Sometimes it’s hard to stay positive during tumultuous financial times. So, I thought I’d highlight at least a few good things that have resulted from the economic downturn to keep things in perspective:

* Lower gas prices

In a time where already cash strapped consumers are witnessing the evaporation of their retirement accounts and house values, a little relief at the pump will be a welcome change. Gas prices have tumbled from their July highs of $4.11 a gallon down to just under $3 in many U.S. cities, due in large part to shrinking global demand. A happy by-product of this is the negative financial impact it will have on psycho oil-rich dictators like Chavez (Venezuela) and Ahmadinejad (Iran) who are now scrambling to restructure national budget obligations. Sorry boys….looks like the energy orgy is over and it’s time to sober up. I guess this might put a damper on their record of “checkbook diplomacy”, in their efforts to sway leftist or anti-West support in cash poor, vulnerable nations.

*Global warming will slow down

Okay, so I don’t have any scientific evidence to support this claim. But, I figure, if there’s less global demand for oil (and that includes oil guzzling China), then there’s less driving/flying/manufacturing, which means less carbon emissions, which means some slight relief for the ozone layer. Well….at least we can hope, right?

* Responsible bank lending

The days of easy credit are officially over. And while this is bad for some consumers, it’s the responsible thing for banks to do (not only for their balance sheets but for the economy as a whole). If there’s anything that we’ve learned from the sub-prime debacle, is that responsible lending is a critical component for a sound economy. Banks are reverting to their old ways…that is, prudent lending practices that were prevalent before the housing frenzy spiraled out of control. Borrowers will actually have to be credit worthy (gasp!) and will be forced to save for down payments in order to buy a home (gasp, gasp).

*Americans will FINALLY recognize the value in SAVING

It’s no secret, Americans are among the worst savers on the planet and that will come back to bite many of them in the tush right now (and of course in the future). A joint survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling and MSN Money, found that Americans are largely unprepared for economic hard times–many don’t even have an emergency fund! I suspect that after we all survive this bitter dose of economic reality, many folks will learn their lessons and give serious consideration to saving for unforseen circumstances (like now) and also for their future. Sometimes it’s the negative experiences that teach us the best lessons and serve as a source of discipline and inspiration in later years.

Cathy Pareto, MBA, CFP®, AIF® is the Founder and President of Cathy Pareto & Associates, Inc. For over twelve years, Cathy has been helping financial consumers and professionals understand the world of investments and finance with a sound, but down to earth money management approach. For over a decade Cathy was a Senior Financial Advisor for another Miami based investment advisory firm, where she managed over $200 million in assets for high net worth clients and retirement plans. She has extensive experience in retirement issues, asset allocation, investment selection, investment management, education planning, estate planning coordination, and asset protection strategies. Additionally, she was an Adjunct Professor and Faculty Coordinator for the CFP® Program at Florida International University’s College of Business.

In the past 48 hours, I’ve consumed roughly 12 hours of NFL. I’ve watched as more yards got run than plays got stopped, seen a team emerge from their imminent 0-2 status to clinch a game in the final 3 minutes, and another team rebound to new heights and a 2-0 lead with their back-up quarterback after their star QB had a season-ending accident last week.

We’re only a week into the NFL’s regular season and we’ve seen our share of daring athletic feats and bone-headed moves. (The Eagles’ receiver, DeSean Jackson, is a prime example of the lethal cocktail of talent and hubris.)

People ask me why I like football. I don’t entirely get the game to be honest. I do know that a team has 4 attempts to make a play and if they can’t, they need to rethink their immediate game plan. I know there’s a ton of strategy that goes into plays, that the quarterback may not be the coach but he has to a lot of quick-thinking and improvising on the field - often singlehandedly calling the play that can make or break a moment and determine a team’s success.

And that in the end, no single person on the team is any greater than any other, star QB or not, cause it takes all of the players working together (and parking their egos aside) to make it the post-season.

