Even if it’s your best friend or closest relative, sometimes you need to learn to say no when it comes to co-signing. The singular most important thing to make sure is that you won’t lose out big by giving someone else the privilege of being their co-signer. Many times it actually does work out- for instance co-signing for a twenty year old’s car who has a steady job and pays it back timely giving him good credit. But when people have histories of bad credit, don’t pay back, don’t know anything about budgeting, and quit their job every other day it can be time to say no.

Some co-signers have had their lives severely disrupted when the borrower for whom they co-signed stopped paying, leaving it up to the co-signer to make the loan good. Most of the mail I get on the subject is from co-signers in this situation. They now regret they did it, and they invariably ask me how they can get out of it.Jack M Guttentag

If you have avoided social-networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook with the excuse that they are the domain of desperate job hunters or attention-seeking teenagers, it’s time to reconsider.

In a world of economic instability and corporate upheaval, savvy professionals like the technology consultant Josh So epitomize the benefits of brushing up your online image and keeping it polished.

When Mr. So, a 32-year-old from Dublin, Calif., learned he had 45 days to find a new job before his company eliminated his division, he turned to friends online.

Within hours of updating his job status on the social-networking site LinkedIn, Mr. So won four job interviews through his contacts there. Within a week, two of the interviews resulted in offers. And within less than a month, his employer counteroffered with a position in another division and a $25,000 bump in his annual salary.

The old business adage that it’s not what you know but who you know takes a twist in the Internet era: it’s what you know about social-networking sites that can get you ahead.

“Build your own inner circle of people you know are good — people you know will get you places,” Mr. So said.

While it lacks the glamour of more popular sites like MySpace and Facebook, LinkedIn “is the place to be,” said the JupiterResearch media analyst Barry Parr, if you want to make professional contacts online. LinkedIn is a “Chamber of Commerce mixer,” he said.

LinkedIn has more than 25 million members, and it is adding new ones at the rate of 1.2 million a month — or about one new networker every two seconds.

With that kind of mass demographic, LinkedIn is hard to ignore. But with that kind of scale, can it be useful? It can be if you use it judiciously.

LinkedIn is intended to appeal to its average user: the 41-year-old white-collar professional with an income of $109,000 a year. User pages are spare: a brief professional summary, a photo and a résumé.

As you create your network, the site shows you people you may know through past jobs or educational institutions. (Facebook also suggests contacts, but it starts with lists from your e-mail or instant messaging accounts.)

And there is a search function so you can find people you don’t know but would like to — for instance, at a company where you want a job.

You might be shy about calling or e-mailing people you have neglected, but the social-networking sites let you avoid that. You are simply renewing the connection when you add a contact.

Bernard Lunn, a Web technology entrepreneur in New York, describes LinkedIn as the ultimate Rolodex.

“I’m no spring chicken,” said Mr. Lunn, 53. “I’ve been in business for almost 30 years. I had lost touch with a lot of people and had spent time in different industries.”

The Web site did the work of finding people for him, providing a list of likely connections by searching its own database of people who had overlapped with him at past jobs. All Mr. Lunn had to do was review the list and select contacts he wanted to add to his network.

“Some of them are now doing very useful jobs,” he said.

That’s the point. You don’t have to fear you’ll be perceived as using them; they are on the site for the same reason. They might well intend to use you.

Even so, don’t go crazy trying to connect with everyone you brushed past in the hallway 20 years ago, or friends of friends. Too many people can weaken your network.

“We try to discourage promiscuous linking,” said Kay Luo, a spokeswoman for LinkedIn.

But don’t be afraid to network strategically. You want to connect to people who can get you jobs. “People usually invite up — people above them in hierarchy,” said Ms. Luo. “When you’re talking about a professional network, quality is so important.”

So if the No. 1 tactic is to connect with people who are useful and successful, how do you make sure you’re one of their worthy connections? There are a few helpful approaches.

