Tips for Your Boomer Years

Raising Chickens in the City - Have Your Own Backyard Flock

For those of us who were raised on farm fresh eggs, the newest health trend of raising chickens in the city

Learn to raise chickens in the city.

may seem funny at first, but then it makes sense. Why not raise chickens in your backyard and have all the farm fresh eggs you can eat?

My grandfather was a chicken farmer during the depression and I grew up on my dad’s stories of living on an Iowa farm in the 1930’s. One time a flash flood came through and killed nearly every chicken. My dad said, “At the time, I never realized how devastating that must have been.” Chicken farming had it’s ups and downs, that’s for sure.

I guess raising chickens is in my blood because I’ve always loved them. When we lived on three acres in Oregon, one of my first farming efforts was to built a small coop with a sturdy fence and get a dozen chicks to raise. By the time we left there 6 years later, I had two dozen hens.

Raising chickens in your own backyard makes sense, even if you live in the city. Eggs from free ranging chickens provide higher levels of omega 3 fatty acids than conventional eggs raised on commercial chicken farms. You can also feed your backyard flock flax seed meal to increase the omega 3’s even more.

Chickens in the city need very little to be happy. Each chicken lays about one egg per day in the spring and summer. My chickens were very consistent layers, even in winter. We always had enough eggs to supply our family, plus my extended family. I also supplied other people in the community. When I got my hair cut, I “tipped” my hair stylist with two dozen eggs and she loved it!

To raise chickens you need a small coop to shut them up at night and provide them a clean, dry place to lay their eggs. Chickens are smart. Every evening at dusk, they “go to bed” and you just need to shut the door to lock out predators. Even the city has raccoons or other animals that might love to have a chicken dinner.

In your litle back yard coop, you need a couple straw filled boxes for the chickens to lay eggs and a small roost of some kind for them to sleep on. I made my own with wood and dowels going across for them to get their claws around.

You’ll probably also need a fenced area for your backyard chickens. It’s nice to think of them running free, but chickens are very hard on landscaping! They dig and scratch for bugs until your entire yard is torn up.

You can also feed your chickens veggie scraps instead of throwing them in the trash. On cold days, I even made hot oatmeal for my chickens (yes, they were spoiled). On hot days, I ran the hose for them too so they could play in the water and cool off.

You probably won’t save money raising chickens in the city. Your first expenses will be building a coop of some sort, buying a feeder and waterer and some straw for the laying boxes. You need to buy chicken feed and continue to get straw to refresh the laying area and keep it clean.

Still, aside from the money you spend raising chickens, you have the wonderful knowledge of knowing you’re raising your own food and, if you have kids or grandkids, they can see first hand where food comes from. Chickens are friendly creatures too and they will come running when they see you.

If you’d like to raise chickens in the city, I suggest finding out first is your city allows backyard flocks and if so, how many chickens you could have. Then read up on the subject of chicken raising. Here are a few books to get you started:

Raising Chickens for Dummies

Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens: Care / Feeding / Facilities

City Chicks

If you’d like to raise chickens and other animals in the city, try this book:

Barnyard in Your Backyard: A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens, Ducks, Geese, Rabbits, Goats, Sheep, and Cows

All of these books on raising chickens in the city are available on Amazon.com and got 5 star ratings from readers.

Further reading:

Mad City Chickens - a great website with lots of chicken info.

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!

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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.

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Would you like to make money at home using your computer? In the current economy, everybody could use some extra income, or maybe even a new career. Working at home means you can get out of bed, grab a cup of coffee and head for your computer to put in a couple hours work. This sort of extra income sounds great and it IS possible for anybody wanting to make money online.

Jumping out of bed, throwing down a cup of coffee and scampering to your car to face bumper to bumper traffic, while trying desperately trying to motivate yourself do do work you don’t like may be something you would love to eliminate from your life. Some of you may be sitting at home with no job to go to and no money coming in.

The good news is that you can make money at home online to supplement or even replace your income. It’s all made possible through blogging!

You probably read blogs on all sorts of subjects all the time. There are literally millions of blogs out there on every conceivable topic which are called niche blogs. They find a niche and fill it, while making money online.

You might think it’s difficult to become a blogger but, with the right help, it’s possible to make a great income online by blogging and change your life for the better.

