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Week of April 10
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Friday, April 14, 2006
Biz Basics
Last Friday, I promised to recommend some great starter
sites for women looking for info on how to open their own
businesses, so here they are: make the site of the Small Business
Administration (www.sba.gov)
your first stop for advice, regulations, forms, loan information,
etc.; SCORE (www.score.org)
is where retired CEO’s and small business owners hang out, waiting
to mentor entrepreneurs just starting out;
www.nawbo.org, the site of the National Association of Women
Business Owners, has a comprehensive resource center;
www.legalzoom.com offers inexpensive incorporation and other
legal services, as well as sound information on the various
incorporation options available; go to
www.entrepreneur.com,
www.forbes.com, and
www.businessweek.com for the best in service journalism and
advice for small business owners;
https://secure.85broads.com/ is a terrific networking group for
women attending MBA programs and girding themselves for a career in
business; and
the Women’s
Financial Network (www.wfn.com)
has a very useful list of angel investors and venture capital firms
targeting women.
Also
instructive and inspiring for those of you thinking about owning
your future by starting a business of your own are the “Biz Whiz”
profiles of successful, savvy women business owners featured in the
19 issues of MAKING BREAD Magazine in our Issue Download Center.
Purchase a $2.95 three-day pass at
http://www.makingbreadmagazine.com/MainCats/content/daypass.htm
for access to the Center.
In
the process of starting MAKING BREAD, I met a lot of women who took
the leap into entrepreneurship. All of them impress me with their
gutsy approach to life and their unshakable belief in themselves, as
well as their financial wisdom. Crystal Williams is one such lady.
She had a clear vision for a regional women’s magazine in her head.
Though her background was in the pharmaceutical industry, not in
publishing, she went about learning everything she needed to know
about magazine publishing and made her vision a reality. Check out
www.originmag.com to see the results. She’s worked hard—keeping
her day job and burning the midnight oil to put out each issue of
her magazine—and someday soon I have no doubt that her hard work
will pay off, as it already is for her many readers.
Wishing you all a happy holiday weekend. Check back on Monday for
some of my favorite steals and good deals, plus other observations
on how money makes our world go round.
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Thursday, April 13, 2006
Links We Love
Being the founding editor of a digital magazine, I have to ‘fess up
that technology—and the way it’s changing our lives—fascinates me.
Reading the media newsletters that come into my mailbox every day,
lately I’m sensing that the era of high-tech boy toys and gal
gadgets (video games, cell phones, PDA’s, laptops, iPods, etc.) is
beginning to be upstaged by companies that focus on the content that
we put on those toys and gadgets. This new development could end up
saving us all some dough.
Take, for example,
www.webaroo.com, a site that allows you to download a kind of
Cliff’s Notes version of the Web onto your laptop or mobile devise.
Presto—do searches without going online. No need to pay for a
wireless service just so you can Google your boyfriend’s name while
you sip cappuccino’s at your favorite coffee shop. By the way, if
your favorite coffee shop happens to be Starbucks, and you’ve got a
green thumb, you’re in luck. The environmentally conscious folks at
4,000 Starbucks stores are giving away their coffee grounds to
gardeners who want to recycle them into the soil. The grounds come
neatly packaged in silver bags. In my local shop, they were in a
large canister by the door. Very cool!
I’m sure you’ve heard that some of the TV networks—most
recently ABC—are beginning to offer repeats of TV series for free
online. The catch: you gotta watch the ads. Missed the episode of
Lost last night? (I did.) Can’t afford a TIVO? Never could figure
out how to program your VCR? No problem. Go to
www.abc.com, and find out what Kate and Jack were up to in the
jungle.
Over at
www.keepmedia.com, you can save dough by cutting back on your
impulse magazine purchases. Subscribe to this service for $4.95 a
month, and you can read that article whose sexy cover line (you know
the one) caught your eye in the supermarket (but you didn’t want to
buy the whole magazine just so you could read it). iTunes plays a
similar tune: save money by only buying the one or two really good
songs on a CD instead of the whole shebang.
Like I said, technology fascinates me. Now if only I
could figure out why more of us aren’t dancing to the beat of the
music on our iPods as we wait in the ATM line.
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Down with Dumbed-Down Divas!
Today, let’s raise a MAKING BREAD toast to rocker Pink for calling
attention to “the stupid girl epidemic” with her hit single “Stupid
Girls” off her album “I’m Not Dead.” In it, she skewers the current
crop of female celebrities who’ve made a name for themselves by
shopping till they drop and acting brain dead in public (think Paris
Hilton and Jessica (“If it’s tuna, why is it called Chicken of the
Sea?”) Simpson. As Pink points out, these women aren’t dumb (they’ve
made a lot of dough by marketing themselves as dumbed-down divas,
after all). But the message they send is having a negative effect on
a generation of teens in search of themselves.
