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Why Green Home Improvements are a Good Investment

When people think about investments, they usually think of a couple of commonplace options such as a retirement fund, maybe some stocks of purchasing some real estate somewhere sunny. Very rarely do they consider improvements on their existing home as investments. Considering how much these improvements can do to increase the value of one’s home and how good the ROI can be, it is wonder more people do not do it.

One of the ways to go is with green home improvements, i.e. those that make your home more environmentally friendly.

Why Green?

The first and the most important reason why you will want to go green with your home improvements is that the value of the home is increased due to these improvements. For example, it is estimated that installing a solar system increases the value of one’s home by $3 per watt of energy that can be produced by the system. The same goes for various other green improvements that you can invest in, such as new windows and doors or improved insulation.

What are the Options?

The good news is that there are almost innumerable green home improvements to choose from. What this means is that depending on your particular situation, you will still be able to find the improvement that will fit your budget and your needs.

One of the options are the so-called tankless water heaters. Instead of heating and keeping a certain amount of water hot at all times, these heaters only heat the water you are using. This not only saves on electricity, but also does great things to reduce your water consumption.

A programmable thermostat is another fantastic investment which is not that huge, especially when you consider the savings you make. This type of thermostat enables you to better control your A/C system, thus dramatically reducing the amount of electricity you waste on keeping your home at the perfect temperature.

While we are on the subject of reducing the amount of electricity you spend on air-conditioning, we should also mention ceiling fans. They might seem a bit old-school or even outdated, but in reality, they are a fantastic way to keep a room cold while spending only a fraction of the electricity that an A/C system uses. In the Mediterranean, you will discover that a vast majority of homes still feature fans instead of costly A/C systems.

Of course, there is also the option of installing an entire solar system which will provide your home with cleaner energy that will also be cheaper than using the more traditional electricity sources available in your area. With a comprehensive solar energy system, you can pretty much stop paying your electricity bills and perhaps even start selling the electricity to the local government.

Are Green Improvements Costly?

For the most part, green home improvements are not that expensive. For example, a programmable thermostat will cost you under $200 a year. A tankless water heater will cost under $2,000 and the savings you will make in both electricity and water will be huge.

Solar systems and similar, more comprehensive solutions can be somewhat expensive. Luckily, there are now new financing options that will make the initial investment much more manageable. With PACE, for example, you do not pay upfront for your green home improvements and instead, you pay them off over time, while still reaping the benefits immediately. You can find more about PACE financing at this link.

Closing Word

There is something very important that we should not forget about here. All of these green home improvements will also do great things for the environment. So, besides being a prudent investment option, these improvements will also help conserve the planet.

August 29, 2016
Earn Real Money with Online Jobs

We live in an age of the Internet and the online world has managed to slip into the world of professions. Freelance jobs have benefited the most out of this, not only by significantly having their income boosted, but also by adding some new extra professions that didn’t even exist before the popularization of the Internet. Here are some online jobs that actually really pay!

Writer

The written word has seen a major boost when it comes to job availability. There are many websites out there, such as iWriter, that offer many unique opportunities for all you wordsmiths out there. If you are able to meet challenging deadlines, you might earn a whole lot in short time frames. The only “problem” with freelance writing is outlined in the fact that you’ll have to be patient and persistent, earning next to nothing in the very beginning, until you level up to a trusted writer status. From that point on, however, you are looking at generous payments.

Web designer

This profession is online-specific; before the mainstream use of the Internet, it naturally didn’t exist. However, if you are looking to get a bit money on the side nowadays, you can get introduced to web design with little or no investment, in a matter of so much as weeks. Of course, if you are looking to really get paid, rather than earning a bit on the side, you could really get into this profession and taking some courses can make you as professional a web designer as web designers get. Instead of being hired for making websites for other people, with an amount of training and investment, you can make your own website and get paid by running it.

Website designer

Often confused with web designer, this profession is similar to the previously mentioned, yet different in some ways. The main difference between the two is this: as a web designer, you need to possess the qualities of a website designer and the ability to run your own website. On the other hand, as a website designer, you specify in creating websites for other people. You could make a buck on the side as a website designer, by coming up with template website designs and selling them to the highest bidder, however, if you want to earn real money, you should consider working by order. Although you may already be somewhat proficient in website design, you will need to get in touch with web design to a certain extent in order to become good enough for people to contact you to make their websites.

Online financial assistant

This online profession is a tad more serious than the previously mentioned. Although a diploma of financial planning is a requirement for this profession, if you are good at planning in general and know your way around money, it can go a long way in providing you some hefty full-time job earnings, without having to commute to work every day, enabling you to work from the comforts of your home.