Ask for recommendations. Mr. So, who so quickly parlayed his connections into job offers, said that having updated recommendations with his résumé on LinkedIn was crucial to being noticed.

“The only way to get recommendations is to go out and ask for it,” Mr. So said. “It’s kind of a weird system. I typically go to my bosses and peers and say, ‘Do you mind?’ ”

The flipside of that system is that it behooves you to be generous. Jeremiah K. Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, has watched the growth of online social media since 2005 and advises social-networking users to follow an 80-20 rule. “Give information and answer questions 80 percent of the time, and 20 percent of the time ask for help,” he said.

When a contact asks for a recommendation, write it graciously and promptly. If you think that person isn’t worth a recommendation, think again about being connected to that person.

And remember the other social-networking sites. If LinkedIn is the Chamber of Commerce luncheon, then Facebook is the after-hours party (and MySpace is the all-night rave, which may make trolling for business connections there a bit trying). “Facebook seems a more natural way of communicating,” said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst for eMarketer in Seattle. “LinkedIn seems more formal.”

Facebook, which began in 2004 as a way for college students to communicate, has more than 80 million active users. The fastest-growing segment is now those 25 years old and older, according to the company.

The site makes it easy to carry on a casual conversation or ask group questions. The easiest way to use it professionally is to join your employer’s network. And it helps to post interesting links that are relevant to your job.

The site features classified ads in the Facebook Marketplace, and there are job-hunting applications on the site, like Jobster. There are also tools for building a professional profile or online business cards. And you can use one of a handful of applications, liked LinkedIn Contacts, to connect your Facebook profile to LinkedIn.

But the social ease of Facebook makes it easy to look frivolous, all of the experts warned. If you tend to overshare, people in your network will quickly learn about the breakup of your marriage or your love of Jell-O shots. (Facebook now offers fine-tuned privacy settings, on the upper right side of the home page.)

So perhaps the best tip of all for online social networking would be: Keep the social separate from the networking.

source:sara jane tribble

Is your boss a yeller, a micromanager or clueless? Does he put insulting notes on memos that co-workers can see? Does he throw things?

Amy Cunningham’s first boss at a Minneapolis public relations firm was a yeller and a micromanager, a tough challenge for a new employee just out of college. After a series of unpleasant incidents, the boss finally exploded when he found out Cunningham had put together a media kit without showing him the separate pieces before assembling it — a routine task she’d done many times before.

The boss stormed into her office, got in her face, yelled and cursed. “He tried to throw out any personal insult he could come up with,” Cunningham says. “I’ve never been in another situation, business or social, that was that scary.”

It all worked out. Cunningham approached another executive at the company and got reassigned. The boss left a few years later, and Cunningham stayed on–15 years, and counting.

Having a bad boss is more than an annoyance. It’s the main reason people leave their jobs. Increasingly, that’s a tough choice these days. A new survey from Working America, an AFL-CIO affiliate, says that more than 50 million workers feel some pressure to stay with a bad boss because of the current economic downturn.

“It’s difficult to handle [uncomfortable] situations without taking some type of risk, and that’s why a lot of people choose to ignore or live with it,” says Manny Avramidis, senior vice president for global human resources at the American Management Association.

So if your boss is a jerk and you feel you have no choice but to stay, how do you cope? Here are some basic tips:

The best way to deal with a micromanager is to update him frequently. E-mail the boss a memo or checklist of what you’re doing on a project so the boss is reassured, and check off your accomplishments as you go.

For instance, if the boss assigns you a report to write and then dictates what exactly you should have in it, tell him, “You’ve given me enough guidance. Let me take a shot at it and I’ll come back after I have a rough draft. Can we talk about the rough draft when it’s done?”

Dealing with an unpleasant boss can be uncomfortable, if you choose to address the situation by confronting him. Weigh the problem and how much bringing it up with him might affect your career. If your boss is a yeller and is creating a tough–or even hostile–working environment, say something like, “These aren’t the conditions I work best under. Let’s talk about a way to make them better.” If that approach doesn’t bring results, seek advice from Human Resources.

