Singapore Office Stories

Here are my weekly money savings tips:

1. Maintain a good credit score! It will save you thousands of dollars in the short and long term when you need to borrow money to buy a car or a home. Creditors will give you an interest rate and the loan amount based on your income and credit score.

2. Large sums of money should NEVER be left in a checking account or even a low-interest bank savings account. Rather, put the money into a high interest savings account (like an ING savings), money market fund, or other forms of short term high interest investments with a fixed return.

3. If you have an employer matching 401K plan, maximize your contributions, so that you double your money!

4. Set aside 10% of your paycheck towards some form of long term savings account, like a money market account, mutual fund, retirement plan, or 401K. As you pay amount increases, your contribution will also increase automatically. 10% will also ensure that you stay ahead of inflation.

5. One of the best investments you can make is to first pay off all your high credit card debts. Credit cards typically carry a high interest rate and by paying off these debts, you get one of the best returns available which also is tax-free.

6. If you are losing sleep over an investment, whether its a stock, mutual fund, or retirement plan, its not worth it! Your lack of sleep is probably a good indication that it may be too risky, too good to be true, or just not the right invesment for you.

7. If an investment is projecting returns that are just too good to be true, they probably are. Unless you are intimately involved in the investment or are an insider, an investment that sounds too good to be true is probably too ambitious, too risky or just a scam.

8. Before you invest in something, always do your own research. Consulting with others and getting a second opinion is good, but you need to investigate for yourself. The internet is typically the best source for lots of information but make sure you read enough or get relevant data.

9. Always negotiate for commissions or fees paid for financial or real estate advice. Don’t be misled by standard commissions and “non-negotiable fees”. It is your money and the experts work for you.

10. Can’t get out of debt? If you are having problems meeting your debt payments each month and feel like you are digging a deeper hole, go talk to your creditors and banks to find a solution to get out of the mess. Beware of debt consolidators as they could charge higher interests in the long term and get you even deeper into debt.

If you like any of these tips, have questions on some, or have some feedback, I would like to hear from you. Visit this article by clicking on http://www.financialresource.org/blog/10-money-saving-tips/ and Post your comments. Look for more money saving tips each week!

Happy Springtime and be Money Smart!

Have you ever thought about making a steady online income… while traveling? Ebay provides a fantastic platform for doing this and it’s not very difficult or time consuming. You can travel overseas for a LONG time by holding just a few online auctions per week if you set things up properly.
Most people dismiss Ebay as a viable travel business because they think you’ve got to have a physical inventory present… and while traveling, that would clearly be limited by the size of your luggage.
There’s good news and more good news. The first piece of good news is that you definitely DON’T need to have a physical item or inventory to sell. You can easily sell a digitally delivered product or inexpensively hire a fulfillment house to ship your stuff for you. Here’s the ‘more’ good news: because most people dismiss Ebay for making a travel income the market is left wide open for this type of marketing!
The other big reason entrepreneurs dismiss Ebay is because they think it’s for selling old junk lying around the house. They take a ‘garage sale’ mentality about Ebay (sell your extra stuff lying around the house). This is great for some people, but wrong for business!
So, Here is your basic model for traveling and making money with online auctions:1)    Find a product to sell. This is easy. You can sell a digital E-book if you don’t want to carry an inventory, or you can resell items from wholesalers at a markup. Simply get on the lists of a few dozen wholesalers and start watching their wholesale product listings.
2)    Based on those products, narrow it down to what people WANT. This is the biggest pitfall would-be auction sellers make… They sell a product they think people need instead of what people actually BUY. You’ve got to find where the highway traffic is flowing and stand in front of it with a big money net. 3)    Study Your Competition. You should steal what other competitors are doing that is working! Watch for the sellers who consistently sell products in the market you’ve chosen, and see what they are doing. They’re on Ebay because what they’re doing is working! By the way, don’t get scared off by competition. Competition means there’s a market of buyers!4)    Get your feet wet. Jump in there and make a listing! Start the bidding price low so that people get emotionally invested in your product. Show lots of pictures. Consider utilizing an auction listing template to make things look nice… but remember, it’s the STORY that people get drawn into more than a pretty website, so make them feel like they already own the product and show them the benefits of owning your product, not the features.
5)    Scale Bigger. After you’ve experienced some success with a few auctions, you can now make more sales and bigger sales.
So how do you travel and sell on ebay? Easy. There are internet café’s all over the world that you can login to for as little as $0.10 cents per hour! Most will be around $1-$2 dollars per hour, and you’ll get a surprisingly high-tech computer to access the web with.
You can modify your listings from abroad and have your fulfillment house (or your little brother!) handle shipments. If you like, you can even have a customer service center answering buyer questions.
**Attn Ezine editors/Site owners**
Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site as long as you leave all links in place. You may not modify the content and must include our resource box as listed above. However, you may sign up as an affiliate at MoneyForTraveling.com and insert your affiliate links to earn income for your efforts.

