We all dream about owning our businesses and quit that full time job. But just how risky is it? According to the the Center for Women’s Business Research statistics, overall survival rate for startups in four years is 44%, 66% for women owned businesses. Most of the startup failures are caused by lacking of capital, market research, and business planning. Here’s an interesting article,
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Managedebt/P143840.asp
Hi there,
I just came upon another interesting article about working from home. “Real Jobs”,
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/CollegeandFamily/Raisekids/P142363.asp
When more and more women and men quit their full time jobs to be stay-at-home parents, people started wondering what has caused the priority shift. After all, spending all that tuition and time in school should at least pay off something. There was an interesting article on msn.com a few years ago about the cost of quitting jobs is somewhere between $700,000 and $1 million over the years. People are not only giving up income, but also retirement savings, pension and benefits. However, as more working mothers get fed up by the daily struggles, more of them choose to stay at home. The other factor that also plays an important part is that earning two incomes not necessarily bring more home taking into account of daycare costs. To offset the financial tradeoffs, many stay-at-home moms have become work-from-home moms. However, not all work-at-home ideas and businesses are good ideas. Some of them are get rich schemes. Most of those promise that little skill, effort, or time is required. A lot of them are offered through email spams. So if you’re looking for opportutnies, be aware of those. But there are also, good ways to make supplemental income while stay at home with the little ones. I’ve selected a few articles by various work-from-home writers.
http://www.benefito.com/bene-workathome.php
http://www.benefito.com/bene-freelancewriter.php
http://www.benefito.com/bene-copywriting.php
We all heard that in order to cover the expenses of unexpected circumstances in life, we need to have savings equal to at least three and preferably six months’ expenses. And that’s not the retirement savings. It’s the kind of money that you know you have but can neither invest nor touch until the unexpected happens. Which means that, for example, if your monthly household take-home net income is $4,000, and if you spend every dime of the $4,000 just to cover all expenses including retirement and child support, then times 3 or 6, you need to have somewhere between $12,000 and $24,000 emergency fund sitting idle. Now if your take home net income is $5,000, which means that you need to save $15,000 to $30,000 for the unexpected. This is not easy for most of us. So how do you do that? Many financial advisors will tell you to put set amount aside each month to accumulate. That’s easier to say than done. You would have to cut down your disposable spending for that. Imagine saving $200/month for this fund starting from the current month, it’ll take you 5 years before you reach your minimum goal. Let’s not talk about the commitment you have to have just to put aside the amount. What about the lost opportunities of this fund? To have the money easily accessible, you probably won’t put in a mutual fund or stocks, what would you do? Like what the financial advisors suggested, you can try a high yield savings account. Here comes the math part that bothers me, so it means that you could be watching your hard-earned money disappearing as taxes and inflation have their shares. Then it comes more interesting stuff, people are talking about 6 months of expenses are not enough because unemployment usually happens somewhere between 6 and 12 months. Oh boy, that’s tough. For some of us, one month emergency fund is enough for the unexpected. Anything more than that belongs to the “disaster fund”.
Hey,
It’s hard to believe, hedge-fund trader Brian Hunter just vanished $5 billion USD in one single week! I wonder he has made to the biggest loser on Wall Street yet. Oh, yes, he just made it, the same guy who made total compensation of more than $75 million in 2005.