Author Archives: ernie

Easy Ways to Cut Spending in Retirement

Many consumers feel that they should just continue living life in retirement. Live the same way they did when they were working. They do not consider that they may have to cut spending in retirement. The unfortunate reality is that with less income they are going to have to make some choices. Regarding their lifestyle and how they spend their money. There are some easy ways to cut spending in retirement. Fortunately some expenses will decline naturally.

For example they will no longer need to pay to commute to work every day. As a result there is less wear and tear on the car and there is less operating costs to be concerned about. But this might not be enough and they will need to reduce expenses in other areas. We put together a list of areas to look at that can be considered to reduce your overall spending. They may not all apply to you personally. But even if one area does, then it means there is more money left in your pocket to be used for other priorities.

Easy Ways to Cut Spending in Retirement

Track Spending
Trim Food Costs
Pocket Savings From Sale Items
Reduce Your Rent
Shop for Best Price for Services
Hunt for Travel deals
Shave Savings from Spending Categories
Ask For Discounts
Pay With Cash

Track Spending – once you know where you are spending your money, better decisions can be made regarding where to trim expenses.

Trim Food Costs – buy in bulk, freeze leftovers, look at the expensive items to see if they can be reduced or eliminated

Pocket Savings From Sale Items – when you buy something on sale (which you should always do and never pay full price) pocket the savings and set the savings aside for an emergency

Reduce Your Rent – if possible by negotiating with the landlord, rent out a room, or downsizing

Shop for Best Price for Services – always compare the cost of services and what they are providing, ask for discounts, senior discounts, cash discounts etc.

Hunt for Travel deals – travel off-season, look for sales and take advantage of all-inclusive packages which are often less expensive that paying individually for airfare, hotel and meals.

Shave Savings from Spending Categories – look at each category of spending and ask yourself if you can reduce spending in each area by 10%

Always Ask For Discounts – the worst that will happen is that they say no. Often business people will reduce the cost by 10% or throw in a needed service that you were putting off for free.

Pay With Cash – only when they offer a discount for cash. Many gas stations do this and some stores will also offer discounts when you pay cash. Take advantage of these offers to save even more money.

What is thin content?

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For many years, thin content has been frowned upon by the search engines. If there was not much content, they figured that there was little value to the content for the reader and ranked a site accordingly. It appears that these views are changing as represented by this slide on the left. Content must be useful, it must be informative, add value to the reader and be accurate or of high quality. If a page could meet all of these criteria yet still considered to be thin content should it rank highly? We think it should and would like to provide an example.

Thin Content – Example

Let’s assume you want to find out when daylight savings time changes are to occur in North America. You search for |daylight savings 2017″ and are presented with over 13 million results. We picked the first one which gave us the dates, times, etc. on a very small page in terms of text. No need for 500 words, 1000 words, etc. or a lot of images. All you needed to know is what the date was for the next time change and it answered this question. The page met all of the criteria we mentioned and still had what would be considered thin content. Yet was the first result on the search results pages.

This is an extreme example with one possible result and a very specific result. However, the message is that the page of content does not have to have a lot of text. What it needs to do is answer the searchers question. They may not even stay on the page very long, but they got their answer.

Our web pages are between 300 and 500 words each and try to zero in on one topic to deliver or answer a question that our readers may have. Let us know if we are addressing these questions and if there are others we should tackle.

Is your retirement fully funded?

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There are many complicated ways to calculate Is your retirement fully funded or not! It really comes down to what lifestyle do you want to live while you are retired and whether you have enough monthly income to lead the lifestyle that you want. This includes all of the usual expenses such as a home to live in, food, clothing, entertainment, and perhaps some amount of travel.

But most retiree’s eyes glaze over when you begin looking at the various cash flows that you will need in retirement. Let alone the amount of money that you will need to have saved to generate the income you need. They must also take into account any pension income that they might be entitled to. This will include government pensions in addition to drawing from their savings plans. They have to assume inflation rates and investment income rates. As well as many other expenses associated with trying to assess if they have sufficient income.