Online reseller

Although this too can be done as a part-time profession by selling your unused items, you can really get into this profession, dedicating yourself to finding out what people need and finding those that want to sell the required item(s). You are more than a mediator here – you actually specialize in buying what is requested from you and selling at a higher price.

These professions can all be done as part-time jobs, but if you are looking to earn some real money, we suggest that you educate yourself as to how to become more professional in each department. In this way, you may benefit from a full-time job, done in less than an average workday – working hours are great and you are your own boss – something most of us dream of!

August 29, 2016
5 Tips to Find the Best Health Insurance Plan for You In 2016
With the increasing risk of diseases from high-in-oil-and-fat food and pesticide-loaded fruits and veggies that we consume on a daily basis and lack of exercise, the best thing we can do to protect ourselves from unexpected health care expenses is to get a comprehensive Best health insurance plan.

If you are an employer, then it’s obvious that you may be considering various health insurance plans for the benefit of your workers.

Are you looking for the best plans for your employees? Do you wish to help them get the most out of their coverage? If you said yes, then here are a few tips to help you offer the best healthcare benefits to your employees with the best plan.
1. Know your options
It’s always good to consider a few options before going for an insurance plan. Here are three main categories related to employee benefits.

Defined benefit plan – This type of insurance offers benefits to employees through a group plan. The perks are strictly catered to members who are directly linked to the network or services of the company.

Defined contribution plan – Through this plan, the employer doesn’t provide insurance coverage to employees but instead provides an allowance through a range of plans from which the workers can choose their preferred ones. For example, people with disabilities get more benefits with disability insurance whereas others get more with a life insurance plan.

Professional employer organization (PEO) – This is the best plan for companies that are looking to provide the benefits of employer insurance but don’t feature-rich plans that workers require. Under this plan, benefits are offered to employees in bigger groups. Get in touch with any of the PEO insurance companies to know more about this plan.
1. Consider wellness programs
The best way to save money on your health care expenses is to protect yourself from diseases. That’s what wellness programs are all about. You’ll be offered perks in the form of wearables like fitness trackers with which you can track your health and fitness on a daily basis and switch to healthier options.

If you’re like many other employers, you can offer attractive discounts on wearables to encourage your staff to purchase them. Insurance companies have offered discounts to employees who track their health regularly. So, this is an added benefit to your employees. Genetic discrimination also plays a major role in insurance eligibility. If you’re not sure what difference that can make to your insurance goals, just check out this easy-to-understand Infographic that helps you to learn more about genetic discrimination.
1. Know the differences between HMO, PPO, and EPO
Health maintenance organization (HMO)

This is a cost-saving way to offer insurance to your employees but the major drawback of this plan is that it offers limited features when compared to the other insurance plans. Your employees will need a referral from their physician to consult the insurance specialist.

Preferred Provider Organizations (PPO)

This one offers more flexibility to employees. Unlike HMO, PPO doesn’t require any referrals from a physician. The insurance buyer can consult a doctor of their choice – it can be inside or outside the network. However, consulting a specialist within the network will help them save money on copays. When it comes to premium, PPO is a bit higher-priced than HMO.

Exclusive Provider Organization (EPO)

EPO is a mix of both HMO and PPO. Employees will have access to a network of providers just like the case with HMO, but the big plus is that they need not seek referrals from their primary physician to consult a specialist.

By considering the factors mentioned above, it can be said that the decision to choose a worthy insurance plan boils down to knowing whether you need more features or low pricing with the plan.
1. Choose insurance according to your employee age group
The last thing you would want to face as an employer is offering a feature-rich insurance plan to your employees and later realizing that you have to downgrade the plan or deduct your employees’ salary because you just can’t afford the plan. Make sure you compare the cost of multiple plans and pick the ones with moderate benefits on a budget.

For example, if the majority of your employees are young healthy individuals, then it’s best to go with lower monthly premiums and higher deductibles because there is a less chance of your members using your insurance in the first place. Also, make it a point to consider other economical options like health spending accounts (HSAs) and Flexible spending accounts (FSAs).
1. Learn what your competitors are offering
There are many ways to benefit from tracking what your competitors are doing. Evaluating the plans offered to their employees is one easy way to chance upon attractive insurance plans. Visit the careers section of your rivals’ websites and try to find out what they are offering their talents. Once you figure that out, take steps to match that or go one step beyond them so you can attract more talented people to your organization.

