Home Equity Loans
Home Equity Loans are yet another way to finance larger projects from the equity you have in your home. These are often called second mortgages (as are HELOCs), and you are allowed to borrow a certain amount no larger than the current equity you have in your home, either from principle payments or property value increases. These are standard loans with fixed rates, and they usually have to be paid back in 15 years or less. With these loans, you borrow a specific amount and have a set monthly payment.
Advantages to Financing Home Remodeling Projects with Home Equity
The average cost of a complete kitchen remodel in the United States in 2004 was $30,000. This is a big enough number that most homeowners need some type of financing, if only partially, to help cover the cost. While both Home Equity Lines of Credit and Home Equity Loans are good candidates for any remodeling project, depending on the project, one might be better than the other.
Kitchen & Bathroom Remodels
These are the two most popular home remodels. They add value to a house, and in many cases have a massive return on their investment. The problem is that estimates from contractors are exactly that, and nearly every project ends up costing a different amount—whether higher or lower—than was originally planned. You will change your mind about 100 times on which materials you want to use, the contractor will run into unforeseen problems, the market price of your materials will fluctuate, among many other things that will swing the price.
The great thing about HELOC is that it is a credit card and you are only paying interest on what you borrow. Let's say you have a $25,000 line of credit that you have earmarked for a kitchen remodel. Your contractor bids your remodel at $15,000. Now you have $10,000 in wiggle room in case you decide on cherry cabinets rather than pine, or stainless steel appliances rather than keeping your old ones. If you decide to hold back a little for the time being, you don't have all this borrowed money lying around.
In the cases of bigger remodels that have several components, HELOC might be the way to go because it allows you the freedom to get a little more money or use a little less. Granted, your interest rate will not be locked in, but this is the rub with HELOC.
Swimming Pools & New Windows
Because of the nature of swimming pool additions and replacing your windows new, the pricing is fairly static. There might be a little flux, but typically these types of remodels don't bounce too much in price. As a result, a home equity loan might be the best route. You take out exactly what you need, and pay for the project in full from the loan check. Sometimes using a home equity loan for remodels that have variant pricing can leave a homeowner without enough money to pay for the project, or they are left holding too much cash because they over-budgeted. Try as we might, most of us aren't strong enough to give that money back as we should.
Dollars & Sense
There are dozens of home remodeling projects that are expensive enough as to need financing: home additions, cabinets, flooring, siding, windows, a new roof, just to name a few. These are just two very smart ways to finance your home remodeling projects. If you have a rich aunt, win the lottery, or discover sunken treasure off the coast of the Bahamas on vacation and want to use that money for your kitchen remodel, that is fine, too. But for most of us, the financing options listed above are the best ways to go.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Home Air Purifiers
Air Purifiers and Air Cleaners – A Guide to the Best Information at AllergyConsumerReview.com
How to choose a good air purifier. Air purifiers compared, rated and reviewed. air purifiers – HEPA, UV, Home, Room – for allergy sufferers.
Air Purifiers
Air purifiers and air cleaners are terms that are synonymous with each other, and we have written, researched and published a great deal about air cleaning, indoor air quality and air purifiers over recent years. This is a guide to everything we have written on the subject and the questions we are asked most often about air purifiers. Some of what we have written about air purifiers we consider to be more worthy of your reading than others. We have designated the articles that we think are best with a graphic light bulb as “best read” for air purifiers.
How to choose a good air purifier. Air purifiers compared, rated and reviewed. air purifiers – HEPA, UV, Home, Room – for allergy sufferers.
Air Purifiers
Air purifiers and air cleaners are terms that are synonymous with each other, and we have written, researched and published a great deal about air cleaning, indoor air quality and air purifiers over recent years. This is a guide to everything we have written on the subject and the questions we are asked most often about air purifiers. Some of what we have written about air purifiers we consider to be more worthy of your reading than others. We have designated the articles that we think are best with a graphic light bulb as “best read” for air purifiers.
फर्स्ट ऐड KIT
A well-stocked first-aid kit, kept within easy reach, is a necessity in every home. Having supplies gathered ahead of time will help you handle an emergency at a moment's notice. You should keep one first-aid kit in your home and one in each car. Also be sure to bring a first-aid kit on family vacations.
Choose containers for your kits that are roomy, durable, easy to carry, and simple to open. Plastic tackle boxes or containers for storing art supplies are ideal, since they're lightweight, have handles, and offer a lot of space.
