The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City

• ISBN13: 9781934170014
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description

The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City

Personal Budgeting Kit

Product Description
Take control of your finances!

Do you find yourself living from paycheck to paycheck? Do you worry about how you can make your next credit card payments? Even worse, do you feel helpless when you try to think about how you’ll ever manage to retire at 65 (let alone freedom 55) or do you try not to think about it at all? Most important, do you feel overwhelmed at the idea of coming up with a personal budgeting plan?

If the answer is yes to any or all of these questions, this kit is for you. It’s a step-by-step guide to getting yourself back on track financially for the rest of your life. Along with all the necessary forms, it contains tips and information to help you create a workable personal budget. It simplifies the budgeting process, making it easy for you to create a solid, realistic plan. You will learn how to do the following:

* Set realistic financial goals * Trim your spending painlessly * Pay down your debt methodically * Save and invest * Develop a retirement savings strategy * Make up an estate plan * Makeover your lifestyle for a successful and stress-free future

Start today, and budget your way to financial freedom!

All forms are included on CD-ROM in MS Word and PDF formats for use on a Windows-based PC.

Personal Budgeting Kit

Questions and Answers on Life Insurance: The Life Insurance Toolbook

Product Description
During your life, you’re likely to make important choices that will affect you for years to come: determining the best community, buying the perfect house, and starting a new family. Purchasing life insurance falls into the same category. But selecting the right policy isn’t easy, especially when you’re faced with a constant barrage of commercials and brochures from competing life insurance companies. With twenty years of experience in the life insurance business, Anthony Steuer delivers a practical, one-of-a-kind resource to guide you through the basics—and the finer points—of life insurance and to help you choose the policy that is just right for you and your family. Using a simple question-and-answer format, Steuer covers everything you need to know about life insurance, including how to:

• Differentiate between types of policies
• Find and evaluate a policy and company
• Hire a trusted agent
• Understand the practice of underwriting
• Monitor your policy

Steuer’s invaluable advice will safeguard you from unpleasant surprises and unnecessary pitfalls. For anyone, from consumers to financial advisors, Questions and Answers on Life Insurance is the definitive resource on life insurance.

Questions and Answers on Life Insurance: The Life Insurance Toolbook

Avoid Top 10 Mistakes Made By Real Estate Investors

Real estate investment is perhaps one of the most lucrative forms of investment today. But it is also equally risk bound especially when one is not well versed with the trends and nuances of the real estate market. So if you are contemplating on investing in real estate, it is best to avoid costly mistakes in real estate investment especially when you invest your hard earned money into it. Knowing the most common mistakes made by real estate investors helps one steer away from making such mistakes in the future and ensures good return on investment.

Here are the top ten mistakes made by real estate investors, according to bankrate.com. Bankrate has put together the top ten mistakes after speaking to established, full-time real estate investors and other professionals involved in real estate investment such as bankers. Read on to know them and avoid them.

1. Not planning up ahead. Lack of a proper plan is the biggest mistake made by novice investors. Finding a house after forming a proper investment strategy is the right way instead of looking for a house to fit the plan. Many make the mistake of buying a house because it seems to be a good deal and then trying to see how they can fit it into their plan. Instead of buying a house and thinking one can plan in due course, investors should rather concentrate on the numbers and try to make offers on multiple properties. This will ensure a good property that not only matches their investment model but also works out well with the numbers they had planned for.

2. To believe you can make money quickly. The second major mistake that real estate investors make is to think it is very easy to get rich in real estate. This is only a myth and the reality is that investing in real estate is a long term project.

3. Doing it single-handedly. For becoming a successful real estate investor one needs to build a team of professionals who would assist the investor in his deals. This would ideally include a real estate agent, an appraiser, a home inspector, a closing attorney and a lender.

4. Making excess payment. One another reason that investors in real estate goof up in their investment is by paying too much for the properties they buy. Paying too much and locking up all the funds in the erred property deal will leave you with no money to redeem yourself.

5. Leaving out the groundwork. Not doing your homework could be a costly mistake if you were a real estate investor. Every field of business needs sufficient amount of homework to be done, and real estate investment is no exception. Learn the fundamentals and then venture into investing in properties.

6. Throwing caution to the winds. Investors have to exercise a certain degree of caution and take earnest efforts while making a deal. New investors often fail in this regard and sign a deal without doing adequate research on the property.

7. Miscalculating money flow. Investors whose strategy is to buy, hold and rent out properties need to ensure sufficient cash flow for maintenance. Property managers could be expensive and the owner has to incur more expenses such as mortgage, taxes, insurance, advertising costs etc. Investors have to allocate their budget such that all these expenses are taken care of, or end up having their asset turn into a liability.

8. Lowering the volume. A larger volume of deals or transactions helps in increasing the profits by reducing the impacts of marginal deals.

9. Getting trapped in your own deal. Having more number of options at hand for the property you buy is a wise strategy. This helps one to be prepared for fluctuations in the real estate market. Plans to rent out the house could go awry when the rental market slumps. Having alternative plans helps you cut down losses and tackle unexpected situations.

10. Making incorrect estimates. People who plan to rehab their house need to check if they will still reap the benefits at double the time that they had estimated. This ensures they do not miscalculate and lose money on the deal.

Footwear Brands Use Isa Tan Tool to Calculate Co2 Emissions for Their Products

The leading manufacturer of high-quality leather, ISA Tan Tec, is the first company in the industry to disclose information on the environmental footprint of each and every one of its products.

An environmental pioneer, the company will now specify how much CO2 is generated and how much water is consumed per square meter of leather for all of its products. ISA Tan Tec’s customers, which include renowned shoe and fashion brands including Timberland, Keen, Hush Puppies, Simple Shoes, and New Balance, will now be able to use this data to calculate the CO2 emissions for their own products and inform their customers, allowing them to improve their environmental image.

“Especially with brand-name products, increasing numbers of consumers are paying attention to whether they are manufactured in an environmentally friendly manner. That’s why we’ve become the first leather manufacture to make CO2 emissions and water consumption visible. With this move, we’re setting a standard for the entire industry. We hope that other tanneries will follow us on this path,” remarked Thomas Schneider, founder and CEO of ISA Tan Tec.

To ascertain how environmentally friendly a product is, ISA Tan Tec uses an innovative color scale based on benchmark data from the British Leather Technology Center. The BLC publishes average energy and water consumption data for the industry. How far below the BLC’s figures ISA Tan Tec products fall determines how the different types of leather are categorized on the scale.

These designations are the logical next step of the green tanning strategy that ISA Tan Tec has been following for years. The company reduced energy and water consumption at its main factory in the Chinese town of Guangzhou by up to 50 percent compared to conventional tanneries. Measures such as using solar energy to warm process water and drying the leather at low temperatures allowed ISA Tan Tec to achieve this result.

ISA Tan Tec recently broke ground on a factory in Vietnam that meets even higher environmental standards. “Our goal is to build a factory that will still be state-of-the-art with respect to energy efficiency, productivity, and sustainability in the year 2030,” Thomas Schneider explained. ISA Tan Tec is succeeding at this by comprehensively utilizing the latest technology in an intelligent way.

In addition to a solar heating system, a wind turbine is also used to drive the pumps for the water supply. Wherever possible, ISA Tan Tec utilizes waste heat from the production process. The new tannery will start operations in June of 2009 with 280 employees producing two million square meters of high-quality leather each year.

For more information, please visit www.cantonfootwear.org