Ever had the desire to quit your lame 9 to 5 job, tell your boss to shove it, pack up and start traveling the world?
All of us have had that desire at one point! The thing that stopped you was probably the same thing that stops most people: money.
“How will I pay for my flights, food, lodging, transportation, yada, yada, yada,” you asked yourself.
Don’t let these concerns bother you too much, because there is an underground, growing group of travelers who are utilizing some simple but hidden techniques to make significant incomes while traveling.
Here’s an overview of how we make money traveling and by landing travel jobs:Underground Travel Income Method #1 – Traditional Travel Job – Hold a job that either a) pays for us to travel or b) is located in the place we wish to travel to. This is the lowest paying and most complicated method of all, but is the most commonplace.
Common jobs that pay for travels are for professional speakers, salespeople, package couriers, flight attendants, travel nurses/doctors, conservationists, cruise ship workers, etc.
Travel jobs located in the places we wish to go to can be any of the above, but also are specific to the location we travel to. There are some FUN jobs overseas that are looking for foreign workers!
Underground Travel Income Method #2 – Travel Writing – Travel writing jobs for magazines are more common than you may imagine. However, there are LOADS of other ways to write as you travel and make money, including blogging, picking up projects from sites like Elance and Guru, and writing travel guides, both online and offline.
Underground Travel Income Method #3 – Selling Affiliate Products – Using a simple website, you can drive online traffic to a product that will be of interest to your online followers. Don’t be intimidated by this! It can be as easy as using your very own Facebook or Myspace profile. Affiliate products typically pay 50% to 75%, so you can make a very healthy income for selling just a few objects. Underground Travel Income Method #4 – Filming Your Adventures – If you’ve got the camera out and you’re taking pictures, why not switch it to ‘film’ mode and make money from it? You simply make a video of your destinations using iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, then use your videos to create a customer base!Underground Travel Income Method #5 – Podcasting – If filming scares you off or intimidates you, you can make an iTunes podcast. It is easier than ever to get listed in iTunes and there’s a HUGE audience of podcast listeners. Simply talk about the places you visit two or three times a week and watch how your following grows… and how your bank account grows!Underground Travel Income Method # 6 – Ebay – The common misconception about Ebay is that you have to sell a physical product to make money. Here’s the trick: You can set up a fulfillment house to ship your product (or hire your little sister or the neighborhood kid). All you have to do is create your Ebay post from an internet café and collect the money!
Take any one of these six ‘travel job’ methods, and there are hundreds of travelers all over the world making more money than they would at a regular ‘job…’ and they’re living it up at exotic, world-class destinations. Take your pick, and take action on the ideas here!
**Attn Ezine editors/Site owners**
Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site as long as you leave all links in place. You may not modify the content and must include our resource box as listed above. However, you may sign up as an affiliate at MoneyForTraveling.com and insert your affiliate links to earn income for your efforts.

