Month: April 2017

What Young Families Can Do To Save More Money

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Whether you have more than one child or you’re a first-time parent, babies are expensive and there’s no way around it. Building your family is probably a dream come true for you, but it doesn’t go without any complications.

Luckily, there are many tricks to make the transition a little easier for you to handle on a budget. Here’s a quick guide on how families can save money, especially with a newborn.

Avoid Eating Out

healthy meals

Eating out is more convenient than taking the time to prepare and cook a meal, but it is more expensive. When you have a newborn at home, you can’t afford to go without any essentials. Find as many sales as possible in your local grocery stores. Your days and nights may run together with a newborn in the home, but most of your money will remain in your wallet when you don’t eat out all the time.

Try making freezer meals a couple weeks ahead of your baby’s arrival. This way you’ll have the time to make good, healthy meals before the craziness of the baby takes over, and you’ll have fewer chances to give into the temptation of ordering out.

See Also: Foods That Will Help You Keep Your Family Healthy

Breastfeed Your Newborn

If you can, breastfeed your newborn as well. Your breastmilk is free and, according to studies, offers a lot more nutrition to help in your baby’s development.

Formula milk is expensive whether you buy a branded or generic formula. It can cost more than $100 each month which translates to $1,200 per year. You can keep this money in your pocket by breastfeeding your newborn.

This, however, is not to say that women who cannot breastfeed are inferior or that every woman will be able to. But, if you can breastfeed, do it if you want to save a lot of money.

Getting A Home Loan

Getting a home loan can save you money from renting, especially when you receive your loan through a credit union. Credit unions have lower fees than traditional banks and they offer some of the best home loan rates. They can help you stop living from paycheck to paycheck.

Use a Mortgage Calculator to see how this option could help you save. You can refinance in some circumstances, or even get a house that better fits your new family before you give birth. This can help you adjust more comfortably and keep your wallet less strained.

See Also: Home Loan Tips: 5 Things To Avoid After Getting Your Home Loan Sanctioned

Receiving Government Assistance

Government assistance is provided for low-income families. You may qualify for food stamps (SNAP) that pay for the cost of your food. Formula milk can also be purchased with SNAP benefits or WIC (Women Infants and Children).

Another government assistance program is Medicaid, which pays for your children’s medical expenses. You’ll have to check if you qualify for any of these first. Check with your doctor and insurance provider to see what you might be eligible for.

Avoid Overloading on Baby Clothes and Accessories

Everything about babies is adorable, including their clothes, toys, baby bags, and other accessories. To save money, however, buy no more than 10-15 outfits.

Babies grow quick and the clothes you buy today will be too small within the next two weeks. Instead of buying, you can try looking for hand-me-downs from relatives your baby can use. Then, send off gently used ones to other newborns when your baby grows.

Have A Baby Shower

baby shower

Traditionally, people have a baby shower before the child arrives, but think outside the box and do what’s best for you. Having a baby shower after the baby is born avoids a lot of guesswork and unused gifts. It can also help you save money on baby items, such as bottles, formula, diapers and clothes.

Saving money when you have a newborn in the family causes you to change the way you do a few things, but this task is not too difficult to achieve. Following these tips will help you save as much money as possible.

 

Information for this article provided by University Federal Credit Union who offers Mortgage Calculator apps and some of the best home loan rates in Salt Lake City, Utah.

 

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April 26th

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A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

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16 Powerful Steve Jobs Quotes to Get Unstuck and Reclaim Your Life Purpose

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You’re reading 16 Powerful Steve Jobs Quotes to Get Unstuck and Reclaim Your Life Purpose, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Frustrating, isn’t it?

Everyone seems to know what they’re doing… but you just have no clue.

You don’t know what’s your life purpose. You can’t find a meaningful job that you enjoy. Nothing excites you and every day looks the same.

Don’t worry.

If you’re feeling lost or stuck, you can get some amazing advice from one the most remarkable figures in modern history.

Steve Jobs, the guru that changed our world with technology, figured out what it means to build a meaningful career and live a fulfilling existence.

Check his powerful words to get some inspiration and give your life a new direction.

1. “For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

2. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

3. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

4. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

5. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

6. “My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”

7. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow know what you truly want to become.”

8. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.”

9. “The greatest thing is when you do put your heart and soul into something over an extended period of time, and it is worth it.”

10. “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

11. “I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and… it wasn’t that important – because I never did it for the money.”

12. “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

13. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”

14. “You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down.”

15. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

16. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

Sergi Marquez writes insanely useful self-improvement advice that helps dissatisfied people build the awesome life they want. Get unstuck with his free eBook, The Killer Morning Hack of Highly Successful People.