Sometimes a boss who’s perceived as a dummy can actually be good for your career. Use cluelessness as an opportunity to gain more responsibility. Ask if you can take on more projects and even help manage the team.

“For people who like to take initiative, that can be a great thing,” says Gini Graham Scott, author of A Survival Guide for Dealing with Bad Bosses.

Meanwhile, others find that they’re directionless without a boss’s guidance. If that’s the case, gently force the boss to critique your work and ask you questions.

Ideally, vet your boss before starting a new job. If you’re in the final rounds of interviews with an employer, use networking to find someone on the inside. Ask about the person you’re likely to work with. What’s his skill set? Does he respect the views of his employees? Does he delegate or does he drive people crazy with questions?

Finally, ask the following to flush out any facts your source didn’t spill earlier: What do you like–and not like–about working here?

If you don’t like what you hear, don’t take the job.

source:tara weiss

The good news: mortgage rates are down. The bad news: it’s much harder to qualify for a refinanced loan these days.

What’s more, the borrowers who need to refinance the most - because their adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) are resetting to higher interest rates - are among those having the most trouble winning approvals.

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“I’m turning away about 60% to 75% of the clients who come to me for a refi,” said Bob Moulton, president of Americana Mortgage Group on Long Island, N.Y. “Some don’t have enough equity and others have bad credit scores.”

During the boom years, lenders approved most anyone with a pulse. Not so today. Mortgage brokers recognize this and are now being very selective about the clients whose applications they choose to submit to the likes of Wells Fargo or Bank of America.

If an applicant has poor credit, or a home whose value is rapidly deteriorating, they’re just not going to bother.

“If the person is Sweet Polly Purebread - good income, good assets, high credit score - there’s money out there,” said Moulton. “But if not, then it’s harder.”

Interest rates are way down - 5.67% is the going rate for a a 30-year fixed loan this week, according to Freddie Mac. That has generated a spike in refinancing applications.

Total mortgage applications were up 73% last week from a year earlier, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), and 69%of those applications were for refis. Last February, when interest rates were about 6.3%, about 46% of applications were for refis.

The make-or-break metric for anyone looking to refinance right now is home equity - the difference between what is owed on a house and what the house is worth. But with home prices down, many homeowners have little of that precious commodity left.

“If you have an 80% loan, with a 10% home equity loan, you may not be able to refinance,” said Peter Grabel, a mortgage broker in Connecticut - especially in down markets.

Consider a homeowner who bought in Miami a year ago with 20% down. Home prices have fallen 15% there in the past year, wiping out three-quarters of the equity. Lenders, who want collateral that’s worth more than the value of the loan, are wary about having so little cushion. If they have to repossess and resell the house, they’re on the hook for a big loss.

“No lender would take that deal,” said Marc Savitt, president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. “It’s a lot different from two years ago.”

The bar has also been raised for credit scores when it comes to refinancing, according to Grabel. And sometimes, it’s not a matter of whether someone can get refinancing but at what price.

“Those with high credit scores are getting very good rates, but the lenders have heightened the requirements to qualify,” said Grabel. Instead of a score of 680 for the best rate, a borrower might need 700 now.

For example, Grabel has a client who wants a cash-out deal. The client has lots of equity in his house but a dismal credit score - 552.

“I used to have 20 lenders I could send him to; now there’s maybe one,” said Grabel. “The rate, though, will be high, higher than what he’s paying now.”

The only reason that this client will take the deal is because he’s going through a divorce and needs to buy out his wife. He doesn’t have time to rebuild his credit rating, but he’s lucky that at least his house appraises well.

Indeed, appraisals are another tool that lenders are using to eliminate unqualified applicants.

“It used to be a formality,” said Grabel. “Now it’s, ‘Lets do the appraisal first and see what value comes in.” Lenders are scrutinizing them to a degree unheard of during the boom. They don’t want to lend $160,000 on an appraised value of $200,000 unless they’re sure the house is truly worth that.