“There’s a push for us all to be size zero and shop all
day and not contribute anything to the world. My message: Try
everything till you find what you’re good at,” Pink told an
audience of young girls at a Toronto high school last week,
Appearing on Oprah this week, she said, “If I wasted my time
trying to be everyone else when I was 10 years old, I wouldn't be
who I am today.”
The fact is that today’s young celebs can be
terrific role models. As I commented in
“Why We Should All Imitate Jennifer Lopez” on this site a
while ago, “it is within our power to be like them. Here’s
the secret: Instead of emulating the trappings of their lives, why
not try to emulate the qualities that got them where they are in the
first place? Not their talent—we can’t all be singers or actors or
talk-show hosts, after all—but their confidence, their
determination, their persistence, their stubbornness, their hard
work, and perfectionism. Their belief in themselves.”
“Stupid
Girls” made the Top 10 list of downloaded songs on ITunes (www.itunes.com)
this week. Must be a whole lot of smart grrrls out there listening
to it! This is perhaps also a good time to note with glee the
passing of one of the latest entries in a glut of celebrity
magazines. The fact that last week Celebrity Living Weekly
bit the dust could be a sign that maybe, just maybe, our obsession
with all those “stupid girls” (and guys) out there is waning.
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Tuesday, April 11, 2006
When You Cross This Line, Maybe It’s Time for Some
Plastic Surgery
I was standing in line at my local
Blockbuster’s last night. The guy in front of me was clutching two
DVD’s. When it came time to pay, he handed a plastic card to the
clerk. “Debit or credit?” the clerk asked. “Credit,” this movie buff
replied. The total came to five and change, and he was charging
it?!? Maybe he should rent “Fun with Dick and Jane,” about a couple
who have their lawn repossessed when the company Dick (Jim Carrey)
works for goes bankrupt. It debuts on Blockbuster shelves today. The
trailer for this movie scared me so much that I couldn’t go see it
in the theater. The specter of bankruptcy terrifies me.
It’s bad enough that debit cards make it
easy for us to bust our budgets every week. I’m guilty as charged.
Run out of cash, just reach for your plastic. But when you start
charging incidentals like Starbuck’s lattes and Blockbuster DVD’s,
you’re headed for trouble. It’s one small step in the wrong
direction, a sure sign that you’re spending more than you make.
Another recent day at the supermarket,
where I routinely use my debit card to access my bank account, just
because I find it easier than carrying around a lot of cash, I
watched a woman pull a wad of bills out of her wallet to pay her
grocery bill. It was impressive—seeing all that cash in her hand, I
envied her; it made her seem as rich as Oprah. Try paying just with
cash for a week. Don’t be surprised if you find that you end up
spending less. Somehow the act of handing over actual $5, $10, and
$20 bills makes you think twice about how hard you had to work to
earn them. I’m going to hold the plastic for a week and see what
happens. How about you?
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Monday, April 10, 2006
Signs of the Pocketbook—Which One Are You?
There
are 12 astrological signs but only two financial “signs”: Savers and
Spenders. Which one are you? Whether the question refers to your
astrological or financial sign, you can probably answer that
question without thinking.
Within those two “signs of the
pocketbook,” though, there are layers and permutations: If you’re a
saver, do you make your savings work hard for you by investing it
aggressively in high-growth mutual funds, or do you stash it away in
savings bonds and conservative, low-interest CD’s? If you’re a
spender, what do you spend your money on? Do you value, enjoy and
“invest” in ephemeral, here-today, gone-tomorrow experiences
(gourmet dinners at the best restaurants; a vacation to some exotic
destination at least once a year) or do you value, enjoy and
“invest” in material things (the best Boze sound system, oriental
rugs, designer clothes, a sports car, an uptown address)?
Those who invest their money in
experiences have only memories to show for their dough when the fun
is over—but what memories they are! Those who invest in things have
only stuff to show for their hard work. They’re building a
“lifestyle,” but are they living a life?
Though conventional wisdom says these are
choices we all have to make, it doesn’t have to be either/or. There
is another financial “sign”: the saver who can also afford to spend,
because she earns enough to do both—let’s call her the One Who Has
It All—and that’s a type worth striving to be. If you’re not earning
enough to save for your future security and live the life you want
now, maybe it’s time to look for a better job, ask for a raise or
promotion at your current job, take on a second job, or make a hobby
bring in extra income. Use what you have—your talents, interests,
acquaintances, networking skills, and ambition—to get what you want:
now and later.
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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If you like the blog, you’ll love the book.
For more savvy
finance advice, buy
“Making Bread: The
Ultimate Financial Guide for Women Who Need Dough,”
by Gail Harlow and Elizabeth Lewin, available on
Amazon.com and at your local bookstore |
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