Include the following in each of your first-aid kits:
first-aid manual
sterile gauze
adhesive tape
adhesive bandages in several sizes
elastic bandage
antiseptic wipes
soap
antibiotic cream (triple-antibiotic ointment)
antiseptic solution (like hydrogen peroxide)
hydrocortisone cream (1%)
acetaminophen and ibuprofen
extra prescription medications (if the family is going on vacation)
tweezers
sharp scissors
safety pins
disposable instant cold packs
calamine lotion
alcohol wipes or ethyl alcohol
thermometer
plastic gloves (at least 2 pairs)
flashlight and extra batteries
mouthpiece for administering CPR (can be obtained from your local Red Cross)
your list of emergency phone numbers
blanket (stored nearby)
After you've stocked your first-aid kits:
Read the entire first-aid manual so you'll understand how to use the contents of your kits. (If your children are old enough to understand, review the manuals with them as well.)
Store first-aid kits in places that are out of children's reach but easily accessible for adults.
Choose containers for your kits that are roomy, durable, easy to carry, and simple to open. Plastic tackle boxes or containers for storing art supplies are ideal, since they're lightweight, have handles, and offer a lot of space.
Include the following in each of your first-aid kits:
first-aid manual
sterile gauze
adhesive tape
adhesive bandages in several sizes
elastic bandage
antiseptic wipes
soap
antibiotic cream (triple-antibiotic ointment)
antiseptic solution (like hydrogen peroxide)
hydrocortisone cream (1%)
acetaminophen and ibuprofen
extra prescription medications (if the family is going on vacation)
tweezers
sharp scissors
safety pins
disposable instant cold packs
calamine lotion
alcohol wipes or ethyl alcohol
thermometer
plastic gloves (at least 2 pairs)
flashlight and extra batteries
mouthpiece for administering CPR (can be obtained from your local Red Cross)
your list of emergency phone numbers
blanket (stored nearby)
After you've stocked your first-aid kits:
Read the entire first-aid manual so you'll understand how to use the contents of your kits. (If your children are old enough to understand, review the manuals with them as well.)
Store first-aid kits in places that are out of children's reach but easily accessible for adults.
Digital Asset Management
Because Storage Can’t Grow Forever
Network storage infrastructure is under increasing pressure to accommodate exponential growth in organizational data. Accelerating use of multimedia-heavy content for everyday corporate work is challenging companies of all sizes to ensure they have enough space to store it all. Because throwing more drives at the problem can be reactive, expensive, and ultimately inefficient, DAM (Digital Asset Management) has emerged as a more intelligent solution.
At its core, DAM involves the intake, tagging, cataloging, storage, and retrieval of an organization’s digital assets, which can include anything from business files created in productivity applications to audio- and video-based content. Unmanaged storage impacts an organization in several ways, including:
Cost. Duplicate files saved across the network eat up finite drive space. Companies often overspend on storage infrastructure to compensate, a stopgap solution that only increases operational costs.
Productivity. End users searching endlessly for materials drive up project and ongoing costs and stretch out timelines.
Risk. Inconsistent use of data assets can compromise branding, decision-making, and regulatory compliance. It’s virtually impossible to have a single version of the truth across the organization when everyone works off of disparate bits of information.
Stressed Infrastructure
Without any proactive storage management in place, the environment can quickly become chaotic. When the data skews toward large media files, the results are even uglier.
“DAM can alleviate strains on existing infrastructures by helping to eliminate storage costs from redundant sets of asset libraries in different locations and by keeping all assets and versions in one master library,” says Widen Enterprises (www.widen.com) CEO Matthew Gonnering. “Multiple copies of a file in multiple locations use even more storage,” which can make version control that much more difficult, as it requires someone to remember each file’s location and then update or renew it should a new one become available or it expires.
Understanding the challenge is one thing. Cost-justifying the solution is another. Seth Earley, president of Earley & Associates (www.earley.com), says inconsistent behaviors lie at the root of the problem.
“The business case for DAM is asset reuse,” says Earley. “There are many challenges to doing so in large organizations. In many situations, people store these types of files on a shared network drive but little thought is given to how to organize and retrieve those assets.”
Better Storage Equals Better Business
As beneficial as DAM is to improving storage efficiency, Thomas Vernersson, president of storage management software vendor Northern (www.northern.net), says the real story lies in data availability in today’s increasingly distributed and collaborative work environments.
