How will the current economic problems impact you and those close to you? Jeffrey A Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal provides some great insight as to which books should be part of your reading library during times of economic downturn.

TOP FIVE PERSONAL FINANCE TITLES

1. “The Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey. A primer on how to cut debt, save money and create a financial strategy.
2. “Debt Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About” by Kevin Trudeau. A look into the dangers of credit card spending and how to reduce your expenses.
3. “Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny” by Suze Orman. Ms. Orman writes about how women can gain better control of their finances by better understanding their relationship with money.
4. “The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke” by Suze Orman. A book on what the young need to know now about money management.
5. “The Smart Cookies’ Guide to Making More Dough” by the Smart Cookies with Jennifer Barrett. The book’s advice: Take charge and get out of debt.

TOP FIVE FINANCIAL CRISIS TITLES

1. “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” by Amity Shlaes. A look at what happened during that other crisis.
2. “The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs” by Charles D. Ellis. An inside look at the famed investment-banking firm.
3. “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism” by Kevin Phillips. Mr. Phillips documents the unraveling of the U.S. economy.
4. “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means” by George Soros. An analysis of the issues behind the crisis and their implications.
5. “The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy” by David M. Smick. An inside look at what went wrong with the banking system here and abroad.

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Entrepreneurs and small businesspeople are always looking for creative
ways to accomplish more of their business goals for less money. One
strategy that can help you save time, money and frustration as you
start and build your business is to outsource as much work as possible
to skilled, but cost-effective, external service providers.

Paul Horowitz is the lead outsourcing manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and has some great suggestions you should take into consideration before outsourcing any “Work for Work’s Sake”. They are focused around outsourcing technology, but are applicable in many other outsourcing scenarios.

1. Have an exit strategy. Think through what will happen in the event things don’t work out. There could be an operations change, acquisition, financial instability, a shift in business models or other changes — at your firm or the vendor’s. The contract should spell out how a transition would be handled if the work is brought back in-house or handed off to another vendor. It should cover as many what-if scenarios as possible.

2. Meet the account team. Often, business managers are wowed by a vendor’s sales staff, but they don’t meet the person who will be running the project on a day-to-day basis. The contract should include the names of the top three to five employees on the account, how much of their time will be dedicated to your work, and under what conditions their assignments can be changed. Meet the account employees in person and find out about their skills, expertise in your industry and comfort with the technical environment they’ll be working in.

3. Don’t breeze through reference checks. Do more than a cursory check of three referrals. Mr. Horowitz encourages clients to ask for at least 10 references — and to choose those most aligned with their industry or particular needs. Find out what worked about the relationship and what didn’t.
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Working remotely can save you money in gas and other transportation expenses. Allowing you to work from home (or one of these dreamy locations) will save your employer some cash too. If you’re not going to be in the office, why not relocate to one of these REALLY remote locations and spend your down time relaxing in beautiful scenery.

[Adapted from HotelClub.com]

1. Caprera Island, Sardinia, Italy
Caprera is a small island off the coast of Sardinia, Italy, best known for its serene beaches but also being the place to which Giuseppe Garibaldi retired. The name is most likely given because of the wild goats inhabiting the island (Capra = Italian for goats). Even though it has only 6 square miles, the island has been declared a natural reserve, being the home of the royal seagull, the cormorant and the peregrine falcon. Apart from being an attractive destination for natural lovers, it also has a sailing center, the only places to stay in being couzy bungalows.

2. Santorini, Greece

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It is possible today to accumulate enough wealth to support the type of lifestyle that you desire. With some effort, you can live like a millionaire without making a million bucks. Below are some great resources on the subject and can help get your mind working and focusing on how to maximize your strengths and efficiencies to reach a better life.

1. The Smart Traveler’s Passport$15 4/5 stars

399 Tips from Seasoned Travelers This ridiculously inexpensive budget travel guide will help you shave pennies, pounds, or francs from your world wide travel excursions. Why pay rent in your home country where you can live cheaper in remote parts of the world? Experience all that foreign cultures have to offer, without spending your fortune.

2. The Middle-Class Millionaire $17 4/5 stars

Sandwiched between the rich and the middle class are 8.4 million
American households with a net worth between $1 million and
million. This book presents intriguing statistical nuggets from their survey of 586 middle-class millionaire households. Although these people may be rich by most definitions, many were raised middle class, earned rather than inherited their wealth and still retain middle-class values. The book offers something for those who yearn to join the middle-class millionaires or move up among their ranks, especially entrepreneurs
with business plans for this population, who are heavily profiled in these pages.