As it happens, football also happens to be a ripe metaphor for a freelancer due to many common, shared parallels:

• Be The Underdog: Peyton Manning & The Colts proved to us this week that sometimes smelling repeated defeat is all you need sometimes to catapult your motivational spirit to the next level. In my own experience, my confidence is never higher then when after I’ve failed at something big-time and can find within myself that driving force to start climbing back up the hill again.
• Let The Chips Falls Where They May: This one is hard, especially when you like to plan ahead, need to know how things will play out, and if you’re like me, even Wikipedia a movie while you’re watching it to see how it all unfolds. There’s a lot to be learned through process and results-oriented people need to remind themselves of this. Just like a football game has 4 quarters, life is also cyclical with its share of ups and downs and turning points. Learn to live with them and you’ll be much happier, or so people tell me!
• Embrace The Unknown: One of the reasons I dig football so much is cause there’s a lot of taking chances which sometimes results in zany, WTF-were-you-thinking moves, but I love it all the more when people get away with “the unthinkable,” debunk the system, and make up their own set of rules as they go along. Call it the rebel in me, or simply the idealist freelancer which hopes that risk-taking moves, such as working solo, will pay off one day.
• Make Time For Pep Talks With Yourself: In football, the coach takes “time outs” to amp up his players, get them focused, energized and feeling good.  In life, we need to make time for these moments too and just as often if not more often than just once a day.  On days I feel low I tend to build my confidence back up again talking it out with friends, family, or if all else fails a giant boost of caffeine! My sister swears by lists. Create a long list of things you like about yourself or your life. #1 on my list is the fact that I have the time in my day to write a meaningful post for my blog, make a mean pot of chicken soup on a seasonably Fall day, and feel a strong sense of accomplishment by 5 PM.

As seen on the TheMomEntrepreneur, a great site for information regarding working mothers, raising kids, and running your own business.

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In The Mom Entrepreneur Online Support Group, I recently posted a topic on how to secure investment money to start or grow a business. There is a speed venture summit coming to our area hosted by the NH High Tech Council and I am considering presenting my business plan for The Mom Entrepreneur.

I asked members of the group if they had any advice. Julie Lenzer Kirk, president & CEO of Path Forward International offered the following tips:

• Know the forum, respect the forum. If you have 2 minutes, do not go over by even a second. If they give you an outline, follow it.
• Know what type of investor you’re pitching to. Angels are different than VC’s and will be listening for different things
• Be able to tell the investor how they will make their money back, how much they will make, and when.
• Focus on the problem you’re solving and monetize it if you can.
• Have a compelling elevator pitch ready and practiced. Include the market size (in $) where you can. For example, “We are targeting the 10M women entrepreneurs” is not as compelling as “We’re going after the $10B women entrepreneurs are spending on x”.

Susan Marks, CEO of Pinstripes, Inc. suggests checking out the Kaufman Foundation website. This organization is dedicated to all things entrepreneurial, and is a great resource for a wide variety of information, education, tools and connections.

Susan is both an experienced angel investor and a recipient of venture capital. She also recommends the book “Winning Angels: the 7 Fundamentals of Early Stage Investing” because it helped her think about her business plan and company from the investors perspective. “For a young company and entrepreneur, this is invaluable in shaping the message to the investor community.” Thanks to our members for their helpful information.

Traci Bisson has been a mom since February 2000 and an entrepreneur since August 2000. Eight weeks after she returned from maternity leave, the company where she had been employed for five years went out of business. She decided to try doing her own thing and failed miserably. After another year of working for two different companies (the first laid off the department she worked in and the other was showing signs of going under), she decided to try entrepreneurship again. Raising her two children and growing her company, Bisson Barcelona, has been both challenging and rewarding. Her story has been told in dozens of publications, including the Associated Press, National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB.com), Plan Ahead Get Ahead (cover story), Union Leader, The Portsmouth Herald, Our Times and Seacoast Ventures.

As seen on the TheMomEntrepreneur, a great site for information regarding working mothers, raising kids, and running your own business.

