You’ve probably seen commercials advertising credit cards that earn 5% cash back or 5 points per dollar spent. Compared with standard cards that often earn just 1% cash back or 1 point per dollar spent, these 5x cards seem amazing. But are they? Should you get them?
In this post I’ll cover the 4 main cards that earn 5x rewards. I’ll then provide my recommendation for whether to get them. (more…)
I recently heard a story about New England quarterback Tom Brady that illustrates the importance of knowing what matters most and pursuing it. By 2005, 27-year-old Tom Brady had already won three Super Bowls. Brady was making millions of dollars. He was dating a model. He had it all. Or so you might think.
Tom Brady and his wife, supermodel Gisele Bündchen
That year 60 Minutues correspondent Steve Kroft interviewed Brady. Kroft asked him what he made of his success. This was Brady’s stunning reply: (more…)
If 18 months ago you had told me that my team would no longer need email, text messaging, or instant messaging to communicate with each other, I would have thought you were crazy. No IM, maybe. But no email and text? No way. Yet here we are, with no need of those tools anymore. And it’s all because of Slack.
In this post I’ll explain what Slack is and how my team uses it. Then I’ll share 5 reasons why I recommend it for your team, too. (more…)
While there are many ways to earn extra money on the side, the primary way to earn more is to get paid more for your work. Improving your skills is a key ingredient to getting paid more. But there are many ways to improve. The question is: which improvements are both easiest to make and likely to have the greatest impact on your ability, value to your employer, and income?
In the book Topgrading, author Bradford Smart lays out no fewer than 50 job competencies. These are 50 areas in which every employee has more or less ability. Topgrading is a book about hiring. The competencies are discussed to help an employer make a top hire.
But in reading about the competencies, I realized it could be reverse-engineered to help someone become more valuable to a current or perspective employer.
Specifically, 5 of the 50 competencies are considered by experienced Topgraders to be both highly important and easy to change. Focusing on growing in those 5 competencies presents a leveraged opportunity. They offer 5 ways to make yourself more valuable to an employer with comparative ease.
In this post I will provide a snapshot of the 50 Topgrading competencies. Then I’ll discuss how to increase your ability—and hopefully your income—through improving in the key 5. (more…)
In my last post I argued that you can save substantially on groceries—perhaps 19% or $760 per year—by having them delivered to you rather than going grocery shopping. Doing so saves a lot of time, too. But I also acknowledged that sometimes it makes more sense to shop for groceries in store. When shopping in store, there are still ways to quickly save money on groceries.
Following are 4 efficient ways to save money when shopping for groceries in the store: (more…)