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.

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.

Quick and Easy Passive Income Ideas

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Building passive income streams can be hard work.  They usually take a significant amount of work and/or money to set up before they can really become a full-fledged passive income stream.  It’s part of the argument over whether they really are “passive” or not.  Obviously, as with anything, the more work or money you put into your passive income ideas the better the resulting passive income streams will be.  But, when you’re first getting started, there are several ways you can set up some small passive income streams that will provide with different forms of passive income.

Here’s a few passive income ideas.

  • deposit money with passive income ideasBlogging – As a blogger, myself, this one is one of the first ones I usually suggest.  To be sure, it’s not for everyone, but it can set up a rather nice passive income stream.  Blogging is work, but a well set up blog, with some content, could eventually be left alone to collect traffic, and Google adsense checks.  The initial work is a bit heavier, but the maintenance while setting it up can be as little as a few hours a week.
  • Cash Back Cards – Some might argue that this isn’t really a passive income stream, but I think that it can be.  Using a tax free cash back card to pay for bills/things that you would normally buy anyways makes the cash back an added bonus.  The only added work is to immediately pay the balance for the things that you’ve bought, and the cash back becomes an extra stream of income that you earned by buying things you would have anyways.  I have a coworker that does this and makes $500-$600 a year.
  • Peer-to-peer lending – I’ve written before about my portfolio on LendingClub, and how, with very minimal maintenance, I’m slowly building a passive income stream that earns me money.  As my portfolio grows, and I reinvest the interest, the interest income from the portfolio grows with it.  Eventually, if I keep with it, I could have a compound interest passive income machine, built with less than $20 and 20 minutes a month.

Those are just a few quick and easy passive income ideas to build passive income streams.  They don’t require a lot of work to get started and maintain, but they will provide for extra income that you can use to build them further, or to help beat broke.
photo credit: alancleaver_2000