How to be Rich, Happy and Free from Scams

Also known as AMEX, American Express is easily one of the most recognized names in the world of credit cards. Even though many people have Visa or MasterCard credit cards, they are still interested in AMEX. With Visa, MasterCard, and AMEX being the most popular and preferred types of credit cards, they are all great although there are also differences between them as well. Both Visa and MasterCard are methods of payment. Both will allow different businesses to accept credit card payments using their systems. Neither of the two issue credit cards on their own behalf, instead they rely on banks throughout the world to issue the credit cards for them, provide the credit, and then charge the interest. Your credit card bill goes to the bank, as Visa or MasterCard doesn’t see any of it. AMEX on the other hand, is very different. American Express has their own payment system, and they also issue their credit cards directly to consumers. Unlike Visa and MasterCard, AMEX runs the entire ...

Rebates have become increasingly popular in the last few years on a lot of items and certainly on electronic items and computers. Rebates of $20, $50 or $100 are not uncommon. I’ve even seen items advertised as “free after rebate”. Do these rebates come under the heading of “too good to be true”? Some of them do and there are “catches” to watch out for but if you are careful, rebates can help you get some really good deals. The way a rebate works is that you pay the listed price for an item then mail in a form and the bar code to the manufacturer and they send you a refund thus reducing the price of what you paid for the item except with a time delay of several weeks. Rule #1. Rebates from reputable companies are usually just fine. You can be pretty sure you will get the promised rebate from Best Buy, Amazon or Dell but you should probably not count on getting one from a company you’ve never heard of. If you really want the product and are OK with paying the price listed then buy it bu...

When you decide to have an opt-in list, it is not just a matter of sending your subscribers your promotional newsletters or catalogs. There are many things to consider in avoiding many complications. While there are so many ways you can make people subscribe to your list, there are also some things you must do to avoid subscribers from wanting to get off from your list. Aside from that, you also want to avoid any problems with the law and your internet service provider or ISP. There are now many laws and rules that are applied to help protect the privacy of the internet users from spamming and unwanted mails. With the popularity of the electronic mail as a medium for marketing because of the low cost, many company’s have seized the opportunity and have flooded many people’s e-mail accounts with promotional mail. But, with an opt-in list, you avoid this annoyance because people subscribe to the list; they want to receive the newsletters and promotional materials. They have consented to ...

The ideal world of affiliate marketing does not require having your won website, dealing with customers, refunds, product development and maintenance. This is one of the easiest ways of launching into an online business and earning more profits. Assuming you are already into an affiliate program, what would be the next thing you would want to do? Double, or even triple, your commissions, right? How do you do that? Here are some powerful tips on how to boost your affiliate program commissions overnight. 1. Know the best program and products to promote. Obviously, you would want to promote a program that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time. There are several factors to consider in selecting such a program. Choose the ones that have a generous commission structure. Have products that fit in with your target audience. And that has a solid track record of paying their affiliate easily and on time. If you cannot seem to increase your investments, dum...

If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the “geniuses” of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box. The ones who have been there and done it have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and is continuously doing so. Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings. 1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically becaus...

By Anne Fisher, FORTUNE senior writer Dear Annie: For the first time in my (16-year) working life, I dread coming to the office in the morning. It's gotten so bad that I can't sleep Sunday nights, and I think I might be getting an ulcer. Why? I took what I expected would be a great job - at least the pay is great - about a year ago, and since then I've felt more and more out of place. My boss keeps giving me tasks that an entry-level hire, without half my experience, could do. He has also stopped including me in meetings where important decisions are made about my department's activities. (All my peers are invited.) To top it off, most of my colleagues have been avoiding me ever since an incident a few weeks ago when I questioned a practice that seemed to cheat one of our clients, and I'm starting to think I should have swallowed my ethics and kept quiet. I don't want to look like a job hopper, but I'm not sure how much longer I can stand working here. What...

