Protect Your Purchases: Free Inventory Software
After our wedding, one of the financial to-do’s* was consolidate insurance. When the agent asked me if I could ballpark the replacement cost of everything we were insuring I jokingly responded – somewhere between $100 and $100,000 should cover it.
Unless you live in a hurricane zone or have a taste for the exquisite, property insurance doesn’t regularly cross our minds. Once you own a home it becomes more of a consideration, but people still fall short in estimating the true value of what they actually own.
Starting out, we have very little, and often discount those items. Seems silly to insure our used futon doesn’t it? Maybe this ties into the disposal mindset we treat our possessions with, but I think it has a lot more to do with lack of documentation.
There’s tons of suggestions for tracking our property from maintaining binders of original receipts to making video documentaries of your residence, but I’ve absolutely fallen in love with this FREE software solution – What Your Own Home Inventory.
From the program itself…
This software will enable you to create a room-by-room inventory of your home. Having an up-to-date home inventory will help you to:
- Purchase enough insurance to replace the things you own
- Settle insurance claims faster
- Substantiate losses for your income tax return
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3 Strategies To Envision Your Way To Debt Freedom
Quite fittingly, the newest book I’ve started – Generation Earn – mentioned Digerati Life under the “Job Juggling” chapter for Gia’s accomplishment in turning her part-time hobby into a full-time gig.
A well-known personal finance site that writes about smart money moves, Digerati Life’s offer to write a guest post was a much welcomed email. Enjoy the post!
Vision is defined as the ability to see. In another definition, vision is defined as foresight, or the ability to see beyond the obvious and beyond the circumstances. According to Dr. Myles Munroe, a motivational speaker, “vision is the source and hope of life.” And is “the greatest gift ever given to mankind.”
That sounds nice and maybe even a little over the top, granted that this is a description that’s offered by an evangelist (it’s his job to inspire, after all). But let’s look at the message here: what does vision have to do with gaining freedom from debt? Would vision be able to eliminate it? Well, you won’t be crediting vision for paying your bills. But thanks to this, you may be empowered to think clearly and to stay on track when pursuing your debt elimination efforts.
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Money Crashers Personal Finance Blog Rankings
With the recent LoveDrop promotion, I figured we might as well keep the theme of promoting others (a la Yakezie).
My buddy over at MoneyCrashers, Andrew shot me an email a while back about their new Top PF Blogs tool they recently launched. There’s plenty of other ranking systems out there already, so what makes this one any different?
We formulated a unique algorithm that factors in statistics like FeedBurner subscribers, Twitter followers, Alexa rank, Compete rank, Technorati authority, Google PageRank, number of inbound links according to Yahoo, SEOmoz rank, and SEMRush organic search value and then calculates a weighted score based on all of the data. You’ll find that by accounting for all of these factors, the list is very accurate in ranking all of the top blogs.
At the time of the correspondence, I was a lowly #322. He tried to offset this with the fact that the list contained a lot of heavy-hitting, big-name blogs… but I wasn’t buying it being the competitive person I am. There’s been a lot of changes going on to the site, so it’s given me something to work towards improving. At the time of writing, I’ve soared up to #265 so it appears their algorithm is working just fine! 
Interested in a little more information, I asked Andrew to expand on the idea behind the ranking methodology.
As for how the rankings work, we don’t want to give away too much as you mentioned, mainly because we don’t want people trying to game the system (which is why we created it to begin with i.e. Alexa). But basically it’s a weighted average of the various different metrics you see on the list as well as a few others we included in the backend. They’re weighted differently depending on what we thought were the most relevant and important, and we’re actually still experimenting with the algorithm to try and make it as accurate as possible. It’s really tough putting numbers on something as subjective as the “best blogs”, but I think we can get pretty close.
Drop Some Money Love with LoveDrop
A regular reader of Budgets Are Sexy, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know the man behind the site – J Money. As everyone knows he’s quite the character, but he’s also a very genuine person.
He truly cares about personal finance. He’s always working on side projected and looking for ways to help others learn about & manage their money. He pinged me about a recent one he’s uber-excited about so I figured I’d share it with my own readers:
LOVE DROP
Teaming up with the social movement ItStartsWith.Us, he and Nate St. Pierre are on a warpath to start giving back NOW. No bailout proposals, political red tape, or misappropriated funds – just plain and simple helping others.
A micro-giving campaign, the idea is based on the participating collective changing the lives of one family every month with donations directly from the site.
“The idea is that if everyone gave just $1 or $2 to a pot, we could turn around and directly make an impact on the lives of those close to our hearts. It’s not a replacement for volunteering or any other charitable things we’re doing, but more of an extra way to help someone out financially. Check it out and let us know what you think!
