Buying a home may seem like a dauntingly complex proposition, perhaps because you’ve never done it before or never understood all the details of financing and closing a sale.

However, once you know what steps are involved, understand the purpose of each step, and learn how each is accomplished, buying a home will be revealed for what it is–a series of simple steps that lead toward a substantial emotional and financial commitment.

Prepare to Buy

1. Clarify your reasons to buy. Because it is such a weighty commitment, buying a home shouldn’t come with regret or second thoughts. Before you buy or even begin the process, make sure that your reasons and resolve to buy a home are clear and firm.

2. Get your financial house in order. It’s hard to have any idea about how much home you can afford if you don’t know how much of your money you want to devote toward housing. If you haven’t done so already, thinking about buying a home is a perfect reason to get your finances in order.
3. Check your credit history. Even if you aren’t going to buy a house, this is a good idea. If your credit report has mistakes or other blemishes, your credit rating will suffer. As a result, you will hurt your chances of securing financing and will probably pay higher interest rates or possibly not be able to secure financing.
4. Figure out how much home you can afford. Getting an accurate estimate of what priced home you can afford will make your search more realistic and efficient. It may even give you cause to reconsider buying altogether.
5. Buy vs. rent. Depending on your situation, renting a home instead of buying may make more sense (financially or otherwise). It’s a possibility that’s worth considering.

Buy a Home

1. Get prequalified. When preparing to buy a home, you estimate how much home you can afford. Now it’s the lender’s turn. Using financial information that you provide, prequalification is a lender’s analysis of your general position as a borrower, or in other words, an estimate of what you can afford. Getting prequalified gives you an even clearer understanding of what home you will be able to afford, and a prequalification letter from your lender helps strengthen your position with sellers in the early stages of negotiation.
2. Shop for loans. Finding a good loan is probably the most confusing part of the process (and definitely the dullest), but since it will dictate how much your monthly payment will be, it deserves your full attention. To simplify, your job is to decide what kind of loan you want, whom you want to get it from, and how long you want the term to be (most are either for 15 or 30 years).
3. Get preapproved. When you get preapproved, a lender gives a firm commitment to loan you up to a set amount without knowing the specific property. It’s particularly useful because when you make an offer on a home, waiting for financing won’t jeopardize your offer. Once you are preapproved, closing the loan is quick, depending only on a satisfactory appraisal and title report of the home. To get preapproved you apply for a certain purchase price, loan amount, and loan program, but these assumptions can change after you’re preapproved.
4. Find a home. Finding the perfect home can be challenging, especially if you are moving to a new area. Regardless of where you’re moving, the Internet offers powerful tools to research neighborhoods and find available homes.
5. Close the deal. Once you’ve found the home you want, you still must get it inspected, have it appraised, get a report on the title (to make sure the history of the house is clean), negotiate the price, and close your financing.
6. Move in. If you’ve made it this far, you’re close to the finish line, but the race isn’t over. Moving presents its own challenges, and there’s a litany of things to be mindful of, such as changing your address and more.

Tiffany Bass Bukow is the CEO & Founder of the #1 Personal Finance Website for Women and Families – www.msmoney.com. My life mission is to help people and the world thrive through creating companies that provide money, career and life skills education.

(from “Busy but Balanced”)
By Mimi Doe, Author of: “Busy but Balanced” and founder of http://www.SpiritualParenting.com

The University of Michigan recently conducted a survey. They wanted to study what effect money had on people’s lives. Three of their findings:

What do people worry about most? Money! What makes people the happiest? Money! What makes people the unhappiest? Money!

Money, and our issues around money, are full and deep and intense and often impenetrable. We all have a story to tell about our money dance.

Mary, a single mother of two, was brought up by her grandmother because her own single mother couldn’t support them. She lives with the fear of losing her daughters as a result of her unsteady income. One father of three battles his demons with money–demons passed along to him by his father. When he was thirteen-years-old his father went bankrupt and lost the farm that had been in the family for generations. As this boy grew up, he had anxiety around money issues and avoided risks of any kind.

We may not inherit money but we do inherit an approach to money from our family of origin. Let’s take responsibility for our prosperity consciousness, our money mentality, so we can blast away the wall that’s keeping abundance from us. When we are alert to our old money programming we can rewrite the script. Not only will our kids get a healthier example but, by becoming aware of money’s role in our childhoods, we can tame old images and fears. We can choose, today, to allow and accept prosperity into our lives.

Balancing Tips

• Be aware of how you speak about money to your children: “We can’t afford this” or “I’ll never have enough.” Is there guilt associated with spending? “I’ve spent a lot of money on your piano lessons, so keep practicing.”
• Give your kids responsibility for using their own money early on. It helps them maintain a balanced perspective on value. My daughter loved special frozen drinks from a local coffee shop. I began to feel the expense wasn’t worth the treat and suggested she use her own money. “It’s totally not worth $3.50″ was her wise response. We concocted our own drink at home.
• Take a look at what you might be trading for money–time with your kids, self nurturing, pursuing a dream. Is there a way you could scale back your expenses to spend time on what you value now?
• Money is a balance buster for many of us. We don’t know the best way to manage the money we earn and haven’t made the time to learn. Get a grip on family finances by setting up a system for paying bills on time (I like the Quicken software program), saving for college and retirement (automatic savings plans are pure magic), handling debt (find a professional to help you create a plan), and meeting your financial goals (you’ve got to make these goals before you can meet them). Once you are in control of your money, you won’t feel thrown off balance.
• Are you avoiding taking responsibility for money because it illicits feelings of fear, stress, scarcity? Schedule a time each month when you and your partner can review your current financial situation. Create goals and strategies. Is saving for your child’s college tuition just a dream? Even if it’s an old coffee can for collecting change, just making the dream concrete opens the way for the flow of money.
• Eliminate debt and find exhilarating freedom. Debt can be an anchor around our “financial psyche”–dragging us down in all areas of our lives. Create a debt repayment plan and move on with your life.
• Prosperity is more than just money – it’s a way of thinking. Open your mind and heart to receive all the abundance the universe is waiting to shower upon you today.

