Archives for December 2013

The Year in Travel 2013

December 31, 2013 10 Comments

This post is inspired by JD Roth’s post, who indirectly (and unknowingly) inspired me to start this blog. Even the name of this blog was inspired by JD’s earlier blog “Get Rich Slowly”. Coming to the point,since we love to travel, I thought ending the year with a note on our travel performance would be a good move. And doing so, I can be somewhat more personal to you. In summary, 2013 was a good year for us with respect to travelling. We went to as many as 5 places in last 12 months!

Amazing view on New Orléans Swamp tour

I get 28 days of paid leave in a year, so managing 5 destinations to travel to is not a bad performance, right? Usually we travel to our home country, India, every two years, and when we take an India trip, most of those 28 days are used up. We are planning our next India trip in Oct-Nov 2014 so, 2014 is unlikely to be a good year for travel.

How Much your Retirement Portfolio Gained Last Year?

December 30, 2013 1 Comment

Starting with a question, how much did you gain in your retirement portfolio, at the end of the year 2013? In terms of absolute dollar value and in terms of percentage? The best way is to glance at your money management software, like Yodlee or Mint, if you have. Else, you can login to online accounts to check the growth.

With excellent stock market performance in 2013 your retirement portfolio might have grown handsomely over the last one year. Speaking about our retirement fund, our 401(k) plan grew by astonishing 80%. Since we started this account only in 2011, the initial amount at the start of the year was not much, hence the growth in percentage term looks so high.

Best of OCAAT in 2013

December 29, 2013 Leave a Comment

Thank you readers, we successfully completed one more year of blogging! This was my third year as a financial blogger who blogs part-time. This was an eventful year, not a success story all the way. Things from technical front was not easy this year.

My original host HostGator was acquired by another company and probably that was the reason behind frequent outages and slowness you experienced throughout the first of the year. During that time some hacking took place and malicious scripts were inserted, which did affect my search ranking with Google. I recovered from the low somehow. But I switched the host a couple of times, which took a lot of time and energy on my part.

This was also the year when I posted lesser posts compared to 2012, by an amount of 62 posts (240 vs. 178), almost one less post a week.

Make your Kid a Better Gift Giver – Infographic

December 27, 2013 2 Comments

While we buy gifts for each other, we often forget to teach our children on gift buying. The following infographic will talk about 10 pointers that can teach your children all about an ideal gift giving. This inforgraphic was offered to me via mail, in a sense this is not unique to my blog. you may find a same infographic at some other site as well.

The subject and the lessons presented here are very touching and these were the main reasons I had accepted to post this on my blog.

For grand parents, the best gift has to be “presence of grand kids”, we should instill the important lesson of avoiding sales pitches to our children right from the young age. We need to tell them not to buy gifts on credit. Gifts should fit in to the pocket, that is, the budget. There is no better alternative to home-made gifts. Your packaging and finishing may not be good but the value of the gift would be many fold compared to a store brought similar item.

How to Start a Low-Cost Patio Garden

December 25, 2013 1 Comment

This is second post this month about gardening in the patio. earlier I wrote about winter care for potted plants. In this article I’ll tell you how to start a patio garden with minimal cost. We didn’t spend more than $10 when we started living in this country.

Are you currently without a yard? Maybe you live in New York City and you’re lucky enough to have a patio. Or, for the rest of us, perhaps we do have a yard, but don’t want to take the time to develop a large garden. Then a patio garden might be perfect for all of us! Let’s take a look at some cheap ways to start and maintain our garden on the patio.

The Importance of Giving this Holiday

December 20, 2013 7 Comments

Today I’ll talk about very important aspect of being rich and wealthy, the giving part of it. we live in a country that knows the importance of giving, holiday giving. Holidays are not only for getting and celebrating, it’s also about giving happiness to others.

Giving happiness to your near and loved ones and also giving happiness to persons or families you don’t know off and will probably never know off. Holidays are for every one, god has been kind enough to grant you good amount of wisdom, health, you were born in to a first world. You were given right education by your parents and you, by your given wisdom, fared well to get a job and earn your living.

The Good Care giving and the Tax Breaks Thereof

December 18, 2013 Leave a Comment

Readers of this blog have different occupation. When certain people contacted me to write about caregivers, I thought about it for a while and decided to go for it. Caregiving is something we all do but, we never spend the time to think about the other advantages like tax deductions. This post is all about how to be a better caregiver and then benefiting from it as well, apart from helping people in need, the primary objective of caregiving.

In my life I have seen a good amount of caregivers, there is one helping my parents back home. I have seen caregivers who go above and beyond to perform their duty. This is a tough and demanding task to be a good caregiver. If you aspire to be one, make sure not to commit these mistakes and follow the good practices.

Things to avoid as caregiver

When someone in your family falls sick, persons nearby turn into caregiver, often they get compensation. Do not just look for the compensation alone rather become a good helper. When the primary caregiver has to take a break and you are the one to step in, understand the previous one’s practices well.

Taking Care of Your Potted Plants in Winter

December 16, 2013 Leave a Comment

While we spend much of winter keeping warm indoors, plants growing in pots in your patio/balcony can have a tough time coping with the cold weather. In this post I’ll talk about few of the methods you can try to safeguard your plants. Thus helping you to avid the cost of replanting, re seeding or buying a brand new plant.

We live in an apartment, we have two patios to place our pots. At any point of time we have more than 10 pots with flowering or fruiting plants. Even during winter as winter in south Florida is like fall months in rest of the country. For us container gardening is a year round pleasure.

New Age Impulse Buying – Buying Things Online

December 9, 2013 10 Comments

Bloggers are always fed constantly with various survey reports and studies. being a personal finance bloggers, I do get daily dose of emails containing press releases and market trends. Last week I received an email from a well known market research firm, about the latest trend in consumer buying experience. It reported declining over the counter sell and increasing online sells over the Black Friday weekend.

Spending at physical stores declined by 2.9 percent compared to the same four-day period last year beginning with Thanksgiving day. Whereas Cyber Monday sales soared 21 percent over last year. Also, this year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest online shopping event to date.

Great DIY Gift for the Holidays

December 7, 2013 2 Comments

The holiday season is upon us and if you are strapped for cash this Christmas, but still want to give several presents to your friends and family, consider making some gifts yourself. Do-it-yourself gift ideas are extremely popular and often cherished by the receiver of the gift.

After all, instead of just going out and purchasing something, you spend the time making a gift instead. Do not worry if you think that you do not have any special skills needed to make holiday gifts because there are plenty of gift ideas that do not require experience. Here is a list of some great DIY gifts you can give away this holiday season.

Archives for December 2013

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Things to avoid as caregiver

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