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Sometimes its 30 minutes, sometimes its two hours. It all depends on how ambitious you are in those early morning hours before the children wake. This is usually the only time I get to myself when the space around me is quiet and my kids are not machine gunning questions at me at the same time. So the 30 minutes I take for myself is sacred…that is if I can get my butt out of bed promptly at 6:30am. My night usually ends between 11:00 - 11:30pm so sometimes 6:30am can be difficult.

The tasks I try to accomplish during this time include laundry, making two lunches, checking email and packing backpacks. It amazes me how fast the time passes. If I get too caught up in email then I can not accomplish anything else and I usually end up leaving the house late. I would like to think that I am an organized person, but I am not so sure.

I talked with three other mom entrepreneurs about their precious morning time and here is what they had to say.

Heather Cabot of The Well Mom established a website that offers moms a space to gain encouragement and advice on nurturing themselves as well as everyone else they care for in their lives. Heather is another early riser whose day usually starts between 5:30 - 6:00am.

“My two-year old twins get up between 6:30 and 7:00am. A couple of days a week, I leave the house at 5:45 to go to a 6:00am spinning class. Other days, I get up at 6:00am to finish writing or answer emails. Sometimes I just make the coffee and read the newspaper before everyone gets up.”

The former ABC News anchor and correspondent admits that on days she is able to get a workout in, she feels much more relaxed. “It is amazing the transformation between walking into an exercise class bleary-eyed and emerging 50 minutes later feeling pumped and ready to start the day.”

Heather’s advice to other mom entrepreneurs is to find a way to go to bed a bit earlier (so you can still get in seven or eight hours of sleep) and start your day a little earlier. “This will help you feel more centered,” she explains.

“Obviously, it’s hard to do this every day. Sometimes my husband travels, so I can’t go to the gym in the early morning or there are times the kids are up during the night and I am fried the next morning. I think the early morning is a wonderful and guilt-free answer to carving out some me-time, a necessity for every mom.”

Mary Schulman of Snikkidy Snacks, a line of fun-to-eat organic snacks for kids made from original family recipes, also starts her day around 6:00am, but admits she is in bed no later then 10:00pm unless she has a deadline to meet for work.

The mother of two says she cannot always find the time in the morning before her kids are up so she prepares everything she needs the evening before. “I will have clothes laid out (for me and them), take a shower the night before, make it a quick breakfast or grab something for them ‘to go’,” said Mary.

The additional time Mary takes in the morning when she can, allows her to feel energized and ready to spend a morning of quality time with her children. “We like to sit and eat breakfast together. It’s as enjoyable, if not more so, than dinner time.”

Liza Lowenberg starts her day at 6:45am. She is the founder of Miles of Marketing, a consortium of hundreds of stay-at-home moms across the country who market to other moms.

Before her two young children wake, Liza takes time to exercise. “I like to do it in the morning so that I do not have to think about it for the rest of the day.” When she does not have time to exercise first thing in the morning, she finds that her routine is off. “I would always be thinking about “when can I exercise” and it takes the focus away from my children . If I can do it while they are still sleeping, then I can dedicate the whole day to them.”

Liza’s advice for other mom entrepreneurs is to take the precious quiet time that is needed so that you can dedicate the whole day to taking care of your children. “We need the time in the morning and in the evening to take care of ourselves,” said Liza.

Traci Bisson has been a mom since February 2000 and an entrepreneur since August 2000. Eight weeks after she returned from maternity leave, the company where she had been employed for five years went out of business. She decided to try doing her own thing and failed miserably. After another year of working for two different companies (the first laid off the department she worked in and the other was showing signs of going under), she decided to try entrepreneurship again. Raising her two children and growing her company, Bisson Barcelona, has been both challenging and rewarding. Her story has been told in dozens of publications, including the Associated Press, National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB.com), Plan Ahead Get Ahead (cover story), Union Leader, The Portsmouth Herald, Our Times and Seacoast Ventures.

