Tips for Your Boomer Years

Guide to E-Learning Sites - Free Distance Learning Online

E-Learning brings lectures, videos and online courses on literally thousands of topics, right to your computer or iPod. Are you interested in the Civil War? Health? The Russian Ballet? Physics? Economics? E learning can be delivered to you on demand.Here is a guide to free e- learning sites on the Internet where you can pursue any hobby or research any subject from the comfort of your home - all for free.

ITunesU - I’ve had an ipod for over a year but never tapped this terrific e learning resource until recently. Would you like to subscribe to a Sanford University course on Colonial and Revolutionary War history? There are 25 one hour tracks just in this one topic. At last count Apple had more than 100,000 educational video and audio files - all free downloads from universities, museums and cultural institutions all over the world. Just go to your iTtunes account and click on iTunesU. You can learn about landscape architecture from UC Davis or the Origins of America from the Library of Congress from this huge e learning site.

On the Research Channel, you can watch a video lecture from USC with a demonstration of rare musical instruments or get an update on Fibromyalgia. The Research Channel offers a consortium of leading research and academic institutions with more than 3,500 videos for free distance learning online.

Video Lectures.Net offers video lectures by famous scholars and scientists taken from seminars, workshops and conferences from all over the world. Nearly 10,000 videos are available in subjects like architecture, medicine, humanities, mathematics and more.

At Academic Earth, you’ll find thousands of video lectures on anything from a Yale course on psychology to an MIT class on physics. Subjects include medicine, history, international relations, astronomy, political science and much more.

For more free e-learning resources, visit Open Culture, a website dedicated to keeping up with new offerings free cultural and educational media on the Internet. Find links to free audio books, free courses online, free foreign language classes and lots more. Check out their listing of 250 free online courses.

To access these e learning lectures and videos:

1.  You will probably need a high speed Internet connection. Loading large files is very time consuming on dial up connections.

2.  Sign up for free with Apple iTunes, which is a handy way to download and organize from e learning sites. Other ways to download include QuickTime, Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. Basic versions of these offer free sign up.

3.  If you have an iPhone or iPod, you can transfer the files to these by saving them to your iTunes library and then transferring them to your media player.

Don’t let the details scare you away from e learning! Find a video or lecture you like and hit “download!”

Most baby boomers know that to age well, you have to keep your mind actively engaged and learning all the time. With e learning sites, you can keep up with topics you’re interested in or learn something new. The Internet can connect you with free distance learning to fit your schedule.

Many Baby Boomers fear they won’t be able to retire at all. If this is you, check out some of the best retirement calculators to see where you stand with your retirement finances.

Some baby boomers enjoy their jobs and want to continue working and some will be forced to continue working into the forseeable future due to economic setbacks or not planning for retirement. I think many baby boomers would like to continue working, but perhaps in a different, more fulfilling job, or even working as a volunteer, doing something they enjoy.

My husband wants to retire within the next year but he hopes to transition into an online business as a virtual assistant. My income also comes from my online businesses so this will leave us free to travel in our RV and take our means of income along with us. We also hope to travel to places where we can volunteer our time, doing something fun and fulfilling.

Best Retirement Calculators

Most of these retirement calculators allow you to put in your vital statistics and come up with an answer for the amount of income you’ll need to live the lifestyle you choose and answer the question as to whether or not the amount you have in savings and investments, plus other resources, will offer you the chance to retire in the near future.

Of all the retirement calculators I tried, I liked these two the best as being simple to use and offering the best information.

MSN Money Retirement Planner

Bloomberg Retirement Calculator

When I calculated our retirement income, I was pleasantly surprised at the findings. Some people don’t like the idea of scaling back their lifestyle but actually, we are looking forward to living in a smaller house and having time to plant gardens and spend more time on leisure activities.

I watched Wayne Dyer on the PBS station talking about his new book, Excuses Begone!: How to Change Lifelong, Self-Defeating Thinking Habits. This 3 hour presentation was a perfect way to begin my new year. Manyu Baby Boomers have excuses for not achieving their goals based on age. Are you using any of these excuses for not creating a better life:

• It will take too long - At my age, I don’t have time!
• It will be too late to change now
• I’ve always been this way
• It’s too risky to try at may age

Louise Hay wrote her first inspirational book at age 61. Wayne Dyer himself is in his late 60’s and still speaking, writing and motivating people. What is too old anyway? As for being too late - do you plan to die tomorrow? If you don’t, then it’s never too late to live a better life for whatever years you have left?

