Month: January 2018

It is a reality that couples disputing over money are the primary reason couples divorce. Its disappointing because there are ways to avoid these disagreements. Reducing the reasons for disputes increases the longevity of marriages. The persistent reasons for divorce over money are as follows:
Couples dont know their spouses money story
A spouse doesnt know where they are financially
Financial disloyaltyI describe the reasons couples divorce in the bullet points below:
Spouses’ dont know the money history of their partners: Whether we aware or not, all of us are a compilation of affirmative and challenging money experiences. Some money occasions are conscious and more stressful than others so acknowledge these moments. Others are unconscious and have subtle influence, so we are unaware that they are controlling our monetary choices unconsciously. The force of an individual operating subconsciously based on their money history is a sizeable situation but having two people performing from this position magnifies issues between couples. This situation creates most of the reasons couples divorce. Although it may feel uneasy, I constantly suggest that couples take time to discover and share their experiences about money from their childhood and their perception of money issues. Having this knowledge will help you see each others side and avoid detrimental confrontations that can destroy your relationship.
Spouses dont know their financial position: Knowing your cash flow is an essential step of an enthused money management system and a smart financial foundation. Yet, when couples/individuals dont know their financial standing, this area becomes agitated and overpowering. At times individuals:
Purposely mask their finances
are in a financial mess and confusion so realizing the whole financial state is an issue
havent consciously agreed on their ambitions so they use their money in different directions that dont support what the relationship is to demonstrate/Below are three reasons that complications and confrontational energy happen in a financial discussion.
Financial disloyalty: Suppressing financial expenditures and activities from your spouse can hurt the faith they have in the relationship. First, verify if financial infidelity has happened in the relationship by asking how you might affect the position of financial legitimacy in your relationship. Second, heed to your spouses ideas regarding methods to boost your financial relationship. Finally, after youve examined your actions and received your spouses ideas, its time to build a financial plan of joint objectives that reflect your financial foundation.These three scenarios above can autonomously alter a couples aptitude for a frank financial dialogue. At times, all three situations can materialize building emotional flare-ups and confusion. This is when spouses’ get quiet entirely fearful to be open because their partner may not understand what their saying or it will more arguments.

If you and your spouse are in conflict over money, my advice is to search how you can connect respectfully in a discussion. Start with the plan to grow the financial area of your relationship. Join your spouse in a conversation actively listening to what they have to say about money.

Keep in mind the above process needs time to see results. I assure you this will lead to a well-built and unwavering financial plan that guides you to a competent life of financial independence.

Learning to Thrive with Bipolar Disorder

Many of us want things to be just right, but when it crosses over to needing to be perfect all the time, it becomes an impossible ideal that can never be reached. That becomes very frustrating and exhausting. What is “perfect” anyway, is it what you believe or what someone else believes? This becomes even more exhausting if you are trying to keep up with what is perfect for someone else like your mother-in-law or maybe even your own mother. If someone else is driving you to be perfect, you need to stop letting them rule your life.

Once you have got all the other “voices” to stop pushing you to perfection, you then just need to work on yourself. Sometimes “Good Enough” is good enough. So what if you have a few spots on your dishes after they’ve been run through the dishwasher? Unless you’re having a major event or party going on, let it go, it’s good enough. So what if your house isn’t spotless and completely cleaned top to bottom? When you are in a depressed state, it’s hard to get out of bed sometimes, much less clean everything. So quit kicking yourself when you’re down. Your house doesn’t have to be perfect all the time.

What other areas in your life are striving to be “perfect”? Finances, relationships, health, education, and your job are all areas that are important , but you don’t have to strive for perfection. Perfection is only an ideal that someone has arbitrarily set for themselves. What is good enough to be satisfactory may vary from person to person, but it should not drive you to a point of hopelessness because it’s not just right. It is okay to lower your standards. You may not get the highest grade in the class, but a “B” is still a worthy grade. So what if you are not the top athlete at the gym; if you are working on your goals, then it’s good enough. If you have goals that you are working on, whether it’s just to get out of bed today and take a shower because you are depressed, or to lose 25 lbs this year, then you are already ahead of many people that aren’t moving forward in their life. And those of us who have bipolar disorder, may have to shift our goals day-by-day when we are either depressed or manic. Depression slows everything down so go easy on yourself if you are in that state. On the other hand, being manic usually has us going in 100 different directions with no real progress on any one goal. Then we get depressed again and feel overwhelmed because we have 100 different unfinished projects. Sometimes, you have to let 90% of those go and focus on the ones that really matter. But remember that you only have to work on good enough. It will make you feel better in the end to get 10 things done at good enough rather than 1 thing done at near perfection.

