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How much does it really cost you to live in a particular region of the world?

You may be appalled to discover some individuals are able to live on $24,000 a year or less. You may think they are living in poverty until you conduct a cost of living comparison. It is very possible that they are living in a location that offers a low cost for homes, vehicles, daycare, groceries, and other necessities. Due to the lower cost of everything they are easily able to live comfortably on their $2,000 per month income.

It can be tricky trying to complete a cost of living comparison on your own. There are too many variables to factor in. There are plenty of tools online though that quickly complete the comparison for you. All you need to do is select two areas that you want to compare and the computer will do the rest of it for you. These cost of living comparison tools are offered free of charge.

If you are considering relocating for work, retirement, or other reasons completing a cost of living comparison is a good idea. You may quickly discover that you simply can’t afford to live in some of the areas you were considering. The grass isn’t always greener somewhere else even if you will be earning a great deal more of money.

In many instances you will find that even though you will be earning more money you won’t have any more of it to spend on anything else. Even in your own area you may be shocked at the cost of living. I know just four hours away from me homes cost three times as much as they do where I live. When we plan a trip that direction I know it is going to cost more for food and hotels. I also fill up on gas before I get there to save money.

Taking the time to conduct cost of living comparisons can help you to make informed choices about where you want to reside. You can use this information to your advantage because you want to live in an area that is affordable for you and your family. It is shocking that there are people out there earning triple digits annually and they still struggle financially to meet their basic needs.

Motivational Tool - Self-Help Quotes

 Staying motivated is an important part of any successful self help program. You may not have the support or encouragement you need from other sources so providing that for yourself is important. Many websites, calendars, and books offer self help quotes that can be helpful and many of them can be funny as well.

When it comes to the issue of the best self help quotes you will find quite a controversial debate erupting. This is because everyone has had different events take place in their life and the self help quotes that are going to reflect those events will be different. What you feel is the very best self help quote you have ever read may not mean anything to me based on my own individual circumstances.

That is the value of self help – while the concepts can be incorporated for everyone they are incorporated differently for people based on their needs. Therefore, you can’t write a book and tell people exactly how to handle a particular issue in their life. All you can do is layout the different tools and let them take what they will .

Another way of looking at it is to think about a buffet at your favorite restaurant. While everyone will have access to the same items the plate of food they have served at the end will be very different. Some of them will have a few of the same food items but even then in different amounts. Think of self help quotes as food for thought that a person picks up as they go through the buffet of life.

It is a good idea to write down the self help quotes that you find particularly helpful. This way you can refer back to them when you find you are having a hard time staying on track. It is easier to look back at those you know are effective than to search for one that will work when you are feeling like you are regressing into old patterns of behavior. Write these self help quotes in a notebook or on index cards and keep a couple of them with you at all times. They can offer you the support and motivation you need to get though any circumstance.

Bob Love’s childhood in rural Louisiana wasn’t easy. He ran away from an abusive father at age 8, then lived with his grandmother as the youngest of the 16 children and grandchildren she was raising in her tiny home. They were poor. And on top of everything, young Bob stuttered—sometimes so severely that he couldn’t articulate a single word.

To help him escape children’s vicious taunts and the generally bleak outlook of the family’s situation, Bob’s grandmother suggested this antidote: Get a dream and hang on to it.

So the boy fantasized about being a basketball star. His initial setup required some resourcefulness: a coat hanger stapled to his grandmother’s house for the basket, and a sock stuffed with grass and other socks for the ball. But he took his dream seriously and hung on to it until, against all odds, he became a three-time NBA All-Star. Love played 11 seasons—eight of them with the Bulls, where he ranked second on their all-time scoring list with 12,623 points. And then the dream came to an abrupt halt. Love hurt his back and after surgery his doctors told him his playing days were over.

Not only did Love’s career leave him; so did his ability to walk properly, and so did his wife (taking with her nearly everything they owned). The only thing that remained with Love was his stutter, and a refusal to give up.

He learned to live around his back pain, but his stutter prevented him from getting anything but menial jobs. He finally landed a position bussing tables for $4.45 an hour at a Nordstrom restaurant. And instead of children taunting him about his stutter, he heard a new breed of unintentionally hurtful remarks from customers: “Hey, that’s Bob Love! He used to be a great basketball player. What a shame.”

But just as he’d done as a boy, Love persevered. He decided that if he was going to be a busboy, he was going to be the best one around. His diligence paid off when one of Nordstrom’s owners took an interest in his career development. John Nordstrom paid for Love’s speech therapy, a move that cleared the path for the former basketball star’s second climb to success—this time toward the unlikely position of company spokesperson. Then the Bulls organization caught wind of Love’s new skills and called him with the offer to be their director of community affairs, which he accepted.

Today the former stutterer and NBA All-Star is one of the top motivational speakers on the circuit. He gives hundreds of speeches and presentations each year, many of them to teens about the importance of education and overcoming adversity. He encourages others to rewrite their life stories by telling them how he rewrote his own. How does he do it? It’s easy—he just speaks from his heart.

“All my life I dreamed and prayed to be able to communicate normally with people. I would have given up everything else in my life to do it.”
—Bob Love

Express Gratitude, Renew Your Faith, Take Action

ok, Stephen Pierce rocks! - he has made a post at his DTAlpha Talk Back Blog about what Napoleon Hill believed to be the greatest asset - FAITH. Make your decision today, renew your faith. This decision alone will allow you to use applied faith for the attainment of whatever you desire in life.

About Applied Faith from the Napoleon Hill Foundation website

• Faith is awareness of, belief in, and harmonizing with the universal powers.
• Faith is a state of mind which must be active not passive, to be useful in achieving lasting success.
• Close the door to fear behind you and you will quickly see the door of faith open before you.
• Fear is nothing more than a state of mind, which is subject to your own direction and control.
• Faith will not bring you what you desire, but it will show you the way to go after it for yourself.

