I’ve been seeing television stories on the news over the past few months about how social media marketing is the new marketing strategy.  The strategy takes advantage of the old adage that the best advertising is by word of mouth.  Rather than taking out paid ads in newspapers, magazines, radio, television, or bulletin board advertising, social media marketing focuses on getting people to recommend products and services to their friends and neighbors.  Since your friends and neighbors theoretically trust your judgement, they are likely to give your recommendation a try.  In the “information technology age” one way this can be accomplished is through blogging.

We love to eat food that has been cooked on our grill. During the warmer seasons we put the grill out on the deck and have grilled burgers or steaks several times a week. In the cooler seasons, we put the grill in the garage and grill a little bit less often – but there are a few warmer winter days we can grill if it is a really sunny day and around lunch time; the garage will warm up enough so that we don’t mind cooking out there with the garage door open for however long it takes to get the food cooked.

Sticking to a budget seems to be the biggest challenge that Americans face.  For a lot of us, we are used to spending more money than we make.  I’m no exception to that!  It has been so easy to just go out and spend money!  The mentality of spend now and pay later is an easy one to get into!  That’s why so many of us are now going to see debt counselors! 

But this tendency has always been a dangerous one, and with so many people having their hours at work cut back, or losing their jobs completely is going to make it even more difficult to manage our debts and stick to a budget.  Once we lose a job, in this economy, it is going to be tough to find a new one.  We will be competing with a lot of people for the few remaining jobs out there!  Darn few jobs are “safe” anymore!

So it is becoming vitally important to create a budget and stick to it.  We need to figure out a way to live within our means and stop thinking that we can have something NOW and pay for it LATER.  We need to go back to the mentality of “if we can’t afford to pay for it NOW, then we will have to WAIT until LATER when we CAN afford it!”

In order to force ourselves to stick to a budget, I think it is a good idea to use a Prepaid Mastercard.  You can get these in the form of a Prepaid Debit Card or a Prepaid Credit Card.  The good thing about one of these is that the card will not allow you to spend more money than you have on it, and you have already paid for it up front.

I don’t remember if I ever told you about our little dog! We have a little dog that was a stray that wandered into our yard two years ago. We call him Pita. At first we didn’t know what kind of dog he was, but we have been told that he was probably the runt of a litter of North American Shepherds. I’ve tried to find information about the breed here and there, and just ran a search on North American Shepherds on a search engine I just learned about. The search experience was different than what I have experienced with other search engines; this particular time I found a site that I had not found before. It led me to a web page that was very informative about the breed, and I discovered that our little Pita is not a runt at all! He is exactly the right size!

My wife tells me that sometimes I drive her crazy because I am so interested in cars, trucks, and motorcycles. Whenever we go anywhere I am always looking around at the other vehicles on the road and making comments about them. What drives my wife crazy about that is the fact that she couldn’t care much less about cars, trucks, or motorcycles. To her, they are simply a mode of transportation; a necessary evil that you need to get from one point to another, and nothing more than that.

So, when we go driving along, she gets a little irritated with me when I exclaim “Oh, honey, look at that audi tt, how would you like to have one of those?”  She says to me “I’m trying to drive, don’t distract me, and I don’t even know what an audi tt looks like!  Besides, I’m not into ’status cars,’ so why are you even trying to get me to look?”

Then I’ll usually remind her that she used to own a Mazda RX-7 when she was much younger, and wasn’t that a status car?  Then she reminds me that was her first hubby’s car and she had nothing to do with it.  Oh well.

Personally I’m a Chevy man, but my wife’s brother owns a ford expedition that he likes a lot.  He’s had it a long time, and it has treated him well.  I think if I were to buy a ford, it would probably be a ford fusion.