You’ve read 16 Powerful Steve Jobs Quotes to Get Unstuck and Reclaim Your Life Purpose, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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“It Is a Great Art to Saunter”

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We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desperate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man — then you are ready for a walk.

—Henry David Thoreau, in Walking

In his journal entry for April 26, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes a pleasant afternoon walk with Thoreau and, later that night, a lesson learned:

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Cliff with Henry Thoreau. Warm, pleasant, misty weather, which the great mountain amphitheatre seemed to drink in with gladness. A crow’s voice filled all the miles of air with sound. A bird’s voice, even a piping frog, enlivens a solitude and makes world enough for us. At night I went out into the dark and saw a glimmering star and heard a frog, and Nature seemed to say, Well do not these suffice? Here is a new scene, a new experience. Ponder it, Emerson, and not like the foolish world, hanker after thunders and multitudes and vast landscapes, the sea or Niagara.

The two men were new friends at this point, and journal entries by both reflect their enthusiasm for shared company — though Emerson may have enjoyed tramping with Thoreau more than Thoreau enjoyed tea with Emerson. In a journal entry for April 26, 1841, occasioned by a visit to Emerson’s Concord home, Thoreau expresses this discomfort with the abodes of “civilized man”:

His house is a prison, in which he finds himself oppressed and confined, not sheltered and protected. He walks as if he sustained the roof; he carries his arms as if the walls would fall in and crush him, and his feet remember the cellar beneath. His muscles are never relaxed. It is rare that he overcomes the house, and learns to sit at home in it, and roof and floor and walls support themselves, as the sky and trees and earth.

It is a great art to saunter.

In his eulogy for Thoreau twenty years later, Emerson recalled how “it was a pleasure and privilege to walk with him,” though he would “as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.” Thoreau would not have objected to the comparison, says Richard Higgins in Thoreau and the Language of Trees:

Human nature appeared slightly bent to Thoreau, but he saw trees as upright and virtuous, the nobility of the vegetable kingdom. Their stance spoke of the “ancient rectitude and vigor of nature.” Nothing, he said, stands up more free from blame in this world than a pine tree.

Although he cites not Thoreau but Walt Whitman as his guide, few have taken the saunter imperative more to heart than Andrew Forsthoefel, whose Walking to Listen describes his eleven-month hike from Pennsylvania to California. With the listening at least as important as the walking, Forsthoefel collected eighty-five hours of taped interviews, as well as detailed notes on his many casual encounters; he also kept himself attuned to the stranger within — “the fact that I was a living mystery, and so were all of the neighbors I’d never met”:

I’d wanted to live this kind of story for as long as I could remember, a story in which a traveler casts off into the big unknown with nothing more than a loaded pack, and meets strangers on the road, and breaks bread with those strangers, learning the unique language of their lives before casting off into the big unknown again. It was an ancient kind of human experience, that of the pilgrim, the wayfarer, but as an American Millennial and a son of suburbia, it felt like a lost inheritance.

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Earthly Remains

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Twenty-five years ago — and twenty-six novels ago — Donna Leon, who grew up in New Jersey, stumbled upon her life’s work in Venice. “I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends,” Leon told me in a 2009 interview, “and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation and we started talking about how to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book. It took about a year, and after it was finished it sat in a drawer because I’ve never really had any ambition. I was always pretty shiftless in my life. But I entered Death at La Fenice in a contest, it won, I got a contract for two books, then two more and so it went.” Decades later, a shiftless Leon is hard to imagine. Aside from writing a novel a year, she has a doctorate in eighteenth-century literature and a passion for Baroque opera, with which she is involved as a writer and a company director. To her readers, of course, she is above all the creator of Commisario Guido Brunetti, the complex and empathetic Venetian investigator who remains the fulcrum of her series.

Brunetti first appeared in Death at La Fenice, where his presence seems slight — perhaps because the plot is one of Leon’s busiest. An obnoxious conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, is found poisoned to death, and the subsequent drama unfolds with operatic brio. There is a tempestuous soprano, a vengeful wife, a horribly wronged mistress, plenty of nasty (as well as Nazi) secrets, and lots of good old comeuppance. Yet no player is a caricature and no plot twist is excessive. Leon’s psychological acuity, sly wit, and artistic restraint both deepen and darken a novel that is, like all enduring crime fiction, a study of character as much as crime. And though the titles of Leon’s three subsequent novels — Death in a Strange Country, Dressed for Death, and Death and Judgment — suggested a series that would proceed with mechanical predictability, the opposite has been true. Almost without exception, each installment in the Brunetti series is substantial and self-sufficient. For within the city of Venice and with a familiar cast of characters — Brunetti’s wife, Paola, and her aristocratic family, his friend and colleague Vianello, his insufferable boss, Patta, and the incomparable Signorina Elettra — Leon constructs elegant dramas around dense matters such as political, military or Vatican corruption, the victimization of immigrants, organized crime, environmental crime, and even New Age hucksterism.

