What’s Important About Money to You?

April 29, 2013, 11:30 am
By CARL RICHARDS
From:http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at The BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

What’s important about money to you?

This is an uncomfortable question because we aren’t used to thinking about money in those terms. But it’s one of my favorite questions to ask. Even before talking about goals or building a personal balance sheet, you might find it helpful to ask yourself this question.

While I’m not certain of the question’s origins, I first learned of it about a decade ago in a book by Bill Bachrach. It was about the importance of understanding your values when making important financial decisions. I’ve been using the question ever since.

The purpose of this question isn’t to think in terms of goals. It’s meant to go deeper than that, or to get at the reason why we have certain goals. The first answers people come up with are usually easy — things like security and freedom. But once we pause and really think, we can move even deeper still, or into what might be called the “why” of money. This question gets uncomfortable because it forces us to get really clear about our underlying reason for doing things. It also forces us to face some inconsistencies in our lives.

Let’s say the first thing you come up with when you ask yourself the question — what’s important about money — is indeed freedom or security. Then, the next question you should ask yourself is, “What’s so important to me about freedom and security?’” From there, keep asking questions until you get to until you get to the thing that is most important to you.

Here’s how it works.

My friend, who we’ll call Sara, was a hard-charging professional whose career required her to be super competitive. She was “type A” to the hilt and worked long hours. So when I talked to Sara and her husband and asked her this question, I was curious what she would say was most important. She said freedom.

When I asked her what freedom meant, she replied, “More time.”

So I said, “Okay, let’s pretend you’re there. Let’s say you have more time. What’s so important about being at that spot?”

With some emotion she said, “I just want the time to raise a child.”

Now don’t get caught up on what Sara said was the most important to her. Her values are just that. They’re hers. Your values may be completely different. The thing to keep in mind is that, like Sara, once you identify what’s most important to you, things get clearer.

The answers to a question like this give you a lens through which to view your financial decisions. And after you’ve identified what’s most important, you’ll have incredibly valuable information to help you make decisions that match your values.

In fact, it can make it easy to say no to things that can distract you from what’s most important. Like the self-help author Stephen Covey said, “It’s easy to say ‘no!’ when there’s a deeper ‘yes!’ burning inside.”

For Sara and her husband, her answer became that “deeper yes.” The same can be true for you. You just have to ask the question.

I’d love to know what’s most important to you. How has knowing the answer to that question changed your life?

By CARL RICHARDS

From:http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/

Arab Women Blaze Trails in Start-Ups

Updated April 12, 2012, 3:55 a.m. ET

Article from The Wall Street Journal

Conferences for start-ups and entrepreneurs often feature "pitch contests," slots in which aspiring entrepreneurs take to the stage to sell their ideas to the audience. Last month's ArabNet conference, held in the Lebanese capital, was no different. What was different, however, was the number of pitches from female entrepreneurs.

The stereotype has it that women in the Middle East are subjugated, oppressed and barely let out of their houses. But if that is the case, how come 40% of the pitches were from women—a higher percentage than is typical in equivalent conferences held in Europe?

Nor was this closer-to-equal representation of women unique to ArabNet.

According to Salwa Katkhuda of the Amman-based Oasis 500 accelerator, a program aimed at developing digital start-ups in Jordan, while 25% of applications to its program come from women, 40% of those accepted are female.

By contrast, a recent report called the Startup Genome, comparing start-ups around the world, found that while New York City has almost double the female founders of Silicon Valley and London, they still comprised just 20% of start-ups.

May Habib, founder of Dubai-based Arabic translation service Qordoba.com, which uses a lot of freelance female workers, said the Internet has transformed women's opportunities. "More flexible work options, freelance, home-based work, low capital requirements; you can see why starting a company on a small scale is a much more viable thing for women to do than get a corporate job."

The ability to work from home is very significant. "Working from home is a big thing," says Ms. Katkhuda. "In Jordan, specifically, the main reason for women not entering the work force is the lack of a proper transit system. We don't have an affordable transit system that can take women from remote areas to the city."

Home working also allows women to combine their traditional roles of homemaker and mother, with being an entrepreneur. This was the reason behind Noura Saad setting up her company, Tadreesna.com, which provides online Arabic tutoring, in the Jordanian capital.