“Efficient digital asset management assures that business-critical data is available when needed; that data is streamlined to facilitate efficient, low-impact, timely backups; and that storage devices are kept from filling up,” says Vernersson. “This allows organizations to defer new hardware purchases.”
For all its promise, however, DAM is no magic bullet. Art Powell, president of Trinsic Technologies (www.trinsictech.com), says it may motivate the wrong kinds of behaviors.
“DAM is good for companies that have lots of files, such as images and PDF files, and want a way to catalog what they have for search and retrieval,” says Powell. “However, it’s not necessarily an efficient way to contain storage growth as it can actually encourage users to store everything. If a company is looking for ways to control storage growth, there are much better ways to accomplish this through network policies and implementations.”
Beyond Technology
Powell adds that company-wide policies should outline user responsibilities, possibly defining personal photos and music files, for example, as unacceptable.
“By having the community or firm working in a common data environment, the resulting IT support costs can be dramatically lower,” says Tracy Rosen, principal of the WH Group (www.whgroup.us). “Savings are achieved in time, continuity, and money by using a standard method of creating, reviewing, modifying, and publishing a given set of assets. The advantages are speed of asset utilization and reduction in all costs associated with the asset life cycle.”
Organizations interested in implementing DAM must first listen to the leaders and workers who will be most affected by the change.
“One size does not fit all, and feature sets need to be prioritized by actual business need,” says Frank Morris, sector champion of digital technology and content with UK Trade & Investment, adding companies often need to balance the need to centralize repositories with redundancy and distributed availability.
Eye-Opening Cost Benefits
The bottom-line results can be significant, and they’re not limited to static data, either. When applied to redundant software installations, companies can realize major savings here, too.
“In our experience, companies can save anywhere from 20 to 30% on their software bill,” says Ron Halversen, VP of marketing for TriActive (www.systemsmanagementondemand.com), adding the benefits also include 30 to 70% savings in IT costs due to streamlined support requirements. “You can do more with less, and it frees up your time so your IT department can focus on things that add more value to your company.”
As hosted DAM solutions gain momentum, more organizations can take advantage of a more proactive data management maturity without incurring significant upfront capital expense.
“There is a tremendous amount of opportunity to consolidate repositories, provide secure, global access to assets and automate manual processes through DAM,” says Tony Bailey, who leads Acquity Group’s (www.acquitysolutions.com) Content Management team, adding that many of his firm’s manufacturing and distribution clients are already using DAM to automate digital asset distribution to their suppliers and distributors. “It has allowed their marketing teams to focus on higher-value activities and less on mundane and cumbersome click, copy, and ship processes.”
Which points toward a bright future for a technology just now reaching its stride.
“DAM is a great way to aggregate assets and make [them] available in a controlled, cost-effective way to highly fragmented and distributed users,” says WH Group’s Rosen. “If you are clear in your objectives and manage the execution, the potential payback is terrific.”
by Carmi Levy
Network storage infrastructure is under increasing pressure to accommodate exponential growth in organizational data. Accelerating use of multimedia-heavy content for everyday corporate work is challenging companies of all sizes to ensure they have enough space to store it all. Because throwing more drives at the problem can be reactive, expensive, and ultimately inefficient, DAM (Digital Asset Management) has emerged as a more intelligent solution.
At its core, DAM involves the intake, tagging, cataloging, storage, and retrieval of an organization’s digital assets, which can include anything from business files created in productivity applications to audio- and video-based content. Unmanaged storage impacts an organization in several ways, including:
Cost. Duplicate files saved across the network eat up finite drive space. Companies often overspend on storage infrastructure to compensate, a stopgap solution that only increases operational costs.
Productivity. End users searching endlessly for materials drive up project and ongoing costs and stretch out timelines.
Risk. Inconsistent use of data assets can compromise branding, decision-making, and regulatory compliance. It’s virtually impossible to have a single version of the truth across the organization when everyone works off of disparate bits of information.
Stressed Infrastructure
Without any proactive storage management in place, the environment can quickly become chaotic. When the data skews toward large media files, the results are even uglier.
“DAM can alleviate strains on existing infrastructures by helping to eliminate storage costs from redundant sets of asset libraries in different locations and by keeping all assets and versions in one master library,” says Widen Enterprises (www.widen.com) CEO Matthew Gonnering. “Multiple copies of a file in multiple locations use even more storage,” which can make version control that much more difficult, as it requires someone to remember each file’s location and then update or renew it should a new one become available or it expires.