Who is Mimi Doe

Ladies Home Journal called Mimi Doe “a parenting guru” and she has appeared on Oprah. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education from Harvard.

Mimi is the author of the just released, “Busy but Balanced: Practical and Inspirational Ways to Create a Calmer, Closer Family” (St. Martins Press)

Link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312272219/qid=1012258913/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_10_2/104-7406789-8620740

Sign up for her free newsletter at: http://www.SpiritualParenting.com

By Jacqueline Marcell
(Impressive Press, April 2001) $17.96

I grew up with a “Jekyll & Hyde” father who was wonderful most of the time, but when he’d get mad he’d explode in a screaming, pounding-his-fist rage. It was never directed at me, I was the golden child, but I watched his temperament change like a light-switch as he’d yell at my mother and brother. We would cower and walk on eggshells trying not to upset him. After my parents retired, my mother had a heart attack and he took care of her for 11 years, refusing all help, despite my constant efforts to hire caregivers who he would throw out. When my mother nearly died from an infection caused by her own waste because he had not kept her clean and taken her to the doctor, I had to step in despite his loud protests.

I started to experience his rages at a heightened level over things that seemed so illogical and irrational. When he took two filthy hand towels out of the trash and threw them at me, accusing me of throwing out all their things, I was stunned and sobbed my heart out to have him turn on me. I thought it was just more of his bad behavior of a lifetime, getting intensified by my mother’s near-death illness and the stress of caring for her for so long without help.

I reported his illogical behavior to the doctor but whenever she saw him, he’d act so normal, so darling, so in control, I couldn’t get help with medications. He was able to act completely sane when he needed to. I didn’t find out until much later that he had told the doctor that I was just after his money and that she shouldn’t pay any attention to me. She knew him for twenty years and didn’t know me very well, as I lived four hundred miles away.

It took me a year to solve it on my own, riding a roller coaster of emotions as some days he’d be my loving dad and so normal, and then all of a sudden something would set him off and he’d go into a screaming tirade calling me every nasty name he could think of. As I tried to make safety changes to my parents home and help them, he threw me out and even choked me over adding HBO to his television for a caregiver who had requested it, even though he had previously given his permission. The police were called and he was 5150′d to a psychiatric hospital for a 72-hour observation.

When he got to the psych unit, he was so adorable, so normal, they released him, telling me they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. After four episodes of violence, and 40 caregivers later, I had to threaten the psychiatrist with a lawsuit if they released him and he came home and hurt anyone. They finally held him 2 weeks (called a “5250″)and reported that he couldn’t learn very well and that his memory was slipping. It was so intermittent, he was able to act normal most of the time, and was still able to hide his life-long temper tantrums.

I finally found help when I got him to the Alzheimer’s Association’s best recommendation for a geriatric dementia specialist who did extensive neurological tests and CAT scans and found that my father had the beginning of multi-infarct vascular dementia and that he’d had numerous tiny strokes and a possible secondary dementia: Alzheimer’s. Once I found doctors who understood the complexity of his brain chemistry, we were able to manage it with medications for the dementia (Aricept and later Exelon), aggression (Risperdal), and depression (Zoloft).

After much experimentation with combinations and dosages, the brain chemistry was properly balanced, without having to zombie him out. Then I started behavior modification on my eight-five year old father. By using “tough love” and “reward and consequences”, he learned how to behave and control his temper most of the time, even with the onset of dementia. When he is on good behavior he gets rewards of praise, affection, attention, and extra dessert works good too. When he is asserting his life-long need to control and boss people around, he gets negative consequences: no dessert, minimal communication, no attention, no affection. He has finally learned that there is no “pay-off” for pounding his fists and screaming and yelling. He will not get his way… period, and no one cowers. We walk away 100% of the time.

The next piece of the puzzle was to get him busy by going to Adult Day Care with my mother. By having daily mental stimulation, physical exercise, proper nutrition and social interaction, he finally had a reason to get up in the morning. Now instead of being a “sundowner” and up all night reeking havoc, he is tired out all day with fun activities and will sleep through the night, which allows everyone else to sleep also.

After turning around a seemingly impossible situation, I decided to write a book about it to help others who are trying to manage “challenging” elders. The result: Elder Rage or, Take My Father… Please! How to Survive Caring For Aging Parents.” Written with a humors tone, people learn to identify the earliest warning signs of dementia, which are very intermittent. Life-long behavior patterns start to get distorted.

I stress that the use of medications can slow the dementia down from progressing as fast as it would otherwise, keeping a loved one in Stage One an extra 2-4 years. Statistically families wait four years before reaching out for help, usually after a crisis, but by then the loved one is already in Stage Two, which requires full-time care. This is going to cost a lot of money and heartache.

Having Long-Term Care Insurance is the answer for the financial impact of caring for someone with dementia. Once there is a record of “memory loss” in a person’s medical chart, Long-Term Care Insurance will be denied.

By being sensitive to the early warning signs, getting to the right doctors, getting the right combination of medications and understanding that demented does not means stupid, many of these disruptive behaviors can be managed. The bottom line message is that there can still be a good life after a diagnosis of dementia if it is properly managed medically and behaviorally.

Ten Warning Signs of Alzheimer’s Disease
Reprinted with permission of the Alzheimer’s Association of Orange County.

