White Women Over 40’s Has High Suicide Rate October 28, 2008

Women ages 40 to 60 years old have largest increase in the overall suicide rate. This is pointed out in the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. A 3.9 percent increase of number of suicide for middle aged white women breaks the 2.7 percent for white men. Medical studies always pointed out that it is men who are at risk of suicide because of men a less socially active compared to women. But this time, it’s the other way around. Researchers say this is very alarming as the number continues to increase yearly. They are trying to find out causes of the problem and consider suicide prevention programs as one major solution.

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Great News Today And Some History Too October 23, 2008

In my previous post “Measuring Cups is Essential in Baking and Life“, we have learned how to measure enough units of happiness in our lives is in some cases a talent and in others, a learned skill. As a motivational speaker, I continuously upgrade myself with new studies and skills which I deem to be important in life.

I’ve just received my Master Practitioner Strategist certification in Neuro Linguistic Programming, learning all kinds of wonderful facts, I will continue to share with you over the coming weeks and months. For example, did you know that information flows into our minds at a rate of 2-4 million bits per second, and yet we can only digest 134 bits per second? That means that the overflow of information floods our minds at a similar speed of water blasting from an open fire hydrant. We “filter” what actually enters our minds by deleting information that doesn’t make sense, distorting information based upon our beliefs, and/or by generalizing.

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Measuring Cups Essential In Baking And Life October 22, 2008

Measuring Cups are essential in baking and in life. Cooking allows for more variation, of course…you have the opportunity to taste as you go while cooking. Baking, however, is entirely different. First you decide what it is you want to make! Today let’s choose to bake a cake.

Then we often entrust that outcome to a recommended recipe—our own or one that has been referred to us by trusted friends or sources. Some of our favorite restaurants publish cookbooks that tantalize us with their tasty treats. Often donors to charities donate their favorite dessert recipes to be compiled into fund raiser cook books.

All this to say that we tend to follow a recipe, measuring ingredient by ingredient, paying particular attention to how many teaspoons of baking soda compared with how many cups of flour. A quarter teaspoon measurement for baking soda is equally important as a cup of flour, even though the measurements are not equal. It’s the combination that is essential to a great outcome.

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100 Things To Do Before You Die October 16, 2008

Life is brittle. No matter how much we value and plan for our lives, one day we are gonna lose it. As a motivational speaker, it is my goal to encourage women to get out of their bag lady fears and make them realize how important it is for us to be able to spend the most of everything while we are here. For life is not destined to burden us but to enjoy it’s benefits. Many of us are so stuck with our pasts and our future fears that we forget to enjoy the beautiful things we have at present. The best things in life are free. It’s only man who complicates it. But what could be the

100 things to do before you die – Upload a Document to Scribd

50 Most Powerful Women – Who Are They? October 13, 2008

Do you wish to be one of the most powerful women in the world? Have you ever questioned what characteristics these women posses that made them to the top? Are they naturally gifted people or they were just lucky? These are the questions a lot of people desire to discover. People dreams to be powerful. That’s the reason why we love to watch movies of superheroes. One famous line from a popular movie, Superman, “with great power comes great responsibility” . Today, Superman is not the only superhero. Women. like G-Girl and Catwoman display their awesome powers. How about in real world? Who are the 50 most powerful women?

Here’s The The 10 Top Most Powerful Women:

1. Indra Nooyi
2. Irene Rosenfeld
3. Pat Woertz
4. Anne Mulcahy
5. Angela Braly
6. Andrea Jung
7. Susan Arnold
8. Oprah Winfrey
9. Brenda Barnes
10. Ursula Burns

No more Pork Sausages please!! October 8, 2008

I know it’s fall, but no where NEAR Christmas, so why all the ornaments on the rescue package? I mean I thought we were in a sub-prime mortgage clean-up and a solidifying the financial liquidity mode here so that Americans could continue to borrow money to keep their budgets or businesses afloat?

