Earth From Heaven by hamedsaber

One of the main considerations in reinventing yourself is to prepare yourself financially. Take Away the Worry offers the following quiz for preparing yourself financially.

“Take this quiz to how prepared you are financially to make a change:

1. Do I have cash reserves in a savings account that equals at least three month’s of my essential living expenses?
2. Do I know how much my monthly essential living expenses are? Do I set aside time every day or every few days to monitor my checking accounts and pay bills?
3. Do I keep my credit card balances at zero?
4. Do I enjoy my money without having to go into debt to purchase things I desire?
5. If I had to fly across country, could I purchase the tickets without having to charge them to my credit card?
6. Could I live on 60 percent of my current include for the next couple of months?
7. Do I regularly check my credit report and know my credit score?
8. Do I consistently save for the future?”

“If you find yourself answering “no” to two or more of the above, you may want to look for a temporary income source as you work on reinventing yourself. It doesn’t have to be big and it doesn’t have to be steady. Save this income for retirement purposes and try to live on your earned income alone.”

I am calling this post financial freedom because I have allowed poverty thinking to dominate my life. I grew up in a household that used money as the battleground. Both parents used money for emotional needs. So I guess I chose at a young age to fear making money and being secure financially. Consequently, I have always struggled to keep myself living at a poverty level. I’ve come to believe that one of my basic concepts about myself has been that I didn’t deserve to be content and secure. I know that money alone is not the answer to anything. But constantly struggling about money is very tiring on the mind, body and soul.

Some quick links for financial help or ideas:

25 Essential Books About Money: Financial Wisdom from Your Public Library

Are Trolls Ruining Social Media?

http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/2009/06/your-own-personal-money-stress-test.html

Gardening for Health, Wealth, and Independence

Gracamayas-rojas by Junctions

Excerpt from one of today’s quick links–thechangingblog.com–

CHANGE might be required if:

• • You got the first job you could find out of college, and you’ve never felt passionate about it
  • Your health (mental or physical) is suffering because of your job
  • You’ve found a passion which, if only you’d known about it years ago, you’d have followed as a career.

GROWTH might be required if:

• • You know the work your company does is important, but your role is getting boring
  • You’re finding it hard to get on with your colleagues
  • You’d like to step up to the next level, within the same company

Arianna Huffington–The Huffington Post: When Will Dick Cheney’s Tower of Lies Finally Come Tumbling Down on Him?

Will Learning the Skills of Well-Being Help Us Grow Up?

New Spin on Why Women Are Pickier in Live–It May Be Because Men Typically Initiate Relationships

Can Smart Goals Make You Weathy?

Women’s Mental Health Hit Hard by Recession

The Difference Between Change and Growth–And Knowing Which You Need

Robert Scoble We’re Shipping Today: The Road to Building 43

What Really Prompts the Dog’s “Guilty Look”?

Internet-Based Therapy Effective in Treating Depression

3 Ridiculously Cheap, High=Quality Companies

Buddhists Return From Four-Year Retreat on Isle of Arran

Hate AT&T?  New iPhone, New Gripes About AT&T

NBC Executive Not Happy With Heidi, Spencer

Blue and Gold Macaw by Ralph and Jenny

New York Times–U.S. Inquiry Into Hiring at High-Tech Companies “The exact focus of the inquiry is unclear, but the people familiar with it said Justice Department lawyers appeared to be looking into whether the companies involved agreed to not actively recruit employees from each other.”

CNET News–Report: Social Networking Up 83 Percent for U.S. “Facebook enjoys the top spot among social networks, with people having spent a total of 13.9 billion minutes on the service in April of this year, 700 percent more than in April 2008, Nielsen said. Minutes spent on Twitter soared a whopping 3,712 percent to almost 300 million, versus around 7.8 million from the same month a year ago.”

Self Help Daily–Relax, For the Love of Your Brain cells, Relax! “Stress is the leading cause of mental decline.  I realize I just typed the same sentence twice, but I think it deserved twice the attention.  Here, according to Dr. Sears, is the reason why stress leads to mental decline:  When we feel stressed, our body produces the hormone cortisol.  In small to moderate amounts, it isn’t that big a deal.  Bothersome, yes, but nothing to panic over.  However, in larger amounts, get this:  IT BECOMES TOXIC TO YOUR BRAIN CELLS.  Toxic!”

The Business Insider: Silicon Alley Insider–Stephen Colbert Takes Over Newsweek “Stephen Colbert will guest edit the next issue of Newsweek. This is the first time anyone has ever guest edited the magazine in its 76 year history. We don’t think he’ll hold true to Meacham’s dream of “provocative (but not partisan) arguments,” but he’ll definitely bring a “unique voice.”

Stay N’ Alive–”With everyone up in arms over how Twitter will monetize and when it will happen, there has been one obvious missing link from the start.  Twitter has never had control over how Tweets get to the users.  They themselves have admitted the API gets used much more than their own Twitter.com site gets used, showing, to me, that there is a way, currently, Twitter could be monetizing.  Twitter has made it clear they do not intend to advertise through Tweets, which would almost certainly be rejected by their current user-base, already annoyed by the abundance of spam on the site.  What Twitter could do however, that is assuming they have control over the main methods users receive Tweets, aka their desktop clients, is insert ads into such a desktop client and their own website, unobtrusive to users.  Users will probably not even care at such ad placement, considering Google gets away with it, Yahoo and Microsoft do within their own search products.”