The action begins, invariably, with a body. “He latched his fingers around the strands and pulled gently . . . As he backed up one step it floated closer, and the silk spread out and wrapped itself around his wrist.” This is Brunetti in The Girl of His Dreams, pulling a dead Roma child out of a canal. And here he is in Leon’s new novel, Earthly Remains:  “At first, Brunetti looked to one side of the rope, then steeled himself and looked at it and what was below: the top of a head, a shoulder, the other, and then the chest of the man . . . bobbing and turning in the water.” The drowned man, David Casati, is an elderly widower, beekeeper, and fisherman who knew Brunetti’s father. Casati is also the caretaker of the villa where Brunetti recuperates following an incident during an interrogation that makes him question his judgment and feel his age. “I can’t stand it any longer, doing what I do,” he confesses to his wife. Later, a doctor identifies Brunetti’s ailment as “Your work. The need to do something when you can do nothing.”

The physician could be addressing Henning Mankell‘s detective Kurt Wallender or, closer to home, Michael Dibdin‘s Venetian investigator Aurelio Zen. After all, what fictional detective does not despair? Certainly Brunetti, like his native city, is repeatedly engulfed: by sadness, by humanity. And never more so than in Earthly Remains, which briefly transports him to an idyllic island (“Brunetti awoke in Paradise”) with Pliny to read and with Casati as his guide on the water. But even paradise is not what it used to be.

“Everywhere, we’ve built and dug and torn up,” Casati rages. ” We’ve poisoned it all, killed it all.” His bees are dying. Soon he is dead, perhaps murdered. And Brunetti is back in harness, but for how much longer? Earthly Remains, for all its murkiness and skullduggery, is the most elegiac of Leon’s novels; it feels like a farewell. In one scene, for example, Brunetti, Vianello, and Casati’s bereaved daughter sit “in silence for a moment, three Venetians, relatives at the wake of a city that had been an empire and was now selling off the coffee spoons to pay the heating bill.” Maybe so, but Leon will always bring this city back to life.

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The Street with Trotsky’s Bones

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I told my children while pointing to the weirdly shaped Polyforum building, the three of us sitting down in the backseat of a cab, feeling a bit foreign in the city in which we had all been born but had not lived for a long time: “The guy who did that thing is the same one who fired the machine gun whose bullet holes we saw in Trotsky’s bedroom, near your grandparents’ house.” They were, of course, immediately interested in the building. I grew up in the neighborhood of El Carmen, on Calle Viena: a quiet, middle-class, residential road that happens to have, at one end, an insane monument engraved with the hammer and sickle: Leon Trotsky’s grave.

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11 Ways To Pick Yourself Up And Bounce Back After Failure

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Success is not always what it seems.

Steven Spielberg had his share of failures and setbacks before becoming successful. So did Walt Disney and Michael Jordan. Arianne Huffington, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates experienced many ups and downs before they became successful in their respective fields. Henry Ford and Steve Jobs also had a bumpy journey to success. These icons are perfect examples that the road to success is anything but smooth.

Failure is inescapable and inevitable. There is no denying it or escaping it. No one is immune to it. No matter how good you are in your field or area of expertise, there is no guarantee or immunity against failure nor is there a surety that you’ll succeed the first time around or make it every single time.

Failure is bitter no matter how you see it. The sting of a letdown, the agony of experiencing disappointment and the pain of defeat is hard to endure. In plain words, failure sucks. It crushes you, hurts you deeply and leaves your ego bruised. There is no feeling worse than having hit rock bottom. No wonder everyone dreads failure, but keep in mind that no amount of hating or detesting it can help you avoid it.

Failure is a part of life and the success process. J.K Rowling, the bestselling author with the phenomenal rags to riches story, has beautifully summed it with this line: ‘It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all. In which case, you fail by default.’

But, failure doesn’t have to discourage, demoralize you or end your success journey. Looking at it in the right perspective, failure doesn’t mean it’s all over. It just means that you didn’t succeed this time around.

Sometimes you’ll face situations where the odds are stacked up against you. Other times, despite your best efforts and preparation, you will still experience failure. You have to train yourself to be tough, take the hits and be able to deal with it all.

Failure can work for you big time if you look at it the right way. It, by itself, is not detrimental. What is damaging about failure is its paralyzing effect once you let it get to you. Your chances of recovering from failure and regaining lost confidence depend heavily on how you approach it.

