What is a Micro Unit?
Micro-unit apartments typically are less than 350 square feet.
The post What is a Micro Unit? appeared first on Apartment Living Tips – Apartment Tips from ApartmentGuide.com.
Micro-unit apartments typically are less than 350 square feet.
The post What is a Micro Unit? appeared first on Apartment Living Tips – Apartment Tips from ApartmentGuide.com.
If youâve started saving for your future, then youâve probably thought about retirement. When planning for retirement, itâs common to want to retire early. Early retirement allows you the time to do things you werenât able to do while working,…
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The post How to Prepare for Early Retirement appeared first on MintLife Blog.
Setting goals is a crucial part of your journey as you work toward financial freedom. By setting goals tailored around your lifestyle, you can improve your financial habits, keep track of your financial progress, and identify expenses you can cut…
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The post Making Financial Progress is Motivating appeared first on MintLife Blog.
Many things may come to mind when you think of professional development, like a big promotion or a much-deserved raise. However, career success and development should be defined by what you find professionally fulfilling, whether that is climbing the corporate…
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The post How To Be a Career-Changing Mentor: 27 Tips To Make a Difference appeared first on MintLife Blog.
Graduating high school is an incredible milestone for kids and their parents. The 18 years of preparation are coming to fruition and they're ready to take on the next phase of adult life. (Or so we hope!) Mighty Mommy has been here six times and as her seventh child graduates high school this week, here are eight tips to guide your almost-adult across the finish line:
I was born a natural master of scheduling and organizing. Whether it was arranging my stuffed animals neatly, keeping on task with my studies, or managing my hectic lifestyle with eight kids, I thrive on keeping a running "to-do list."
Learning to manage your time is one of the most critical skills for leading a productive life. But it's also one of the most difficult to learn. I assumed that my kids would follow suit with my organizational skillset, but I quickly learned that most of them had no concept of managing their time.
We practiced this skill a lot in our household. We made lists, figured out how much time every task needed, and worked backwards to understand when something needed to start in order to finish on time. It takes practice, but once they hone in on the concept of being in control of their time, they will master the rest of their goals much more quickly.
Check out the episode Time Management Tips for College Students to prepare your high school grad for adult life.
When I was in high school (many moons ago), the emphasis was on algebra, calculus, and geometry. I don't recall one class that focused on personal finance. That has changed a bit now, but if there is one critical skill I'd wish for every high school graduate to take seriously, it's getting a handle on personal finance.
Learning to manage your money means understanding how to keep track of your income and expenses. This includes managing a debit and credit card, setting a budget, saving money, and investing.
Quick and Dirty Tips' financial expert, Laura Adams, has lots of practical advice for all stages of life. Her popular episode, How to Create a Personal Finance System for Money Success, has tangible steps to understand and navigate your finances.
Financial know-how is essential, but another winning skill for all high school graduates is the art of communication. Good communication skills include speaking, listening, writing, and non-verbally using body language, eye contact, and even posture.
Effective communication takes practice, but now is the time for your young adult to pay attention to how he/she interacts with others so that this skill can be groomed and perfected. It will be critical for their professional and personal success.
Check out this helpful video, 5 Conversation and Communications Tips (With Exercises), that can help anyone kick their communication skills up a notch or two!
It's easy to get swept away with the novelty of having the latest electronics, smartphones, sports equipment, trendy clothes, and other accessories. But at what cost? In my episode Here's What Happened When I Became a Minimalist Mom, I share the down-to-earth benefits of not letting material possessions rule your life. If your student can grasp this now rather than later, he/she will live a well-intentioned life.
It's easy to get swept away with the novelty of having the latest electronics, smartphones, sports equipment, trendy clothes, and other accessories. But at what cost?
I remember how alive and free I felt after graduating high school. I was active, healthy, and full of energy. Because I was young and wasn't sick often, I know I didn't prioritize my health.
I consider myself lucky to have sustained good health with such a carefree attitude, but I remind my eight kids never to take their health for granted. As young adults start venturing into the world independently, they need to recognize the importance of maintaining good health, in both body and mind. Have open and candid health conversations with your kids, including recognizing the risks of substance abuse and sexual health and safety.
For more excellent health and fitness advice, check out the Get-Fit Guy and Nutrition Diva podcasts.
When we graduate from high school or college, many of us are ready for a learning break. It's normal to want to walk away from textbooks, structured curriculums, and course deadlines, but we all soon realize that life is a learning journey.
Quick and Dirty Tips' workplace expert Rachel Cooke (aka the Modern Mentor), shared some excellent advice on how to stay hungry in the quest to learn more in her episode The 2021 Career Wisdom You Need from Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She shared a great quote from the late Supreme Court Justice in response to a letter from an eight-year-old girl:
"Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true."
There are endless ways to fill your mind with new information. Listen to podcasts, find topics that interest you on YouTube, explore your local library, visit museums, attend free talks at nearby universities. The only limits are the ones created by you.