1. Recent memory loss that affects job skills.
   It’s normal to occasionally forget assignments, colleagues’ names, or a business associate’s telephone number and remember them later. Those with dementia, such a Alzheimer’s disease, may forget things more often, and not remember them later.
2. Difficulty performing familiar tasks.
   Busy people can be so distracted from time to time that they may leave the carrots on the stove and only remember to serve them at the end of the meal. People with Alzheimer’s disease could prepare a meal and not only forget to serve it, but also forget they made it.
3. Problems with language.
   Everyone has trouble finding the right word sometimes, but a person with Alzheimer’s disease may forget simple words or substitute inappropriate words, making his or her sentence incomprehensible.
4. Disorientation of time and place.
   It’s normal to forget the day of the week or your destination for a moment. But people with Alzheimer’s disease can become lost on their own street, not knowing where they are, how they got there or how to get back home.
5. Poor or decreased judgment.
   People can become so immersed in an activity that they temporarily forget the child they’re watching. People with Alzheimer’s disease could forget entirely the child under their care. They may also dress inappropriately, wearing several shirts or blouses.
6. Problems with abstract thinking.
   Balancing a checkbook may be disconcerting when the task is more complicated than usual. Someone with Alzheimer’s disease could forget completely what the numbers are and what needs to be done with them.
7. Misplacing things.
   Anyone can temporarily misplace a wallet or keys. A person with Alzheimer’s disease may put things in inappropriate places: an iron in the freezer, or a wristwatch in the sugar bowl.
8. Changes in mood or behavior.
   Everyone becomes sad or moody from time to time. Someone with Alzheimer’s disease can exhibit rapid mood swings from calm to tears to anger for no apparent reason.
9. Changes in personality.
   People’s personalities ordinarily change somewhat with age. But a person with Alzheimer’s disease can change drastically, becoming extremely confused, suspicious, or fearful.
10. Loss of initiative.
    It’s normal to tire of housework, business activities, or social obligations, but most people regain their initiative. The person with Alzheimer’s disease may become very passive and require cues and prompting to become involved.

HOW IS ALZHEIMER’S DIAGNOSED?

There is no single diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s Disease. Instead, AD is diagnosed by comparing a series of test results and exams including: a thorough medical history, assessment of mental status, physical exam, neurological exam, lab tests including an EEG and brain scan, such as a CT, MRI, PET, or SPECT, psychiatric and other exams. A diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease through this evaluation is considered 80-90% accurate. The only way to be absolutely certain is through an autopsy.

Launching a new company or business division? A new award-winning book by Wayne McVicker, co-founder of dotcom roller coaster Neoforma, offers some been-there-done-that advice that can help you keep your cool in the midst of the maelstrom.

Start-ups can be scary. Whether you’re heading up a new division of an established corporation or launching your own small consulting firm, uncertainty comes with the territory. So many variables are involved-from business and societal trends to employee personalities to competitor attacks to investor pressures-that your new creation will take on a life of its own. You might as well try to raise a predictable toddler. Still, according to entrepreneur Wayne McVicker, there are some common threads and overarching principles that transcend time, place, and type of business.

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to pay particular attention to commonsense keys to the development of a strong corporate culture,” says McVicker. “They are the rocks in the shifting sand. The problem is, the whirlwind nature of a start-up makes it difficult for many entrepreneurs or professionals to stay focused on them. You get distracted. You second-guess your decisions. Fear takes precedence over logic. You allow yourself to be swayed by others. And often, even though luck plays a role in the success of any start up, it’s failing to follow the tried-and-true principles that hurts or even destroys a new operation.”

McVicker certainly speaks from experience. And he traces that experience in his upcoming book, Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Control, Confrontation, & Corporate Culture (Ravel Media, 2004, ISBN: 1-932881-01-8, $22.95). The book follows McVicker’s journey as the co-founder of Neoforma, the first health care-dotcom-B2B-e-commerce company, which opened its doors in 1996.

By the time of its IPO in 2000, Neoforma had grown from the seed of a good idea into a publicly traded company worth $3 billion. Yet there was trouble ahead. Within four months, the company was in deep trouble, laying off good people and watching its stock value plummet. McVicker “made a few hundred million and lost a few hundred million” . . . just like that.

While Neoforma still exists, McVicker has little connection to it. Yet the lessons he learned from that experience will always be with him. And part of the reason he wrote his book is to share those lessons with others who might benefit from seeing how the commonsense principles that everyone “knows” can be affected during the tumultuous realities of “starting something.”