I hope you gained some useful insights, and for more information visit me at www.thrivingwithbipolardisorder.com

You can get my eBook at http://www.shop.thrivingwithbipolardisorder.com

Contact me at

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I wish you the best in all your pursuits.

Author: Cassandra L. Good, MA

Some days are a lot more stressful than others if you take into account everyday life aspects. Aspects like your career, your marriage or relationship, or even paying your bills on time.

Every day events certainly warrant stress relief management tactics, but every few months your stress is exponentially compounded on specific days of the year.

Here is a list of 5 of the most stressful days of the year:

#5 Thanksgiving
What could possibly be stressful about a family gathering to eat some turkey and watch some football? Hopefully, you have been through enough Thanksgivings to pick up on my sarcasm in the previous question. The turkey and football are definitely effective stress reducers in their own right, provided the Lions play a competitive game. The turkey provides a scientifically engineered excuse to skip forced family conversations and doze off for a while.

#4 Finals
For students, it’s make or break time. For parents, it signals time to prepare your home for their summer or extended return home. There is a good chance that their finals will go well and all their extensive fretting and preparation will have paid off. Just like any other stressful day or situation, there is a period of stress release expected. Do your poor, over achieving student a favor and foot the tab for a night out (given they are 21 or older of course!)

#3 January 4th
Researchers have pinpointed January 4 to be the most stressful day of the year. They say that the perfect storm of cold weather, economic gloom, and the end of Christmas cheer will leave many temporarily sad and depressed.

Judi James, a psychologist and expert in communications and body language, said:”January can be one of the most stressful times of the year between sale shopping and recovering from the excesses of the party season, which can stimulate negative behaviors such as rising tension, stress levels and blood pressure.”

#2 Tax Day
April 15th. Many of us taxpaying, ever tax write off searching adults know this day all too well. Consider yourself lucky if you or your highly accredited tax professional has decided that a return is headed your way. For those who have to scrounge up funds to meet the deadline experience a lot more stress leading up to this day. April 15th isn’t just stressful for tax payers; it takes a toll on all those involved in the process. Immediately move this day to the #1 most stressful day if it has resulted or results in an audit.

#1 Christmas
As parents, you most likely guessed this one. But even without highly expecting children to shop for, Christmas is easily the most stressful time of the year. Scouring malls and department stores looking for the latest and greatest gifts can leave you physically and emotionally exhausted.

If it isn’t finding the perfect gift to please the loved or hated one you’re shopping for, it’s the management of available cash or credit to purchase for all of those on your list. Shopping is only half of the holiday battle as you will still have to attend a “joyous” family gathering or worse yet, host the event yourself.

Custom SharePoint Designs & a well thought out SharePoint Branding effort ensures that prospects, customers, partners and vendors are always encountering the exact same corporate identity on SharePoint Websites, SharePoint Extranets & any SharePoint portals that they might have access to.

Document Collaboration via SharePoint Intranets & SharePoint Extranets

In todays work environment thats highly connected, documents created and used by multiple users, editors, and stakeholders are becoming the rule, rather than the exception. If your business needs to ensure easy channels of communication and collaboration between end-users but reduce the responsibility on administration required to support it, a SharePoint Server 2010 implementation is ideal. With the implementation, you achieve the co-authoring functionality of Microsoft Office 2010 with Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, as well as Microsoft OneNote 2010 documents on SharePoint Server 2010.

Thanks to co-authoring, collaboration of server-based documents becomes easy and your business overheads, which were earlier linked to traditional document sharing via attachments, decrease. So, if your business needs multiple users to work on the same document, you can now ensure that work is done productively without any user intruding on anothers work or locking the others out. You wont need any additional server setup to use this functionality as it is the default state for data stored in SharePoint Server 2010 implementation. Whats more, administrators can manage the sharing and collaboration functionality with the use of same tools and technologies that they have already used to manage SharePoint. This way, not much impact would be there when you decide to use SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint Portals for Project Management

Your business has got a lot of information scattered everywhere in the form of spreadsheets, documents, e-mails, presentations, and more. Most of the data is usually stored on different computers and at different locations, making it difficult to manage the same. However, with the enhanced document and record management capabilities of the SharePoint 2010 implementation, you can now manage your projects and data effectively.

