yakezie member and challengers, you make blogging easy! Stealthily I am building a new site, personal finance related. Finance Product Reviews, which brings on my product reviews on various personal finance products. I have planned on to separate out product reviews from this blog and move them over to FPR. FPR is very nascent baby, which needs feeding frequently. If you are a blogger and want to exchange blogroll with FPR, contact me soon before limited spaces are taken away. its a mutual benefit. Roundup of great articles As usually there were plenty of good reads last week. Bringing in a few of the choicest ones. Finance Related You Can Afford Anything, But Not Everything – Afford Anything Major Blog Acquisition – Would You Buy a Blog for 50K? – The Financial Blogger, This is interesting to know the interest of buying out established and moderately successful blogs from the original bloggers. He

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One Cent Weekly Roundup Car Trouble Edition

February 19, 2012
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I reported a few bad news last week. I did found out solution to a few of them. Tomorrow I am going to publish a mammoth post on how this blog affected my at-work performance. I request you to come for that article tomorrow. Our older car, 2002 Hyundai Elantra, finally gave in. The cheap car with cheap parts has its limitation. With KBB value of $2,800 I am not at all fond of shelling out $2,500 towards fixing my engine, radiator, AC belts and a new battery. I am eyeing for a Toyota or Honda used car as the replacement. I spoke to a few friends and colleagues. I may get one by March second week. Until that happens, SMB has to wake up early and drop me to office and every evening she has to  pick me up from work. Naturally I am not as complaining about the car problem as she is doing. Yes, it’s a monetary loss of a $1,500 (after factoring in resell price of $1,000) but, I had that money saved anticipating a break down. I vowed not to own another Hyundai ever. Roundup of good reads The exceptional reads from last weeks are listed below.

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Weekly Happiness Report Card and Roundup

February 12, 2012
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This was not at all a good week for me. We have taken some decision about our life that is costing us money like a rain. I will talk about it another day. At work the blog took its first toll (at least to me it seems that way) when the 2011 appraisal came across finally. More about it later (this Friday). SMB’s job hunt continues, some formality still remains before she can apply formally. If she could land up a job by March end, we would be thankful to our fate. I keep track of my credit score every month, and this month there was a 13 point decrease, for no reason, I promptly ordered credit report (once in a year it’s free) and nothing was negative. I am still investigating about it, if I get more information, I would share it here. Added late: There was an apparent calculation adjustment by Transunion. They thought I paid off my car loan, that was a mere part prepayment, hence, the backward adjustment. I got a 14 point increase last month for that wrong information. On the blog side, February started great but there were traffic decrease since Thursday, I am not

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