Twelve Things to Keep in Mind When Starting Something

1. Be who you are. If you aren’t true to yourself, your company’s culture will suffer. So will you. A recurring theme during Neoforma’s early days was determining how to present the company to potential investors. Investors wanted to hear that McVicker and his partner, Jeff Kleck, planned to pursue fast and furious growth for their company. McVicker wanted the growth to happen in a more “organic” way. “We argued about whether it was right for us to project an image of ourselves as a very large corporation selling hundreds of millions of dollars of software and services a year,” he writes. “We didn’t doubt that this was possible, but frankly, we would have been quite happy to sell a few million dollars’ worth of software a year.”
2. Hire for culture first, experience second. If someone feels wrong, they are. However exhausting and distracting hiring is, don’t delegate it until after the first hundred employees-and then only very carefully. Early on in the process of staffing Neoforma, McVicker learned the value of listening to his gut. He extended a job offer to a man named Isaac. McVicker disliked him but felt that he had the necessary experience. After some “aggressive and abrasive” negotiation, Isaac accepted the offer, but made Neoforma wait two months-and then quit the first day. McVicker writes about his rage: “This guy hadn’t felt right from the beginning-even though he sounded right. I had focused on his computer skills-which can be learned-instead of more important and innate qualities-like an arrogance, born of insecurity-that would have made him difficult to work with, even if he’d stayed.”
3. Communicate empowerment. In the maelstrom that is a young company, it is easy for employees to feel helpless or isolated. All employees powerfully influence a company’s success and direction. Let them know they are valued and their voices are heard-often and in many ways. Don’t waste the potential of any employee. “By far the most common, frustrating, and damaging issue I had to deal with in those days of frenzied growth was disempowerment,” writes McVicker. “Within this dynamic, unstable environment, employees were convinced that their voices were not being heard. No matter how much we tried to ensure that they were empowered and had access to me and other executives, many felt undervalued. They flooded into my office, yelling, crying, and pleading.” What McVicker learned from this phenomenon, he says, was simply this: “Don’t underestimate the importance of communicating empowerment to your people. It’s one of the most critical functions of a leader.”
4. Learn to release, without letting go. When you delegate (and you must) you can neither control every detail nor allow the idea to get diluted. Make your plan clear and monitor progress regularly. If you hired well, everything will work out. The saga of Larry and Emma, two employees hired in 1998, underscores the paradoxical “releasing without letting go” principle. McVicker told them to take control of their respective departments. Taking this directive to the extreme, they began disregarding his requests and suggestions. When he discussed this behavior with them, they went behind his back to complain. Fearing that he was being a “control freak,” McVicker allowed Larry and Emma to continue their behavior. “In retrospect it’s clear that I should have nipped the situation in the bud,” he reflects. “Not only were they ignoring what I wanted, but they were creating a culture of division and closed doors. Clearly, this was not the culture I wanted for our company.”
5. Balance is not always found in the middle. Make and communicate clear decisions. Changing a position is better than not having one. In 1999, Neoforma needed to cut some projects. One project on the table, which McVicker loved, was a capital equipment solution code-named Picasso. In a classic leadership dilemma, McVicker had to determine whether to make the popular decision to cut Picasso and alienate the people who had remained loyal to his original vision for the company, or make the less popular decision to keep Picasso alive and alienate the others. “In an attempt to be fair to everyone, I came up with a weak compromise that satisfied and inspired no one,” he writes. “We’d keep the Picasso program going, but only allocate it just enough to stay alive. Sadly, my half-hearted decision conveyed uncertainty. The effect was immediate and deeply disheartening.”
6. Do one thing well, then do it better. Then, while you are still improving the first thing, consider doing one, and only one, related thing well. And so on. Neoforma had a powerful catalog and messaging system on its website that was used by thousands of medical professionals. Then, in the interest of expanding their reach and potential, the team decided to “add a few new features.” These features ended up overwhelming Neoforma’s resources to the point that they completely obscured what was good about the site. Traffic dropped precipitously overnight from tens of thousands of visitors per day to hundreds. “We had tried to be everything to everyone-all at once” writes McVicker. “In the process we turned our innocent, obedient child into an adolescent monster. On the surface, it looked much larger and more grown-up than it had been before, but it was raw and unstable underneath.”
7. Regularly wear your customers’ clothes. Most entrepreneurs come from the industry they are trying to serve, but when confronted by the challenges of starting or running a business, they quickly lose touch with the customer experience. One of the features the Neoforma website was known for was its state-of-the-art virtual reality tour of medical facilities. To create this technology, Neoforma and a firm called Be Here Corporation spent days photographing the interior of the Center of Advanced Medicine (CAM) in Chicago. McVicker found that the task gave him and his team a valuable sense of purpose. “Even though we had all worked in health care to varying degrees, we had only an abstract idea of the potential impact Neoforma could have on real people in real hospitals,” he writes. “The creation of this virtual tour solidified our connection to the real thing and gave us a renewed sense that what we were doing wasn’t just good for business-it might actually be important.”
8. The unsatisfied customer is the most important customer. Therein lies all opportunity. In the early days of Neoforma, McVicker was showing off his new website to his father-in-law, a dentist. His father-in-law checked out the feature that allowed visitors to send e-mail inquiries to vendors, but couldn’t see the value since writing an e-mail and waiting for a reply would be slower than a quick phone negotiation. He added that if he could send messages to several vendors at once, that would be a timesaver. So, McVicker sent a specification to the developer that weekend, and by the end of the next week, Neoforma had implemented the new feature. “At its peak, twenty thousand messages a week were being sent from buyers to sellers,” writes McVicker. “We knew that we had significantly improved the lives of many people. I felt very good about that, even though it hadn’t been my idea.”
9. Never let your competitors drive your business decisions. Stay focused. If your competitors come up with something good, your customers will let you know. Right before Neoforma’s IPO, CEO Bob Zollars received a call from the CEO of major competitor Medibuy. The CEO informed Zollars that WebMD was not going to renew its agreement with Neoforma when it expired later in the year, but was instead going to go with Medibuy. Zollars recognized the Medibuy/WebMD deal as a “transparent ploy” designed to “take some wind out of our sails.” “Had Bob not rationally analyzed that the WebMD deal was worthless, he might have been tempted to pay an exorbitant fee to renew the agreement to keep it out of the hands of the competition,” says McVicker. “And he might have been knocked off balance by the notice of cancellation on the day before our IPO. Instead, Medibuy paid an inordinate amount of money to steal a worthless deal from Neoforma-not in an attempt to help themselves, but to hurt us.”
10. Never let your investors drive your business decisions. They are usually smart and can be intimidating, but they aren’t as familiar with your business as you are. Their viewpoint is short-term; yours should be long-term. Pressure from investors was a problem McVicker faced constantly. From campaigning to change the logo to insisting that Neoforma hire certain people, they relentlessly made their opinions known. Perhaps the most painful example of this pressure was when later-in-the-game venture capitalists insisted upon a participating preferred clause. Basically, this meant that if the company were sold, the most recent investors would get their money first-in fact, they would be guaranteed a multiple of their original investments before any money was distributed to earlier investors. This issue caused a major rift between McVicker, who favored compromise, and his partner Jeff Kleck, who was totally opposed to the clause. Kleck eventually agreed to a compromise, but harmony was lost. “As much as I had disagreed with the inflexibility of Jeff’s position on the funding round, I did agree with him on one thing-my new partners, the VCs, were certainly not my friends,” writes McVicker. “I had allowed them to manipulate me into putting my fear of losing everything above my loyalty to a friend.”
11. Listen to all advice, but trust what you know. As you confront frequent obstacles, you may begin to question your core beliefs. Don’t. Be patient. Ideas that require customers to change behavior often take ten or more years to implement. In the midst of their fundraising activities, McVicker and Kleck hired a Stanford Ph.D. and MBA named Sasa to create their business plan. Sasa was insistent that Neoforma should emphasize the health care supplies market (which the founders knew little about) over the equipment market (which they knew very well). Though he had misgivings, McVicker capitulated. “After two months of work, Sasa delivered a hefty document that defined our long-term business plan,” he writes. “I never even read the whole thing. I was much too busy, and I knew the plan reflected where the company could go, not necessarily where I thought it would or should go.” This documented shift away from the founders’ core expertise triggered a very subtle division between them and their customers, and, perhaps more importantly, their company.
12. Enjoy yourself. It is very easy, during the inevitable times of monetary starvation and market inertia, to lose sight of how much fun it is to create something new and useful. In Starting Something, McVicker describes his slide into depression, anxiety, and marital distress that, ironically, accompanied Neoforma’s rise to success. He eventually began working with a business consultant with an unconventional background who got him to dig into the emotional issues that he was trying so hard to keep superficial. To McVicker’s surprise, he found that such an experience wasn’t unusual. “It was not until years later that I would read disclosures by several well-known executives describing the bouts of extreme depression that they had suffered,” he writes. “I didn’t hide under my desk for hours at a time, as one had, but I certainly would have welcomed the idea that such an escape was possible. It would have helped to know earlier that I wasn’t alone after all, that it is okay to admit limitations and seek help.”

