Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Your Net Worth

Your net worth is your total assets minus your total liabilities. In other words, your net worth is everything you own minus your everything you owe.

Why should every goddess know her net worth?  Because it gives you a simple picture of your financial health. It lets you make informed decisions about where you stand financially. It helps you plan for your financial future by showing you what you need to work on and what you have with which to work. It can be easy to lose track of how much you owe or how much you have. This gives you a simple number to sum it up.
I compute our net worth about once a year around this time so I can see how we are doing year to year.

How to compute your net worth.

Basically you add up everything of value and subtract what you owe. There are computer programs you can use to plug it in; just search net worth calculator for some examples.

You could also make a list of all of your accounts and add them together. Examples include:

Savings accounts
Checking accounts
Retirement accounts (401k, IRA, etc)
Stocks and bonds
Mutual Funds
CDs (certificates of deposit)
Value of your home
Value of your car

You could also include any valuable jewelry or artwork you may own.

This is your total assets.

Then list all of your liabilities aka debts and add them together. Examples include:

Balance on your mortgage
Home equity loan
Car loan
Student loan
Credit card debt
Personal loans

This is your total liability.

Now take your total asset amount and subtract your total liability. This is your net worth. Hopefully it is a positive number. If not, it shows you what you need to work on.   More importantly, it gives you a number to focus on. If nothing else, it is knowledge and knowledge of your financial health can only help.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

You Deserve A Vacation Or A Chance To Rest

A lot of women tend to work themselves into exhaustion trying to help everyone; trying to accomplish everything. Maybe you work full time outside the home, then you come home and take care of the house and the kids. It seems to be a common issue amongst women that we try to accomplish 80 hours worth of work in 60 hours.  This may mean staying up too late or getting up too early. Sacrificing your sleep, your health and your peace of mind to help everyone.

You deserve to rest. You deserve a break. It is OK to take some time for yourself.

The number one cause of death for a woman is a heart attack. Some of the leading causes of heart attacks are stress and not taking care of your body.  I know the kids need feeding and the dishes need doing. It may feel like a waste of time or a betrayal to take 20 minutes for yourself. It is not.

Would you want your kids working themselves to death? Would you want them overdoing it and causing themselves stress and health problems?  Then don't do it to yourself.

If the problem is a lack of help from your spouse or kids, then talk to them. Make sure you do not act as though it is a confrontation; that will just make them feel attacked and not inclined to help. Ask them to do things and praise them when they do. Everyone wants to feel as though they are being helpful.  And yes, chances are you are doing a lot more and not getting praised, but this is one of those cases where it is a small investment that will make everyone feel better in the end. You will get more help and they will feel appreciated.

Also, do not be afraid to use paper plates sometimes so you can save that time you would have spent doing dishes. If sometimes the dinner dishes wait until after dinner the next night so you can sit down and rest for 10 minutes than so be it. If you have to use your slow cooker a few nights a week so you can do 20 minutes of yoga, by all means.

Remember that you being around 10 years from now is a lot more important to your kids continued health and well being than whether or not the dish washer got unloaded. Take some time for yourself. It will make you healthier and happier and that makes your whole family better off. Plus you deserve it.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse

One of the things every goddess should know is how to survive. The first most important thing is a good attitude. Tell yourself you will survive. You can do this. Yes, there has been a terrible outbreak and many of your neighbors have turned into some kind of hideous zombie, but you can survive this. You have to believe it.


When dealing with zombies, it is very important that you determine what kind of zombie you are facing.   Are they intelligent or brain dead? Are they fast or slow?  This information will be very important to your survival plan.  If they behave like complete idiots, then you may be able to out think them or scare them off with flaming torches. Perhaps you can thwart them by climbing stairs. If they are intelligent, you have to be more cautious.

If you are lucky, they will be slow shambling dumb zombies. Congratulations! These kinds of zombies can often be outrun. You can build fortifications to keep them out.  Their constant moaning, while annoying, makes a great early warning system. If you are not so lucky, they will be fast. If you are extremely unlucky, they will be fast and intelligent. These are the most dangerous forms of zombies. Avoid them at all costs!