Is Your Retirement Fully Funded

The cash flow method may be the simplest in the near term for most people. How much income do you have now? What are your expenses and are you saving some money towards reducing debt as well as for retirement? This is a start and a way to get control of what you are spending and what you are actually saving.

How much income will you actually have at retirement? Take a look at the pension income from your company. When you will receive it, what options there are to consider such as early retirement? Next, do the same thing for government pensions and assess how much and when you will receive your pension.

What are your expenses discretionary and required expenses now, and after your retirement? Do you need to downsize? Do you need to reduce spending to get control of spending and match spending to income levels? Once you have this data consumers can quickly tell whether they will have shortfalls or not. They can tell how much they need to save to replace the income they may need in retirement.

Can you project your schedule of income and expenses a few years into the future during retirement? If you can also add inflation and anticipated increase in income to this picture you will then have a more accurate estimate of how well you will fare during retirement.

Strategic Content Plan

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Developing a strategic content plan as part of your SEO responsibilities for a customer is actually much more complex than most people think. After all don’t you just have to have a couple of pages that talk about who your company is, the products and services they offer, and how to contact you? The answer is yes you need these things, but as most web masters for small and large companies know, you are just beginning to scratch the surface. In this post, we will list and discuss a few other topics that need to be thought about when a website is launched on behalf of a customer, or even yourself for that matter.

Strategic Content Plan – Areas to Focus On

Company Description – one page
Company Services and Product descriptions – many pages
Contact information – one page
Ordering information – one to several pages
FAQ-Frequently asked questions – one page to many
Customer reviews – one too many with approval?
Images of Products – one too many

The above is definitely important and must be included. However, there are other areas that should be thought about that are aimed at helping the search engines decide how to rank you against other similar web sites. These can include:

Linking to other websites
Links from other websites
Linking to customers, suppliers or even competitors
Quality of content
Length of pages in terms of text
Image control and linking
Tracking of customers on your site
Chat room capability
Content pages related to typical search terms
Search phrases and links to your site
Conversion rate tracking of visitors to paying customers

Some webmasters would suggest that there are well over a hundred variables that should be taken into account when developing a web site. Following the 80:20 rule, we believe that these are the major ones with the addition of one more.

Every page must offer useful content, informative and valuable content to the reader. Above all, you need to try to answer the question the reader is looking for. If you can do that you most likely will rank well and attract the kinds of customers you are looking for on your site.

Website crashes or becomes unresponsive

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If the website does not respond or the Website crashes, there are lots of reasons that would cause this particular problem. It is not always a problem for the website itself; there are so many connections within the Internet that there could be a problem, and they could be just about anywhere. For example, to reach any website from your computer, there could be as many as 23 connections over routers and modems through the Internet before they reach our hosting site. Anyone of those could be the culprit that is slowing things down. Sometimes, it is just heavy traffic on one of the routers or the server your website is hosted on that is causing the problem.

Once this traffic clears, your response time will be back to normal. Before reacting, wait an hour or so and then retest. If it is still responding slower than usual, it is time to take some action. You will need to do some investigation to figure out where the delay is occurring so you can do anything about it.

Website Crashes – These include

Your ISP has lost connection with the Internet
A portion of the Internet is down
A router on the path to your website is not responding
Your connection to the Internet could be lost
Your computer, tablet, or phone may need to be rebooted.

These are the main reasons why a website may not respond, in addition to denial-of-service attacks on the host. Give it sixty minutes, and then retry. Just be patient and try clicking the link a little later to see what happens. If it doesn’t work the second time, it is a good idea to reach out to the website owner.

If you are the website owner, any delay can cause you to lose traffic and customers. Always investigate any delays and take the appropriate action immediately if you want to maintain your revenue stream or customer base. Start with your host provider and ask a technician to load your website in his or her browser.