BizzyWomen.com is a web community committed to empowering professional women, career women and business women around the globe.  We’ve recently launched and invite you to check out our great content from a wide variety of contributors: from learning from female entrepreneurs on TV, to a vibrant discussion about our female vice-presidential candidate, to the powerful women leading Generation Y, to insight into maternity leave policy in the U.S., BizzyWomen is focusing on tough issues and addressing them.

It’s an easy step to make for BW to move from merely writing about poignant issues to doing something about them.  I want to recruit you to our lending team, BizzyWomen, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world. You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.

If you join our lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you’re a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva “count” towards our team’s impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team’s collective portfolio, so our team’s overall impact will grow!

Check out the BizzyWomen lending team, and learn more about lending teams on Kiva in general, by clicking here: http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=community&action=viewTeam&team_id=703&_isc=e1eef358-ce5c-102b-ac3c-ecd46065da15.

Thanks,
Editors, BizzyWomen

Your cell phone bills may start to get cheaper. Why? Well just like traditional fixed land-line prices dropped to virtually nothing due to new technology, most notably Voice Over IP (VOIP), the same thing may very well happen to your cell phone as well. An Israeli hi-tech start-up, Spikko ltd. is set to launch a free cellular telephone service for handsets with at least 3G capabilities.

According to a report in Globes: “Each subscriber receives the company’s SpikkoPhone software and an Israeli telephone number, which is used to make calls and accumulate airtime, allowing for the placing of calls for free anywhere in the world. The service also offers video and chat services, and will soon also offer e-mail and instant messaging.”

Currently it’s available in Israel only, but the company is working on making the service available internationally. The company estimates that customers will save between 40-80% off existing bills.

It will take time for cellular prices to drop down to levels that we pay with our landlines. It’s not something that will happen overnight, but with companies like Spikko, and others trying to do similar things, I have a hunch that cellphone companies better figure out other revenue streams, like content and other value added services, because it does stand to reason that we will continue to see price erosion on airtime charges.

 Aaron Katsman is Managing Editor of the Israel Opportunity Investor newsletter. He is lead portfolio manager for the Israel Growth Portfolio and Managing Director of America Israel Investment Associates, LLC. For more information, go to www.israelnewsletter.com or call 1-888-327-6179, or email aaron@profile-financial.com.

Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com has a great article out this morning about the recent sale of DailyCandy.  A great site with some great content, I agree with Salmon that DC, with great content and a great vibe, has built a great email newsletter.  The design is top notch, extremely well designed and the right blend of

edginess.

Salmon’s belief for all those running a web business (or a business that utilizes the web channel) is that it is extremely important to turn web content into an email product.

Says Salmon:

It’s also an important reminder: if you want to make money from a website, put a lot of effort into turning your blog(s) into some kind of email product. Email reaches millions of people who never read blogs, and advertisers often adore it.

When thinking about utilizing the web to tap the power of social networks or using Sales 2.0 techniques to quickly scale your online business, email still remains one of the most powerful tools for reaching customers, selling advertising, and as we see with DailyCandy’s recently announced sale, monetizing your equity value.

Dane Carlson lists 20 Things Not to Do Before Starting A Business. While I agree with some of his points, I disagree with many others and think that if you follow them, they will either hinder the growth of your business, or get you into trouble. Dane’s point was to help entrepreneurs bootstrap, but it is important for business owners to walk the fine line between saving where possible, and spending where needed.

