One of the strangest things for me to learn in my adult life has been the concept of landscaping designs.  Having grown up in apartment buildings all of my life, I had never had the responsibility or opportunity to learn about plants or yard care.

So, when I moved out on my own into a duplex that had grass, and a yard, I just didn’t know what to do.  I rushed down to the library, and searched for as many lantana care guides as I could find – at least I knew that those were the types of plants we had in our yard.

Now, many years later, I have a better grasp on gardening and I now am able to come up with my own landscaping design ideas.

Not bad for a kid who didn’t know how to mow the grass or water plants, right?

It may seem a little strange, but I take my insurance broker out for lunch once per year.  Now, it isn’t that we are truly great friends by any means, but it gives us the opportunity to talk in private about the lower cheap car insurance rate that I qualify for each year.

The reason that I qualify for a reduced rate every year is the fact that I own a number of vehicles that are all insured through the same firm.  Even though I pay a bit more for my classic car insurance compared to if I went to the competition, they are happy to give me cheap auto insurance on my other two vehicles.

Needless to say, I think that my insurance broker loves the fact that I take her out once per year – I guess it is just my way of saying thank you to her.

Since we will be starting to heavily focus on property investing, I thought that it was time to get a better team together.  Sure, we had our real estate agent, lawyer, and accountant, but I thought that we needed some specialists as well.

You see, we are looking at a pretty diverse set of commercial and residential properties that are in a slight state of disrepair, and we want to make sure that we know what it is going to cost to do the renovations before we buy.  Most of the building we are looking at need new roofs, so we have hired a specialist in rubber roofing RI, flat roofing RI and commercial roofing RI.

We will be looking at these properties the first day of next week, so I have arranged that our whole team will be available to be there.

One of the things that I think most of us experience is the fact that even though we grew up with money, we really don’t know much about it.  If you look at what is taught in schools, we learn how to add money, subtract money, figure out the taxes and that’s about it.

Unfortunately, this lack of financial intelligence hurts most of us later on in life.  In fact, most of us don’t truly learn about money until we are in financial trouble.  It is very much like you waiting until after you jump out of the plane to try and figure out how to use your parachute.

This can be clearly seen with the popularity of poor credit debt consolidation loans, books on how to reduce credit card debt and the advance of debt diet plans.  We treat these options as Band-Aid solutions instead of being a little more proactive and learning how to use your money effectively before we are in trouble.

What I would suggest is that you take the time to learn how money works and how you can make it work for you before you run into financial difficulty.  If you do this, you’ll be on the road to becoming financially intelligent.

One of the great things about the Internet is that there are so many more conveniences provided to you in the comfort of your own home or business.  Instead of having to run out to the store to pick up employment documents, you can just go online, order them, and print them off.

In order to find websites that provide business forms that are ready to be printed, a simple search will suffice.  In fact, there are websites for pretty much every country that cater to the business owner and their needs.

For example, if you are trying to create HR policies for your company and don’t know where to start, you can order a sample online which will give you a good basis to work from.

Some say that running a business is very difficult, but with so many resources at your fingertips, it really is not that hard of all.

One of the best ways to find a great place for cheap holidays and I found this by asking my friends where they have gone for their holidays.  They seem to be very happy to share their experiences with you and since they don’t receive a commission for referring you to a particular place, I find that they give you an honest review of the trips that they have taken.

A great example would be the suggestion for my friend Pete to take advantage of the cheap flights to Turkey that are always available online.  For the past couple of years, he has taken his family to Icmeler Turkey to enjoy a quiet vacation on the beach.

As it turns out, from the friends of the talk to let go to travel agents, it is rare that they ever mention Turkey at all.  But after doing some research online, I found that what Pete had said about his experiences at Icmeler were shared by many other people that have travel there.

So if you’re thinking of going on a trip, I would suggest asking your friends where they have had great holiday experiences.  Not only will the they give you great ideas, they will give you unbiased reviews as well.

For the past three years, we’ve been operating a booth at a traveling wedding show selling wedding cufflinks.  It has been an interesting business venture that has been very profitable for us and has offered us agreed standard of living.

I still find it strange that no one else is competing with us in this highly lucrative industry.  If I were to let you know what our markup is on each sale, chances are you’d be doing what we are doing too.

We sell a lot of designer cufflinks in cities where the show was held in more affluent areas.  In these instances, our customers usually more concerned with appearance than price.  This is radically different than what we sell in most other centers as the engravable cufflinks that we carry are usually the favorite.

We will be selling the business in a couple of years so that we can settle down and raise a family but it has been a great ride.  There’s just something nice about having a "paid vacation" and I know that I will miss this freedom someday.

I remember the day that I first called to get some Disney ticket information. We were thinking about going on a Disney Cruise and I wanted some information about it, even though we were not, at that point, completely serious about going.

I was told that with the cruise package, we would also get WDW Hopper tickets, so the family could enjoy a day at the theme park. I knew that my kids would be all for that and I asked if they could please send us some more info about it.

They sent me a whole bunch of brochures and once the kids saw them, it was all they talked about. We decided that we had better make this a reality and once we figured out what the whole trip was going to cost, we started a strict budget that would allow us to go by Christmas.

It was wonderful and I feel like we are all so much closer as a family, having enjoyed the memories that we made together.