Money and Bills Blog

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Pros vs. Cons of Hiring A Certified Financial Advisor

The Pros vs. Cons of Hiring A Certified Financial Advisor – Do You Actually Need a Financial Advisor?

There’s no doubt that you’ll have more investment opportunities as you attain more wealth. Unfortunately, more wealth often comes with lots of complexities and of course a greater need to get a certified financial advisor. Generally, a financial advisor can help you plan out your investment and financial life and prevent you from falling into financial pitfalls.

While you can do it with the help of a certified financial advisor, you can as well do it all by yourself and still become successful. Doing it yourself gives you more control over your financial situation and obviously saves you some money.

But hiring a financial advisor comes with immense advantages such as saving your precious time and expert advice on how to invest and plan your financial future.

Who is a Financial Advisor and What Does They Actually Do?

A financial advisor is a certified professional who helps his/her client plan personal and business finance. A financial advisor will help you come up with a practical retirement savings plan. He can also help you make sound investment decisions now and in the future.… READ MORE

Get A Bad Online Review? Here’s What To Do

When someone leaves a bad review about your business, it can feel like a punishment of the worst kind! In this article, we’re going to discuss reasons for why someone would leave you a bad review, and what you can do about it.

There are many reasons that can come up for getting a bad review. It’s becoming an unfair world out there! The sad truth about customers is that they don’t care about all the countless hours you’ve put into perfecting your business idea. If they have a perceived experience that is undesirable, they are going to leave a bad review.

Then new potential customers could find that negative review and be turned away from giving you a chance to earn their business!

Bad reviews can end up on websites such as:

  • Social Media Platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
  • RipOff Report
  • Yelp
  • Yellow Pages
  • Yahoo
  • Google Places
  • Facebook Merchants
  • Craigslist
  • Internet Blogs or Online Forums

The Most Common Reasons For Getting A Bad Review

1) Your Competitor Wrote a Bad Review About You, Which Was FAKE

They’ll use this as a tactic for trying to get customers to come over to their place instead. I think this is … READ MORE

What Is Brand Online Reputation Management?

Online reputation management. This term has been thrown around quite a bit in recent years, along with a slew of web-based information that isn’t always the most accurate.

(It’s also referred to as Brand Online Reputation Management.)

Shocking, right?

In the spirit of restoring journalistic excellence to the web – let’s explore the factual side of this ever-evolving topic and why it’s relevant to you, your business and your life.

Whether it was a dear-diary type of platform, the original MySpace website, or current social media sites like Facebook and Instagram – every piece of information you have willingly put out into the webosphere is still there and available to those with enough tenacity to find it. Every picture, every status update, every comment. It’s there, somewhere. And it doesn’t matter if you edited it or deleted it – that alcohol-infused 3AM rant (complete with a matching selfie) still lives on.

As you progress through life, establish a successful career, build a profitable company, and start a family, managing your online reputation is critical – and it starts with knowing what people are saying.

Personally and professionally, it is essential that you have a pulse on the information that is … READ MORE

A Beginners SEO Guide For WordPress Bloggers

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and is actually not as intimidating as you’d think, once you invest a bit of time learning the basics of an effective SEO Strategy.

Search Engines will be one of the biggest and free sources of referral traffic for readers to discover your blog. The most popular search engines being Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

Depending on your industry and the context of your blog, a search engine like Google is going to run your website on over 200 different measuring points for quality, reputation, and credibility.

The Truth About SEO

The truth is that no one really understands 100% of how any search engine really works. Search engines are very complex and are constantly being updated and changed in how search results are ranked!

It will be up to you to learn as much as possible about the best practices of SEO and then develop your own strategy for it while providing your reader with the best user and content experience possible! (We’ll be going over some best practices later on!)

What To Expect From An SEO Strategy

Here are some main points to keep in mind when you build an SEO Strategy … READ MORE

5 Steps For Removing Bad Yelp Reviews

In this guide, we’re going to discuss some hacks for removing bad Yelp reviews. These techniques can also be used for removing fake ones too!

The most common types of businesses I see on Yelp tend to be restaurants, retail stores, beauty salons, personal services, and professional services. Most of these businesses have a lot of local customers, which makes the potential for repeat customers very competitive!

Exercising your legal rights and battling negative reviews on Yelp requires time away from doing the day to day operations of your business. If you don’t have this extra time, I’d seriously consider hiring a professional to help with the process.

Yelp’s Automatic Algorithm

Yelp’s automatic algorithm is better at detecting good reviews as being fake than the bad ones. Wow, talk about being biased. Algorithms are always improving, and with advancements of AI, maybe down the road, it will actually work a lot better.

BTW… Many social media platforms are also known for constantly changing their algorithms around to hide or show more favorable posts. Just ask people who use to get lots of free traffic with Facebook pages.

