Sometimes we get to the end of our rope and realize that what we are currently doing isn’t working. Take heart, despite how we may feel at the time, it might be the best thing that ever happened to us. So many successful people have the rock bottom story that changed their lives. Whether it is when the creditors started calling, the death of someone close, a sunken business, failed college course, or even the loss of a close friend to a huge mistake; they all hold opportunities for growth. Opportunities to change our lives. No matter how we get [...]
Read MoreAugust 2007
“Women working full time earn about 77 percent of the salaries of men working full time”. That number is a little misleading, as it doesn’t take into account education and employee status, but the difference is still 11% when equal employees are studied across genders. We all know the gender differences in salary still exists in business and so does the glass ceiling to some extent. The common explanation is sexism and deliberate underpayment of women. Linda Babcock, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, has been studying the issue at length and has produced some interesting findings. Time and [...]
Read MoreThis is a guest post form Linda Bustos. Linda is an editor for CreditorWeb, where you can learn about credit cards, compare offers, and apply for a business credit card online. We all know that banks are not on our side. They offer us products and services to make our lives more convenient and pull us through financial jams, but we end up paying for them through interest charges…and bank fees…and late payment fees…and overdraft charges…and NSF check fees…the list goes on. Banks have no shame in trying to squeeze as many cents and dollars from their clients. Financial institutions [...]
Read MoreWelcome to the 88th Festival of Frugality! The Festival of Frugality is a blog carnival, which is a periodic round up of blogger’s best posts related to a specific topic hosted by various blogs. Below are the 5 articles that I enjoyed the most, followed by the rest of the 35 entries that were accepted to the festival. For each entry I included a link to selected article and a link to the author’s ‘About Me’ page. For those blogs without an easy to find ‘About Me’ I will link to the main page. The posts are listed in the [...]
Read MoreI will not be posting an article Monday, because on Tuesday morning I will be hosting my first blog carnival. The 88th Festival of Frugality will be jam packed with some great frugal advice. Second, for a while now I have been working on a redesign of the site. I hoped to release it this weekend, but caught an ugly cold that kept me down. I am having trouble deciding on the column colors for the new theme and wanted to enlist your help. Click through to the Picasa album below, have a look at the six pictures provided, and [...]
Read MoreRemember the second round of contests I posted last week in the learning from others post. Well, yours truly, won a copy of Quicken Deluxe 2007. Shelley Elmblad @ The Personal Budgeting section of Suite 101 sent me the good news yesterday. I quickly responded with my address, and the software will ship tomorrow. Perfect, just as I was having some troubles with Microsoft Money I will get to try out its main competitor. Hopefully the Money import feature works well! Who says they never win anything? A couple of minutes returned a $39.99 piece of software. Did any other [...]
Read MoreHi, my name is Frank and I have a problem! I am addicted to Sitemeter and any other web site tracking package. My new love is pMetrics. The statistics are tailored for blogs and it lets you easily track your visitor’s movement within your site. It combines my favorite reports from other sites into one visitor overview page. Plus it is much faster than loading than everything else I have tried. I haven’t needed to visit SiteMeter or anything else since I signed up. I know The Happy Rock is a small site, but that just means that there is [...]
Read MoreBeing debt free has been more amazing than I thought, and I want others to be able to share in a similar joy. For those who are trying to get out of debt or entertaining the thought, here is some ammunition. As my wife and I and slowly hacked our way out of $70,000 in debt, there were a few key strategies that were extremely helpful: 1. Find Your Passion – Finding your passion is my number tip for anything that requires a large amount of energy and commitment. I started thinking about being debt free, because I realized that [...]
Read MoreThere was some great stuff out there this week. Here are my favorites : Saving Advice offers a beautifully pictographed list of 25 personal money confessions. Blueprint For Financial Prosperity gives as a quick description of 10 top personal finance books. The description on Your Money Your Life makes me want to read it even more. One Frugal Girl starts a discussion on whether or not debt is an integrity problem. Bankruptcy usually is in my opinion, and I can see consumer debt bordering on an integrity issue. Even if we don’t come to conclusions, I think the discussion is [...]
Read MoreI cleared a hurdle I had been putting off for about three weeks now; I spent about two hours tonight bringing my Microsoft Money records back up to date. It was two hours I didn’t have, but two hours that were sorely needed. In mid July Microsoft decided that their Money servers need a complete overhaul. Since that time I haven’t been able to download my transactions for my ING Electric Orange checking, savings, or my one credit card. With the July Cash Spending Experiment in full swing, I wasn’t too worried about it since my normal way of operating [...]
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