Although McVicker is adamant that following tried-and-true principles is no guarantee of start-up success, he also points out that guarantees aren’t what drive the entrepreneur in the first place.

“There are rewards, many rewards, inherent in creating something new,” he says. “You meet fascinating people and form complex relationships. You learn something every day. You get that intense feeling of accomplishment that comes only from running on pure passion and adrenaline. There is nothing like conceiving a new idea and bringing it to fruition. Of course, much like having a child, you can’t predict with certainty how that child will turn out. But regardless, parents are seldom sorry they had the child. That’s the lesson I most want to convey with my story.”

# # #
About the Author:
Wayne McVicker is an architect and entrepreneur. Having co-founded Attainia, he has served as an executive there since its inception in 2001. He has 25 years of experience in the design, health care, and IT industries. McVicker’s five-year-long wild ride as co-founder, board member, and president of Neoforma (NASDAQ: NEOF) is the basis for his book. He lives with his wife and two sons in Silicon Valley, California. For more information, please visit www.startingsomething.com.

Starting Something won the 2004 DIY Book Festival Book of the Year Award. In the late September press release announcing the winners, Bruce Haring of DIY Convention stated: “McVicker perfectly captures the excitement, strategy, and struggles of building his own venture, a battle which DIY artists and entrepreneurs face on a daily basis. For perfectly capturing that quest, McVicker wins our top honor.” For more information, please visit www.diyconvention.com.

About the Book:
Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Control, Confrontation, & Corporate Culture (Ravel Media, 2004, ISBN: 1-932881-01-8, $22.95) is available at bookstores nationwide and all major online booksellers.

Tiffany Bass Bukow is the CEO & Founder of the #1 Personal Finance Website for Women and Families – www.msmoney.com. My life mission is to help people and the world thrive through creating companies that provide money, career and life skills education.

By Kara Stefan

Who thinks the average American woman is the chief financial officer of her household? The auto industry for starters. According to J.D. Powers and Associates, women make more than half the car buying decisions in the U.S.

And the Recording Industry Association of America weighs in with this statistic: women account for more than half the music sales in the country. There’s more: women comprise 44% of motorcycle owners, 51% of convertible owners, and 48% of truck or SUV owners. Guess it’s no longer a man’s world.

What this proves is that women, traditionally the purveyors of clothes, cosmetics, and groceries, have now taken the reins when it comes to nearly all of the purchasing decisions in most households. Not only that, but 80% of women will be responsible for their own finances at some point in their lives, says Mary Farrell, managing director of Paine Webber and author of Mary Farrell’s Beyond the Basics.

The Survey Says
In May of this year, research from the Wingspan Bank Financial Index confirmed that women, on average, hold the primary responsibility for managing the majority of financial activities for their households. In fact, 83 million women are responsible for creating their household budgets, managing the checking account, and reviewing and paying bills.

Now if that doesn’t qualify you for a CFO title, I don’t know what does. So whether you’re a business owner (38% of all firms in the U.S. are women-owned), or a soccer mom whose days are filled with carpools and home-baked cookies, you have the same genetic make-up that empowers you to learn, manage, and excel at finances.

Moms Rule
It may be particularly intimidating for stay-at-home moms to serve as the financial taskmaster of the house. After all, it’s your spouse who’s bringing home the dough.

However, a study conducted by Edelman Financial Services concluded that moms are worth more than $570,000 per year in today’s job market–a decent salary for any CFO.

Says Chairman Ric Edelman, “Since a mother wears many hats and is on duty 24-hours a day, we decided that the typical mother deserves a full-time yearly salary for 17 different occupational positions”–ranging from executive chef and animal caretaker to computer systems analyst and property manager.

Just in case you still doubt your ability to manage money effectively, rest assured it’s not as hard as the myriad tasks you juggle each day. For example, check out the following “job” qualifications for being a Mom, as compiled by a fellow household CFO:

Position: MOM

• Must reconcile petty cash disbursements and be proficient in managing budgets and resources fairly unless you want to hear “He got more than me!” for the rest of your life.
• Must have strong skills in negotiating, conflict resolution, and crisis management.
• Must be willing to withstand criticism, such as “You don’t know anything.”
• Must be able to think out of the box but not lose track of the box because you most likely will need it for a school project.
• Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars, and coordinate production of multiple homework projects.
• Must be willing to be indispensable one minute and an embarrassment the next.
• Must possess a highly energetic, entrepreneurial spirit, because fund-raiser will be your middle name.
• Must have a diverse knowledge base in order to answer questions such as “What makes the wind move?” or “Why can’t they just go in and shoot Saddam Hussein?” on the fly.