3. The 4-Hour Work Week $12 4.5/5 stars

The “Manifesto” for the new New Rich…don’t miss this book. The author has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.

Whether you are an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business,
this book is the compass for a new and revolutionary world. Join Tim Ferriss as he teaches you:

• How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and freuent “mini-retirements”
• What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income
• How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
• What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• What the management secrets of Remote Control CEOs are
• How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50–80% off
• How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office

4. Work Less, Live More $13 4.5/5 stars

Another great book with clear examples and ideas on how to escape from a never ending McJob and semi-retire sooner that you might think.Tired of the daily grind? Looking for an alternative to a lifetime of stress and overwork? Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement is your roadmap to the exit. Written by early semi-retiree Bob Clyatt, the book gives encouragement and step-by-step knowledge for securely moving beyond full-time work, whatever your age.

5. Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 of the World’s Greatest Trips $26 4.5/5 stars

This amazing guide produced by National Geographic covers the greatest destinations around the world. From Berlin to Hong Kong, this book has it all. Compiled from the favorite trips of National Geographic’s travel writers, Journeys of a Lifetime spans the globe to highlight the best of the world’s most famous and lesser known sojourns. It presents an incredible diversity of possibilities, from ocean cruises around Antarctica to horse treks in the Andes. Every continent and every possible form of transport is covered. A timely resource for the burgeoning ranks of active travelers who crave adventurous and far-flung trips, Journeys of a Lifetime
provides scores of creative ideas: trekking the heights of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania… mountain biking in Transylvania… driving through the scenic highlands of Scotland… or rolling through the outback on Australia’s famous Ghan train… and dozens of other intriguing options all over the world. Journeys of a Lifetime also features 22 fun Top 10 lists in all sorts of categories. What are the world’s top 10 elevator rides, bridges to walk across, trolley rides, ancient highways, or underground walking adventures? Readers will love evaluating and debating the selections. Each chapter showcases stunning photography, full-color maps, evocative text, and expert advice—including how to get there, when to visit, and how to make the most of the journey—all packaged in a luxurious oversize volume to treasure for years to come.

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Making money online used to pretty much require you to have your own
Web site, products to sell and some marketing savvy. But a new
generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know
and who you know without you having to be a web designer or a marketing
genius.

Below is a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:

• Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win money
• Don’t require you to have your own Web domain or your own products
• Don’t involve any hard-selling
• Aren’t just promoting more Internet marketing
• Give a good return on your time investment

In the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.

Help friends find better jobs.

Sites like H3.com and JobThread connect employers with prospective employees, many of whom are already employed and not actively job-hunting, via networking - the people who know these qualified candidates. Rewards for referring a candidate who gets hired range from a few hundred dollars to as much as $5,000 - not chump change. This is a great way to break into the recruiting business with no overhead. JobThread is intriguing in that they can set up a job board for your site or your organization (you don’t even have to have a web site) at no cost to you — no merchant account required. You determine the posting fees and split the revenue with them.

Connect suppliers with buyers.

Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven’t been used much in online networking sites because there was no way to track them. InnerSell provides that. Vendors set the referral fees they’re willing to pay, then when a deal happens, you get 70% of the referral fee.

Provide business contact information.

One of the greatest challenges in sales is getting accurate contact information about prospective customers. A growing number of services have launched in the past couple of years to help address this, but most rely on members to maintain their own contact information. Jigsaw, on the other hand, pays members to help keep information up-to-date on the people they know, not just themselves, and pays them to do so ($1 for each unique new qualifying contact you put into the system). According to Jigsaw, in their first payout after launch, the top ten
point-earns each received more than $750.

Become a semi-pro reporter.

Creative Reporter is a new program from Creative Weblogging that lets just about anyone become a paid reporter/blogger. They’re looking for people to create original, but non-exclusive, blog posts / articles of 250-500 words on topics including parenting, celebrities, travel, mobile technology, and more. Pay is $10 per 1,000 page views on your posts (that’s excellent pay for Web writing, although there’s no telling how much traffic/money you’ll actually get).

Write your own blog.