High school is usually a time when kids bond and make some of their best friends. Once graduation happens, however, kids head off to different colleges or paths in life. New friendships will blossom after graduation, along with romantic partners, work relationships, and professional interests.
Those of us who have had lifelong besties are truly blessed. In addition, having a close relationship with siblings, cousins, and other family members is also essential.
Encourage your young adult to nurture quality friendships and special relationships as part of his/her's transition into the world of adulthood. The Mayo Clinic's article, "Friendships: Enrich Your Life and Improve Your Health," explains that solid friendships play a significant role in promoting our overall health and offer suggestions on cultivating these relationships.
No matter what you’re dealing with, there are low-cost options that can make a real difference. Here are some of the best ones to try out.
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The post 9 Affordable Ways To Take Care Of Your Mental Health appeared first on MintLife Blog.
Money Girl Laura Adams: When did you decide that you wanted to become an author (or other career)?
Andrew Simonet: I decided to be a choreographer in September 1988, after my first week of dance class at age nineteen. That’s quite old to start dancing, but male dancers get a lot of leeway. It was sudden and complete. Dance was something I had been searching for without knowing it. Dance was my portal.
Writing showed up in my life at age 35. Specifically, a story showed up, an odd bunch of friends who have to protect themselves and their town from a benignly evil corporation. I dictated dialogue into a tape recorder while driving to my dance teaching job. I wrote scenes in spare moments when I traveled. I lost most of it in a computer crash and assumed I would stop, but the characters wouldn’t leave me alone.
I didn’t decide to become an Author; I decided to write. I wanted to dive into sentences and characters and story. For my own mental health, I am very careful about the difference between wanting to write (generative, expansive) and wanting to have written (paralyzing, stressful). The artist life quickly becomes brutal for those who want to have created.
I worked on that first novel for seven years—it has never been published—while running my dance company. The solitude of writing was a reprieve from the social intensity of dance making and collaboration.
I was interested in writing when I was young, but, seen from the present moment, I was not ready. I wrote clever, bloodless things. I had dreadfully linear things to say, restrained and over-rational. I needed twenty years of making dances to bring my body and senses and all the terrible magic of the present moment into my language.
MG: Do you write full-time?
AS: N.B.: Over the past fifteen years, I’ve worked with thousands of artists on these questions: intentions, time and money, making the art and impact that matters to you. That project, Artists U, has an open-source book with principles and tools I gathered from artists. It is how I earn half my income, the other half coming from writing.
I don’t care for the term “full-time writer/artist.” In my experience, most artists spend a similar amount of time actually making their work: between 1/5 and 1/3 of their working hours. Some spend the other hours earning money at an unrelated job; some spend the other hours promoting their art, dealing with agents, clients, galleries, and grants.
When I waited tables to pay the bills as a young choreographer, I was a full-time choreographer: Everything I did with my days was to support my artistic practice. Later, when I made a living from my dance company, I was called a “full-time” choreographer, but I did not have more time in the studio. Rather, my non-rehearsal hours were spent raising money and planning board meetings instead of serving brunch.
MG: Did you study writing (or something else) or has it always come naturally to you?
AS: Very little that I care to do comes naturally to me. Making dances is still the hardest work I’ve ever taken on. I didn’t choose it because it came easily, but because it felt impossible, unimaginable and thus unimaginably exciting.
I studied choreography at university and at an experimental dance school in the Netherlands where we threw our bodies around, and, in one piece, performers threw raw meat at the audience. All of that training in composition is compost in my writing life, and the most delightful kind, since it can’t offer opinions on what to write but rather how a thing is made.
I have not studied writing formally. Growing up, I had great teachers who introduced me to fascinating writers, and I had friends obsessed writing and art and transformation. These days, I listen closely when people talk. I read a lot. I follow other art forms, especially dance and performance. I talk to artists about practice and craft. And I talk with my artist wife constantly about art, about tiny moments of life and pathos, about precisely observed experiences.
MG: When you first started writing (or something else), were there any financial challenges? If so, how did you manage them?
AS: Everyone has financial challenges. Work that capitalism undervalues—art, social work, farming, spiritual practice, activism, community building—has an added challenge: I can’t simply apply for “job of choreographer” and start cashing checks.
If I have a reasonable budget that pays for my life and a reasonable schedule with time for art making, I can make my art.
Time and money are my—I might say the—structural challenges as an artist. There are other challenges to making art, some of them beautiful and spiritual, but the things I see stop artists, myself included, are time and money. The positive way of saying that is: If I have a reasonable budget that pays for my life and a reasonable schedule with time for art making, I can make my art. Forever. I focus on those two numbers: the dollars I need to earn and the hours I need to spend making art each month. There are many, many ways I have gotten to those numbers in the last thirty years, but always by treating it as a math puzzle, not as a question of my value or success.
MG: What advice would you give someone who's creative or wants to change their lifestyle about balancing passion for their art and earning an income?