Best Health Insurance Plan
August 28, 2016
Eight Things You Need To Know About Insurance – Assess Your Needs
Everyone knows that the sole purpose of insurance is to protect individuals against unexpected financial losses during an event of illness, accident, or death but what is surprising is that, the majority of Americans are uninsured.

Are you insured? Are your near and dear ones protected against financial losses that could arise due to health related problems? If not, then it’s recommended that you first get to learn the purpose of having health insurance and how it can help you during major illness, disability, or death.

Insurance stands as the difference between knowing what you already have (i.e. good health and fitness) and what you want in case something happens to your health.

Here are eight things you need to consider when assessing your insurance needs.
1. What you have at present
First, analyze what you have now. How much savings do you have in the bank? Do you have a regular source of income to meet your monthly expenses? Have you made smart investments in properties or shares?
1. Debt
What are the debts currently running? Do you have personal loans, mortgage loans, or any credit card dues? How much of the amount is yet to be paid? What happens to the debts when something unexpected happens to you?
1. Health
Are you hit by any health issues like back pain, obesity, blood pressure, or heart problem? If so, make sure you purchase insurance plans before things go worse. It makes sense to check out reliable sources and find out whether you need to go for genetic testing or not. A healthy person gets up to 20% on premiums.
1. Financial commitments
Ask yourself, how much money should you leave for your spouse and children to lead a stress-free life financially? If you don’t have children, how much will your loved ones require to meet their household and healthcare expenses? What are the significant future expenses they’ll need help with? Education, household, and healthcare are the major expenses for a family. In addition to these, there will be other costs like vehicle repair and maintenance, home renovation, and home appliances.
1. Childcare and home duties
Childcare is another major scenario you need to consider when thinking about whether you should purchase insurance or not. How would you like your children to be cared for if you or your spouse meet with a major accident or disability or death? In most homes, the parents are the primary earning members, so when something happens to them, the life of their children will be bleak when there is no backup plan. The two best ways to offer protection to your kids are (1) having a caregiver to take care of them or (2) sending them to childcare. Try to come up with a rough estimate of how much that would cost.
1. Living expenses
Coming to your personal expenses, ask yourself how much money you will need to take care of yourself when you’re affected by a threatening disease, illness, or disability? Also, consider the additional medical and caretaker expenses.
1. Funeral expenses
Well, let’s hope that nothing of this sort happens to anyone at a young age or even middle age, but again this is one scenario that needs to be considered when assessing one’s insurance needs. The hard fact about funerals is that they are pretty expensive costing anywhere from $3000 to $5000 depending on how it’s done. Leaving your family behind with little or no financial support can leave them devastated in their toughest time. So, the funeral cost is something you need to think about as well.
1. Timeframe
In the event of illness, how long will you be able to survive without your working income? Again, this comes down to the savings you have at present and the returns from investments you’ve already made. If you haven’t made any, then it’s high time you purchased a suitable insurance plan to prevent any unexpected financial damage to you and your family in the future.

Make sure you are always covered!

Situations and financial status change from time to time, so ensure that your insurance needs are regularly reassessed, and you are covered accordingly.

Get expert advice

If you’re not sure how to get started, then getting in touch with an expert is the best way to go about it. Talk to multiple insurance agents and compare different plans before choosing one.
August 28, 2016
5 Ways to Invest in Your Employees

There are many ways in which you can elevate your way of doing business to a next level, such as better marketing campaigns, solid business plans and even fresh new business ideas. However, most of these things are unreliable at best. The only way to be certain that your business efficiency improves is to find a way to invest in your employees. More skilled, better motivated and well-versed teams will certainly bring better ROI. With this in mind, here are five most cost-efficient ways to invest in your employees.

Weekly Recognition

In the past, a lot of businesses heavily relied on the employee of the month practice in order to boost morale and encourage people to get more involved. Unfortunately, in the past few years, it was proven that this particular practice may not have been as good as was formerly believed. Putting one person on a pedestal tends to raise tension in the office and even evoke animosity. On the other hand, a weekly recognition means that you will show your appreciation to everyone (even if it’s the entire office) for any good work they might have done.

Teambuilding

Sometimes, every staff member in your company will give their very best, but the results still won’t be satisfactory. The reason behind this may be the fact that even the most talented individuals don’t necessarily make a great team. Needless to say, in large group projects that can determine the future of your company, having a great team is the absolute paramount. In order to fix this, you might want to consider some teambuilding activities. Sure, going somewhere on a team vacation is great, but often extremely expensive. Luckily, there are some teambuilding activities you can even do in your office like truth or lie, poker tower or egg drop.