Have you ever wanted to travel the world and make money for sharing your adventures with the world? Using the web and a simple blog, this couldn’t be easier. There are just a few simple, yet hidden techniques for making a healthy income for blogging about your travels.
In fact, the number of underground travelers who hold no jobs, yet make cash for writing about their  travels is growing by the day. We keep our mouths shut about our techniques as we visit worldwide destinations and get paid for telling the world about it. I know there have got to be great people out there who deserve to travel and want this information, so I’ve decided to share a few of our techniques: 1)   Own Your Blog. Sites like Blogger, Myspace, and BlogSpot are no good for our purposes, because you can’t tweak the site to make a profit very easily. Instead, if you buy a domain for 10 bucks and then install Wordpress, you now have the platform to make it extremely profitable. 2)    Utilize PPC (pay-per-click) to get started. You won’t make a massive income off of this right away, but you can easily make 5-10 bucks a day in the beginning. That may not sound like a lot… but it’s enough for a meal every day or a flight after a month, and the number only gets bigger as your blog grows in readership.
3)    Collect names and email addresses. You want to do this so that you can bring your readers back to your blog. Very few people ‘bookmark’ a site any longer, but if you email your readers every time you post a new article, you will grow your readership at an exponential rate. 4)    Offer an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) subscriptions. Don’t let this intimidate you. Setting this up is as simple as checking a box on your blog’s options. RSS is another way for your readers to keep up-to-date with your blog. Insead of you emailing them, their RSS reader of choice will automatically show them the newly posted content. The more they see your content, the better chance they’ll click on an ad (and therefore, the better chance you’ll get paid)5)    Sell a product that will interest your readers. Once you are up and running, you will see your readership growing as well. Now it’s time to really monetize your site. This is where affiliate marketing comes in. This is simply taking a commission for any customer you send to another product (considering they buy the product). So, every now and again, make a blog post about the affiliate product you are promoting. When your readers see this, those who are interested will click on your ‘affiliate link,’ and if they buy, you get paid. Easy as that. Becoming an affiliate is always free, and there are thousands of products begging for active affiliates.
By the way, affiliate commissions are typically 50% to 75%. Gigantic, and very profitable.
6)    Create your own product. The only problem with affiliate marketing is that the product is completely out of your control and you only take a part of the cut. Once you have a bunch of blog posts, you can bundle them together and make an ‘ebook.’ Sell this to your loyal readers, and you’ll be surprised at how many of them will pay for the content they’re getting for free anyway!
There are bloggers out there who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for writing about their passions. My instincts tell me you’d be happy with a few hundred or thousand dollars extra per week, so start taking action on these ideas. They’re not complicated, they just require action. The best part is, once they’re set up, they can all be automated and can take place without your presence!**Attention Readers**

To get your copy of our free step-by-step guide showing you how to make money as you travel without ever holding a ‘job,’ visit http://www.moneyfortraveling.com. The expert authors at www.MoneyForTraveling.com have all made a substantial internet income while traveling or they have been hired and paid well to travel the world and will show you how to do the same.
**Attn Ezine editors/Site owners**
Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site as long as you leave all links in place. You may not modify the content and must include our resource box as listed above. However, you may sign up as an affiliate at MoneyForTraveling.com and insert your affiliate links to earn income for your efforts.

Making money using your digital images has never been easier. Microstock photography sites have now made it possible for just about anyone to earn money from their digital images.

Microstock photography allows users to sell their digital images for free. Users are encouraged to upload their digital images to a microstock site. Every time your image is downloaded by a registered user, you receive money. The amount you take home depends on the size and resolution of the image downloaded. iStockphoto, Dreamstime, Fotolia and Shutterstock are popular microstock sites.

Although the payout per picture is not that high, your earnings do add up. In fact, you can make thousands of dollars a month from selling many of their digital images.

Below are a few tips to get you on your way to making money through microstock photography.

Note 1: Image Quality is Important

A high end camera is not required to produce acceptable images. Any high resolution digital camera can do the job.

Note 2: Your Photos Will Be Reviewed

Each individual image submitted to microstock sites will be reviewed. Therefore, it is important to analyze your own images before submission. Also, make sure to read all the image terms and requirements before submission. Images are sometimes rejected. Today, many of the prominent microstock photography sites have tutorials that you can follow to help you take fantastic images.

Note 3: Subject matter is important

Content does matter. Certain subject matters, such as business and food images are popular. However, images of family and flowers may not make the cut. Do some research and see what image types are downloaded the most. This will give you an idea of what sells and potentially what to focus on.

Also, images containing people may require you to complete a model release form. Please read the terms and conditions of the microstock site before making such submissions.

Note 4: Portfolio Development Takes Time

To make a serious income from microstock sites, it is important to develop a portfolio containing a many high quality images. Also, make your images keyword rich. Relevant keywords will allow your images to appear more frequently in customer searches.

Also, submit your images to numerous microstock sites. This increases the probability of your images being downloaded.

With these notes in mind, you can be on your way to making serious money using only your digital camera!