Making Room for Two: How to Adjust to Life with a Roommate – Mortgage
Making Room for Two: How to Adjust to Life with a Roommate
Dan The Roommate Man
Because downsizing is a fact of life these days, many renters and homeowners can, at a moments notice, find themselves unable to pay the rent or the mortgage. It suddenly becomes necessary to find a roommate - and fast.
In previous articles, weve discussed the screening process and what kinds of questions you should ask before moving anyone into your home, whether he or she is a close friend or complete stranger.
In the rush to simply find a roommate we can trust, however, we often overlook the other insidious issues. How are you going to make space for a newcomer when youve been living solo for such a long period of time After all, each one of us is set in our ways. Introduce a new element into the picture, and your routine is interrupted. How will you react Consider the fact that your furniture is arranged just the way you like it.
Where is your roommate going to place his or her own furnishings Are you willing to make room for some of those items, possibly rearranging yours or even placing them in storage What if he/she doesnt own many items and has designs on your plates, your television, your kitchen table Do you mind If your new roommate is a family member, the issues become even stickier, and youll have to tread lightly. A record number of new college graduates are returning to their parents homes -- at least for the first year, when finances are tight, salaries are low and job stability can be uncertain.
And as a greater percentage of our national population reaches their 60s and above, weve witnessed many of them moving in with family members - even those who remain very active - simply because the cost of living makes a solo lifestyle difficult to maintain.
Regardless of your relationship to your new roommate or the size of your living quarters, both of you must have your own respective spaces in which you may shut the door and maintain a basic level of privacy. This is key to everyones sanity. If you have to clear out that storage room youve been avoiding, or spend an extended period doubling your kitchen table as an office because you give your spare bedroom to your new roommate, then so be it. The importance - and, ultimately, the benefits -- of a good relationship with your roommate far outweigh any temporary inconveniences youll face.
If you suddenly find that the combination of your own belongings and your roommates is causing excessive clutter in your home, you may want to consider either hosting a garage sale after all, the need for a little extra money is what prompts many of us to search for a roommate in the first place or placing your belongings in a climate-controlled storage facility, many of which are cheaper than you might expect.
Some roommates opt for an existence in which theyre two ships passing in the night; and so they shop for groceries and cook for themselves. If you want to save money as well as time, however, youll consider splitting the shopping and cooking responsibilities with your roommate. Plan your menus weekly. Place a magnetic memo board on the refrigerator, on which each roommate may write his/her personal weekly shopping list for snacks, breakfast items or other groceries you dont share. Roommates should alternate weeks making the trip to the grocery store. And plan to allocate a particular number of nights each week on which each roommate is responsible for preparing dinner. Be clear about your food preferences obviously, a steak dinner wont sit well with a strict vegetarian.
Ultimately, meal-sharing will save you money and time. Be smart in your approach; prepare larger portions, and freeze the remainders for another night. In addition, youre less likely to rely on convenience foods, many of which have little nutritional value and tend to be significantly more expensive.
Household chores are a major point of contention among roommates. So set the record straight from day one. Create a list of who will perform what.
And be realistic. If your roommate would rather have a root canal than mow the lawn, how easy it going to be to coax him into this chore on a regular basis If you feel the same way about lawn care, you might consider hiring a neighborhood teen to handle the job. Youre paying for the preservation of your relationship, so its a worthwhile investment.
If your roommate is a family member and isnt paying rent, determine immediately upon their arrival how theyll compensate you for the convenience of living under your roof.
If its a parent, perhaps he or she can chip in weekly grocery money, pay for a meal in a restaurant once a week or assume an extra chore or two. If its an employed child returning to the nest after college graduation, you may consider asking them for a small amount in monthly rent and/or to assume responsibility for weekly tasks - the grocery shopping, yard maintenance, taking the family out once a month for dinner, etc. Of course, these extras arent a substitution for the expected tasks of doing his/her own laundry, dishes and bedroom and bathroom maintenance.
Introducing a roommate into a previously solo or empty-nester existence is never an easy proposition. But when you approach the transition with careful planning and open communication, youll find yourself pleasantly surprised at the results: a closer relationship with your family members or a trusted new friend and confidante.
About The Author
Since 1989 Dan The Roommate Man has helpe 1000s people find roommates. Need help Contact him at 800-487-8050 or www.roommateexpress.com
info@roommateexpress.com
Marketing Tourism Online, Part Two: Attracting Visitors to your Website – Marketing
Marketing Tourism Online, Part Two: Attracting Visitors to your Website
Bryan Wilson
This is part two of an article series which will introduce some basic strategies, considerations, elements, and techniques for marketing tourism products online. We plan to update and refine these articles as situations change and when we have new knowledge to present. If you have comments or questions, or you are interested in Leave Homes travel marketing consulting services, please visit www.leave-home.com or contact the author directly. You can also request to be notified when a new article in the series is available.
GETTING THE WORD OUT
Your site does no good if nobody visits. Put your website address on everything you produce that goes in the hands and in front of the eyes of your customers, distributors, and other audiences: in your email messages; on your brochures; on your letterhead; on handouts at presentations; on company vehicles; etc. Mention the address when you are speaking with potential customers and in audio communications.
