environment

What Is the Average Credit Card Limit and How Can You Increase It?

When you get a credit card, it comes with a credit limit. This is the maximum amount that a cardholder can spend on the card before needing to pay the credit card’s balance. A credit limit is sort of like a loan maximum — the higher the credit limit, the more money the cardholder can […]

The post What Is the Average Credit Card Limit and How Can You Increase It? appeared first on SoFi.

What’s On The Mind Of A 2020 Buyer: Sustainability and Climate Change

Sometimes trying to guess what’s on the mind of buyers can be a difficult challenge. While some of those answers vary, statistics are showing us that despite location or style of home, buyers have one thing on their minds: sustainability and climate change.

The post What’s On The Mind Of A 2020 Buyer: Sustainability and Climate Change appeared first on Homes.com.

12 Things You Should Never Donate to Thrift Stores

Not all of your unwanted items are welcome at donation centers. Here’s a list of things most resale shops don’t want and can’t accept.

LendingTree Review

LendingTree is the nation’s leading online loan marketplace. It provides borrowers with a one-stop shop where they can search for lenders on one online platform. It gives the borrower the ability to find the best loans available and allow you to shop among the various loan offers available. More than this, LendingTree creates an environment […]

The post LendingTree Review appeared first on Good Financial Cents®.

How to See, Solve, Scale with Danny Warshay

Whether you have dreams of starting the next global enterprise, you’re considering a side hustle, or you’re just looking to be more innovative in your corporate day job, building an entrepreneurial skill set is something that can benefit every one of us.
 
Danny Warshay, Executive Director of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship and Professor of the Practice at Brown University, joined me today to discuss his new book See, Solve, Scale.
 
In this interview, we discuss how entrepreneurship is grounded in listening well and solving problems creatively. He shares his favorite strategies for turning an unsolved problem into a breakthrough success.
 
Listen to the full conversation on Apple, Spotify, your favorite podcast platform, or just click play on the audio player above.

Entrepreneurship is a structured process

 
“Sometimes people think…[entrepreneurial skill is] something that you're born with; it's congenital; that you're able to be an entrepreneur just by virtue of being born with a talent. And I know for a fact that is not true. I know everybody is born with the innate ability to be an entrepreneur,” he began.
“Entrepreneurship is a structured process.”
 
  • The first step is See. This is effectively looking around, paying attention, and spotting real opportunities, pain points, or holes in the marketplace that even the end-user or customer may not realize they need.
  • The second step is Solve. This is what “you might call invention. There’s certainly creativity involved.” But it’s invention with intention. “Too often, tech people are starting with a potential solution and hoping to stumble into a problem they can address.” There is “some structure about the creativity. It uses things like nominal group technique and systematic inventive thinking.” Often these solutions don’t emerge from big “eureka” moments, but rather moments in which you might say “huh, that’s funny.”
  • The third step is Scale. And here the focus is on delivering real impact over the long term. Because something could be impactful but short-lived. And we’d call this a fad.

How can we apply this process in a corporate environment?

Not everyone is or aspires to be an entrepreneur in the traditional sense. But there are ways to infuse this structured, creative problem-solving methodology into the work we’re doing for a company. 
 
“You don’t have the embrace the entire process,” Danny explained. “There are times when people will embrace bottom-up research” (a concept described in the book) in order to be more empathetic and to “understand what other people are going through in order to identify problems you can solve.” 
 
This may mean a salesperson paying more attention to the customer experience to identify opportunities to enhance or simplify service. Or it may be the HR person watching teams interact with policies and programs, seeking areas of complexity or confusion they can streamline.
 
“If you're being hired to do almost anything, it's in some way to solve a problem. And so learning how to identify those problems, how to use different structured approaches to creativity and innovation in order to do, to develop the solutions and then figuring out how you can have big impact” is going to set you up for success.

What does bottom-up research look like in practice?

Danny shared a story from his book that delivered both insight and a chuckle.
 
Bottom-up research is effectively about learning not by asking questions but by observing people firsthand—because consumers don’t always know there’s a problem to be solved. And further, it’s not their responsibility to define the problem.
 
So Danny talked about how years ago, Proctor and Gamble (P+G) sent researchers into the homes (with consent of course!) of some of their customers to observe how they interacted with P+G products—one of which was a powder laundry detergent packaged in a cardboard box. And rather than open the box from the top, researchers discovered that some people were stabbing the middle of the box to create a hole from which to pour the detergent.
 
This insight—which only came through firsthand observation—ultimately became the impetus for liquid detergent, which was an improvement that customers didn’t realize they needed.

How might you apply the See, Solve, Scale framework?

Danny encourages you to think about where there might be an unmet need or yet-to-be-discovered problem or opportunity. 
 
