Guilt Free Vacations

Are you feeling bogged down with debt? Don't worry, you are not alone. However, you CAN rise up and take that dream vacation. It's not just a fairy tale. Lots of people are finding out how and sharing their stories with us.

I read an article today over at Yahoo Finance: "Staying out of debt leads to first affordable vacation in years."
The article explained how an average couple found themselves, "in a continuous cycle of borrowing from this week's paycheck to pay last week's bills and desperately wanting to catch up and get out of debt."
However, they "finally had to sit down and ask, "Where's all our money going?""
Once they did that, they were able to prioritize their spending. Rather than just throw money away on things that didn't have value to them, they consciously spent or saved their money for things that did. The end result?

After climbing out of debt this year, my fiance and I were able to take our dream vacation to New Orleans. Everything was paid for outright, without any interest charges. We were able to enjoy the trip to its fullest, without wondering how it would be paid for.

This is my idea of a dream vacation! Paris, France.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr, Brooklyn Musuem

It seems that a common thread lately from personal finance bloggers is chronicling the personal success stories. JD at GetRichSlowly.com features a weekly Reader Stories, Trent Hamm at TheSimpleDollar features numerous Mailbags where he answers individual readers questions with his own opinion, Ramit at IWillTeachYouToBeRich also has featured success stories entitled Master's of Earning More.

It makes sense - that is how their own blogs were started. They were reporting on their own personal finance journey. Once they achieved their own success and continued to prosper with their new foundation in personal finance, they have all started showcasing the personal stories of other fellow readers.

This isn't a new tactic. Personal finance books have always included snippets of success stories from people that have been helped by following the proposed program or principles. In some ways, reader stories serve as a further testimonial that what the author is spouting out really does work and more importantly, that it works for more than one type of person.

Take heart in the success stories and realize that you CAN achieve your dreams, too. Others have done it. Look at their stories and try to identify what was their turning point. Identify what things worked for them and try to apply some of the principles and ideas into your own life. Not everything will work all the time, but there is a lot to learn from the experiences of others.

Stop dreaming and start sailing!

How to Display HTML Code in a Blog Post

Sometimes when you are creating a page, you want to include the code that you used to be able to share with others.
For example, if you wanted to know what the specific HTML tags are to create headings and paragraphs, I couldn't just type them in because the program would interpret them as code and process them as such.
So, how to display HTML code as text? or How do I quote HTML code on my blog?
This comes in to play when you want to give someone a blogger award like the one below.

And, now I want to share that code with you.
But in order to do so, I must change some parts of the code to a different piece of code. If you want coding elements to appear as text, you must provide the code equivalent of the characters.

<p>
</p>
<img src="http://www.scrapboxusa.com/ImagesWeb/210x210_Ad_Rachelle_ani_20100712b.gif" border="0" />
<p>
</p>

To make the above code appear as text and not be immediately interpreted as another command to display the above picture I had to make some changes to the code. When a browser happens upon the bracket symbol it knows to begin code interpretation. The way around that is to feed the browser the code that displays instead the symbol as text. This is done by replacing the symbol with its code equivalent.

Replace "<" with "&lt;" (without the quotes, and yes, that is a lowercase "L")
Replace ">" with "&gt;" (again, without the quotes.)

Additionally, I found via this forum, that it is good coding practice to enclose the code you want to appear as text with the <code> tags. This way, if your page is ever translated, some browsers will just skip over the section and not waste time trying to translate a section not intended nor needed.

Here is a great resource page for any web programming language.
http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp

A final note, the <p> and </p> tags just create a paragraph break. If you don't want the extra paragraph break you can omit them. If you wanted a line break, use a "b" instead of the "p".

Writing Tips

I get a little surprise every month when the latest issue of Popular Science arrives in my mailbox. It is a fun magazine to read. It's all about big dreams and big ideas. The magazine offers a variety of articles that range from the quick to the more in depth stories. This format makes it perfect for any moment you have to flip through to find something for your moment.

I was intrigued by a small article near the back of the April 2010 issue titled 5 Things to Help You Write Your Masterpiece.
1 - Start somewhere. Anywhere. We all need to Practice, Practice, Practice. They suggested a collaborative story website protagonize.com. I have also found onemillionmonkeys.com and occasionally writers will host a collaborative story on their blog.

2 - Focus. They mentioned minimalist word processors like Dark Room and WriteRoom. "The bare bones text editor nix the features you don't need so you can focus on getting the words down."  Personally, I thought, well, maybe that is why Rachelle likes her Dana so much - it is just a text editor, very basic and to the point.