I recommend finding an easily defensible area of your home. In our house, I would go for the basement. We have a partially finished side that could be used as a living space and the unfinished side has an assortment of tools including saws and axes.   We have fire wood and lumber down there that we could nail over those small basement windows and over the door leading down stairs.  It gives us a defensible choke point if the enemy comes down.

You will want to stockpile as much canned food and water as you can as soon as you realize there is a problem. If you wait, most of the food may be gone. Make sure you take a manual can opener with you into your safe area. You don't want to have food but no way to open it if the power goes out. Be cautious about hunting fresh game. Always check to make sure the animal has not been zombified first. You don't want to be infected by eating zombie rabbit meat.

Eat perishable items first and then eat the food in order of what is going to expire first. I know this is an upsetting time emotionally but now is not the time to revert to emotional eating choices. Practical choices must be made. Limit your calories and eat what is available so you can stay healthy.   Spend the time you are confined exercising so you can be stronger and faster. You may want to take the opportunity to practice such as swing an axe or striking targets with your available weapons. This will come in handy if some zombies do find you, especially if they are the fast kind. 

Make sure you know what counts as a kill shot. Do you need to take out the head? The heart?  Will cutting off a limb stop them?  Avoid getting bit or scratched as these are going to be your most likely sources of contamination.  Grab anything in your home that might be a good weapon--guns, of course, but also baseball bats, broom handles, butcher knives, my husband's Japanese sword (sorry honey!).  Try grabbing chemicals such as bleach and seeing if the zombies react to it--preferably thrown on them from a safe distance.

You will also want to stockpile medical supplies. I would not go too overboard on these. Chances are any wound that would require bandaging is going to be one that turns you into a zombie anyways so why waste the shelf space that could be used for important things like food and toilet paper?  Decide early how you will handle latrine issues. If you use a bucket system, be careful of where you dump it. You could be leaving a smelly trail right to your hiding place.

If you can manage to hole up, be cautious and practical, chances are the zombie infection will run its course in a few weeks to months or the government will come in and shoot them all down anyways. Be patient, be careful and you can survive this. Just don't poke your head out when you hear gun fire. You don't want to have survived this long to get shot down by friendly fire.  Good luck and good hunting.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

I'd Rather Be Safe Than Polite

When I was a teenager, I was out waiting at a bus stop one day. A car with 3 guys in it drove up and offered me a ride. I smiled and said, "No thank you."  The guy in the back of the car leaned out, sneered at me and said in a voice dripping with contempt, "It's not like we're going to rape you or anything."  I continued to smile and again said, "No thank you."  They squealed away from the curb and I never saw them again.

There was nothing that seemed particularly wrong with these guys. I just simply was not going to take the chance. What ever fun they thought we would have was not worth the risk.  They do, however, illustrate a common problem.  I was a young girl by myself. No one knew precisely where I was. These guys tried to make me feel bad for being cautious. They tried to embarrass and shame me by insinuating that I was crazy to consider that they could be up to no good.

Let's assume they meant no harm whatsoever. Do you think if they are all grown up now with daughters of their own, that they would want their daughters to get in that car?  I certainly hope not.

Never let anyone make you feel stupid for being safe. If we could tell the rapists, muggers and murderers at a glance, no one would ever get hurt.

When it comes to your personal safety, it is better to offend that complete stranger than take the chance that they mean you harm.   Making you feel stupid for being cautious is one of the best tricks in a rapist's arsenal. So go ahead and be safe; be cautious. 

I would rather feel a little stupid for being overly cautious. I know I can survive that.

And if your instincts are telling you something is wrong? Above all, listen to that little voice in the back of your head that says tread lightly.  Do not let trying to be helpful or trying to be polite, put you in a dangerous situation. You can always leave and go call for someone to go help them if they are truly stranded.

Your safety comes first. If a voice in your head tells you something is wrong, listen to it and get away.  There is only one you and I would rather you be around in twenty years to have the opportunity to feel silly about not taking that ride. But then, I don't feel silly about it at all.