Yelp encourages many business owners to sign-up for a business account and then … READ MORE

Debt Settlement Can Be A Tax Nightmare!

When hard economic times happen, debt settlement can seem like a very appealing option. Maybe you lost your job, your income was reduced or you had your income affected by a large medical expense.

For these reasons, you may have fallen behind on your bills and the creditors are now on your back!

You failed to pay your debts and now one of your creditors has lost hope getting you to pay up. For reasons known to them, they’ve decided to stop trying to collect their debt and may have decided to write off your debt.

While you may be feeling relieved, what seems to be a good fortune to you may turn out to be a tax nightmare!

Below, are some things you need to be aware of regarding settling or having large amounts of debt forgiven. If you’re not 100% sure on how this affects your financial situation you to need to seek out a finance professional for help!

Believe it or not, I was in a similar situation during the last great recession of 2008. If it was not for my CPA, I would have had some big tax problems and possibly owed over 100,000 dollars to … READ MORE

Wave Apps Cloud Based Accounting, an Honest Review!

We’ve all experienced the pain of having to track receipts or reconcile our bank accounts with our monthly bank statements, then send if all off to the CPA for our yearly tax filings.

Because this pain exists we need to pick our accounting software wisely, and there is a saying over at Wave Apps, it reads: “Let’s not complicate this!”. The price is not complex either; it’s FREE!

I started using it several years ago, and in the next section, I will share with you some amazing things it has done to make managing my finances a dream come true.

Before we begin you need to know a few things about this software:

It’s cloud-based which means it will work on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computers.

It’s best utilized by small businesses with up to 10 employees.
To use the built-in credit card processing and payroll services you will have to pay money. Here’s a link to the Waveapps Pricing Page: Wave Accounting Pricing

Why did I switch from Quickbooks to Wave Apps?

Back in 2007, I found myself for the first time in need of using accounting software. I had no idea where to start, but since Microsoft … READ MORE

How Volunteering Can Boost Your Earning Potential

Volunteering your time has a variety of benefits: you get to help others who are in need, you get to meet new people, and you may even open the door to new career opportunities. In addition, you’ll have the opportunity to meet like-minded people and can also put the experience on your LinkedIn profile to attract employers and recruiters.

Did you know that 20% of managers acknowledge that they’ve hired candidates because of volunteering experience?

ALL OF THESE BENEFITS CAN DIRECTLY WORK IN YOUR FAVOR TO BOOST YOUR CAREER AND BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES; THUS BOOSTING YOUR INCOME POTENTIAL!

How Do You Find Volunteer Opportunities?

1) Search Engines

If you know the exact organization in your area that you’d like to volunteer for, you can usually find volunteering opportunities and information on the non-profit’s website. Just use a search engine like Google and search for the “city name” and keywords such as “volunteer” or the “organization’s name” if you know it.

Most non-profits are largely dependent on volunteers, so they typically make it easy to find volunteering information on their websites. Look for words like “Get Involved,” “Volunteer,” or even “Donate,” to find … READ MORE

5 Lessons For Building & Keeping A High Credit Score

What’s the best way to build credit? The secret to building and keeping a high credit score is done by forming good habits when it comes to managing your credit and overall finances.

A lot of people think that just using credit cards (or loans) and paying them off every month is all that is required for having and building good credit. The truth is this! It’s a good start, but there is much more you need to know about in order to keep a good credit rating once you get it!

We’ll discuss what you need to know in the below lessons.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to increase your credit score by doing the following:

  • Limiting your credit applications
  • Building a strong credit age and payment history
  • Keeping a low credit utilization
  • Using auto-payments to help make on-time payments
  • Filing disputes when errors appear on your credit report. The dispute process keeps the credit bureaus in check.

Maintaining a strong a strong payment history is mandatory no matter what!

Lesson #1: Limit Your Applications, Choose Wisely

Every time you apply for new credit you get a small ding on your credit score, whether or not you get approved. … READ MORE

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

Once you set up your WordPress blogging site you’ll need to add additional functionality at some point. This is where plug-in’s come into play. WordPress Plug-ins will allow you to customize WordPress without having to code anything.

You’ll be able to add in features for contact forms, spam control, social media buttons, meta tags, and much more. Below I’ll list my favorite WP Plugins, many of them I use on this blog.

Here’s A List Of My Favorite WordPress Plugins

Advanced Excerpt – With over 100,000 active installations, the Advanced Excerpt plugin is handy for providing an excerpt on each one of your posts when someone is browsing them by category. I have mine set to do the excerpt for the first  200 words of each post. Then the reader has to click “read more” to view the rest of the article by clicking into the actual post. Without that option all the articles would just run together as a long page when viewing by category, that does not look nice.

Akismet-AntiSpam – With over 5 million active installations, the Askimet-Anti-Spam plugin is a must for controlling spam on your WordPress contact forms and comments. It’s continuously updated from … READ MORE

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