So to hear that the “new” package being voted upon in the Senate as we speak holds provisions for wooden arrow manufacturers in Oregon and tax breaks for Nascar race track builders and Virgin Island Rum Makers and research tax credits for Harley Davidson and subsidies for General Electric is stomach turning sick! I mean isn’t Warren Buffet’s 3 billion dollar investment in GE subsidy enough? Tax credits for film makers to shoot in the US? Without homes and jobs, there’ll be little demand for films…sorry! And while most people won’t be able to afford cars or the gas they guzzle, we’ll be reduced to bicycles NOT Harleys!

All the ornaments—that are supposedly “making it more palatable for more Republicans”–add up to over $112 billion dollars MORE than the unthinkably large $700 billion dollars floated over the past week. What are the senators, not to mention each of our Presidential candidates thinking? Especially after both McCain and Palin are out fist pounding for “no more pork sausages”! Then, what exactly WILL they call this?

Ok…so perhaps each Senator (or House member for that matter) hasn’t read every word of the over 500 page new missive, yet to capitulate to these lobbyists in this manner, to subjugate real credit pain of average Americans to the special interests of a few companies or industries that are, may I emphatically state here, totally fringe to the day-to-day survival of most Americans, and superfluous to them “making it” is more than irresponsible, it’s outright enraging!

The defeat of the first bill was unexpected, yet most, including me, argued that to have extra time to thoughtfully consider the ramifications and to educate those who didn’t understand the inextricable connection between Wall Street and Main Street could turn out to be an unexpected blessing. As it turns out, all it bought time for apparently was every last lobbyist to cram back into the halls of Washington to concoct their wildest, most harebrained pet projects and somehow, interject them into this otherwise serious bill.

I never want to harangue without dispensing some good news, or giving some good advice, and believe me, it’s taken me some time to come up with any, yet here it is. If we all carve out more time to become involved in our nation’s politics, perhaps we can preclude future debacles such as this. The phone campaigns in the past week have been remarkably popular and effective. What’s to stop us then from regularly writing or phoning our Congress people or House Representatives and making our voices/values known? It’s worth the expenditure of time, believe me. We need to get involved, and not just in the 11th hour.

Finally, if we all take a smart approach to investing, and instead of “betting” on individual companies; i.e., investing in individual stocks, we were to invest our money in no load diversified mutual funds or Exchange Traded Funds, then we’ll never be subjected to the single-stock risk that has been so stinging to those who have “lost fortunes”. I understand investing in the companies in which we work, especially through our 401(k)s and retirement plans. However, we must diversify our overall investment portfolios and focus on investing in no-load, low-cost index funds or Exchange Traded Funds in order to capture a decent return without the risks of concentrated positions in any one or two companies. (My guidelines have always been that I want an investor to have at least $250,000 in mutual funds, before they buy even one stock.)

I’ve heard hundreds of people exclaim, “that couldn’t happen to MY stock” only to watch Lucent, Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers (and others I’m forgetting) all bite the dust. It CAN happen to “once good” companies, so why try to guess which ones will be next? If Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch–two of the most talented stock pickers of our time–BOTH recommend against buying individual stocks, and instead recommend that investors buy index mutual funds, who are you to not heed their advice?

For those stocks you’ve inherited, consider the tax ramifications of selling them—either for gains or losses. Finally, should (after careful analysis) you end up choosing to keep some of those stocks, at least protect yourself on the downside by buying an insurance policy on the stock, otherwise referred to as buying a Put, at a particular price, which will be a good step towards potentially limiting a lot of downside risk. However, my best advice here is to invest in no load index mutual funds—stocks, bonds, and money markets—thus diversifying your risk.

Smart money is always medium-to-long money…hang in there!

Toss Out Bailout October 1, 2008

Today’s was apparently a fairly acceptable if not good bill as an answer to an unprecedented liquidity and credit predicament bred here on US’s Wall Street and spawning across the globe. Voting to pass it to rectify the vast ineptitudes of lax financial regulation and it’s aftermath of failed banks and credit squeezes all at once was apparently too daunting for many of those we elected to lead us in Washington. Leaders lead in tough times. Shamefully, and certainly regretably, our leaders didn’t lead effectively today, from the President on down.

