While your vocation is about so much more than simply making money, your job is one of your most significant financial assets. I have my resume posted online and I regularly receive solicitations for job openings. I’ve paid attention to my site’s referral logs to see how recruiters find my resume. Almost every search includes the following keywords, and almost always they are required keywords:

+objective +education +experience

A large majority of searches also exclude the following keywords, which was a little surprising to me. Most likely these keywords are intended to exclude job listings from the search results. If you post your resume online you should take care not to use these words!

-job -career

I have also seen the following keywords and exclusions. They are less common than the above, but it is worth considering them:

• +senior +programmer
• +engineer developer
• engineer developer
• intitle:Resume OR inurl:Resume
• “application programmer” OR “application engineer”
• -sample -example
• -your -we
• -opportunities
• -apply -submit
• -tips -guidelines
• -interview
• -service

It’s possible that I’m missing other common searches because my own resume doesn’t meet the search criteria! If you are aware of other common search terms please let me know.

Tags: advice, asset, employee, employer, finance, income, job, money, personal-finance, resume, salary, tips, Vocation

Free money finance is giving away a copy of You Need a Budget Pro budgeting software. To enter you need to write a comment sharing the number one reason a person needs a budget. Here’s what I wrote:

You need a budget because building wealth is not possible without self-discipline.

A budget is an essential tool for setting goals; establishing reasonable boundaries that are necessary for meeting those goals; and measuring your performance and holding you accountable to those boundaries. If you lose ground, a budget will alert you to this fact, and you can adjust your budget to compensate. If you exceed your goals, a budget gives you some freedom to enjoy any excess you are blessed with.

A budget is an essential tool for exercising financial self-discipline!

Tags: accountability, budget, discipline, finance, giveaway, goals, money, personal-finance, self-discipline, technology, tool, wealth

Several years ago it was getting increasingly difficult to work from home (which I typically do 1-2 days per week) using dial-up internet access, and I was considering broadband service. It was much more expensive, so I was reluctant to spend money on it. But I asked my manager if my employer would reimburse broadband service — and he immediately agreed to partial reimbursement since I use it so much. As a result, we now pay less out of pocket for home broadband service than we did for dial-up.

Similarly, on three separate occasions I have indicated to my manager that the speed and memory capacity of my work-issue laptop were growing inadequate for work. Twice it was replaced on the same day with a newer model, and more recently the turnaround was a month or so.

In every case I was pleasantly surprised at the readiness, even eagerness, to make sure I had adequate tools to get my job done well. Several friends have had similar experiences, from getting their work-issue cell phones upgraded, to getting their work-issue computers upgraded or replaced.

If you have aging technology tools that you use at least in part for work purposes, consider asking your employer for an upgrade. If you are able to justify how this will help your work, you might just be surprised at how quick your employer is to respond!

Tags: broadband, budget, cell-phone, computer, dial-up, employee, employer, internet, laptop, manager, memory, money, Penny pinching, personal-finance, repair, replace, saving-money, technology, tool, upgrade, work

When it comes to saving and to giving, there is no substitute for just doing it. If you are not saving, find some way to begin right now, even if it is a very small amount. I am a Christian, and have the same conviction on giving to my local church — if you are not giving to your local church, find some way to start now. You will find that disciplining yourself in this way is very helpful — not only are you starting to work on one of your financial goals, but you are building healthy habits that will continue to serve you over the long haul.

But once you have started, I have found that the best way to continue saving and giving is to practice incremental improvements. Every time my income changes (either from a raise or due to additional withholding exemptions) I strive to increase my rates of saving and giving by an incremental amount. For example, if I am saving 6% and giving 11% of my income, when I get a raise I might adjust my saving to 7% and my giving to 12%. This means that I’m regularly growing my rates of saving and giving, but I’m doing it in a way that is relatively painless.

Of course, if you’re able to discipline yourself carefully and make more room in your budget, you should grow your rates of saving and giving at that time too. But when you earn a raise is a very natural and important time to increase your saving and giving.

Tags: budget, discipline, finance, giving, income, investment, Penny pinching, personal-finance, raise, salary, Saving, saving-money, wealth

Freemoneyfinance writes of how to pay off student loans while building wealth:

The real answer is: it depends. However as a rule of thumb, the lower the interest rate on your loans, the better off you’ll be just paying the minimum monthly payment and nothing more. Take the extra money you were going to pay on your loan and invest it instead.

Graduating from a private Christian liberal-arts school (Messiah College), my wife and I had $60,000 in student loan debt between the two of us. At first, because of some foolish spending habits and because of my introductory salary, we were barely able to cover the minimum payments. In recent years we have started to pay off our student loans at a faster rate (we are not done yet!). Our reason for doing this was mostly psychological — it is very satisfying to be getting debt out of the way. But the advice given above really is generally a wiser financial move for most graduates (depending on various factors, of course, as the article mentions), because in the long run it builds more wealth. In our case, our student loan rates are good enough that this is a wise move for us. So in the past year we have changed our strategy and are now socking away the money that we had been using to accelerate student loan payments.