3 - Their advice for getting an agent was to register for free access to LiteraryMarketPlace.com, a giant database of publishers and agents, searchable by city and genre. For a substantial fee you can actually get their contact info.

4 - Getting published: Go to Poets & Writers web site, pw.org, which lists summaries of more than 450 fiction , poetry  and essay journals which let you submit your work online and find information on writing contests and MFA programs, etc.

5 - Copyrights: Go to Myows.com to defend against plagiarism.

Rachelle Christensen has been putting together some of her tips that helped her publish her first book on the national market. 

Compound Interest Video Contest GetRichSlowly

I recently entered the Get Rich Slowly 2010 Video contest. From the website...

Get Rich Slowly has always been devoted to sensible personal finance. Since April 2006, JD Roth and other writers have shared stories about debt elimination, frugality, saving money, and practical investing with millions of readers. Now it's our readers' turn to tell their stories.

We are calling on real people like you to enter the contest by submitting a 2 minute-or-less video in one of two categories: 1) Personal Finance Tips and 2) Success Stories.

I was really excited to enter this contest for a few reasons.
Number one was the nice cash prize motivation. Although, it may have made my ability to be creative a little bit harder because I knew that my work was going to be in a competition. And the competition is really good!  You can check out the latest videos that have been submitted in the contest and learn a lot of cool tips or be inspired by some really great success stories.

This is my entry into the contest and just so happens to be the first official video that I have posted to YouTube. It's not my first foray into making movies on my computer. I am definitely still an amateur, but I have had the opportunity to put together and author a few movies that involved splicing clips of music, voice, pictures and video. I didn't do any acting in this little short piece. There just was not enough time!



I chose the topic of compound interest because it is one of the fundamental principles to finance. Interest can make or break you. If you are in debt you need to know how easily you can be a slave for the rest of your life. If you are saving money you need to understand why it is so important to start saving right now!


One of the first rules of successful personal finance is to pay yourself first. What does it mean to pay yourself first? It means your most important and your first step after getting paid should be to put money away for your future self. Save money for your future. Save for your retirement. Save for the days that you will not be working. Establishing the habit early in life will ensure you a comfortable lifestyle later in life.

Hope you liked it! Let me know if you have ideas or suggestions on the video. Or please, if you have a personal experience with compound interest that you would like to share - feel free to do so, in the comments below.

Reuse Blogger Pictures In Future Posts

Pictures are worth a thousand words. However, pictures take up valuable storage space and Blogger only gives you 1024 MB or 1 GB of storage for your Blogger albums.

How do you reuse a picture that you have posted before? Rather than upload the same picture all over again into your new blog post, open up a new tab, or window and head over to Picasa Web Albums. This is where all your current Blogger pictures are stored.

NOTE: If you delete pictures from your Web Albums - they will also disappear from your blog posts.

When you have found the image that you want, click on it. You should see a screen similar to this below.

On the right hand side there is an option to "Link to this Photo". Clicking on it reveals more options.
If you want the HTML code, then select the "Hide Album Link" checkbox. The more familiar method would be to select the "Image Only" checkbox and to copy the link provided.
Then, go back to your blog post you are editing and insert an image. 
This time, however, provide the web address that you copied from Picasa Web Albums and voila! You can reuse the photo again.

For example, you can see that I reused the ShareBuilder logo here and here.

Happy Blogging!

Monetize Your Blogger Blog Using Amazon Associates

Google has integrated Amazon Associates into Blogger for an additional way for you to earn revenue from your blog. You can have immediate access to product searches and customized links when enable the Amazon Associates widget. The widget will appear on the side of your "New Post" page, the Blogger Editor, where you go to craft your latest blog entries. It will not show up on your homepage unless you add it to your layout as well. The widget for your homepage is for you visitors to search amazon products or to have products relevant to your most recent post. The widget that shows up when you are typing up your posts is a handy search tool that allows for quick and easy insertion of text links, or image links of products directly into your blog content. This can be useful if you are doing a product review or in my case - you wanted a relevant image to go along with your content and you were too lazy to go find something from a free stock photography site. Hope that helps!  Three screen shots are included below.
Note: An Amazon Associates ID is required for this to work. Get an Amazon Associates Account.

Once you have the widget enabled, head on over and start your next post. 

Has the addition of Amazon Associates to Blogger been helpful to you?