If it loads quickly, chances are that it is not your website, your host, or your server that is causing the problem. It will be somewhere else, not your website provider’s issue. Check your server to determine where the delays are creeping in.

For more details about web hosting, click here.

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Will Your Retirement Savings Last

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Many people throw up their arms in frustration, confusion, and worry regarding the question. Will your retirement savings last? They seem to have no idea whether their savings will last through retirement or not. There are so many variables to think about. It’s challenging to know if they will have enough money to live comfortably during their retirement. Like all problems of this complexity, it is important to break them down into smaller pieces. For example first focus on your income. How much income will you have and where will that income come from? Your income will come from several sources. A pension from your company, an old age pension from your government, and income from any savings you may have.

Next focus on your expenses. What expenses do you have now, what will you have in the future and what expenses are under your control where you can make decisions with regard to how much you spend? Once you have this information you can begin to assess whether you will have enough money to last through retirement.

Will Your Retirement Savings Last

Let’s look at income and expenses in a little more detail.

Income

Make a list of all the potential income sources that you have. This would include government pension, company pension that you may participate in, income from savings, and income from Business or rental income that you may have. With regard to savings, Many financial advisors recommend that you only withdraw a maximum of 4% each year. This will provide a conservative approach to ensuring that your savings will last through your retirement. If your savings increase through appreciation then your 4% withdrawal rate will increase as well. once you do the calculations you can quickly determine whether your total income will be sufficient for your retirement as compared to your current income or whether you still need to be working. If not you may want to increase your savings, or work longer.

Expenses

Add up all of your expenses in much the same way as you did your income. First of all identify the fixed expenses for things like the mortgage, rent, utilities, and communications such as cable TV and telephone. You may also have insurance payments or payments for a variety of things that will last for some period of time. The next set of payments or expenses that you should look at is your discretionary expenses. This would include food, clothing, and entertainment as well as vacation travel.

The last group of expenses or expenses associated with things like weddings, emergencies, repair and maintenance to your home, and any other major expenses that may crop up during retirement years. You may want to budget for those in advance.

Once you understand your income level, and your expenses during retirement you can then analyze both to make adjustments according to the lifestyle that you would like to live. You may have to generate more income to maintain your lifestyle or conversely you may need to reduce your expenses in some areas to live in the manner that you feel comfortable. The decision is up to you.

SEO – Strategic Design Change

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You’re adding content, maintaining the basic design, a good balance of images, and crawlable text, yet you are not getting the traffic that you feel should be coming your way. What changes should you make, and how far should you go? Is there a light bulb moment, as shown in the diagram, that changes everything? What about the investment that has already been made in time, design, writing, etc? Do you just throw this out and start over? This is the Strategic Design Change that most, if not all, designers face.

There are so many questions, and most website owners as well as web site managers just do not have the time to deal with these kinds of issues. It is important to have a strategy for your web site – what are the objectives, what customers are you trying to reach, what is the best way to reach them and how much investment do you make in this aspect of your business compared to other possibilities.

Strategic Design Change – Decisions

These are hard decisions to make, and most people will just go on doing the same thing until something happens that forces them to change. Also, the search engines are constantly updating their search engines all of the time to try to deliver a better result to their customers who pay the bills.

We feel that the right strategy is to define the following attributes and then focus on delivering to your customers:

Who are your customers
What products are you offering them
What services are you providing
Have you described these well on your web page
Do you have high-quality quality well-written content that describes the above
Is your site responsive
Can your customers find the information they need and are looking for
Is there a way for your customers to provide feedback
The old principle – Apply the KISS principle – Keep it Simple ….. applies

Every customer will have a different strategy, but the point is that they need to have one before they even begin building a website. They need to have a strategy before they begin making serious changes to an existing website.

They also need to understand the changes that they will make to existing sites and what impact this will have on search results.