You don’t have to have your own Web site, or install blogging software, or even figure out how to set up the advertising. At Blogger you can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes without knowing a thing about web design, and Blogger even automates setting up Google AdSense so you can make money off your blog by displaying ads and getting paid when people click on the ads. To make even more money from it, set up an affiliate program (see below) for books, music, etc., and insert your affiliate links whenever you refer to those items. You’ll have to get a lot of traffic to become a six-figure blogger, but pick an interesting topic, write well, tell all your friends, and you’re off to a good start.

Advertise other people’s products.

If you already have a Web site or a blog, look for vendors that offer related but non-competing products and see if they have an affiliate program. Stick to familiar products and brands - they’re easier to sell. To promote those products:

• Place simple text or graphical ads in appropriate places on your site
• Include links to purchase products you review or recommend in a blog, discussion forum or mailing list you control
• Create a dedicated sales page or Web site to promote a particular product

They all work - it just depends on how much time you have to spend on it and your level of expertise with Web design and marketing.The above list is by no means comprehensive, but it highlights some of the new and interesting ways to make money online without investing any money, without having a product of your own, and without having expert sales and marketing skills. Most of all, unlike taking
surveys or getting paid to read e-mail, the potential return on your time investment is substantial.

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If you’re working to earn more money, and spend less time doing so, crowdsourcing is a great option to research and implement in your New Rich lifestyle. Crowdsourcing is all about the “crowd” - the wisdom and participation of crowds in these instances really made the difference and permitted each idea to take off.

1. InnoCentive, started in 2002, crowdsources research and development for biomedical and pharmaceutical companies, among other companies in other industries. InnoCentive, one of the largest commercial examples of crowdsourcing, provides connection and relationship management services between “Seekers” and “Solvers.” Seekers are the companies conducting R&D, searching for solutions to critical challenges. Solvers are the 125,000 registered members of the InnoCentive crowd who volunteer their solutions to the Seekers.
2. Emporis, a provider of building data, has run the Emporis Community (a website where members can submit building information) since May 2000. Today, more than 1,000 members contribute building data throughout the world.
3. Since 2004, MoveOn.org has applied crowdsourcing to a variety of challenges related to organizing a political movement including phonebanking, field organizing via house parties, and the creation of ads against opponents.
4. In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called “HITs” (Human Intelligence Tasks”) can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”, it was named after The Turk, an 18th century chess-playing “machine”.
5. Stardust@Home is an ongoing citizen science project, begun in 2006, utilizing internet volunteer “clickworkers” to find interstellar dust samples by inspecting 3D images from the Stardust spacecraft.
6. In 2006, the American online DVD rental company Netflix announced that they were offering a $1,000,000 prize for anybody who could improve their existing DVD rating system by at least 10%. Contest participants can download vast amounts of anonymised data from Netflix to test their proposals. So far over 27,000 attempts have been submitted; the best showing an improvement of 9.15% over Netflix’s current system.
7. Cambrian House applies a crowdsourcing model to identify and develop software and web-based businesses. Using a simple voting model, they attempt to find sticky software ideas that can be developed using a combination of internal and crowdsourced skills and effort.
8. Threadless, an Internet-based clothing retailer that sells t-shirts which have been designed by and rated by members of the public.
9. reCAPTCHA, used for deciphering ancient texts, by providing the ancient text (that can’t be “read” properly by OCR software) to be read by end users of Captcha spam filter.
10. In January 2008, the State of Texas announced it would install 200 mobile cameras along the Texas-Mexico border, to enable anyone with an Internet connection to watch the border and report sightings of alleged illegal immigrants to border patrol agents

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There are lots of web based office solutions available online. Perhaps too many. However, there is really only one that you need - Zoho Office.
By the way - I don’t work for them or anything. I am just amazed at the high quality and usefulness of this set of tools.

What is Zoho Office?

Zoho Office is a collection of useful, well designed web-based applications that rivals the best desktop-based office applications. Best of all - it’s completely free for small time users and pretty cheap for medium to large sized organizations. Zoho Office is owned and maintained by AdventNet - a successful software development firm. While they may not be as large as Google, their tools are top notch and high quality. Think about how telephone conversations were conducted before everyone and their brother had a cell phone attached to them 24/7. People used (and paid for) multiple office phone lines at a premium price. Then the phone call was liberated by the invention of the cell phone. Now, business can be conducted while you are waiting at a red light or walking down the street. You are no longer bound to the confines of your office to conduct phone based business. You’ve been freed.
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Americans are working harder than ever before. The dogged pursuit of the paycheck coupled with a 24/7 economy has thrust many of us onto a never-ending treadmill. But of workaholism’s growing wounded, its greatest casualty has been practically ignored — the planet.