Transitioning Job Experience
Now that we know women are innately qualified to handle finances, here are several tips from financial expert and author Dr. Judith Briles on how to transition those skills into money management expertise:

1. Identify any fears and concerns you have about handling and managing your finances.
2. Identify how money is spent in your household by keeping a log for a month or two.
3. Take advantage of the Internet to learn about topics such as investing and credit management.
4. Assess your current financial situation by listing all income, assets, equity, fixed/flexible expenses, and discretionary income.
5. Identify your financial goals and create a written plan for college, family, and retirement.
6. Determine the types of investments most appropriate for your current situation and goals.
7. Determine how much money you can save and invest monthly.
8. Refer to experts, including financial planners and Web sites that offer sound advice.
9. Create a realistic financial plan.
10. Actively follow your plan, but allow for mistakes you’ll inevitably make in the process and learn from them.

Tiffany Bass Bukow is the CEO & Founder of the #1 Personal Finance Website for Women and Families – www.msmoney.com. My life mission is to help people and the world thrive through creating companies that provide money, career and life skills education.

For some of us, retirement may seem a long way off. But consider this: the steps you take now will have an enormous influence on the quality of your life 10, 20, 30 or 40 years from now. Whatever your age, the time to start planning your retirement is now. All it takes is five simple steps.

STEP1: Establish clear, simple, and memorable goals.
Ask yourself, “When do I want to retire?” and “How much money will I need to retire?” Check out our Visual Retirement Planner in our related tools to help you answer these questions.

STEP 2: Put yourself on track to meet your goals.
When you retire, you’ll want to have enough money to enjoy your free time and maintain your current lifestyle. The sooner you start putting money away, the more time it has to grow. Start a monthly transfer from your checking account to your investment account.

STEP 3: Make regular contributions to your company retirement plan.
If your employer offers a 401(k) or 403(b) plan, participate to the maximum. Your contributions are made with tax-deferred dollars so they may reduce your taxable salary, and both contributions and earnings can grow tax-deferred until they’re withdrawn. If your employer matches your contribution, you’re throwing away free money if you don’t participate.

STEP 4: Contribute regularly to an IRA.
If you’re not covered by a company retirement plan, make regular contributions to an IRA. Regardless of the type of IRA you qualify for – Traditional or Roth – your savings will grow tax-deferred. And even if you’re contributing to a plan at work, consider putting some additional money in an IRA. To get on the fast track to retirement, go to our products and services page to view Wells Fargo retirement accounts and the type of IRA that best suits your situation.

STEP 5: Review your goals and track your progress annually.
Read your retirement plan statements and continue to monitor your spending. Are you on target? Remember, you’re involved in a marathon, not a sprint: day-to-day fluctuations in the stock market will have little bearing on your long-term goals.

A rule of thumb
By the time you’re ready to retire, you probably won’t have the same expenses you do now. Some costs will decrease while others will increase. Many financial planning experts estimate that you may need as much as 60% to 80% of your current annual after-tax income to live on through your retirement to maintain your current lifestyle. Think about how you can trim expenses now in order to save more for the future. The sooner you start, the less painful it will be.

Tiffany Bass Bukow is the CEO & Founder of the #1 Personal Finance Website for Women and Families – www.msmoney.com. My life mission is to help people and the world thrive through creating companies that provide money, career and life skills education.

By Dr. Judith Briles

No one is born with a fear of or attitude towards money. Fears and attitudes–be they good, bad, or ugly–develop over time. No doubt, your upbringing is a major contributing factor. Past experiences–successes and failures–also play a critical role. Then there’s society–whether it comes through the media, common practices, your friends, family, or even the government.

In spite of a myriad of influences, however, let’s face it: you are the steward of your money–you are in charge of its destiny. So what are your fears? Being poor? Making mistakes? In my book, 10 Smart Money Moves for Women, I identify 10 financial fears, 5 of which I describe below. See where you fit in and read my next article which covers the other 5 fears.

The Fear of Being Poor
In 1985, one of USA Today’s headlines read, “Bag Lady Fears Drive Women to Stash Cash.” Not a lot has changed for many women since I clipped that gem for my “nudge” file. The #1 fear that women shared over the past year in my “$mart Money” workshops is becoming destitute when they are older.

Is being poor really a concern for today’s woman? You bet. Government statistics show that for every 100 women and men who reach 65, only two are financially independent.

How do the rest survive? By relying on relatives, the government, friends, or working until they die. What an unfortunate and seemingly unnecessary prospect for a modern society in the midst of a booming economy.

Women live longer than men. A fact that means that women are more likely to spend far more years just barely getting by than men if they don’t step into the money maze and learn how to navigate on their own. Forget about being rescued by a white knight. It’s nothing more than a media-driven myth.

The reality is that whether you are rich, poor, or in-between, the person that you are going to have to rely on the most to keep you from the poorhouse is you–your creativity, imagination, intuition, and smarts.

The Fear of Losing Money
At some point, everyone loses money–from a bad investment, inflation erosion, or a failure to act or make a decision.

Losing money is scary for anyone, but women are more fearful of losing money than men. Why? First, men typically earn more money than women do and therefore feel as if they have more to invest. Moreover, if men lose money in a bad investment, their reaction–that it can be replaced–differs from many women who may exaggerate the loss’ significance in their overall financial situation. Women are also less likely to take the more aggressive and riskier financial positions that men do. Risk-taking, in part, has to do with a man’s familiarity with money. Men, in contrast to women, are generally exposed to the subject of money early on and by the time they reach adulthood, the topic is no longer unfamiliar or intimidating.

Working with and investing money does not have to be a giant leap into the unknown. In fact, it’s wiser to start with small steps. Whether it’s putting money in a mutual fund (many funds allow you to start with as little as $100 if you commit to contributing a minimal amount on a monthly basis) or a fund for your children’s education, small amounts can build into fortunes.

