Canadian Association of Movers: A 10-Point Plan for a Summer Move!
The most important way that CAM can assist is in helping to FIND A REPUTABLE MOVER – a mover who will provide professional moving services as agreed in the estimate, subscribes to CAM's code of ethics, meets CAM's business standards and commits to …
Read more on SYS-CON Media (press release)
Summer jobs are entrepreneurship practice
Entrepreneurship is the engine that drives economic growth in our communities, and a summer job mowing lawns or baby-sitting is a great way for teens to get experience running their own business, building their work ethic, and setting goals. Growing up …
Read more on Hillsboro Star-Journal
WHERE HAVE I SEEN THIS?
05.04 – Open Mic with Rob Dye The Sunday night event is THE place to find musicians congregating, hanging out, trying new ideas, cutting up on some classics and generally enjoying one of the MUST events for Jersey Shore music fans. … The Small …
Read more on redbankgreen
Sewing becomes a cool hobby again
… a bad thing. During a time when many businesses were struggling, Lisa Stevens doubled the size of her quilt store to offer a wider selection of sewing machines, fabric, instructional books and expanded classroom space to accommodate more customers …
Read more on Sun-Sentinel
9 Made-Up Languages from Books
All writers play with language in one way or another, but this business of inventing imaginary dialects is a particular kind of game which can be played by writers attempting to imagine, not just the feelings and relationships of characters, but the …
Read more on Huffington Post
For parents and students summertime is a time of vacations, no school, and great weather – generally an all around good time to kick back and relax. If you have a college bound student anytime in the next few years, there are some real opportunities that you are going to waste if you don’t do some active planning during the school break.
First, you should be clear that if you do not have a large six figure investment account set aside for college, if somehow the last 16 or 17 years flew by as did your good intentions for saving for your child’s education, then you are in need of “short-term” college planning. While this planning will even work for parents with kids already in college, ideally we like to see moms and dads of sophomores and juniors. I am always amazed when I get the question from the parents of Freshmen, Sophomores and Juniors if it is too soon to come see us for planning. My standard response is “I wish you would have come in 10 years ago- NO, IT IS NEVER TOO SOON!”
There is income planning, asset planning, and college aid profiling that can be done if you start today. With every passing day the opportunities for increasing financial aid may be passing you by. Summer time is the best time for parents of sophomores and juniors to be preparing for the strategies as many of these things need to be wrapped up before you base financial year starts.
Summer is also a great time to put your kids to work. If you have the opportunity to receive financial aid (if you don’t know, you better find out and DON’T ASSUME) your child can earn up to $ 2577 without negatively affecting your financial aid. If you are a Category III and will not qualify for financial aid, there are no limits on what the student may earn. Having your child earn money to pay for their incidental expenses is a great way to have them participate in this major expense you are about to incur for their future. Having some “skin” in the game may be a good way to see the importance of this nest step of their academic career. Use the 50-50 rule (or some derivation) which allows them to keep half for spending money today and half gets saved for college. This also instills wonderful saving disciplines that will last a lifetime.
This is also a good time for juniors to review test scores and academic short comings. Increasing SAT and ACT scores by even a couple of points can open up admissions to schools that may be out of reach with current scores. More schools mean more opportunity to find financial aid. There are great companies around that specialize in helping students improve their SAT and ACT test taking skills. It may be money well spent.
If working is not in your child’s summer plans, then volunteering should be. Remember schools are looking at the complete student picture, not just their academic prowess. Volunteering can certainly add value to a college application and may possibly give you opportunities for additional aid.
As you can see, while summertime is a great time to enjoy, it is also a great time to get your college planning in gear. Don’t let this time pass by without doing anything, because as you know, it will before you know it!
Sending children to college is a major life transition for families. For many it will be the most expensive time of their lives and if not handled properly, could cost them their retirement. Remember, you shouldn’t have to choose between your child’s college and your retirement.
Scott Moffitt is the President and CEO of Summit Financial Group, Inc. and Summit College Funding. He is one of the nation’s authority on short term college planning. You may visit his web site at http://www.summitohio.com
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) April 30, 2013
With summer fast approaching, video producers and advertisers are currently putting together warm weather themed projects. RoyaltyFreeKings.com, a music licensing website, has put together a variety of collections aimed at companies in need of upbeat, fun and beach themed music.