SharePoint 2010 implementation allows users to put related document sets, create business specific workflows, metadata, homepage and archiving processes. So, whether your business need to manage rigid processes like regulatory submissions or deal with informal process management where teams have to merge several file types in same process, you can do all that with SharePoint 2010.

Some other features of SharePoint 2010 that will help you manage your projects include allotment of unique document id to files that make it easy to search them, easy process to rate and add notes to documents, defining rules on a folder for further routing of the document, and usage of metadata by combining structured taxonomies and keywords, among others.

Dashboards & Reports

Thanks to SharePoint 2010, you can create rich, context-driven dashboards that help you to put data and content at a place, and get an overall view of your business performance at all levels. In other words, creating business intelligence dashboards and publishing them is an easy task in SharePoint 2010 environment. You can use the Dashboard Designer, which can be launched directly from the browser, and use it to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), reports, scorecards, analytic charts and grids, filters, and dashboards.

Business Process Optimization

SharePoint 2010 has a new service architecture, multi-tenant features, and other improvements that have made it capable of handling larger volumes of content and an increased number of users as compared to its earlier version. You can reduce downtime by using its enhanced recovery and backup utilities as well as its improved support for high-availability features of SQL Server. You can analyze feature usage and find misconfigurations and other problems with the help of improved logging and log analysis tools. The considerably expanded PowerShell interface will help your business handle most administrative procedures, which in turn would encourage standardization and efficiency.

Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our expert SharePoint consultants help organizations achieve their financial and business objectives by effective using Sharepoint implementations, SharePoint branding, Sharepoint Intranets

According to “Fortune Magazine,” the third most admired company in world is Berkshire Hathaway. When we think of Berkshire Hathaway we think of its head one of the wealthiest man in the world Warren Buffett. What business principles we learn from Warren Buffett? What is his magic?

Strategic Approach

Warren is one of the best investors in the world. His approach is simple. He does not buy stocks as much as he buys businesses. He focuses on a companys value, its stock price and its risks. He looks for companies with strong brands, simple business models, a good return on equity with a lot of debt.

If the price of a firm is less than its value, Warren is interested. In doing his homework, he studies the firms competition, ignores what analysts have to say, and pays little attention to fluctuating market trends. In fact when the market is down, he believes that may the best time to buy.

Jim Collins’ Lens

Let’s start by looking at Warren from a perspective of what Jim Collins teaches in his seminal book “Good to Great.” The book was the result of Jim’s research, where he led a team in a five-year study in which they “scoured a list of 1,435 established companies to find every extraordinary case that made a leap from average results to great results.”

Jim describes the best leaders of the companies that became great as “level 5″leaders. They are ones who built “enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.” A level 5 leader is first and foremost ambitious for the cause.

Humble Style

Warrens humble style is refreshing. He has simple tastes. He doesnt wear expensive suites. He lives in the same home he bought in 1958. And, he drives his own car. Warren also is famous for how he makes fun of himself. One of his one-liners is, “I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.”

Professional Will

Warren is driven as demonstrated by his almost incomprehensible wealth. Warren looks not only for businesses that are a good deal, but he looks for leaderships who have long tenures of success in their business and who are deeply passionate for the business.

Back to Jim Collins – the Hedgehog Concept

Jim’s team came to simple but powerful conclusions. One important point they make is referred to as the “hedgehog” concept. A key to greatness is finding the intersection, referred to as the sweet spot, between your talent, passion,and economic opportunity.

When we look at Warren from the “hedgehog” framework, we find simple insights:

Passion: What are you deeply passion about?

Talent: What you can be the best in the world?

“I was wired at birth to allocate capital and lucky enough to have people around me early on-my parents and teachers and Susie [his late wife]-who helped me make the most of it,” Buffett told Carol Loomis of Fortune magazine in the June 25 issue.

Economics: What drives your economic engine?

Finding great companies and leaders and investing for the long-haul.

Warren found his passion and talent in life and focused. He became one of the most successful and richest investor in history.