by By Jonathan Clements provided by When recession rules, cash is king. It's tough to figure out where the economy is headed, and some folks think today's biggest risk is inflation , not recession. Still, in trimming the federal-funds rate last week, the Federal Reserve noted that "the tightening of credit conditions" could "restrain economic growth." Indeed, the signs are ominous. August's jobs data were notably dismal, with nonfarm payrolls shrinking by 4,000, instead of the 112,000 job increase expected by Wall Street . Americans are getting squeezed by tumbling home prices, rising mortgage payments and $80-a-barrel oil, and all this could cut into consumer spending. If the economy turns sluggish, it will be rough on those who lose their jobs, while offering buying opportunities to those still employed. But either way, there's one thing you'll want -- and that's access to cash. • Taking advantage. A mountain of cash would, of cours...

The reckless are getting relief from Bernanke while the prudent are paying the price, argues Fortune's Allan Sloan. FORTUNE Magazine By Allan Sloan, Fortune senior-editor-at-large (Fortune Magazine) -- One of the core principles of the U.S. medical profession is the Hippocratic oath, the most famous part of which is "Do no harm." It's too bad that the governors of the Federal Reserve Board don't have to take such a pledge when they assume office, because their recent interest rate cut has done a lot of harm to those of us who've managed our finances prudently. Even though the Fed's stated reason for cutting short-term interest rates by half a point was to help keep the economy from falling into recession, anyone who's been paying attention knows that a major motivation - if not the major motivation - was to try to calm the turbulence that has been roiling the markets since August. The players in the biggest trouble, of course, were the ones who'd t...

Laura Bruce The Fed rate cut isn't a signal to completely rejigger your portfolio but it can be an opportunity to consider investments that generally perform better as interest rates drop. While lower rates often mean lower borrowing costs for businesses, a continually declining rate environment may mean that the economy is so soft that businesses aren't doing well, unemployment is rising and consumers are cutting back on purchases. A portfolio that does well in those times may look bit different from one that does well when the economy is performing better. A few changes may be all your portfolio needs to keep it in the green. We asked two portfolio managers for some ideas that do-it-yourselfers can consider when reviewing their portfolios. Where to invest now Bryant Evans: In his own wordsBryant Evans is a portfolio manager with Cozad Asset Management in Champaign, Ill. He specializes in high-yield stock portfolios. There are two very important things to keep in mind. You kno...

Courtesy of EmailCashPro! Join EmailCashPro now! The Best Paid to Read Emails on the Internet! And...you know what? It's totally FREE to join! Recently, I heard a story from a self-made multimillionaire. The moral of the story is profound. I hope you can learn something from it. Here's the story...... A sage challenged his students with a question. The question is "Assuming that you have piece of land full of weed, propose what you would do to get rid of the weed." One student suggested to pull out the weed by hand. One said use a shovel is faster. Another said why not we just burn the weed. "The answers are all wrong," said the sage. "The answer is to farm the land." The moral of the story...... We all face problems everyday. Problems are just like weed. They will grow regardless of how you remove them. When facing problems, most people will think of ways to solve the problem, just like the sage's students who pro...

Answer these questions truthfully: 1.) Does your spouse or partner complain that you spend too much money? 2.) Are you surprised each month when your credit card bill arrives at how much more you charged than you thought you had? 3.) Do you have more shoes and clothes in your closet than you could ever possibly wear? 4.) Do you own every new gadget before it has time to collect dust on a retailer’s shelf? 5.) Do you buy things you didn’t know you wanted until you saw them on display in a store? If you answered “yes” to any two of the above questions, you are an impulse spender and indulge yourself in retail therapy. This is not a good thing. It will prevent you from saving for the important things like a house, a new car, a vacation or retirement. You must set some financial goals and resist spending money on items that really don’t matter in the long run. Impulse spending will not only put a strain on your finances but your relationships, as well. To overcome the proble...