‘Summer Fun’, ‘Laidback Acoustic’ ‘Sports’, ‘Surf’ and ‘Road Trip’ are just a handful of a range of royalty-free albums put together with such projects in mind. These summer themed albums consist of upbeat pop rock, surf rock, reggae, funk, acoustic and uplifting orchestral tracks. All these fun and energetic tracks are available individually at RoyaltyFreeKings.com as well.
This year brought about a recent new milestone for RoyaltyFreeKings.com: 1,000,000 plays through their demo player (powered by SoundCloud.com). In their first year of operation, RoyaltyFreeKings.com has become known throughout the world as a source of quality music. Traffic to the website and sales of the library’s downloadable background music have steadily increased each month as producers from every corner of the world have learned of the music licensing website, and the strict quality control that runs through the entire catalog.
In addition to this significant milestone, RoyaltyFreeKings.com recently clocked up over 50,000 downloads of their free tracks, which are available to anyone with a budget under US$ 250,000.
Wedding video producers have been the of focus of RoyaltyFreeKings.com’s attention of late. With over 2 million weddings each year in just the USA alone, the 40 billion dollar wedding industry has grown to include thousands of independent videographers and editors whose primary work is producing wedding videos and photo montages. Music licensing website RoyaltyFreeKings.com has amassed a collection of music aimed squarely at these wedding video producers, with dozens of heartfelt instrumental tracks designed for montages, and live renditions of wedding classics, such as: the Wedding March and Pachebel’s Canon for traditional use within wedding ceremonies.
With wedding season just around the corner, RoyaltyFreeKings.com offers several hand picked albums of royalty-free wedding music, including: Weddings & Romance volumes 1 and 2, three diverse “Drama – Light” albums and two “Laidback Acoustic” guitar albums. As with all the music found on the site, every track has been handpicked for quality and maximum emotional impact.
In addition to the music for wedding videos offered at RoyaltyFreeKings.com, over 1000 tracks covering a wide range of genres are available for immediate download.
In recent months, RoyaltyFreeKings.com has been busy with major under-the-hood updates in preparation for a steady stream of new royalty-free albums and tracks. The considerable addition to the catalog includes a eclectic selection of new albums, including western film music, solo piano and epic orchestral trailer music, all aimed primarily at independent producers.
Several new releases include: ‘Wild Wild West’; a royalty-free western music album featuring sweeping orchestral film music and brooding western acoustic soundscapes, ‘Moody Piano’; solo royalty-free piano tracks aimed at independent dramatic films and perfect as music for a documentary; and ‘Epic Worlds 3’; modern royalty-free epic music designed for use in trailers and promos.
Alongside the new tracks and albums, a wide selection of free-to-use production tracks is also available to anyone working with a low to medium budget (US$ 250,000 or less per project). The music is immediately downloadable and ready to use. This complimentary background music section has proved to be very popular with students, educators and charities around the world. The range of styles and genres in the music given away by RoyaltyFreeKings.com include: epic dramatic orchestral, ambient piano, jazz, comedy, rock and suspense tension.
The mission of RoyaltyFreeKings.com since launching in 2012 has been to make searching for background music for video production incredibly easy and streamlined. The crowd-sourcing business model (where anyone can upload music), like that used by many competing royalty-free websites, has the benefit of a rapid expansion of content. The downside is that with so many tracks being uploaded, the catalog easily gets bloated with mediocre music that does little to enhance a project, whether it’s a commercial, wedding video, film or webisode. Producers looking through these crowd-sourcing music licensing websites have to spend significant time sifting through vast collections to find something they’d actually want to use, or worse – settle for something inferior just because they don’t have the time to continue searching.
By hand picking each track, RoyaltyFreeKings.com only allows in music that meets a strict standard of musicality and production value. The growing catalog of hand picked tracks at RoyaltyFreeKings.com is produced by an international group of over fifty award winning composers, including a pop rock producer in Finland, a Nashville based folk and country expert, a heavy metal specialist in Italy, a renowned acoustic guitar artist in Hawaii and several well known trailer music composers. The high quality of tracks from these composers results is a streamlined shopping experience where producers can find, purchase and download the music they need within just a few minutes.
A guiding principle for RoyaltyFreeKings.com is fair treatment of their content suppliers. The composers who provide the carefully vetted music are given an equal share of the sales, before any discounts a customer might receive. This is in sharp contrast to many of its competitors, some of whom are offering far less – 40%, 35%, or in some cases just 30% of the sales to composers.
Seller Summer School: Get Your Small Business Social, with Paul Armstrong, Head of Social, Mindshare. Paul helps us all understand easy ways to get your smal…