Instructions For Life…

• Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
• When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
• Follow the three R’s:  Respect for self, Respect for others and Responsibility for all your actions.
•  Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
• Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
• Don’t let a little dispute injure a great relationship.
• When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
• Spend some time alone every day.
• Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
• Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
• Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
• A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
• In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
• Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.
• Be gentle with the earth.
• Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
• Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
• Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
• Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Traffic Machines - SEO Software & Free Website Visitors System

 Bishop Anders, search engine genius, has created 26 little traffic machines that are making folks lots of money and driving floods of free, tragted traffic to their websites and affiliate pages. This program is worthy of a second look and he also offers up a boat load of bonus material.

Here’s what some of the people who are using their software are saying:

"This will create a tsunami of traffic and subscribers!" - Rick Macaulay

"Ran it through the software once and now the site gets hits every day." - Wallace Schempp

"More unique visitors in one day than in 6 months using traditional methods!" - Sky Benson

"…a few days later I started to see more traffic hitting my websites and more comments left on my blogs!" - Marc Sibille

"Within 2 months they were all on the front page of all the major search engines for many different keywords." - Floyd King

"It gets me listed in minutes. I use this software to launch every campaign." - Clifton Boston

"I have never had as much success with any other software as I have with yours. In just one day I managed to make 2 sales of a big ticket item" - Patrick Bankay

"This software is revolutionary in how fast it got my websites ranked in the major search engines!" - Lamar Owens

"Using your software I was able to double my views almost overnight!" - Marcus

Be sure to check it out at www.trafficmachines.com

Wired Magazine’s Free! Article is clever and thought provoking! The article says that all markets will go to free as marginal costs of creating the service fall to zero, zilch, nada. 

Wired Magazine Says… 

The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

Read  >>> Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business and  the share with us any examples of "free business" showing up in your life.

What can we learn from the terrible news coming out of Big Spring, Texas today?

It makes me wonder about oil refinery safety and begs the question…What can businesses (especially oil refineries) do to prevent incidents like this from happening?

Although there are still plenty of questions left unanswered about what caused the the Big Spring, Texas oil refinery explosion, it is clear that the potential for significant loss to business and life occurs through fires in the workplace every year. Some past examples like; Abbeystead, HMS Glasgow and BP Grangemouth can’t be ignored. Although it appears as though this recent explosion in Big Spring, Texas did not result in a signifcant loss of life, What if it wasn’t a holiday, how many more workers would have been injured?

Whether large or small, fire causes personal suffering, damage to facilities, communities, equipment and buildings, and loss of business. There are two excellent books for business owners and risk managers to consider. The first book is written by Norman Thompson, Fire Hazards in Industry. It is suitable for those with little or no experience in fire safety and empowers staff to begin developing their own fire risk assessment. The second book, Handbook of Fire & Explosion Protection Engineering Principles for Oil, Gas, Chemical, & Related Facilities is more of a handbook but has decent content specifically related to those in the oil, gas and chemical plants.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of those effected by the Big Spring, Texas explosion.

Related Oil Refinery Explosion Articles

OAOA - Big Spring explosion

Associated Press - Explosion at Texas Oil Refinery Hurts 1

KFDM News - Explosion at Big Spring Refinery Felt Miles Away

Recommended Reading

Largest Ever Beef Recall - Linked with School Lunches

The Depertment of Agriculture issued the largest ever beef recall in the United States, determining that 143 million pounds of beef was unfit for human consumption because of inspection violations. In the released statement by Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer, he said, “Because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection FSIS has determined them to be unfit for human food and the company is conducting a recall.” The beef products that were recalled ar stated to come from the Westland, King Meat Co., Regal and Hallmark Meat Packing Labels.

The Los Angeles Times reported…

It was not immediately clear where the meat products are, but the USDA said that some Westland meat products were purchased for federal food and nutrition programs. The agency placed a Jan. 30 hold on all Westland products in federal outlets, including the National School Lunch Program, the Emergency Food Assistance Program and the Food Assistance Program on Indian Reservations, USDA officials said Sunday. 

So what does this all mean to you and waht can you do to protect yourself now and in the future?

• Grow Your Own.
• Try to Eat Seasonally 
• Join a CSA and spend some time on this site http://www.eatwild.org to find farmers in your area. 
• Andrew Weil M.D. recommends eating only organic beef. See Worried About Mad Cow Disease? 
• Check out this great video about diet, the environment and animal cruelty.

Related News Articles

The following products are subject to recall. They include boxes. of mechanically tenderized steaks and ground beef of varying weights. …
www.fsis.usda.gov/PDF/Recall_023_2007_Release.pdf

A company voluntarily has recalled nearly 96000 pounds of ground beef products after two people were sickened, possibly by E. coli bacteria, …
www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/health/chi-beef_26nov26,1,3441512.story

A California meat supplier once again expanded a beef recall Saturday to include a total of 5.7 million pounds of both fresh and frozen …
www.foxbusiness.com/latest-news/article/beef-recall-expands-57-million-pounds-e-coli_279916_1.html

Stephen Pierce just outlined the 3 ways to make money online. The video is only seven minutes long but definitely worth viewing - if only to serve as a reminder about keeping things simple and focusing on already proven ways to make money online.

In this video Stephen Pierce covers the following strategies:

• Pay Per Click
• Pay Per Lead
• Pay Per Sale

All effective strategies in their own right but when you combine them into one - that’s when you have the opportunity to earn real money online.

Check out the 3 Ways To Make Money Online - by Stephen Pierce