Instead of sneaking a peek at your favorite blogs during your 9-to-5 job, you can be the one sitting at home and writing these blogs that other people read! You’ll not only be providing great content for people, you’ll also be pulling in some great money that can literally change your life and having fun too.

Getting rid of the doubt that you can do this is going to be an important first step. As long as you are able to compose and send an e-mail, you can be a professional blogger!

What you need to help you learn the art of blogging is a tutorial that will show you step-by-step how to do this. It’s also important to have motivation and encouragement. The absolute best place to get this online is The Niche Blogger.

This membership site is great for the beginning at blogging and also for the intermediate marketer who wants to learn more about how to build a successful, money-making blog. In fact, many of the people who join the membership site are brand-new at blogging and have little computer knowledge.

The good thing is that there is a whole mix of experience levels so you are sure to be able to find help among the community whenever you need it.

The startup cost is incredibly low as well — making sure that those who want to join learn about blogging and making money online to escape their jobs are able to do so. Even if you’re happy with your job, it never hurts to have extra money coming in. Blogging is fun!

You already know that companies spend millions and millions of dollars in order to attract customers. Part of their advertising costs online go to a affiliates. These affiliates place ads on their websites and blogs and their readers often make purchases. When readers make purchases, the blog owner makes money! It’s as simple as that.

All you need to do is have your blog in place, with affiliate ads relating to your content and you can be the one whose links customers buy through.

The main difference between making money at home online and going to a 9-to-5 job is that you are now in business for yourself - a professional blogger.

There is no reason to limit yourself into thinking that you have to stay at a job you don’t like forever. Become your own boss and work at home in your PJs so you can do what you want to do, when you want to do it.

Try The Niche Blogger for FREE! Click Here for a FREE 3 Day Trial and see for yourself what a great blogging program it is.

About a year ago, I decided to try my hand at blogging for money. I love writing but what I needed to know is the nuts and bolts of how to build a self-hosted WordPress blog from scratch. Earning blogging money is easier than you think, no matter what your level of expertise - even if you aren’t sure of your writing or computer abilities. The most important thing, if you want to earn money from blogging is to have a solid plan of action to help you earn a good income from your blogs. It’s not enough to just put a blog up and hope that the money will soon show up.

Blogging can create retirement income for you. What will you do in retirement? Travel? Volunteer? Play with your grandchildren? Are you still working and saving? All of these make great blogging topics.

So, you think you want to earn money blogging - now how do you find the right plan of action to help you earn as much money as possible? By finding a mentor or model in someone who is already a successful niche blogger. Niche blogging is the art of creating a successful blog in one small subject area. Do you know something about gardening? Where to find great coupons on the internet? Birding? Nostalgia? Just about any topic you can come up with has a small niche waiting to be filled.

The source I used to help me create several successful niche blogs is called “The Niche Blogger!” This is a complete program that was put together to help new people get their own start in blogging.

This will cut down on your learning time and help to ensure that you don’t make mistakes that will prevent you from making money. The program covers just how to set up a self-hosted Word Press blog, how to choose a successful topic and write about it, what plugins you need, how to promote your blog and much more.

One note of warning, if you join The Niche Blogger, you are going to have to dedicate yourself to it. You need time each and every day to devote to the program, which takes you step by step. There is also a great forum for asking any questions you may have.

One of the problems with trying to earn money blogging is that there are many different methods out there. The trick is to choose a good model from the very beginning, making it much easier to dedicate yourself to it because you know you will be able to succeed.

You should also realize that even though you can start earning very quickly, you won’t become rich overnight. Building a successful niche blog takes time but it’s also fun and you can enjoy the process as well.

Blogging money will begin to trickle in and then build upon itself over time. Before you know it, you can be earning a great part or full-time income from your blogs! And, once your blog is set up, the income becomes relatively passive. All you need to do is write a blog posting 2-3 times a week.

Earning money from blogs gives you a great second income, retirement income or passive income.

All you need to do is make sure you find follow The Niche Blogger instructions, and that you dedicate yourself to it until you are successful. You may well remember the moment you became a niche blogger as one of the decisions that changed your life for the better.

Blogging money is truly the way to go for passive income!

The Niche Blogger - Make Money Blogging