Category: Money Talk

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Economy, Money Talk

How Startups are key to the economic recovery

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Despite the promise brought by the latest round of successful IPOs and rallying public markets, the news continues to be filled with headlines around the possibility of a “false recovery.” Europe’s continent-wide recession and expanding debt issues, rising oil and gasoline prices, an only-modest improvement in the unemployment rate, and the “moderate” growth predicted by the Fed continue to leave people feeling uneasy about the state of the economy. With the underlying and systemic issues still present in the financial sector, some even believe that we could see something akin to the recession of 2008 happen all over again.

But there is one segment that remains very bullish about the future of the economy and where signs of improved growth and economic stability can be found. This “hope” for our economy is in the entrepreneurs who start small businesses — the innovators and dreamers who believe that against all odds they can build something better — create something from nothing, and drive change in the world…

Continue reading… “How Startups are key to the economic recovery”

Breakthrough Thinking, Business, Current Events, Economy, Historical Perspectives, Money Talk

Crowdtilt Launches To Become The “Kickstarter For Any Group”

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Kickstarter has spawned a whole new generation of funding potential.

Inherently, we like doing things in groups, as it makes our experiences more social. It’s not about what we’re doing so much as who we’re doing it with that makes our experiences enjoyable. Group messaging took off two years ago, overrunning SXSW, as a better way to keep groups of people engaged; Kickstarter has grown like a week thanks to the power of the crowd lending legs to fledgling projects that need quick capital to get off the ground.

A new startup launching today called Crowdtilt is taking a page out of Kickstarter’s book, riffing on “crowdfunding,” but instead choosing to call itself “groupfunding” or a “Kickstarter for groups of friends.”

Continue reading… “Crowdtilt Launches To Become The “Kickstarter For Any Group””

Analysis, Business, Economy, Latest Trend, Money Talk

8 debt options to finance your small business startup: part 1

credit-cards

Credit cards are the most common form of financing for small business startups.

There are eight solutions to financing your startup with debt.  When you are talking about debt options, think of loans and lines of credit that you pay back to a lender.  We are not looking at any equity solutions such as angel investors, venture capital, etc.  But nothing is easy these days and if you have damaged credit or you’re looking for several hundred thousand dollars it’s much less likely to happen purely with debt.

Continue reading… “8 debt options to finance your small business startup: part 1”

Analysis, Economy, Latest Trend, Money Talk

The rise of the new super-rich

global elite

Today’s super-rich are different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity.

If you were watching television on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious on NBC.  David Gregory, host of Meet the Press, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling.  He argued that what we were seeing was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Culture, DIY, Economy, Historical Perspectives, Hot Issues, Human Behavior, Money Talk

Happy 69 Year Old Lady Has Not Used Money For 15 Years

Heidemarie Schwermer, a 69-year-old woman from Germany, gave up using money 15 years ago and says she’s been much happier ever since.

Heidemarie’s incredible story began 22 years ago, when she, a middle-aged secondary school teacher emerging from a difficult marriage, took her two children and moved to the city of Dortmund, in Germany’s Ruhr area. One of the first things she noticed was the large number of homeless people, and this shocked her so much that she decided to actually do something about it. She had always believed the homeless didn’t need actual money to be accepted back into society, only a chance to empower themselves by making themselves useful, so she opened a Tauschring (swap shop), called “Gib und Nimm” (Give and Take)…

Continue reading… “Happy 69 Year Old Lady Has Not Used Money For 15 Years”

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