So let’s go through his list. I will discuss five points at a time, so let’s begin:

1. Don’t quit your day job: Disagree
   This is advice I see repeated for entrepreneurs, but it’s not necessarily good advice in all situations. If you really believe in your business and want it to grow, this is more than a full time job. Aside from the actual work ordered by clients, you have to spend a lot of time on marketing, networking, administration and more. If you don’t quit your day job, your business might not get anywhere since you won’t be able to give it the time it needs.
2. Don’t incorporate: Agree
   I think this is good advice in most situations. Unless you are involved in huge amounts of money or have an investor, incorporating is an unecessary cost and uses money which might be used better elsewhere. I recently met two young entrepreneurs who started a film-making company. They had one or two clients and had been working on very small projects. For some reason they had incorporated their business. By incorporating, they had increased their accounting fees and added many additional annual expenses to their budget, such as the need to open a business bank account (see point 3 below), and use the services of an attorney (see point 5 below).
3. Don’t get a bank account: Agree
   This is true especially in Israel. Israeli banks suck you dry, and every bank account means added fees for every little move you make. This is another reason not to incorporate (see point 2 above), since if you are incorporated you need to open a business account, and in these types of accounts the fees are even higher. In the MATI small business course, the teacher told us that we should open bank accounts for our businesses right from the beginning. I followed his advice, paid the fees for a while, and then decided to save myself some money and close the account.
4. Don’t rent an office: Agree
   If you can work from home and it doesn’t detract from your business in any way, then this is a great way to save yourself a huge expense.
5. Don’t hire an attorney: Agree
   You can generally get by with straightforward contracts with clients that you put together yourself or from templates. Unless you are involved in huge deals like mergers and acquisitions or real estate, attorneys are an unnecessary expense. This is yet another reason not to incorporate your business (see point 2 above), since to incorporate you need to hire an attorney.

Stay tuned for an analysis of Dane’s next five points: Don’t hire an accountant, Don’t get a loan, Don’t hire anyone, Don’t get a business license, and Don’t try to patent anything.

In order to maximize sales and improve marketing tactics, each small business must learn the fine art of bootstrapping. There are many ways to cut costs in order to leverage your assets. Some of these methods are complex and only gradually save money, which is fine if you have the luxury of waiting.

However, many businesses resort to bootstrapping out of urgent necessity and there are certainly ways to cut costs immediately. Below are eight bootstrapping tips that will show you quick results.

1. Switch to VoIP - Many companies are saving thousands each year by using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) providers like Skype. All phone calls are free between Skype users around the world and Skype-to-landline calls are cheaper than traditional long distance services.
2. Sell Your Unnecessary Frills - Did you get overexcited when you opened your office and purchase some unnecessary goods? If you need to free up some cash for more important ventures, then you can certainly do without your hip decorations. Sell them on eBay or Craigslist.
3. Stop Faxing Everything - Are long distance costs rising because of your constant faxing? There are cheaper alternatives, such as scanning documents and emailing them. Most companies will have no problem with receiving a PDF instead of a fax.
4. Go Easy on the Thermostat - Energy costs are hard on everyone these days, not just small business owners. While you don’t want to create a terrible work environment for your employees, there is nothing wrong with asking them to bundle up a bit in the winter and dress cooler in the summer. That way, you can be a bit more sensible with the thermostat.
5. Outsource That Open Position - If you are struggling to cut costs, then the last thing you need to do is hire more employees. Outsourcing is a preferred method of saving money for companies both small and large. Sites like Elance and Get a Freelancer are brimming with eager, virtual assistants who will save you time and money.
6. Buy Secondhand / Refurbished Goods - The fact is, you don’t need a new desk or copy machine. You can find secondhand office furniture at many stores, as well as refurbished electronics. Conduct some research beforehand, however, and make sure you are buying from a reputable source.
7. Go Open Source - There are numerous open source alternatives to the commercial software you may be considering. In case you haven’t heard, open source = free. Free is good, so find out more about open source software at osalt.com.
8. Stop Paying for Lunch - Are you the type of boss who likes to buy lunch for everyone several times a week? That ends now if you want to leverage your assets to the max. Yes, even those pizza deliveries are adding up. For those of you who run a one-person operation, the same rule applies. Stop eating out and start packing your own lunch.

Great companies have been built with very little money and efficient bootstrapping skills. Don’t be afraid to start cutting costs on a smaller scale with the above tips. You will be surprised at how much money you will save… money that can be put toward marketing, for example.

[Image from Jeff Belmonte's photostream on flickr]