The Fear of Looking Stupid
No one wants to appear or feel foolish. Yet, when it comes to money strategies and decisions, many women fear that the wrong move or outcome will serve to broadcast that they blew it and don’t know what they’re doing. Of course that doesn’t happen, but the fear can be inhibiting.

The good news about money mistakes is that they can be valuable learning opportunities after the crisis has passed. Once you become more confident in your decisions and accept that you will stumble once in a while, you will be able to assess your financial situation quickly and rationally and focus on finding solutions rather than dwelling on the mistakes.

The Fear of Talking About Money
Your upbringing will most likely play the largest role in shaping your money practices. It’s a broad generalization, but it’s also true: most women grew up in homes in which money discussions were avoided or restricted to parents only. Money may have been mentioned but rarely discussed in a positive and productive manner. As a result, women never received the necessary training and guidance about money and investing. And the practice that started within the family is then perpetuated by the woman herself: “If I don’t talk about money or acknowledge it, it won’t be a problem in my life.”

By talking about money and sharing your experiences and outcomes with other women and men, you will discover how much there is to learn and how much you have to contribute to the conversation.

The Fear of Making Mistakes and Failing
I wish I had $10 for every mistake I’ve made over the past 50 years. Although most women believe they’ve had their fair share in the mistake and failure departments, it doesn’t erase the stigma that mistakes and failures can bring.

The unsurprising truth is that mistakes happen. What you do about them is up to you: will they cripple and paralyze you? Or will you look on them as facts of life that provide learning and growth opportunities? Making money mistakes and experiencing failures won’t destroy you, but allowing yourself to get stuck mentally could cause more lasting damage. The key is to determine:

• What happened?
• What factors could you control, influence, or alter?
• What factors were out of your control?
• What did you learn from the experience, both bad and good?

For most of us, financial fears are both powerful and deep-seated. By recognizing your own fears and how they operate on you, you can begin to cut them down to size and use their force for something much more worthwhile–taking charge of your financial well-being.

Click here to read part two of Face Your Financial Fears!

Judith Briles, Ph.D. is a speaker, columnist, and award-winning author of 20 books including 10 Smart Money Moves for Women and Smart Money Moves for Kids. She can be reached at 303-627-9179 and e-mailed at DrJBriles@aol.com. Her Web site is www.briles.com.

Tiffany Bass Bukow is the CEO & Founder of the #1 Personal Finance Website for Women and Families – www.msmoney.com. My life mission is to help people and the world thrive through creating companies that provide money, career and life skills education.

CCCS provides tips for consumers about protecting their finances during divorce

There is evidence that couples’ financial problems are linked to increased levels of stress, conflict, and marital duress, as well as decreased levels of marital satisfaction (Sanchez and Gager, 2000), which clarifies the reason why financial problems are frequently cited as a major reason for divorce. Ironically, the financial problems that result from divorce may be even more severe. While it may be hard for people involved in an emotionally draining divorce to clearly think about their money, it is imperative they do. One of the most pressing concerns of newly divorced people is determining who is responsible for the repayment of debt.

According to Consumer Credit Counseling Services of the East Bay, a division of Money Management International (MMI), the first financial action after separation is to pull a copy of your credit report. You will want to review entries carefully and either close joint accounts or change them to individual accounts. Alert your secured lenders of your marital status and instruct them not to allow any changes without your permission. You may also want to “freeze” joint bank accounts or divide any funds into two individual bank accounts.

As preparation for the divorce, you and your spouse need to reach an asset settlement to be presented in court. This settlement agreement outlines how your debts and assets will be divided; it also includes plans for spousal and child support.

“To avoid future problems, it makes sense to develop a plan to pay off your debts prior to your divorce,” said Shirley Dean, education and community relations director for CCCS of the East Bay. “Remember, your divorce decree is an agreement between you and your spouse (not your creditors) on how your debts and assets will be divided. The contracts you signed with your creditors cannot be changed by the divorce decree. Whoever signed the original contract with the creditor will still be obligated to pay the debt after the divorce.”

As protection, your divorce agreement can include a clause stating that if the assigned debts are not repaid, you would be entitled to indemnification. After the fact, your only recourse may be to file contempt of court charges for failure to abide by the terms of the divorce decree. Keep in mind that still would not relieve you of your obligation on the debts.

Because divorce can be a very complex process, consider hiring a trusted financial advisor for help; be certain to ask about your advisor’s experience with divorce situations.

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About Consumer Credit Counseling Services
Consumer Credit Counseling Services (CCCS) is a non-profit, full-service credit-counseling agency, providing confidential financial guidance, counseling and debt management assistance to consumers for more than 47 years. CCCS helps consumers trim their expenses, develop a spending plan and repay debts. Counseling is available by appointment in branch offices and 24/7 by telephone and Internet. Services are available in English or Spanish. To learn more, call 800-762-2271 or visit their Web site at www.moneymanagement.org.

Tiffany Bass Bukow is the CEO & Founder of the #1 Personal Finance Website for Women and Families – www.msmoney.com. My life mission is to help people and the world thrive through creating companies that provide money, career and life skills education.

National Financial Planning Week isn’t traditionally celebrated like National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or other “special” months. There aren’t any special documentaries on television, no one wears colored ribbons, or runs in 5k charity races. We don’t even send cards to our financial advisors…

But maybe we should.

Financial planning is important. It might not save lives in a medical way, but it certainly protects lives in a financial way. That is what financial planning is all about – security. By carefully and comprehensively planning for your financial future, you can help to protect yourself, your family, and your estate against both foreseen and unforeseen events. Knowing that you have a solid financial plan to lead you into the future means that you have one less thing to worry about when scary, stressful unexpected events occur – such as medical emergencies or job losses.