AS: Definitely make art. It is a powerful addition to life, a form of devotion that feeds the artist and feeds the world.
Set up your life so you can keep creating. Think in decades, not years. Art is a long, gorgeous arc.
Making art and earning money can overlap differently at different times. I have earned 0% of my income from art and 100% from art. Both were great revenue models; both helped me make work that was important to me and to my community.
Being creative and strategic about revenue can help, staying alert to unexpected ways you can generate income.
Being nonjudgmental helps, too. Earning money from my art does not make me a real artist. My commitment to my practice is what makes me a real artist. Period. A dollar earned waiting tables is worth exactly the same as a dollar earned making art.
MG: What productivity tips have helped you achieve success?
AS: Knowing myself. Tips from other artists help me when I am grounded in my practice, my life, and my community. Otherwise, I’m chasing someone else’s work and intentions, and I end up thinking something must be wrong with me because their productivity tips don’t help.
I collect tools and tactics artists use to make their work and lives. Some are directly useful, some are useful by contrast, and all provoke my thinking.
That said, I do collect tools and tactics artists use to make their work and lives. Some are directly useful (the Pomodoro method), some are useful by contrast (I could never work on five projects at a time, but I know artists who thrive that way), and all provoke my thinking.
I often steal not the idea but the thinking behind the idea. An artist told me, “I wake up at 5:00 am and go to the studio before eating breakfast.” That’s not my rhythm. But it made me think about my entry into the day, the connection between waking and creating which, it turns out, has been crucial for my writing.
MG: What do you like to spend money on that some people might consider a splurge or luxury?
AS: Time. I always look for ways to spend more time making art, thinking about art, connecting with community, doing nothing, swimming, traveling. Some of that might look to an outsider like wasted time. My life and my art are not focused around maximizing productivity. There are so many crap myths that artists must sacrifice everything for their art or their success. I find that toxic and extractive, directly opposed to the values I strive to put in my dances and my writing. I see a lot of art and think: That was made by a stressed out artist.
MG: What’s the best thing you’ve bought in the last few months?
AS: I bought a guitar from a guy in Vermont. We stood in his cold barn, I played one chord and knew it was right. To pay for it, I sold a difficult-to-play guitar given me by a former stepfather, a complicated figure in my life. I’d spent years struggling to play and to fix this awkward instrument. It was exactly like my relationship with my ex-stepfather. If you wrote this guitar into a novel, it would be a painfully obvious symbol.
MG: What’s the biggest money mistake you’ve ever made?
AS: Not buying a house in Philadelphia when I was in my twenties, preferably a multi-unit house. I could have lived in one apartment and rented out the others. Best way for artists to build assets.
MG: Tell me a financial rule that you never break.
AS: Only buy used cars, only from individuals, and always get it looked at by a trusted mechanic. No new cars, no dealers, no loans.
Know the difference between depreciating assets (cars, computers) and appreciating assets (real estate, investments.)
I am shocked to see artists struggling to pay their rent while making monthly payments on a car that loses value every day.
Life insurance is essential if you want to provide for your family after your death and donât have substantial assets to leave them. Itâs something that everyone should consider when they have dependents, but if youâre over the age of 60 those insurance premiums could cost more than you can afford and more than theyâre […]
Life Insurance for Seniors: Tips on Getting the Best is a post from Pocket Your Dollars.
When you’re stung by a bee, carefully grasp the stinger and pull it out as fast as you can. The less venom that enters your body, the smaller and less painful the resulting welt will be. Ice the area immediately to reduce the swelling.
To reduce the pain from insect bites, make a paste of curry powder and water. Apply it to the bite and let dry, then wash off. The spices in the curry powder will relieve discomfort and swelling.
Rub liquid laundry detergent on the bite and let dry. The liquid soothes the skin, dries the bite to reduce irritation, and seals the area from outside irritants.
Take some single-use laundry detergent packets on the go for unexpected bites.
Been stung by an insect? It’s lavender oil to the rescue! Rub a bit directly onto the sting to alleviate the pain. You can use the healing oil on scrapes, burns, and bug bites as well.
When you’re stung by a bee, carefully grasp the stinger and pull it out as fast as you can. The less venom that enters your body, the smaller and less painful the resulting welt will be. Ice the area immediately to reduce the swelling.
Nobody likes a bee sting, but sometimes they’re inevitable. Bring down the pain and swelling by rubbing some raw onion on the sting. The sulfur in the onion will detoxify the area and give you relief.
Suffering from a bee or wasp sting? Soothe the pain with Vicks VapoRub. It contains menthol, which will provide a natural, cooling anesthetic effect.
Apply apple cider vinegar to a wasp sting with a cotton ball and the sting will subside.
All content here is for informational purposes only. This content does not replace the professional judgment of your own health provider. Please consult a licensed mental health professional for all individual questions and issues.
Does your spouse sabotage your career or demand you tell them about all your purchases? These are signs they are trying to control you through money. Spot the red flags before financial abuse escalates to domestic abuse.