Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

The Value of Professional Conferences

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If you’ve been paying any attention to other personal finance blogs over the last week, you’ve heard a good bit about the financial blogger conference that took place in Chicago last weekend. While I don’t work full-time as a blogger, I do make money from blogging, which makes FINCON a professional conference for me.

For any professional, a conference can give you a lot of value. It doesn’t necessarily have to be value in the form of education or additional profit, either. For many, there are additional benefits to attending a professional conference.

Professional education.

Primarily, if your company is going to send you to a conference, they’ll be sending you because they believe you’ll get some educational value out of attending. The many breakout sessions are full of speeches and presentations that are designed to educate you on new and different ways to improve your business. Because of the focus of FINCON, for instance, the many speakers were mostly speaking about how we, as financial bloggers, can improve our writing and reach to provide the reader (that’s you!) with a better experience. J.D. Roth (Get Rich Slowly) gave a wonderful presentation about the power of the story. Cliff Ravenscraft (Podcast Answer Man) presented ways (and reasons) to use the power of the spoken word to reach our readers. Pat Flynn (Smart Passive Income) closed the conference with a rousing speech on being epic and providing the best content you can.

Networking.

The other, just as important, value you’ll get out of a conference is the benefit of networking with other professionals. Everyone of the attendees at one of these conferences is in the same industry as you are. They have experienced the same difficulties that you have. You can share your difficulties and accomplishments with them. Some will have overcome those same difficulties and will share how they accomplished it. Even better, through networking, you’ll make friends in the industry that you can contact after the conference is over and bounce ideas off of them. For many, the relationships created during these conferences will develop into strong professional partnerships. At FINCON, I was able to meet with many of the Yakezie. For most of us, it was the first time we were meeting in person after over a year of interaction on the Yakezie website, Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail.  We took advantage of the power of the network, and strengthened the relationship we already had.

Affirmation.

The final value that I’d like to mention is the value of the affirmation that a professional conference can provide.  If you’re in a professional position in an industry that you love, a professional conference can provide an affirmation of your chosen path.  For me, FINCON provided that.  The last thing that I wanted to do on the Monday after the conference was go back to my day job.  It’s not that I hate that job, but I love my job as a blogger. FINCON affirmed my decision to become a blogger.

Professional conferences can be exhausting.  They can even be a bit boring at times.  But, the value that they provide far exceeds the cost, both monetarily or physically.  I encourage you to find a conference in your field and attend it.  Especially so if you are a small business owner or a self-employed person.  It’s doubly important, then.  It doesn’t have to be half way around the world; for most industries, there are regional conferences all the time.  It’s worth it.  It pays off.

Have a No Spend Month This Fall to Save for Holiday Gifts

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Have you ever watched your family open up Christmas gifts while mentally calculating how much each gift cost and comparing that against the amount you have in your checking?  Have you dreaded opening the bills in January because you know the credit card statement from holiday shopping will be coming soon and you do not have the money to pay the balance in full?
When my husband and I were newly married and dirt poor, we carefully planned our Christmas purchases to fit within our meager budget.  We didn’t buy many gifts, but the ones we bought were well thought out.  When we went to visit my mom over the holidays, she kept telling us about all of the presents she had bought for us.  There were so many under the tree!  Because we are the only people to buy gifts for my mom because my dad has passed, we started feeling guilty about the few presents we bought her.  Noticing that her bathroom towels were worn, we went out Christmas Eve night and bought her an entire set of 6 new bath towels including hand towels and washcloths with money we did not have.  Then we bought her some jewelry.  We charged everything knowing we didn’t have the money to pay.

50mm HBWOn Christmas morning, she delighted in her presents.  When we opened ours, we were in for a surprise.  She too had bought a few well thought out gifts for us.  But all those extra gifts we found under the tree?  They were leftover t-shirts from a conference some of the professors had hosted at the university where she works.  She bought them for a $1 each.  Each time I or my husband opened another one of those presents that contained a t-shirt, I felt sick.  We had put ourselves in debt to try to make sure our presents were equal to hers, but she had stuck to her financial budget by giving us “filler” presents.  There had been no need to buy those extra gifts on Christmas Eve. . .

We worked like crazy selling off things in our apartment such as textbooks we no longer used so that we could pay off those credit cards used to buy the extra gifts.  On our meager salary, it took us until March.  Thankfully, we have learned our lesson.

If you don’t want to spend the months after Christmas worrying how you will pay off the new debt you just acquired, consider having a no spend month now.  We still have nearly three months until Christmas.  Pick a month such as October or November to drastically reduce your spending.

If you normally spend $1000 a month on groceries, gas, entertainment, eating out, toiletries, etc., decide how much you want to cut that amount.  Maybe you will decide that in October you will only spend $500 a month.  To make up the difference, perhaps you won’t eat out or you will eat from the pantry to use up those groceries that have been on the shelf for awhile.  Maybe you will do something for free as a family rather than catching the latest movie.

By reducing your spending for just 4 weeks, you will be able to come up with a good amount for your holiday gift giving.  If you normally spend $1000, but only spend $500 of that in October, you now have $500 saved for holiday gift buying.  Yes, you sacrifice now, but it will be well worth it when you know that every present under the tree has been paid for.  Best of all, there is no reason to dread the bills in January.  Isn’t that a great way to start the new year?

photo credit: kevin dooley

The Wealth Cure

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The Wealth Cure

By: Hill Harper

When you first see the image of who Hill Harper is (He’s an actor on CSI:N.Y.), you assume that this is just another book by a celebrity to boost his status and pad his wallet.  What you get when you read this book, however, is another thing entirely.  Not only is this not a book that Harper had someone write for him and then published using his name, it’s a thought provoking book that happens to be about wealth.  If you’ve read many books on money and wealth, you know that a majority of them are dry, boring books to read.  Harper manages to take what is a very important message about the role that wealth plays in our lives and melds it into a very engrossing story about life, success, and the real worth of wealth in our lives.

He starts the story with a short few paragraphs setting up the story for the rest of the book.  Recently diagnosed with cancer, he decided to take a train from Los Angeles to Chicago.  The rest of the story is about the revelations he came to while riding the train.  It’s a wonderful book that really cuts to the core of what wealth really is, and how, so often, we pervert it into something entirely different.

This is a book about life, and how the way we treat our wealth, build our wealth, and live our lives really can make a difference, not only in our life, but in the life of others.  I would highly recommend reading it, especially if you find yourself struggling with the role that money plays in your life.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for free as a review copy.