It’s been said in these past weeks, investors hate uncertainty. I disagree! My paltry 30 years in the business of advising clients to match their monetary investments with their choices has told me that investors HATE lying! So when lying results in the markets’ uncertainty, prices gyrate and the press and media pounce like starved tigers thrown a week’s worth of red meat.

The special interest groups don’t have any idea what was in this bill, nor the checks and balances that had been added, so to have set and stoked a huge bonfire of steam, admonishing anyone who could fog a mirror to call or email their representatives or Congress people on Capital Hill and vote NO, was about as irresponsible as special interest groups often turn out to be.

Where were those same special interest groups last week? Just as in the dark as they were yesterday, yet yesterday they chose to pull the blast email trigger that was so itchy for oh, so many days; too many days, in fact, and let their voices be heard. Where were these people all along this elongated process, of borrowing maximum home equity loans, gaining credit with merely a signature—who needs a job? Where were these smart consumers who borrowed more money than their paychecks, often at interest-only just because the loan shark sold them it? Where have these people been as they, themselves often got caught up in impulse spending over the past years and now are facing the sobering truth that yes, indeed, these massive credit card balances do have to be repaid—not just the minimum monthly payment? Is it too harsh to draw the comparison that while 700 billion just has too BIG a sound to swallow, so does the average American’s credit card balance relative to their annual salary? Who’s dropped their common sense here? Oh…perhaps most all of us!

So, we indeed have action today. The proverbial “Bill and Betty in Boise” have had their voices listened to; principally their NO vote registered. Bill & Betty have effectively trumped our elected officials and our governments’ financial representatives, who despite not having crystal balls, do have a fiduciary duty to us taxpayers, and who would potentially stand trial for mis appropriations, if I correctly understood the checks-and-balances that were written into the final bill.

Perhaps my fictitious characters Bill & Betty believe this “relief” is for the other guy and not them.  It’s not. The first time they try to get a credit card or mortgage or car loan, or expect that their employer can simply and continuosly fund payroll—yes their paycheck–out of their Money Market, they’ll realize that their lives and that of their family’s are also impacted. You see, while we may not have seen our neighbors—near and far, we are still all stitched at the hip with the financial systems being as intertwined as they are, unless, of course, you live on a remote farm, grow your own food, and till the field with horses that don’t require that darned expensive gas we’ve all been saddled with.

The so-called bailout bill (and I DO trust they’ll give it a relatable name next time) is necessary and perhaps the defeat was cast as early as they named it, a week ago. Bailout sounds like the average unaffected guy and gal has to do the heavy lifting for the high rolling gamblers who should have pushed back from the financial buffet tables before the second round of desserts. That’s a BIG part of the problem.

And, finally, I really believe that there was still a ton of confusion and indecisiveness around this final bill—yes that same confusion that apparently prompted John McCain to return to Washington to explain, particularly to his party—but IF some House Republican Representatives got so peeved when the cause of these dire circumstances was outlined by Pelosi this afternoon, that they changed their vote out of displaced anger, I would suggest that they:

1) grow up into the leader roles they’ve been elected to, and

2) re-direct that very anger to the failed policies and those politicians behind same over the past 8 years, just like many voters are poised to do in November.

After all, where DID that huge 2000 surplus evaporate to anyway? Ahhh. The truth again. Ouch, that hurts! And yes, the current financial situation of the United States and the world hurts too, hurts for strong willed and courageous elected officials to lead by putting a shovel in the ground of rebuilding, not run for cover screaming “Chicken Little, Chicken Little”.

The smart money is ALWAYS long term, so fear is not an effective emotion now. Neither is selling equities now at depressed levels. If you are not diversified with your Certificates of Deposit to qualify for FDIC insurance on all your fixed income deposits, then transfers of the amount in excess of the FDIC insurance to achieve that end are in order. Otherwise, keep your powder dry, and pray for more wisdom than has been served up in Washington today.