Understanding the challenge is one thing. Cost-justifying the solution is another. Seth Earley, president of Earley & Associates (www.earley.com), says inconsistent behaviors lie at the root of the problem.
“The business case for DAM is asset reuse,” says Earley. “There are many challenges to doing so in large organizations. In many situations, people store these types of files on a shared network drive but little thought is given to how to organize and retrieve those assets.”
Better Storage Equals Better Business
As beneficial as DAM is to improving storage efficiency, Thomas Vernersson, president of storage management software vendor Northern (www.northern.net), says the real story lies in data availability in today’s increasingly distributed and collaborative work environments.
“Efficient digital asset management assures that business-critical data is available when needed; that data is streamlined to facilitate efficient, low-impact, timely backups; and that storage devices are kept from filling up,” says Vernersson. “This allows organizations to defer new hardware purchases.”
For all its promise, however, DAM is no magic bullet. Art Powell, president of Trinsic Technologies (www.trinsictech.com), says it may motivate the wrong kinds of behaviors.
“DAM is good for companies that have lots of files, such as images and PDF files, and want a way to catalog what they have for search and retrieval,” says Powell. “However, it’s not necessarily an efficient way to contain storage growth as it can actually encourage users to store everything. If a company is looking for ways to control storage growth, there are much better ways to accomplish this through network policies and implementations.”
Beyond Technology
Powell adds that company-wide policies should outline user responsibilities, possibly defining personal photos and music files, for example, as unacceptable.
“By having the community or firm working in a common data environment, the resulting IT support costs can be dramatically lower,” says Tracy Rosen, principal of the WH Group (www.whgroup.us). “Savings are achieved in time, continuity, and money by using a standard method of creating, reviewing, modifying, and publishing a given set of assets. The advantages are speed of asset utilization and reduction in all costs associated with the asset life cycle.”
Organizations interested in implementing DAM must first listen to the leaders and workers who will be most affected by the change.
“One size does not fit all, and feature sets need to be prioritized by actual business need,” says Frank Morris, sector champion of digital technology and content with UK Trade & Investment, adding companies often need to balance the need to centralize repositories with redundancy and distributed availability.
Eye-Opening Cost Benefits
The bottom-line results can be significant, and they’re not limited to static data, either. When applied to redundant software installations, companies can realize major savings here, too.
“In our experience, companies can save anywhere from 20 to 30% on their software bill,” says Ron Halversen, VP of marketing for TriActive (www.systemsmanagementondemand.com), adding the benefits also include 30 to 70% savings in IT costs due to streamlined support requirements. “You can do more with less, and it frees up your time so your IT department can focus on things that add more value to your company.”
As hosted DAM solutions gain momentum, more organizations can take advantage of a more proactive data management maturity without incurring significant upfront capital expense.
“There is a tremendous amount of opportunity to consolidate repositories, provide secure, global access to assets and automate manual processes through DAM,” says Tony Bailey, who leads Acquity Group’s (www.acquitysolutions.com) Content Management team, adding that many of his firm’s manufacturing and distribution clients are already using DAM to automate digital asset distribution to their suppliers and distributors. “It has allowed their marketing teams to focus on higher-value activities and less on mundane and cumbersome click, copy, and ship processes.”
Which points toward a bright future for a technology just now reaching its stride.
“DAM is a great way to aggregate assets and make [them] available in a controlled, cost-effective way to highly fragmented and distributed users,” says WH Group’s Rosen. “If you are clear in your objectives and manage the execution, the potential payback is terrific.”
by Carmi Levy
crm software & solutions
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business philosophy involving identifying, understanding and better providing for your customers while building a relationship with each customer to improve customer satisfaction and maximise profits. It's about understanding, anticipating and responding to customers' needs.
To manage the relationship with the customer a business needs to collect the right information about its customers and organise that information for proper analysis and action. It needs to keep that information up-to-date, make it accessible to employees, and provide the know how for employees to convert that data into products better matched to customers' needs.
The secret to an effective CRM package is not just in what data is collected but in the organizing and interpretation of that data. That's where computers come in handy (apart from the Solitaire you can play on them :-)) Computers can't, of course, transform the relationship you have with your customer. That does take a cross-department, top to bottom, corporate desire to build better relationships. But computers and a good computer based CRM solution, can increase sales by as much as 40-50% - as some studies have shown.
