Household savings for a family vacation during the year is possible, through some simple measures.
Most banks have a vacation and/or holiday club where you deposit a specific amount each week depending upon how much you wish to save. For example, a Christmas club for $5.00 would yield $250.00, whereas a Holiday Club for $25.00 a week would amount to $1250.00 for the 50-week period.
In addition, you can automatically withdraw an amount from your paycheck and have it deposited to a savings account.
If you have a family budget, you may already be setting aside money for the family vacation. But there are other ways you can save throughout the year.
Here are some ideas:
* Cancel magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
* Bundle your cable, internet, and phone service.
* Call credit card companies and reduce the interest rate.
* Become more energy efficient.
* Bring lunch to work as well as a thermos of coffee.
* Instead of eating out once a week, try once a month.
* Walk to your local stores instead of driving.
* Park on side streets where there are no meters.
* Ask everyone in the family to put the change they have accumulated at the end of the day into the family jug.
If you consider how much you can save by engaging in any one of these money-saving tips, imagine how much you could save if you followed all these tips.
If you are a smoker, quit. $10.00 a pack per day or $100.00 a carton per week can pay for a fabulous vacation for the entire family.
Utilize grocery coupons whenever possible. There are a myriad of online websites devoted to discounts, printable coupons, and other savings. Comparison shop; check out consignment stores for clothes; utilize the library to take out books, DVDs, and magazines.
Money is very tight these days, and this recession is not going to get better any time soon. If you want to spend even a few days away with the family, try these ideas to begin limiting expenses and finding alternative ways to save money.
tent created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM)”.
While the majority of technology users have heard of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace (and most of us are probably guilty of using at least one of these applications, if not all) how will they integrate or influence interactions within a virtual world? 3D chat within a virtual world currently is an option in a handful of VW’s. However, will they become mainstream in the future?
Some Quick Stats:
-Twitter still continues to grow despite constant outages and other issues. In fact Nielsen reported in October 2008 that Twitter is growing as much as 343% in 12 months.
-Facebook is now growing by about 600,000 users each day.
-Blog readership has grown by over 66% in the last year.
-According to ELearning Magazine “Approximately 47% of enterprises are reportedly planning to use social networks for employee, customer and channel communications. What once was considered a productivity drain, has now moved to the mainstream of HR, Training, Sales and Service department operations. Organizations are realizing real business benefits from these new collaboration tools”.
The 3D application of Just Leap In allows you to connect to friends on Facebook. Second Life is looking to embrace social media within its platform. Are there drawbacks? Yes. Well, for one thing if one is training/ learning in a virtual world social media would not be the best device to focus on the content at hand. Most would much rather be updating their status on a social media application. “Here I sit writing a blog entry…” While collaboration should be encouraged is the integration of social networking within virtual worlds for training a must? And if so, how and to what extent?
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