I think seniors especially need to read Excuses Begone. You may have spent your entire life making excuses for not achieving what you want in life and by now, after multiple failures in life, you believe it’s not possible to change now and live a better life.

What do you want to achieve in the new year? Do you have a medical issue you want to heal? Do you want to retire? Do you want to volunteer more and work less? Would you like to lose weight, write a book, have a more loving relationship with your family? All these things are possible if you get rid of the excuses that have been holding you back.

In his book, Wayne Dyer goes over the 18 most common excuses, sent to him by his readers, people like you. He goes over each one and helps you look at the excuse, and your thoughts about it, in an entirely new way. Using this new perspective, Dyer offers a plan for you to over come the excuses and achieve whatever goals you may have.

One of Wayne Dyer’s books, 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace, literally changed my life, helping me to be happier and have more loving relationships in my life. That was the first of his books that I read and since then, I’ve read all the others. They’ve helped me to set out a plan for my life and achieve what I think is important for my happiness.

The Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Make your first step reading Excuses Begone and you can then lay out a blueprint for the rest of your journey to the life you’d really like to live. At our age, we don’t have a single day to waste on excuses!

Cavalry Investments, LLC, a company which purchases distressed national consumer receivable portfolios, is dedicated to helping their individual customers find professional and affordable solutions. Once Calvary Investments, LLC purchases the portfolio, it is then transferred to their affiliate, Cavalry Portfolio Services, where a highly trained Resolution Specialist handles credit card and medical receivables, installment loans, utilities and more.

Cavalry Portfolio Services uses the most innovative collection methodologies, plus a professionally collection staff to achieve affordable solutions for each and every customer.

Cavalry Investments, LLC, founded in 1998, is proud to provide industry leading professionalism and quality customer service to every client. If you would like more information, click here to visit their website and read frequently asked questions.

The New Year is almost here and it could be time to start a new business sideline to make some quick money or even start a whole new career. Baby Boomers all need extra income so they can retire in style. Other reasons for needing quick money might be that a car that breaks down, or you’d like to start traveling or maybe just pay off some bills and provide basic household needs. Whatever reasons you might need money fast, here are a few ways to use the Internet to get that flow of cash into your bank account.

The Internet can provide anyone unlimited, legitimate opportunities to make money online. Choosing your money making method is the first step to earning an online income. Many of these online income opportunities require having your own blog or website, which I can also show you is easy, and inexpensive, to do.

Method #1 — Provide a Service to Businesses

One way to make money using the Internet is to provide a service online to businesses. There are many out there that are looking for people to drive traffic to their websites by posting on forums or on blogs or to write articles for them.

This is a good option if you have studied a little bit about Internet marketing and know how to do these things. You’ll probably earn a fee per hour or per job depending on how you make arrangements.

Method #2 — Affiliate Marketing

Many companies spend a lot of money on advertising. Part of this advertising budget includes paying affiliates to send traffic to their website. You can sign up for free with product or service, receive your affiliate links, which include banners, and post it on your blog or website, use it as your signature in emails and forums or simply let your friends know about these products. You are then paid a commission for any purchases made.

Many companies with affiliate programs are well known to you, such as Amazon.com and Google. Many pay immediately through pay pal so you get your money quickly.

Method #3 — Selling Your Own Information Product

If you are able to quickly create an e-book or other kind of information product, you can make quick money. You can simply drive traffic to your website through Pay Per Click, or by promoting your ebook on blogs and forums and you can start earning money right away.

You can see a common thread among these ways of making quick money is that they are all made possible through blogging.You can blog about your services or make a sales page for your services or ebook. You become an “expert” in your field by posting blog entries, which go up in the search engines. You add articles about the products you are promoting as an affiliate and add a link to the product.

Once you have your blog set up, with all the proper plug-ins to drive traffic to it, the rest is easy. If you know nothing about blogging, or if you’d like to set up a professional blog to help you earn money quickly through many avenues, you need The Niche Blogger Program. The Niche Blogger is a subscription site that takes you day by day through every single step to set up your first blog, then, using the same steps, you can create multiple blogs and begin earning real money fast. It even helps you choose a profitable topic, or several of them.