“If you come [to a meeting with your boss] armed… with some of your qualitative research, your ethnographic research, your bottom-up research from the See stage of watching consumers interact with [your] product… and you say, ‘Hey, I've got some interesting insights that might shed some light on where we might take the product moving forward,” what kind of value might you have the opportunity to deliver?
 
Danny shared more tips, stories, and bits of inspiration in our conversation. And there’s even more to be discovered in the book. Listen to our interview for more great insights. And then pick up your copy of See, Solve, Scale.
 

Beverage Stocks to Buy for Dividends, Defense and Inflation Protection

Any bet that could offer the trifecta of value, dividends and inflation protection would appear to be a slam dunk pick in today’s particularly tricky market. Well, it just so happens that such names exist, and they hail from a somewhat surprising sector: beverage stocks.

Believe it or not, beverage stocks – or shares in companies that make carbonated refreshments, sports drinks, coffees, teas, juices, energy drinks and more – could be an investor’s best friend amid a turbulent 2022, says CFRA Research.

“With interest rates expected to rise and inflation near a 40-year high, we view the investment case for soft drink equities as the strongest it has been in some time,” writes CFRA’s thematic research team. 

  • SEE MORE Hedge Funds’ 25 Top Blue-Chip Stocks to Buy Now

Before you dismiss this argument as a case of market strategists imbibing something a bit stronger than Diet Coke, let’s hear them out.

Beverage stocks, like most consumer staples names, have a lot of what the market most wants this year. They’re value stocks, for one thing, which are currently back in fashion at the expense of last year’s growth darlings.

Beverage stocks also are defensive names, with relatively stable sales and earnings, strong margins and free cash flow. Those attributes, in turn, support attractive dividends, which soft drink companies have a history of increasing, regardless of economic conditions.

“As such, we view soft drink equities as good inflation hedges due to their ability to leverage brand value to successfully raise prices,” the CFRA team concludes.

Of course, not all beverage stocks are created equal, and CFRA Research calls out four names in particular as top Buys. 

Have a look at CFRA Research’s best beverage stocks to buy below. We’ll recap the investment case for each one, and check in briefly with what the rest of Wall Street says about the picks too.

  • SEE MORE 10 Stocks Warren Buffett Is Selling (And 7 He’s Buying)

Share prices and other market data as of March 18. Analysts’ recommendations courtesy of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Stocks are listed alphabetically.

24 Household Uses for Vinegar that Will Save You Money

Did you know that you could do more with vinegar than just use it on food? Here are five ways to use it outside the kitchen.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.

5 Low-Vol Dividend Aristocrats to Survive a Stormy Market

Turmoil in the stock market has many investors looking for ways to manage risk. If your goal is safety and reliable income, a great starting point is the Dividend Aristocrats, a group of high-quality S&P 500 stocks known for delivering at least 25 straight years of dividend growth. 

A dependable dividend can also have a significantly positive impact on stock performance since these payouts typically account for roughly one-third of total annual return, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Equally as important, the increasing payouts from the Dividend Aristocrats have not come at the expense of an attractive yield. These stocks have consistently delivered, with yields averaging 2.5% over the past 24 years versus a 1.8% yield for the S&P 500. 

The potent combination of consistency and rising dividends have helped the Dividend Aristocrats outperform the broader S&P 500 benchmarks over long periods with lower volatility.

One measure that captures the downside protection provided by these stocks is beta, which calculates an individual stock’s volatility versus the overall market. Since 1990, the average beta for the Dividend Aristocrats has ranged around 0.8. Any beta below 1.0 indicates a stock that is less volatile than the S&P 500.

The calming effect of lower beta is most apparent during periods of stock market decline. Over the past 40 years, the Dividend Aristocrats have performed better than the S&P 500 69.3% of the time during market downturns and 43.4% of the time during market upticks.  

Here, we look at five Dividend Aristocrats with betas below 1.0. Each of the safe dividend stocks featured here offer investors solid downside protection and provide an exceptional dose of stability with reliably rising income.

  • SEE MORE The Pros’ 10 Best S&P 500 Stocks to Buy Now

Data is as of March 15. Dividend yields are calculated by annualizing the most recent payout and dividing by the share price.

Everything You Need to Know About Japandi Design

You’ve heard the word, you’ve seen the headlines, now it’s time to see if Japandi design is right for you.

The post Everything You Need to Know About Japandi Design appeared first on The Rent.com Blog : A Renter’s Guide for Tips & Advice.

30 Uses for Baking Soda for Jobs Around the House

It’s probably sitting in your pantry right now, just waiting for you bake another cake. Well, we found a bunch of other uses for baking soda that’ll help save you money.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.