Ted Grose, a past president of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers, said lenders now often conduct what he called “bench reviews” of appraisals. “They have an experienced, independent third-party go over the appraisal to make sure the numbers are accurate,” he said.

Grose called many of the applicants he sees “very challenging, mostly because of high loan-to-value ratios.”

Many of these people took exotic loans to get into high-priced properties. They used hybrid ARMs that are resetting to higher rates, or interest only loans.

Particularly deadly are option ARMs, which act as negative amortization loans; the payments don’t even cover the interest and the balance grows over time. Combine that with falling home prices, and the loan balance may be more than the home’s market value.

Under those circumstances, said Grose, few borrowers can be helped.

Source:yahoo personal finance

The above title might have scared you. For most of us, the ideal is to be as educated as possible and it’s a dream for us to also be able to send our kids to good schools.

That’s where the tag line comes in. What’s a good school? Will your child get a better job because he/she attended a prestigious four year university and received a B.A. in liberal arts?
I actually think not. Your child (or you, if that’s the more relevant case) will receive a huge debt, that’s what you can guarantee he or she will receive. The debt may take years to pay off.

Here’s a secret: The easiest thing to market in the world is education. “Without a good degree you won’t get any good job and won’t make any money,” is what every private or even public post high school recruiting agent will tell you. They essentially are experts at selling the American dream, which is not too hard to sell for many idealistically driven youth.

The reason why they are so successful is because what they’re saying has much truth. But that’s the difficulty in processing information. Truth mixed in with a little bit of lies is what ends up sounding as truth, but is actually quite different.

To fully comprehend what I’m saying, you’ll first have to understand the history of colleges, most notably the prestigious well established universities. These colleges were not intended (and in my opinion, are still not intended) for middle class and poor people to become educated in order to get good jobs. Universities were simply a social class symbol of pride. Previously you didn’t have to get straight A’s to get into Harvard, but rather come from the right family and have the right charisma and likeability to get accepted. Colleges were intended as a way for the wealthy to continue on with their education without ever having to get a real job, thanks to their family wealth and inheritance.

Does it make any sense to get a $100,000 loan to go to college (or even a $30,000) when the average person makes 7 career changes over their life-time and it may take a good few years until the person is established in a job which he likes and which pays decently (usually starting salaries aren’t that high, face it, regular people don’t make that much and it takes time until they are established and start making money.) The only thing it accomplishes is putting people in huge debt which can and usually does take years and years to pay off. Usually these payments need to be made in the years where every penny counts and people can least afford it. Globe, a Salt Lake City community newspaper discusses the financial difficulties pertained by students who have to make the tough decision of choosing to go to a prestigious university or opting community college.

Money is always a problem for college students. No matter which way you look at it, students will end up spending thousands of dollars each year for tuition. One positive is that SLCC is on the lighter side of the tuition scale. A full-time student at SLCC can expect to spend approximately $2,300 a year, where the tab at the University of Utah can tip the scale at about $5,000. More than double the cost, and for students on a budget $2,700 goes a very long way.

Do I advise not going to college altogether? Not at all. What I do advise, though, is going to community colleges. They are more career oriented, friendlier learning environments, and offer more practical classes. They also cut on big bucks.

The second, mostly over-looked issue reagarding college is the issue of maturity. Most 17 or 18 year olds are still too young to know what they want to study and do with their lives. Many students feel lost in huge universities where they don’t even know what they’re paying so much for. A common sentiment you’ll hear from university drop-outs is that if they had instead started out in a community college and then transferred they probably wouldn’t be drop-outs today.

Another separate issue to think about is what major to get into. A major in French Literature or Art History may be very fun and interesting, but honestly does not offer very many jobs. If your goal is to become a professor, so be it, but otherwise think through your options carefully.

Remember, it takes time until anyone- whether he is a graduate of Yale or Santa Monica College- to establish themselves and start making money. People generally don’t start making big bucks fast. Do you really want to have enormous loans sitting on your head while you need the money the most? I think not.

