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 …

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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 …

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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), …

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Things are finally settling down a little bit in my household with our newborn. I’m getting used to the lack of sleep and the incessant crying. I’m getting used to multitasking while taking care of the kids. In fact, I wrote my last post while standing up and bouncing my son in my sling! In any case, now that I have somewhat of a routine, my writing schedule should slowly revert back to normal.

In any case, it has been a while since I’ve answered questions. Usually, I’m pretty good about responding to email but lately, I’ve been dropping a lot of things on the floor in order to catch up on rest. But without further ado, here are the topics for today.

These first two sets of questions are related so I’m lumping the answers into one.

i am in the process of importing from thailand …

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I recently spent some time working with Adsense on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com so I thought I’d share with you some of the optimizations I’ve made with Google ads on this blog. As many of you may have noticed, this blog makes part of its revenues from Adsense ads which can be found directly above and below the content. But depending on how you arrived at this site, you may not have noticed the ads at all.

Because the income I make from Adsense ad clicks is directly related to the conversion rate of the people seeing the ads, it is to my benefit to only show these ads to interested parties. If too many ad impressions are shown but do not lead to conversions, Google will reduce the payout per click for my entire site. This phenomenon is know as “smart pricing”. In this case of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, the …

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Many would be entrepreneurs hesitate to start their own business because they think it is too risky from a monetary perspective. In fact, most people don’t think starting a business is even worth trying unless they can come up with a grand slam profitable idea. Of course profitability is an extremely important factor with any business, but what if I were to tell you that you could save a decent amount of money every year with your business while only making a small profit or none at all?

Photo by Chasing Fun

That’s right! Most people don’t consider the tax savings involved in running a business. Most people don’t realize that having a day job is one of the worst ways to save on taxes because Uncle Sam takes a huge chunk out of your paycheck BEFORE you pay for anything. On the …

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As many of you know, my wife and I recently gave birth to our second child Kyle. It’s only been about a month but we’ve already discovered that taking care of Kyle has been drastically different from taking care of our first child. For one thing, we are much more confident this time around. We know what we are doing. We aren’t afraid of minor issues and we can usually recognize when something is truly wrong versus just a normal phase of childhood.

We are also much more proficient at reading our baby’s signals and figuring out what needs to be done. Because we have our own “baby care system” in place so to speak, it’s especially interesting because we are now more keenly aware of how hospitals, books and friends influence us into thinking that certain methods are the right and only way of doing …

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Your website could be the most beautiful site in the world but it does you no good if it takes forever to load. Let’s face it. People are impatient and a slow website prevents potential customers from completing their purchase. When I go online shopping, I expect pages to load at worst within 5-10 seconds. Any longer than that and I get antsy or I leave the store altogether. Sure, some people may be more patient than I am but why take the chance? Play it safe and make your business website as fast as possible.

Photo By Meddygarnet

Before you begin however, the first thing you need to determine is how fast is fast enough? This extent of your website optimizations largely depends on the analytics and demographics of your web visitors. For example, 3 years ago when my wife and I …

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