Great financial tips to ensure you make more dollar

Shopping when you’re hungry can lead to disaster. Either you spend too much, fail to get the food you came for – or both. Though you went to the store for a week’s worth of meals and with the best intentions, you’ll arrive home with a bag of oatmeal, a trunk full of gelato and the ingredients for an exotic french feast you’ve been wanting to make ever since you saw that film…unless you make a list. A list will save you.

Shopping for a house is no different. Though you may have been dreaming of your new home for years before you start looking, it’s a good idea to get your thoughts down on paper. Think of it as drawing up a contract with yourself. Because when you’re feeling pressured by market conditions, your spouse, price fluctuations or “once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” you can lose your head and jump on the first thing you want.

Of course, drawing up a truly useful list when it comes to buying a home is far more complex than making a grocery list. So to get you headed in the right direction, here are several things to consider when you start putting pen to paper:

Location, Location, Location: This one is the big one. Where you live affects where your children go to school, where you work (or don’t), the length of your commute, whether or not you can walk to the store when you need a loaf of bread and whether or not that bread is fresh-baked. The location of your home will also have the biggest impact on what it’s worth in years to come. So get ready to take a good hard look at where you’re willing to live (or not) because it will have the single biggest impact on your day-to-day life.

House Size: Yes, size matters. What’s the biggest house you’d want to maintain? The bigger your space, the more care it demands and the more costly it is to heat and maintain. On the other hand, what’s the smallest house you could live in comfortably with your family? Though you may only need a single bedroom for sleeping, are you both homebodies that will be tripping over each other in a tiny house? What about an office?

Lot Size: Of course cramped quarters can always be expanded if your lot is big enough so you should also consider how much land you need. Would a semi-detatched home suit you? What about a garden? Are you a farmer at heart that needs to grow their own beans or are you over it and looking for someone else to mow the lawn? Find out what your parameters are on either end of the scale for both house and lot size. Mull this over carefully and never budge!

Architecture: Face the facts – you can’t turn a Victorian mansion into a cool mid-century rancher and you can make a log cabin into a cute French provincial. The architecture of a building is what it is and if it’s not what you’re looking for, it won’t really work out between you two. There’s nothing worse than 1970 split-level home with fake scrollwork and a gabled addition. Ick. So include architecture in your list as well.

Privacy: Are you the kind of person who likes to leave all your curtains open? Do you avoid your neighbours or do you rush outside when they’re in the yard? Do you like to practice your drumming at midnight? How much privacy and seclusion you need or don’t need is important to your day to day life. Even houses in the city can have private yards and cleverly laid out lots, so if privacy is important to you – put it on the list.

Needs and Wants: It’s important to prioritize these when you’re looking for a home because as you shop for a home you’ll be presented with whole worlds of possibilities. Do you need a bathroom for your teenagers? A garage? A fence? Do you want a workshop? A fireplace? A sauna? Hardwood floors? Write them all down and then put them in order, most important to least important, to help keep things in perspective while you look.

Making the list doesn’t have to be hard, but it will take at least an hour or two. Every minute you spend will be worth it though. Once you’re done, you’ll be better prepared to sort through the myriad of housing choices available to you. You’ll also be able to clearly tell your REALTOR exactly what you’re looking for so they can help you find it!

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More than $117 billion passed hands from Internet shoppers to Internet vendors in 2004, according to the statistical research firm comScore. Thats billion, with a B. Compared to the year before, the figure represents a whopping 24 percent increase in sales. Compared to the early 1990s, when the Web was a questionable commercial venture, todays $117 billion is proof-positive that the Web is the full-fledged money-making machine. It seems to be a big enough pie that any merchant with a Web site can cut out his heaping slice.

Not so fast. As any merchant whos tried to take a bite out of the Internet will tell you, turning a profit online is not as simple as throwing a few pages together. Professional Web sites cost big bucks for design, consultation, and upkeep. Either you have to hire a full-time editor or technician to manage your Web store, or you need to pay three-digit hourly rates to contract Web professionals. Then you have to face fees for Web hosting, broadband access, and IT maintenance.

Even after you expend all of this capital and launch your Web site, youre still not guaranteed anything. Your site will only be one among millions, if not billions. Yes, thats billions with a B again. The Internet, after all, is like a clear sky on a dark night. How can you expect a customer to pick your star out from among all of the others that shimmer for their attention?

On the Web youll quickly learn that attracting your clienteleand building your Internet-based businessis just as tough as it was when you first started your brick-and-mortar shop. It takes smart investing, creative marketing, a little luck, and a lot more know-how.

Whats great about the business side of the Web, however, is that your old-fashioned know-how translates quite well on the Web. A great example is the timeless merchant adage: Location, location, location. This saying holds true on the Web, too. You can place your stores site in a spot on the Web where no one will discover you, or you could position it on a busy corner on the Internet.

One such spot are online classified sites. These sites provide similar services as you would get from a newspaper classified. Sellers can place ads online that describe a particular product for sale. Buyers browse these ads and contact sellers when theyre interested. Online classifieds, though, are far more dynamic. They allow a merchant to display dozens, if not hundreds, of their goods with pictures and descriptions. And believe it or not, some online classified sites allow you to do this for free. Yes, thats free with an F.

The benefits dont stop there. As a merchant on a classified site, you can enjoy:

A store that never closes. Your goods are for sale 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The Internet never turns off.

A mall of online shoppers. Think of a classified site as a virtual shopping mall, with your grouping of ads under your own virtual storefront. By having a storefront, this allows you to have your own web page and listings, under the umbrella of the classified site.

A chain reaction of shopping. Real shoppers go to a mall to visit one store, but often they end up browsing through all of the stores in the mall. The same is true of virtual shoppers. Even when they visit a classified site looking for one particular thing, theyre likely to spill over to your storefront out of curiosity. At the very least, it leads to advertising for your store; at best, business.

An advantage over pure Web merchants. Your classified site will pit you against wily online vendors who only sell their wares on the Web. This is where your brick-and-mortar business comes in handy. Its proven that shoppers seem to trust online merchants that have a real address and a real store somewhere.

A solution to the intricacies of the Internet. Many classified sites can help with setting up your ads and with designing your storefront, providing you with instant IT IQ. For your buyers, the sites offer the security that Web shoppers demand to protect them from identify theft and fraud.

As mentioned before, many classified sites charge absolutely nothing for all of these benefits. The listings, the shopping traffic, the sense of business community, the advertisingyou receive all of these perks for free. Oh, and dont forget your piece of the $117 billion dollar pie.

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