For building websites, SEO, and the strategy behind it, click here.

What Permalink Structure is the Best for Optimal SEO

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What permalink structure is the best for optimal SEO? In the opinion of most SEO experts, the permalink structure that is the best is “postname”. There are several reasons for this position. When you use your focus keyword for the post as part of the post name, it is then also listed in the SERP results pages. The search engines treat the post name as another SEO factor that contributes to the overall ranking. In addition, it is much easier for both readers and bloggers to navigate the post if the post name is being used.

What Permalink Structure is the Best for Optimal SEO

When WordPress is initially installed, the default used for permalinks is a numeric, which really contributes nothing for SERP results. Before adding any new posts, change the permalink setting to “postname”. Click on settings and then click on permalinks. Select the postname setting. All new posts and new pages from that point forward will use the “postname” in the URL structure.

If you have already written a few posts with a numeric as a permalink, your webmaster should add 301 redirects to direct the old post to the new post using the post name convention.

Most bloggers don’t give this issue much thought. However, it is one more factor in SEO optimization to consider, and once implemented no more changes are needed.

Always select post names that are 5 to 6 words in length, avoid using stop words, and use your focus keyword in the post name so that it is also reflected in the permalink. As always, write excellent original content that is related to the post name to ensure your readers and visitors can find the information they are looking for.

Finally, we do not recommend the use of dates as part of your post name permalink. Using a date tells the reader how old your post is. They may tend to click on newer posts and bypass yours. Even though the content is up to date and current.

For a lot more SEO-related information, click here.

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SEO – Inconsistent URL Structures

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Throughout our posts, we have emphasized that the content on websites must be great content, interesting to readers, answers their questions, and generally solves their problems. After all, they have initiated a search to find the answer to some questions that they have and they do not want to be bothered by poor content and content that does not address their needs. This is the objective that the search engines have set for themselves. They want to meet the customer’s demands and present the best possible results to their customers each and every time. Search engines employ search and indexing algorithms that are complex, to say the least. They are kept very top-secret for the most part by Google, Bing, and Yahoo as well as others. Inconsistent URL Structures can make it difficult for search engines to do their jobs.

Webmasters are tasked with keeping their content up-to-date and meaningful for their customers. They also try to make sure that they place well on the search results. After all, if you cannot be found then no one is going to read your web page, blog, etc.

Inconsistent URL Structures

One attribute that we believe the search engines value is consistent URL structures. In other words, they see the same URLs each time they visit and index a site. They also see new content being added. Many webmasters will look at old content that is no longer relevant for whatever reason. They may simply delete that page. This action can be interpreted as Inconsistent URL Structures and cause the search engines to rank a site lower in search results.

Instead, webmasters would be better off updating the content of the page. They should make it more relevant to today’s issues and needs of the consumer etc and retain these older URLs. It spells longevity, commitment to content, and commitment to ensuring that a website’s information remains relevant.

This is part of the SEO activity that many webmasters need to address. We will be discussing further issues like this one in upcoming posts.

Financial Retirement Planning

Planning your retirement

Author Archives: ernie

Easy Ways to Cut Spending in Retirement

Easy Ways to Cut Spending in Retirement

What is thin content?

Thin Content – Example

Is your retirement fully funded?

Is Your Retirement Fully Funded

Strategic Content Plan

Strategic Content Plan – Areas to Focus On

Website crashes or becomes unresponsive

Website Crashes – These include

Will Your Retirement Savings Last

Will Your Retirement Savings Last

Income

Expenses

SEO – Strategic Design Change

Strategic Design Change – Decisions

Three activities that may put your website at risk

Website at Risk – Poor content

Website at Risk – Poor on-page optimization

Low-quality backlinks pointing to your website

What Permalink Structure is the Best for Optimal SEO

What Permalink Structure is the Best for Optimal SEO

SEO – Inconsistent URL Structures

Inconsistent URL Structures