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How to Throw a Better, Cheaper Birthday Party
Tweet Share on Facebook September 28, 2011 Comment (2)As I started planning my daughter’s second birthday party, the stakes seemed to keep getting higher. We attended a birthday party for about 30 kids at a gymnasium, where guests were treated to a trampoline performance by an aspiring Olympic athlete and toddlers could jump into foam pits. Another party was at a Gymboree, which featured a professional toddler-wrangler who led the small guests in songs and games. How were we going to compete with that without completely blowing our budget?
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The Future of Freelancing
Tweet Share on Facebook September 27, 2011 Comment (9)At Freelancer.com, you can hire someone on the other side of the world to design a website for you, which means you’ll probably pay far less than you would for a local designer. Users post their projects, wait for bids to come in, and then accept one. The most popular jobs include design work, online marketing, search engine optimization, and copywriting—work that can be done from anywhere and then delivered online.
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What You Need to Know About Estate Planning
Tweet Share on Facebook September 26, 2011 Comment (2)It’s hard to get people excited to talk about estate planning, much less take action to prepare for the inevitable. But in The Wall Street Journal Complete Estate Planning Guidebook, Rachel Emma Silverman attempts to do just that. After convincing readers that they do, indeed, need a will and other estate planning tools, she breaks down the tasks into manageable, bite-size pieces. US News recently spoke with Silverman about common estate planning mistakes, how to get started, and how to discuss potentially awkward topics with family members. Excerpts:
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The Secret to Living Well on $40,000 a Year
Tweet Share on Facebook September 22, 2011 Comment (81)As Washington politicians debate whether earning $250,000 a year makes a family rich, special education teacher Danny Kofke has come up with a much lower threshold for wealth: The father of two says that his family of four can live well on his $40,000 a year salary—and you can, too. He explains how in his new book, A Simple Book of Financial Wisdom, a follow-up to his first book, How to Survive (and Perhaps Thrive) on a Teacher’s Salary. US News spoke with Kofke about how he manages to stretch his income and his tips for others trying to do the same. Excerpts:
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Why Quitting a Job Can Make Financial Sense
Tweet Share on Facebook September 21, 2011 Comment (28)This week, I wrote about when it makes financial sense to quit your job, which might sound like a ridiculous question. In this economy, does it ever make sense to leave a job? Well, yes, it turns out, and sometimes doing so can even be a smart financial move.
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How to Avoid Resenting Your Children
Tweet Share on Facebook September 20, 2011 Comment (3)Not only do children keep you up at night and drain your bank accounts, but new research from the National Endowment for Financial Education suggests that twenty-somethings continue to inflict financial pain on their parents even as adults. That’s largely because some 40 percent of 20 and 30-something children still live at home, or have until recently. As a result, parents report that they’ve had to give up privacy (30 percent), take on debt (26 percent), delay major life events such as getting married or buying a home (13 percent) and delay retirement (7 percent).
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The Real Impact of Babies on Career Success
Tweet Share on Facebook September 16, 2011 Comment (1)Jamie Ladge knows that people hate hearing that they can’t ‘have it all.’ As a professor at Northeastern University who studies career success, she’s discovered that one problem with that phrase is that it usually refers to working in a full-time, inflexible environment while trying to juggle the demands of parenthood. But a newer way of defining career success focuses more on subjective measures such as self-fulfillment, rather than pay and promotions.
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How Two Sisters Traded Corporate for Cupcakes
Tweet Share on Facebook September 14, 2011 Comment (6)Katherine Kallinis and Sophie LaMontagne, sisters and stars of TLC’s reality show DC Cupcakes, had been dreaming of opening a cupcake shop together since they were kids. “But we never considered it as a real career option. We were expected to go to college, get good jobs, and we were afraid we would disappoint our parents,” says LaMontagne. Even as LaMontagne excelled in the venture capital world and Kallinis in the fashion industry, the idea of launching their own bakery continued to nag at them.
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How a Mom’s Website Became Her Full-Time Job
Tweet Share on Facebook September 12, 2011 Comment (6)When Maria Sokurashvili’s son was born about a decade ago, she organized meet-ups with other new moms near her Washington, D.C.-area home. Those casual get-togethers soon led to regular e-mail exchanges and a mailing list, where the moms shared advice and asked each other questions. Membership grew quickly, first into the hundreds and then thousands. That’s when she and her husband, Jeff Steele, decided to launch a website.
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This Real-Life Cake Boss Bakes a New Career
Tweet Share on Facebook September 8, 2011 CommentAs business slowed as his father’s famous Georgetown deli in Washington, DC, Chris Furin, who worked full-time at the restaurant, started revving up his side-business in custom cakes. “I knew at some point the restaurant was going to close, so I was slowly cultivating and building [my client list] and thinking about what would happen next,” says Furin, 41.