Failure doesn’t care about how you feel. It makes no concessions. It only throws two choices in your way: either give up or fight again. It’s up to you to decide and take the call. You can choose to opt for the easy way out, step back and quit or make the hard choice of picking yourself up, getting back on your feet and starting all over again. The right choice will help you steer yourself towards success and transform your life.

Here are 11 ways you can bounce back from failure and get back on track again.

Accept what happened

The first thing you should do after you have failed is to accept it and come to terms with it. Don’t ignore, deny or hide it. You have failed and there’s nothing you can do to reverse it now.

Accept it and know that it’s okay. Failure happens all the time. It’s no big deal if you accept it and decide to do something about it. That’s how you start learning how to overcome failure.

Take total responsibility

Own your failure. There’s no shame in it. Everyone fails sometimes.

Things won’t always pan out the way you want them, but the sole responsibility should always be yours to take. You must be accountable for your actions, choices, and decisions. Never blame others and hold them responsible for your failures. Passing the buck is a sure recipe for disaster.

Analyze what happened

You cannot undo what happened, but, by taking stock of what happened, you can dispassionately assess and gain insight into what went wrong and where. It will also enable you to understand what worked and what didn’t so that you can begin with a whole new approach.

Analyzing can help you in revising your strategy, preparing yourself, working on your weak points and improving your future performance. It will also give you the confidence to bounce back and begin more confidently.

Learn from your mistakes

There is much truth in the words of Henry Ford when he said that the only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. Failure teaches you like none other can teach you. You must learn from your mistakes and ‘heed the lessons of failure’, as Bill Gates put it.

Make the best of your mistakes. Embrace them, learn from them and never repeat them. Identify your weaknesses, work on them and turn them into your strength.

See Also: 9 Powerful Lessons from the Success Story of Bill Gates

Don’t dwell on failure

dont dwell on failure

The worst way to deal with failure is to take it to heart. What has happened has happened. No amount of crying, complaining or regretting can help you overcome it.

So, stop ruminating over it, re-running it in your mind and feeling sorry for yourself. It will not serve any useful purpose and will only take you deeper into sorrow and unhappiness.

Get over it; Move on

Failure is ‘a temporary detour, not a dead-end’, as Denis Waitley, the American bestselling author is once known to have said. Failure only lasts until you succeed again. So, don’t let it become permanent and scar your psyche.

A negative feeling cannot have any positive outcome. It is best forgotten. Wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start. Look ahead, move on, and give yourself a chance to recover and rebuild yourself.

Develop mental toughness to triumph over failure

Setbacks should not dishearten or break you. Failure is not an end in itself so, don’t let it steal your confidence. Train yourself to take bad hits in life. Use failure to learn, grow and better yourself. Maintain a positive attitude in the face of failure. That’s how you can strengthen your mental toughness.

Jump into a positive frame of mind

When you face defeat, you are engulfed by fear and self-doubt. Failure brings with it a dark cloud of negativity. You begin to question yourself and start to doubt your ability. Positive thoughts are the last thing on your mind and that’s how it is. Recovery and rebounding

Recovery and rebounding take time. To facilitate and make the process faster, you must fight all negative thoughts that cross your mind and fill yourself with positivity. Look back and reflect on your own life how you faced past failures and overcame them.

Nothing can inspire you more than your personal experience and your own success story. You know you have dealt with it before and can do it again.

Let go of fear

let go of fear

When you experience failure, one thing is sure. The worst has struck you, but things can’t go bad from there.

When you fall down, you can’t go further down. So, what is there to fear?

From there, you can only move towards the positive direction. So, get up, gather your broken pieces and start building yourself again. Success is achieved by those who don’t fear failure. Don’t let failure hold you back or stop you from realizing your dreams.

See Also: How To Conquer The Fear Of Success (Or Failure)

Focus on bettering yourself

Everyone faces failure but how you look at it and what you do about it is what makes all the difference. In most cases, failure happens because a person wasn’t able to prepare well, didn’t plan properly or was ill-equipped. It can also be because he’s just plain unlucky.

Disregarding the last one, everything else can be fixed. So, make a list of all the things which you think contributed to your failure and start working on them, one thing at a time. Do everything within your power to rectify, resolve, improve, develop and put right.

Begin again

Failure can devastate you if you allow it to. It can also help you rebuild yourself and restart your journey if you choose to.

Failure shouldn’t be the end of your dreams, goals, and aspirations. The power of failure should motivate you to chase your goals, take a fresh start and make a new beginning. Let failure make you stronger, tougher and more resilient so that you don’t just survive it but you’ll bounce back stronger.

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. -Nelson Mandela

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The Virtuoso of Compassion

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The Caravaggio originals on display in an exhibition at the National Gallery in London demonstrate why the painter exerted such an overwhelming influence on patrons and colleagues alike, and why he is so passionately loved today.

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