An example of a CRM application would be in a car manufacturing business (assuming they sell directly to end users). If they maintained a database of which customers buy what type of product, and when, how often they make that purchase, what type of options they choose with their typical purchase, their color preferences, whether the purchase needed financing etc., the manufacturer knows what marketing material to send out, what new products to promote to each customer, what preferences/options may swing the sale, whether a finance package should be included in the marketing material and when would be a good time to target each customer. They could use the information to build a relationship with the customer by reminding customers of service dates, product recalls, and maybe even to send the customer a birthday card.
So how do you go about choosing a CRM software solution?
Using a consultant could save you time and money. Software resellers are often good first line advisers as they have experience and feedback from selling competing CRM packages. Some resellers offer wider packages including strategic planning and process management.
Want to do the research yourself? Most of the big CRM software manufacturers have extensive advice, pdfs and guides on their sites that reputedly hold your hand through the choosing process. They are likely to be biased, of course, but can be good sources of ideas anyway. Sage, in particular, has a pretty neutral sounding Adobe document download.
For the Dyers another good place to start would be to make a list of your objectives and the benefits your organization hopes to achieve. When looking at CRM solutions you want to check the features and functionality "out of the box"
- customization is all very nice but it takes time and may not be as easy as you think
- supported platforms in terms of hardware, operating systems, databases, online activities and online ordering systems etc., (not just your back office systems but third party software you use too)
- integration with those systems
- global perspective
- price - preferably a one-off purchase price with no annual license fee.
And look for references, preferably from companies in a similar industry as you. Test their customer service and look for unbiased reviews of the same.
When you've narrowed the field down you can ask each supplier to provide you with a full cost (including mods), time frame for implementation, likely downtimes in your current operations during implementation, breakdown of further costs (including training and licensing). More on choosing CRM software.
To manage the relationship with the customer a business needs to collect the right information about its customers and organise that information for proper analysis and action. It needs to keep that information up-to-date, make it accessible to employees, and provide the know how for employees to convert that data into products better matched to customers' needs.
The secret to an effective CRM package is not just in what data is collected but in the organizing and interpretation of that data. That's where computers come in handy (apart from the Solitaire you can play on them :-)) Computers can't, of course, transform the relationship you have with your customer. That does take a cross-department, top to bottom, corporate desire to build better relationships. But computers and a good computer based CRM solution, can increase sales by as much as 40-50% - as some studies have shown.
An example of a CRM application would be in a car manufacturing business (assuming they sell directly to end users). If they maintained a database of which customers buy what type of product, and when, how often they make that purchase, what type of options they choose with their typical purchase, their color preferences, whether the purchase needed financing etc., the manufacturer knows what marketing material to send out, what new products to promote to each customer, what preferences/options may swing the sale, whether a finance package should be included in the marketing material and when would be a good time to target each customer. They could use the information to build a relationship with the customer by reminding customers of service dates, product recalls, and maybe even to send the customer a birthday card.
So how do you go about choosing a CRM software solution?
Using a consultant could save you time and money. Software resellers are often good first line advisers as they have experience and feedback from selling competing CRM packages. Some resellers offer wider packages including strategic planning and process management.
Want to do the research yourself? Most of the big CRM software manufacturers have extensive advice, pdfs and guides on their sites that reputedly hold your hand through the choosing process. They are likely to be biased, of course, but can be good sources of ideas anyway. Sage, in particular, has a pretty neutral sounding Adobe document download.
For the Dyers another good place to start would be to make a list of your objectives and the benefits your organization hopes to achieve. When looking at CRM solutions you want to check the features and functionality "out of the box"
- customization is all very nice but it takes time and may not be as easy as you think
- supported platforms in terms of hardware, operating systems, databases, online activities and online ordering systems etc., (not just your back office systems but third party software you use too)
- integration with those systems
- global perspective
- price - preferably a one-off purchase price with no annual license fee.
And look for references, preferably from companies in a similar industry as you. Test their customer service and look for unbiased reviews of the same.
When you've narrowed the field down you can ask each supplier to provide you with a full cost (including mods), time frame for implementation, likely downtimes in your current operations during implementation, breakdown of further costs (including training and licensing). More on choosing CRM software.
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