The other day, I was having a conversation with a friend who works at a popular search engine company, and he was telling me about some of the idiotic ways people use their web browser. Did you know that the majority of people type in their search query straight into the URL box at the top of the browser? Did you also know that a good number of people don’t use search at all and instead just append a .com to whatever they are looking for?

Photo by Dana-2

It’s funny because as he was telling me these things, he was expecting me to look surprised and shocked but instead, I just stood there and smiled. After running our online store for the past several years, stories like this don’t faze me at all anymore. I’m well aware that there are a ton of people out there …

Many would be entrepreneurs don’t start their own venture because they are afraid of failure. And quite frankly, they have every right to be afraid. After all, we are constantly bombarded by vague sayings like “9 out of every 10 startups fail” or “chalk up your first startup as a learning experience”, or my favorite, “most relationships and marriages can’t survive a startup”. After you hear enough of these cliches, you soon start believing them.

Photo by Jeffrey Beall

The problem is that these ideals are further reinforced by the various entrepreneurship blogs out there that are telling everyone to fail early and fail hard because that is how you learn. Everywhere we turn, we are constantly reminded that statistically speaking, there is an extremely high probability that your first startup is going to die so it’s better to get that first failure out of the way.

Seriously folks…If …

This is part 1 of a 2 part series on hiring an accountant versus using Turbo Tax or Tax Cut. The second part of hiring an accountant versus using Turbo Tax or Tax Cut can be found by clicking here.

This year marks the first year that my wife and I are hiring an accountant to do our taxes for us and I’m pretty nervous about our decision. Even though I absolutely hate doing them, I’ve filed my own taxes for well over a decade now and I’ve done so because I prefer keeping my financial data private. I also like the feeling of control I get from being able to see how all of the numbers are calculated. That’s not to say that I don’t trust my accountant but while we’ve had an accountant for quite some time now, we’ve only used him as an advisor …

It has been a while since I’ve done a competitive analysis of the various shipping carriers so I thought I’d do a quick update. With the United States Postal Service jacking up their rates every 4-6 months, what used to be the most economical shipping method is now priced inline or even more expensive than some of the more reliable carriers like UPS or FedEx.

Photo By Atibens

Because there are so many different shipping variables and options to choose from, it’s difficult to make an apples to apples comparison without locking down some of the basic parameters. For the purposes of this article, I am going to assume the following.

A 14in X 12in X 3in package is being shipped cross country from California to a residence on the east coast. Incidentally, this is the same size as a USPS Medium Priority Mail Flat Rate Box.
Out of the …

In order to build wealth effectively, we all have to be frugal to a certain extent. We have to watch our spending. We have to analyze our expenditures and cut back on the fat. We have to make sacrifices to make sure that we can save enough money for college and retirement.

Photo By Edward Kimuk

Fortunately, my wife and I both share the same principles when it comes to spending money (ie. we don’t spend frivolously). Otherwise, we would be seriously screwed. But after analyzing last year’s expenses using Quicken, I feel all frugalled out. We have pretty much cut back as much as we possibly can without drastically affecting our lifestyle.

If we look closely at last years expenses, we cut spending by another 4% over the year before. We are going out to eat less thanks to my wife’s desire to …

Probably the number one question that I always get asked is “How can I earn some money on the side?” How do I find that special niche that will make me wealthy? How can I get the gears turning and make progress towards eventually becoming my own boss?

While my wife and I found the answer by opening our own online wedding linens store, I can tell you that it wasn’t easy finding our special niche and executing our business plan. It took a lot of trial and error, a lot of mistakes and a ton of perseverance to become successful. In fact without the proper guidance, my wife and I would probably still be sitting here spinning our wheels.

We wouldn’t have been able to make our goal of 100K in our first year of business if it weren’t for a bunch of books and a …

Every 2 or 3 months, I set aside a couple of hours to analyze the competitive landscape for our online wedding linens store and to see what our competitors are up to. And in most cases, it’s business as usual. Sometimes a new competitor pops up and a new one goes under. Sometimes I find some new products that I feel that our store should carry. But for the most part, things are pretty calm.

Photo by the Justified Sinner

This past week however, I noticed that one of our old competitors completely revamped their website and started slashing prices on similar products. When I told my wife about this, she seemed very concerned. After all, how could our little online store possibly compete against a store with such low prices? Unless they were purchasing their products at a much lower cost (unlikely), …