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
Optimize your website for indexing by search engines, and above all, get other sites to link to yours. Most of the popular search engines, including Google, base their rankings on key word and phrase relatedness to the search and the popularity of your site as measured by the number and popularity of the sites that link to it. Youll usually need to be in the top 20-30 results for the most important related search terms to really benefit.
The other major determinant in search engine ranking is the amount of content on the site that matches or approximates the search terms...so, a site with more content is likely to be ranked higher.
Make sure search engine "spiders" or "robots" can crawl through your pages follow links to all the pages on your site. If your site is built entirely in Flash or another multimedia plug-in offfer a plain HTML version!, or generates most pages dynamically, you will need to take special steps to ensure that your site can be indexed.
Get your site listed and linked in portal websites covering tourism sectors, destinations, and lifestyles related to your offerings--generally, for free. Trade links with related sites. These activities not only help with search engine rankings, but will be a source of visitors by themselves.
There are many factors that affect rankings, and they are weighted differently by each engine. Despite these differences, you will be on the right path if your site has plenty of content that contains the search words or phrases your customers will use, if you include key search words and phrases in the page text and in the TITLE tags in your HTML pages, and if you can get a few dozen pages on related sites to link to your site. It can help to bold or italicize some of the main key phrases in the text of your web page and to put them in heading tags , etc.
Generally, you do not need to bother resubmitting your site to the major search engines once you have done this for the first time. They will continue indexing changes to your site as they are made. Check your site access logs--youll see that their robots keep returning to your site! It may not be worth your time or resources to keep returning to some of the minor engines that are slower to update without your involvement, unless they are important to a target market! The major ones are used worldwide and have multiple language versions.
Consider buying pay-per-click advertisements in popular search engines like Google and Yahoo!. Youll never pay more than you specify per click and per day, and these can be very effective while you are still working to build a search engine ranking that puts your website on the first page!
BEYOND SEARCH ENGINES
Include tools on your site for visitors to tell others about your website, products and destinations! Consider using electronic postcard tools or offering subscriptions to free email newsletters which should, of course, contain links to your site!. The topics of email newsletters and multimedia tools will be covered in subsequent articles in this series.
Consider writing articles for submission to Web article banks, sites which offer free articles for use in websites, email newsletters, and other communications You may be reading this article via an article bank submission!. In return for use of your article, you receive a listing of your name and company and a link to your website. This can also be a good way to establish yourself or your organization as an "expert" in your field or tourism domain.
Also consider frequenting relevant Usenet discussion lists e.g., rec.travel.japan and Web-based bulletin boards, or joining email discussion groups, to offer advice in your area of expertise or about your destinations. Dont spam and do follow their rules of "netiquette", or online behavior. Do include your Web address and a short business description with your "signature" at the bottom of your responses. Not only will you attract visitors to your site, but youll learn about the concerns and interests of potential customers. You can incorporate questions paraphrase or attribute and your answers into an FAQ Frequently Asked Questions section on your website!
Paid Web banner advertising can be cost-effective if properly targeted and timed, and if the message is right. The same holds true for ads in print and other media but these are outside the scope of this article.
IN CONCLUSION
There are many techniques for attracting visitors to your website. Make sure you cover the technical basics like search engine optimization, but dont focus on technical tricks or spam methods--you may be removed from search engines and turn away potential customers. Offer quality content, find online partners to share links, and be a bold online networker!
The next article in this series presents guidelines for the creation and use of websites.
Seattle, USA; August 2004
About The Author
Bryan Wilson is a travel marketing consultant and partner in Leave Home Productions. Leave Home Productions provides marketing services and tools to tourism-related businesses and organizations. Our clients benefit from strategies, tools, and creative concepts developed to clarify their needs, make use of their resources, and help them achieve their goals. We specialize in promotions, online communication, distribution and the creation of multimedia and Internet tools. Leave Home also supports marketing with traditional media formats and personal communication. We work to develop solutions that support healthy growth for our clients business and sustainable tourism for the host communities and environments.
Leave Home, tourism marketing consultants
http://www.leave-home.com
bryan@leave-home.com
Lighting the Way when Two Become One – Weddings
Lighting the Way when Two Become One
M J Plaster
Whether you want to add a little extra romance to an evening reception or a little glow to your house of worship, candles are a natural, effortless addition to your wedding theme. Youll have no trouble finding a role for candles at the wedding ceremony, at the reception, and even as part of the floral displays.
Unity Candles
Join the growing number of couples who include a unity candle as part of the wedding ceremony. Perhaps you think that unity candles are steeped in a rich history of religious tradition, or perhaps you think that unity candles are the invention of the candle makers to sell an extra candle or 10,000. Neither is the case. The exact evolution of the unity candle is uncertain, but since it began 30-40 years ago, it seems that we have that ever-lively 60s generation to thank for yet another custom that has wormed its way into modern life.
Id like to propose my own idea of the unity candles origin