“We now seem more determined than ever to work harder and produce more stuff, which creates a bizarre paradox: We are proudly breaking our backs to decrease the carrying capacity of the planet,” says Conrad Schmidt, an internationally known social activist and founder of the Work Less Party, a Vancouver-based initiative aimed at moving to a 32-hour work week — a radical departure from the in early, out late cycle we’ve grown accustomed to. “Choosing to work less is the biggest environmental issue no one’s talking about.”

A backlash against overwork fatigue, the Work Less Party is one of a growing number of initiatives aimed at cutting work hours while tackling unemployment, environmentally unfriendly behavior and boosting leisure time. According to Schmidt, author of “Workers of the World RELAX,” which examines the economics of reduced industrial work, working less would allow us to produce less, consume less, pollute less and — no complaints here — live more.

“As a society, we’re working exponentially hard to decrease sustainability and it’s making us miserable — just look at how antidepressants are on the rise,” he says. “In order to reduce our ecological footprint, we have to take working less very seriously.”

Americans work more hours than anyone else in the industrialized world. According to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization, we work 250 hours, or five weeks, more than the Brits, and a whopping 500 hours, or 12 and a half weeks, more than the Germans. So how does ecological damage figure in to the 40-plus workweek?

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Some people spend the majority of their lives working, sleeping, or just plain bored. By effectively managing your work/non-work life balance, you can work less — and live more.

There’s a saying in the corporate world:

“Don’t make yourself irreplaceable. If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted.”

As an entrepreneur, this is still true in its own way. Let’s think of “being promoted” as earning more and working less. You can raise your prices, but until you can remove yourself from being directly involved in doing the work that generates the income, there’s always going to be a limit to how much you can earn, and it can only increase very slowly.

Passive income, on the other hand, is income that does not require your direct involvement. Some kinds of passive income you may be familiar with include owning rental property, royalties on an invention or creative work, and network marketing. If you want to earn more, work less, and have a decent retirement, you’re going to have to start creating income streams that do not require your direct involvement. Whether you’re just starting your business, or you’ve been running it a while, the sooner you start thinking about how you are going to shift your business model to create more passive income, the sooner you can achieve personal and financial freedom.

Let’s look at two basic types of passive income, and a third type of income that, while technically not passive, is a key strategy for earning more and working less.
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Thomas N. Bulkowski is a successful investor with twenty-five years of experience trading stocks. He is also the author of the books Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns, Second Edition; Trading Classic Chart Patterns ; and Getting Started in Chart Patterns. He is a frequent contributor to Active Trader; Stocks, Futures and Options; and Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities magazines, with nearly 100 articles published.

Before earning enough from his investments to “retire” from his day job at age thirty-six, Bulkowski was a hardware design engineer at Raytheon and a senior software engineer for Tandy Corporation.

He was the vice president of membership and later treasurer of the Keller Chamber of Commerce, chairman of the Keller Parks and Recreation board, president of Keep Keller Beautiful, vice president of the Friends of the Keller Library and a member of the Keller Writers’ Association. He also authored the Keller Recycling Task Force report and Park System Study.

1. Tighten stops. If other stocks in the same industry begin trending down, then tighten the stop in the stock you own in that industry. If your stock shoots up several points in a few days, then tighten the stop because price may reverse and retrace much of the gain.
2. Trade with the trend. If the market and industry are moving up, select stocks with upward breakouts. Avoid countertrend trades - the market or the industry is going down and your stock is moving up. The rise will be less than you expect unless the market or industry reverses. If you buy a stock even though the market is trending lower, that’s fine providing you expect the market to reverse shortly. Just hope that you don’t get stopped out while waiting.
3. Trade on the intraday scale. Switch to the intraday scale or the next shorter period to place the trade. The shorter time scale will zoom into the price action and highlight support and resistance zones. I use the one- and five-minute scales to time my entry.
4. Raise that stop as price rises. Check the volatility and place the stop no closer than 1.5 times the current price volatility.
5. Never lower a stop. If you feel a desire to lower a stop, sell the stock. Fall in love, just never with a stock.
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