The Niche Blogger is affordable (in fact it can save you weeks or time and energy trying to figure things out on your own!) and you can cancel once you get your blog up and running. However, besides setting up a blog, The Niche Blogger program also teaches you to write and sell your own ebook, set up an automated email campaign and many other more advanced techniques to get you to where the real money is in blogging.

The program is set up like a blog, with steps to take each day and place for comments so you can get instant feedback if you have questions. There is also a helpful forum where you can get advice and tips.

To create a good retirement income for my husband and myself, I used The Niche Blogger program to set up several very profitable, self-hosted Wordpress blogs, including this one. You too can begin earning quick money on the Internet in 2010, by using The Niche Blogger Program.

Want to retire and live the RV lifestyle? Full time RVing can be a rewarding way to spend retirement,

Support Your RV Lifestyle by Jaimie Hall

filled with fun and adventure. My husband and I are planning for full time RV living as soon as he retires in a year or so. Although people of all ages would love to live the RV life, retirees and others also need to make money on the road. Believe it or not, there are many ways to so this.

When we began our search for ways to support full time RVing, I purchased Jaimie Hall’s book Support Your RV Lifestyle! An Insider’s Guide to Working on the Road, 2nd Edition I highly recommend this book at a great RV lifestyle resource. Jaimie interviewed full time RVers for over 10 years and put together their tips and advice for working on the road.

It’s possible to take your job with you using her recommendations and resources. First, you need to evaluate how much money you need to make, what sorts of qualifications you already have for making money on the road and setting goals for yourself.

Hall covers setting up your own business that you can take with you while RVing, like writing, or how to find jobs at campsites, state parks or through tourism bureaus or temporary or seasonal work for RVers. She even has a section on managing your RV expenses and lifestyle considerations which are taken from stories told to Hall by other RVers.

The resources for those who want to live the RV lifestyle are worth the price of the book. Get a complete listing of state parks and tourism offices, tax information, grocery shopping and budget work sheets, websites for job searches, budgeting, using computers on the road, how to do a job search for the type of job you want, how to get hired at parks or resorts and so much more! I refer to this book again and again in our planning.

Since I like to write, I am already planning an RV blog about our travels. If you’d like to make money blogging about your experiences or some aspect of the RV lifestyle, visit the The Niche Blogger - a terrific resource that I used to help me set up my five money-making blogs. The Niche Blogger is a subscription site but you can learn all you need to learn in about 3 months of the subscription. You can cancel at any time and keep reusing the information to set up more blogs.

Jaimie Hall also has a free ezine and blog about her RV lifestyle experiences.

At present, my husband and I are RV shopping and downsizing our possessions so we can hit the road in another year. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

If you own your own company and it’s time to retire, you need expert advice for selling at the perfect time. Since 1986, The March Group, the leading private mergers and acquisition firm, has specialized in the sale of middle-market businesses.

The March Group also provides a full spectrum of investment banking and consulting services. If you are an entrepreneur, they can help you obtain financing for all stages of your company’s development.

The March Group also focuses its efforts on providing financial advisory services to middle market companies. Their brokers help clients in all sectors, not only with mergers and acquisitions, but with corporate finance, restructuring, business plan development, strategic growth consulting and advisory services, developing an individualized outreach plan for every client.

To help you make the best deal possible when selling your company, The March Group offers informational workshops, business valuations, premium buyer list development and deal closing negotiations.

With headquarters in South Florida, The March Group also has offices located conveniently throughout the world. They employ more than 200 experienced mergers and acquisitions brokers who are experts in the valuation and sale of privately held companies.

Contact the The March Group for additional information about their merger and acquisition services.

The author was paid for this posting.

Teachers need to continue learning, right along with their students and distance learning puts graduate classes right at their fingertips. Canter.net is a leading provider of distance learning for teachers and Teacher Training, offering graduate classes for K-12 from an accredited program near you.

Every teacher wants the opportunity to provide the tools for success to their students. Canter courses allow teachers to take classes from some of the leading educational experts in the nation, on topics of importance in the classroom.

It’s easy to get started. Select the state where you wish to teach and find an accredited course near you. Choose from 25 different graduate courses such as Classroom management, which includes Assertive Discipline, plus courses in instructional strategies, motivating students, reading and literacy, teacher leadership courses and much more.

Canter has partnered with universities which are recognized as leading institutions in their regions.