"I was an ordinary mom with a lot of responsibility. You have to struggle daily how to cope being a mom, being a wife, helping your children. How you do this and in addition you have to work?" For Ms. Saad it was the freedom the Internet gave her to work from home that was the catalyst.

"Working from home is not something common in the Arabic world," she said.

Even Saudi Arabia, a country notorious for restrictions on women, is starting to realize the potential of women workers, according to Adbullah Alghadouni, CEO of the Riyadh-based Glowork.net, a site aimed at helping women find work in the kingdom. Over 80 of unemployed women have academic degrees, says Mr. Alghadouni. "This is an untapped ocean of talent," he said.

He said that in the private sector one of the problems has been the cost of segregation, not simply the cultural objection to employing women. He said that some private-sector companies would consider employing women, but were put off by the cost and the lack of knowledge of how to hire them. "One of the problems is that they don't know where to go to find the right kind of talents." The Internet, cloud computing and other distributed systems are allowing some women access to the jobs market in limited employment that avoids the need for face-to-face meetings, he said.

However Fay Niewladomski, CEO of the training firm ICTN based in Lebanon, said before running away with the idea that the Middle East has become a bastion of feminist valuesit was important to realize that there are still major restrictions on women.

"I have been here since 1972 and I have seen a tremendous revolution in how women interact in society and how women interact in business. What has not happened is that our legal system and our political system has not moved. If you were to look at the law, even in a country that claims to be as liberal as Lebanon, technically if your husband wanted to prevent you from traveling, he can. Technically you cannot open a bank account as a married woman, your husband has to do it. However, in practice these laws are not enforced."

Furthermore, most of the female entrepreneurs at the conference were young and had spent time in Europe, the U.S. or Australia. According to Ambareen Musa, CEO of the Dubai-based souqalmal.com, "in all of the networking events I have been to, English is a language you need to have." How well women without such benefits fare has yet to be seen. And that women are channeled into starting their own tech companies is, itself, a manifestation of oppression as other jobs remain closed to them. According to the International Labor Office, the MENA region has the world's lowest share of women in nonagricultural paid employment, at around 28%.

However, an event that opens Thursday in Dubai, the MENA Business Women's Network Forum, aims to widen further the appeal for women. It would be ironic if a region that is castigated for its attitudes toward women actually turned out to be more welcoming of female entrepreneurs than those doing the castigating.

Article from The Wall Street Journal

Lessons from 'Prometheus' on Building an Effective Website

BY CAROL TICE| April 4, 2012|
Article from The Entrepreneur

In the upcoming Alien prequel, Prometheus, it's 2073 and Weyland Industries is the largest company on the planet. But today's small business owners can learn a few lessons from the website that the movie's marketers have created for the fictional mega-corporation.

Page through the Weyland website for valuable tips on how to create a compelling business website:

• Concise copy. Bad business websites blather on and on, creating long, wordy pages. When reading online, people prefer quick, scannable information. The Weyland site has just a few short paragraphs on any one page, making the copy more impactful and more likely to be read.
• Company timeline. An elaborate timeline covering 30 years of Weyland history gives quick, one-sentence summaries of all the company milestones. Such a page adds depth to the website of any business that's more than a year or two old.
• Company snapshot. On a strong "About" page, Weyland quickly states where it is, how many employees it has, its headquarters location, and other vital statistics. I can't tell you how many small-business sites I've searched in vain for these kind of useful facts.
• Visual cues. Weyland works in seven different industries. A small illustration has been created to represent each, making it easy to see at a glance what the company does.
• Press releases. The site has a media archive of old press releases (at the moment, it's locked, likely until closer to film's June release date to avoid giving away the plot). Collecting releases and putting them on your site shows that your company has a history and gives media a chance to quickly scan through your highlights.
• Multimedia. In the site's masterstroke, the marketing team has created a faux TED Talk the company founder "gave" when he started it in 2023. With the great reputation of TED Talks and the impact of video generally, this feature immediately gives the company credibility and makes the site more engaging. If you have any public speaking engagements, remember to have them taped for posting on your site.
• Engagement. Under the guise of offering investment opportunities in "classified projects," the site invites visitors to "register" to get more information. Of course, this is more a marketing pull for the film itself, attempting to connect with fans on Twitter and Facebook

Article from The Entrepreneur