On the Internet, it is very possible to make money without selling any product. One way of doing so is through starting your own eZine, also known as an electronic newsletter. In a nutshell, you send out your eZine issues on a periodical basis to your subscribers. The good part is that you have a flexible choice in automating the process of sending out your eZine issues for you or manually sending them on a periodical basis. As an eZine publisher, not only can you easily achieve the benefits a conventional newsletter publisher enjoys without having to chop down several trees in the process, you can easily and conveniently spread your marketing influence and expertise to your base of subscribers from the shoes of an ordinary individual. In other words, you do not have to invest in expensive printing equipment, brick and mortar business, and hiring staff just to run your own newsletter publication, resulting in a lot of time, money and effort saved. Basically, all you need to start your ...

Every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. Sometimes they think it is a magic formula that is readily available for them. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It is just good marketing practices that have been proven over years of hard work and dedication. There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online. What are these three tactics? 1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more. Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them. Als...

Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoo’s takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena. To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted. Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume t...

To know why Adsense is essential for your content sites is to know first how this works. The concept is really simple, if you think about it. The publisher or the webmaster inserts a java script into a certain website. Each time the page is accessed, the java script will pull advertisements from the Adsense program. The ads that are targeted should therefore be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying the search engine for the click. The search engine is the one handling all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display content-sensitive and targeted ads without having the hassle to solicit advertisers, collect funds, monitor the clicks and statistics which could be a time-consuming task in itself. It seems that there is never a shortage of advertisers in the program from which the search engine pul...

by Ben Stein Now for some vital news about what to do differently with your investments, as we may or may not be sliding into a recession. In a word, buy (and keep buying) broad indexes of foreign and domestic common stocks. Lunch Is on the Gunslingers Here's why. Unless you're a short-term trader -- in which case you shouldn't pay much attention to my words at all -- you're looking for how your results will be in 10 or 20 years. Your results will be better if you have an entry point at which your cost is low. Your cost will be lower if stocks have been hammered by short-term traders selling out of panic because of a recession. That's one of the few "free lunches" -- as my investment guru pal Phil DeMuth calls them -- you get from the stock market . If short-term traders allow you to buy stocks at a discount, thank them, take a polite bow, and go out and buy. The short-term trader will bail out of stocks if there's higher unemployment, temporarily lowe...

by Robert Kiyosaki As you know, in early August of this year the Dow dropped nearly 400 points. Within hours, I received phone calls from producers at Fox News, CNN, and Bloomberg asking for my perspective on the near-crash. The first question they asked was, "Are you still investing?" I answered, "Yes." In fact, I told them that on August 9 my wife, Kim, and I closed on a $17 million apartment complex in Tulsa and were quite happy with the investment. Their next question was, "Do you think the Federal Reserve should intervene to save the economy by dropping interest rates?" My reply then as well as now: "No. This is a capitalist system, not a communist one. Anyone who expects the government to bail them out every time their greed and stupidity causes them to lose money is being foolish." Winners and Losers While this sounds harsh (and it is), I explained that the hedge funders, private equity players, and those with other portfolios losing mo...

By Nichole L. TorresSara Wilson Making a million is a milestone--the defining moment of success for many entrepreneurs and an attainable goal for those tapped into today's hottest trends. Entrepreneurs are keeping their fingers on the pulse of what's hot in today's marketplace. They are the trendsetters, the pioneers, the ones to watch as they lead the pack, followed closely by franchisors poised to capitalize on winning ideas and spread concepts nationwide. Already dreaming about living the good life as a millionaire? We've compiled the most lucrative trends across seven industries. But keep in mind that regardless of the route you choose--whether it's going solo or buying a franchise--arriving at your first million in sales will require persistence, strategy and, in most cases, multiple locations. And in case you doubt it's doable, we got the scoop from savvy entrepreneurs who went from zero to a million. Fountain of Youth With the first baby boomers starting ...