Many webmasters have learned how to make a sizeable amount of money on their sites through posting google ads. They learn how to put in high paying keywords in order to keep their page ratings high and have people clicking on their ads. Yet, many times the money does not just roll in after putting up the supposedly correct keywords to generate maximum growth.

The answer lies in a simple secret: location, location, location. An easy navigation system which pulls readers to the correct pages is what is lacking. Having the pages with the high placed keywords is one thing, getting your traffic to click and go to those pages is entirely another thing.

The links on your pages which lead to the desired pages you want your readers to navigate must be attention grabbing and look interesting. It all comes down to good marketing skills in advertising your links and a good navigational site which contains a menu on each page and is easy to go through.

One way of doing this is by placing those links on the pages which most of your traffic comes to. It is a good idea to test this option by choosing a few high earning pages to link to. Come up with a catchy and unique name for that link. Think of something which will trigger the readers curiousity. And don’t forget to use interesting graphics on your site.

Many sites these days have lists of “hot pages” and “most read pages.” Get to know which lists websites are using and try to come up with your own version of a unique style. Try putting different texts on different pages. Doing a little trial version with mixing things around is a great idea to test your site out. Put links both on top and bottom and see which links are being ignored and which are being clicked.

Test and track until you find the site navigation style that works best for your site.

In today’s competitive world, how can you stand out and shout to the world “Look at me, my business is worth coming to?” It sounds like one of the biggest challenges of internet marketing, and yet the solution is remarkably easy. It’s called “branding.”

Branding is when your personalize your business and your site in a way where it becomes synonymous with what your personality reflects.

How can this be done? Number one, you can start through having original content instead of just copying and pasting what’s on the web. Original content means that you yourself thought up the ideas and wrote your own articles. If you aren’t confident enough in your writing ability you might want to look for an editor just to offer insight into your writing, but the writing should still be yours.

Your site should boast your personality; your voice, your colors, your clothes. Your home business was created from your experiences, your talents, and your skills so in a sense your website is you.
A Brand is like a human being, there is not another one in the whole world who is the same.

The brand is something which can be built over a period of time. It is an emotional relationship between your website and your visitors and over-time it will get stronger and stronger, especially if it is not changed.

Key to good business: Imagination

When most people think of a business man they conjure up to mind a grim faced  well dressed “all business-no play” type of guy. The image we are saturated with is one of a super boring, non creative executive who rolls in all the money. This mold is at the least, entirely misleading.

The truth is that the most essential tool in business and what makes for the best CEOs is good old fashioned imagination. Imagination is manifested in two faculties: synthetic and creative. 

Synthetic imagination relies on the old, standard routines and concepts which we are used to and then channeling them into a broad new more efficient way of dealing  with them. An example of this would be following a recipe for baking a cake, and yet slightly adding or changing the ingredients. 

Creative imagination, on the other hand, is  something which is totally new and unprecedented to start with. A simple example, which I will use based on the above example, is a cake made from scratch. Napoleon Hill, in his book Think and Grow Rich basically sums up creative thinking as follows: ”Through the faculty of creative imagination, the finite mind of man had direct communication with Infinite Intelligence. It is the faculty through which ‘hunches’ and ‘inspirations’ are received. It is by this faculty that all basic or new ideas are handed over to man. It is through this faculty that individuals may “tune in,” or communicate with the subconscious mind of other men.”

An example of this would be Apple’s ipod which introduced an ingenious way of music ownership through customers paying for each song. On a deeper level we can even see when creative marketing can influence popular culture to such an extent that the red and white Santa Claus as we know him is actually nothing more than Coca Cola’s aggressive approach to marketing an item with their original Coke recipe.

Imagination for some reason is rarely mentioned in business relations. We are misled into believing that creative imagination is best left for a skilled artist. 

Once a business person or entrepreneur begins to use more imagination he will certainly expand his vision in broad ways through creating more revenue by channeling exciting marketing campaigns.