Tags: Debt, equity, finance, interest, investment, money, personal-finance, psychology, salary, Saving, student-loans, tax, wealth

Tags: budget, Debt, finance, Humor, Penny pinching, personal-finance, saving-money, skit, SNL

Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad was a helpful and inspiring read for me. Among many smaller points, there were two significant points that I gleaned from the book:

1. Use creativity, ingenuity and counselors when it comes to making and investing money. Seek out ideas from other people. Brainstorm your own creative ideas. Don’t be afraid to try something new or engage in risks that you are willing to bear. Check your ideas against someone else to see if they are reasonable but don’t limit yourself to what other people are doing.
2. Take care to ensure your use of money is producing assets rather than liabilities. It is obvious that a dollar is better spent on a 3% CD than a 1% savings account, and it is better to payoff the 9% car loan first than the 5% student loan. But we need to think about more than interest rates. Is it better to put extra money into paying off your mortgage faster or to invest it elsewhere? There are many factors that go into this decision, so it’s not possible to give a rubber-stamp answer. But Kiyosaki points out that the paid-off house won’t be producing income for you — in some ways it’s even a bit of a liability, since it will continue to require upkeep. If you had invested some of that money elsewhere, it might be producing real ongoing income. Again, this observation certainly doesn’t force the decision, but it’s something that I had never considered before.

There are two things that I didn’t like:

1. Kiyosaki is very keen on real estate investment, almost to the exclusion of anything else. This is, after all, apparently how he made his own money, so that is understandable to a point. And there are legitimate reasons to invest in real estate: there are high potential profits; it is easy to obtain leverage via a mortgage so that you are potentially making a lot of money without a lot of personal money invested; there are ways to buy and sell properties without incurring taxes in for the exchange; etc. But the potential advantages of real estate investment are accompanied by their own risks and challenges. Real estate investment is not appropriate for every investor’s situation and risk tolerance.
2. My second concern is more a problem with me than the book. It is certainly appropriate to wisely plan your improvement and use of money. But as I read the book I found myself increasingly thinking about how this could be put to selfish use. As a Christian, I know that wealth is first a gift from God to be used in service to others, and second a gift from God to be personally enjoyed with an appropriately grateful heart. There is no room in either case for greed, so this is an attitude I must work to keep in check.

In general, Kiyosaki’s advice is general rather than specific. He encourages you to work to build wealth, but doesn’t provide a lot of specific ideas for how to do so. That’s fine — how you earn, spend and invest your money depends on your situation, so there is no “one size fits all” advice. But that means that reading this book is merely a start (some people have said that it is barely a start), a pep talk to get you going and encourage you to put the effort into actually doing something. I do recommend reading this book for the inspiration it serves, but it is only a beginning. Also consider other book recommendations (most of which I haven’t read) from places like freemoneyfinance and Get Rich Slowly.

Tags: asset, book, eternity, finance, greed, house, investment, liability, money, mortgage, personal-finance, Perspective, real-estate, review, rich, Rich-Dad, Robert-Kiyosaki, wealth

A year and a half ago we were paying roughly $40 per month to our local phone provider for local phone service and voice mail. On top of that, we were using prepaid calling cards for long distance service. I had long been curious about the new voice-over-IP services that provide phone service through your internet connection (see how it works). I was reluctant to switch for a long time, primarily because I doubted that the call quality would be very good (we weren’t worried about having phone service in an emergency since we had an inexpensive cell phone plan).

We decided to make the switch. We wanted to use Vonage, but at the time they were unable to “port” our phone number to their service. So we tried Earthlink trueVoice instead (very bad idea!). But by the end of our bad experience with trueVoice, Vonage was able to port our number, so we switched to them.

I’m very pleased with the results. Once we adjusted the call quality settings, we had very few problems; there are only occasional temporary glitches. We were able to keep our existing phone number, and when we travel to visit family we can even bring our phone along and set up using their internet connection. And additional services like caller ID are included for free (with our local provider we didn’t think it was worth paying extra for these services so we didn’t). Most importantly, our monthly costs including long distance have gone from $50+ to roughly $19 (we found the 500-minute plan quite sufficient for our usage). You can also save money by referring your friends to Vonage; if they sign up using your referral, you get two months of free service!

If you have a reliable high-speed internet connection, I highly recommend you try one of the voice-over-IP providers. We have had a good experience with Vonage and recommend them.

Tags: finance, Penny pinching, personal-finance, saving-money, trueVoice, voice-over-IP, Vonage

Zillow is a very neat and incredibly useful website where you can find a value estimate for many homes. Of course, for official numbers you’ll need to talk to an appraiser. But Zillow has enough real estate and property tax data, and enough smarts, that it seems to be able to make very reasonable estimates based on comparables.

I’m using Zillow right now as one gauge for when I should refinance. My wife and I bought our home using two mortgages, and between our payments, improvements we’ve done, and the growth in our home’s value, I hope to reach the magic 20% equity point in a couple of years (provided the housing market doesn’t collapse).

Check it out! I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised at your house’s value, but even if not, it’s useful information.

Tags: appraisal, appraiser, comparables, equity, finance, home, house, housing-market, mortgage, personal-finance, property, real-estate, refinance, tax, tool, value, Zillow