Invest in Technology

Another way in which you can help out your employees to unlock their full potential is to invest in technology to make their job easier. Purchasing a device, an app or a platform service to take up some of their most repetitive, mundane tasks may allow them to focus on the things that really matter and, in this way, significantly improve the quality of their work.

Make Room for Advancement

Even if the pay at your company is good, if you don’t give your employees some room for advancement, they might feel suffocated. Vertical mobility is the key part to keeping most promising (and most ambitious) employees motivated and eager for work. If this is absent, you shouldn’t be surprised if your best talent leaves you only to work for your competitors. In the modern business world, everyone thinks of themselves first.

Investing in Education

Last, but in no way the least important, you need to think about further professional growth of your employees and provide them with additional seminars that will help them acquire new skills. For example, instead of outsourcing your accounting, you can send your most promising staff members on renowned financial planning courses. In the long-term, this always pays off since it allows you to deal with one of the most important aspects of your business in-house.

As you can see, none of these steps cost you much resources or effort, but to your employees, this can mean a lot. In this way, you will show them just how much you care and this often goes a long way. Today, in a hostile dog-eat-dog world of business, this kind of loyalty can make the delineation between success and failure go in your favor, which is never a small thing. Just show your staff you care about them both as individuals and professionals, and you are both likely to benefit from it.

August 20, 2016
Essential Tips On How To Recover Your Debt Without Any Interruption

Recovering debt can be full of hassle, especially if the debtor is deliberately dodging you. Read the blog to know how you can recover your debts without any interruption.

It is needless to say that recovering debt from the debtor is a quite difficult job. But for a financial institution or any business that provide service in exchange for the money it is essential. So, when you are already suffering from financial losses due to the failure of payment of the invoices you need to give debt collection a really serious thought.

My experience in this field has taught me that when the debtor is failing to pay you back and you are trying to recover from them the first reaction you are going to get is their anger. Then if you fail to use some trick you are going to get into an ugly confrontation. But you can avoid all of it if you remain a bit patient and involved with the recovery agency in the collection.

Most of the time if your invoices come back without the payment there can be several reasons.

• The debtor is suddenly have been suffering from a financial crisis due to illness, accident or huge financial loss or family demise.

• If you are a service provider, the client may state that they are not satisfied with the service they got.

• The debtor might have left the city without any prior notice.

In the above-mentioned circumstances, it becomes difficult for you to get your money back. This happens especially when either the debtor has left the city without any prior notice or providing the new address. Hence it becomes quite difficult for anyone to track them down and make them pay you again. So, in such a situation you will surely need the help and proper advice of an experienced debt collection agency so that you can recover your loan as fast as possible.

Thus while hiring such an agency, always start with proper planning and make your next move efficiently to recover the debt. There are a few things that you need to keep in mind. For uninterrupted debt recovery here are a few tips for you. Take a look.

Contact Debtor with Gentle Reminder

A gentle reminder is the best way to take the first step for recovering a debt. If you are thinking of going directly and demand the money then it is less likely that you will get the money. Moreover, a chance of ugly confrontation will be there. So, the first step should be a gentle phone call or an email. It will give both of you some time.

Next Step, Direct Demand

Now, once you are done with gently reminding them without any fruitful result you need to take a direct approach. Directly tell them to refund the money immediately. There is no need to hostile and no need to pretend it is perfectly alright if they are not refunding.

Stronger Approach – let the Agency Work

After all these warnings and direct demand, you still don’t get the money you need to ask your agency to work in their own way. In such a situation it often happens that the debtor cuts all ways of contacting him. The debt collection agencies are experienced with dealing such situations.

When you are trusting an agency with this job make sure you know everything about them. Keep the following tips in mind.

• You need to do proper research while hiring the agency. In which field they are working, what clients they are handling all of these are important to determine whether you should hire them or not.

• Hire a licensed agency. Since it is the matter of a huge amount of money you need to make sure that the agency also doesn’t cheat you.

• Look for an agency that has insurance. It will protect you if the agency tries to forcefully recover the debt and the debtor decides to sue you and the agency.

• Compare the price while hiring. Before you zero on some agency get a clear idea of their costs and payment.

But sometimes recovering your debt can be extremely difficult, especially if the debtor is skipping it deliberately. So you need to be conscious and make yourself prepared enough to handle any kind of confrontation. However, hiring an experienced and good debt collection agency can help you to get your money back and invoices paid in time.

Thereby, you should always keep the above-mentioned tips in mind while hiring agencies for debt collection.

Article by
Peter Samuel is a renowned blogger on finances and legal matters. He has immense knowledge on recovering debt with the help of debt collection agency. Read his blog to know more about debt collection agencies.

August 16, 2016