Besides protecting the people, places, and things in your life, planning for your financial future also protects your goals. Having your finances in order is just one way that you can move toward your ideal lifestyle. Maybe your goal is going back to school, purchasing the home of your dreams, or going into business for yourself. An active and independent retirement is also a goal. Many people no longer feel confident that they will be able to rely on pensions or social security checks after they have retired. Most goals take more planning than just a savings account and good intentions. Financial planning involves long term strategic management…but it is worth it.

Not too many years ago, financial planning was an administrative challenge to say the least. It was difficult to see your entire financial picture across all of the often “siloed” financial vehicles of insurance, savings, investments, real estate, and trusts, among others. The paperwork, phone calls, and meetings alone could be overwhelming. Lucky for us, today’s financial advisors understand the importance of comprehensive wealth management. Like the doctor who examines his patient from head to toe before concentrating on a specific ailment, the financial advisor who can assess the entire financial picture before making specific recommendations is better able to develop and institute a successful course of action.

To streamline the paperwork and administrative work of financial planning, many of today’s best advisors turn to technology. Your advisor might provide you with a personal financial homepage that aggregates all of your financial investments, savings, accounts, etc. onto one easy-to-use web page – giving you 24/7 access to all of your financial information in just a few clicks of a mouse. Check it everyday, check it once a month, check it once a quarter, it’s up to you. The point is that it is there, organized and at your fingertips, when you need it.

So stop making excuses. Find a qualified financial advisor and put together a comprehensive plan that encompasses your entire financial picture. Then next year in the first week of October, send your advisor a thank you note for helping you to secure your future.

Edmond Walters is the Chairman and CEO of eMoney Advisor, an award-winning provider of web-based, holistic wealth planning solutions to the financial services industry. For more information, visit www.emoneyadvisor.com

Tiffany Bass Bukow is the CEO & Founder of the #1 Personal Finance Website for Women and Families – www.msmoney.com. My life mission is to help people and the world thrive through creating companies that provide money, career and life skills education.

By Kara Stefan

Most of the time, the greater the risk you assume with your investments, the greater your reward. But sometimes excess risk can lead to nothing more than just that–excess risk.

That’s why it pays to keep track of your portfolio and find out exactly which securities deliver good returns, and which are a drain on your portfolio.

By the same token, it’s often hard to compare apples to oranges. For example, whose 401(k) plan performs best, yours or your spouse’s? With various percentage holdings in different stock and fund offerings, you can never really be sure.

You could compare your rate of return; but then again there’s what’s called your risk-adjusted return. It’s equally important to know if the amount of risk your portfolio assumes yields proportionately higher returns.

Tracking on the Web
Morningstar.com offers two tools to its members who register as members for free on its Web site:

• Portfolio Manager allows investors to track, analyze, and continuously update the progress of multiple portfolios. You may use it to follow your 401(k), any investment account, or as a watchlist for investments you are considering.
• X-Ray Overview allows investors to analyze investments across 8 different screens, including Asset Allocation, Style Box Diversification, Stock Sector, Stock Type, Stock Statistics, Fees & Expenses, World Region, and Top 10 Holdings.
• Premium Service enhances the Morningstar service (for a $9.95 monthly fee) with the ability to search Morningstar’s database of 15,000 stocks and funds, and access their ‘Quicktake Reports.’

The Morningstar system helps investors stay on top of how current market conditions affect their portfolios. You can monitor changes in the value of your stocks and funds since your purchase date and study year-to-date returns at both the portfolio and individual stock level.

RiskGrades offers another tool on the Internet for portfolio tracking. It can also be found at other financial Web sites that license the technology, such as Reuters, Sharepeople, and Worth. The RiskGrades tool is free to online users, and its service helps investors put risk into perspective when evaluating their portfolios.

“In general, we’ve found that people are under invested–in other words, they don’t invest aggressively enough,” says Ethan Berman, CEO of RiskMetrics, the spin-off company from J.P. Morgan that developed the RiskGrades system.

Once you register at the RiskGrades site, you can input the market symbols and number of shares you own for each holding or mutual fund in your portfolio, and the tool does the rest. It will give each security and your portfolio a numerical risk grade between zero and 1,000–with zero indicating a no-risk portfolio.

In addition, RiskGrades now offers a measure of risk-adjusted returns for assets within a portfolio. This allows you to evaluate returns in relation to the degree of risk being taken.

“Many investors fail to understand that return is only half the equation,” Berman explains. “It’s not until return is weighed against risk that you achieve an accurate and true assessment of how your investments are performing.”

The Software Solution
If you’d prefer more in-depth portfolio tracking that can be combined with your tax and/or accounting functions, try one of the many off-the-shelf portfolio tracking software packages. Some of the most popular offerings include:

• Easy ROR (Rate of Return)-(Hamilton Software, $149): This package provides exact calculations of internal and time-weighted returns on your investment. It requires only minimal data input, including deposit, withdrawal, and optional tax or fee information.
• Investor’s Accountant-(Hamilton Software, $395): This tool tracks an unlimited number of portfolios through the one-time entry of data for prices and dividends. The software measures portfolio performance, evaluates securities and market trends, can aid you in year-round tax planning, and produces detailed accounting records and financial reports.
• Reeally!-(Mantic Software Corp., $495): At the top of the line is Reeally!, a performance measurement software that tracks all of your investments and trading activities, measures your true portfolio performance (including long and short positions and margin reserves), compares the performance of filtered slices of your portfolio over time, and handles multiple currencies for international investors.

Coming off a long bull run in the market, investors are now witnessing more market volatility than ever. That’s why it’s so important to carefully assess what you currently own in order to make informed investment decisions for the future.

Today’s technology offers many options for evaluating not only what you own today, but projecting how your portfolio will react in various market scenarios in the future. They say you can’t predict what the market is going to do, but you can prepare yourself by imagining what could happen. Accurate and proficient portfolio tracking tools allow you to do just that.

Tiffany Bass Bukow is the CEO & Founder of the #1 Personal Finance Website for Women and Families – www.msmoney.com. My life mission is to help people and the world thrive through creating companies that provide money, career and life skills education.