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

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