Guest Blogs
Knowitall.ch often invites local experts in their field to contribute to their own blogs on our site. This means not only you will benefit from the useful recommendations that we make on our News pages, but you can also profit from some of the great advice and tips that these experts have to make on their favorite subjects. Whilst each of these bloggers has been recommended to us at some point during the evolution of Know-it-all passport and knowitall.ch, obviously we are not able to test out all the suggestions they make on their blogs, nor do we necessarily agree with all their opinions. So if you do find one of their tips useful (or not!), do let us know!
To make these blogs more accessible to you, we have now decided to group them altogether in one section, entitled Guest Blogs, accessible from our main menu bar. We will also post the most recent blogs on the home page of our site in the right hand column.
We are still building up this area of the site, and are looking for bloggers in a number of sections, including Your Home, Travel, and Leisure, so if you feel you have a useful contribution to make in either of these areas, and have the time to submit blog entries approximately every month, then please get in touch!
By David Cooper, Fund Advisers Europe
Plan for the future—that’s where you are going to spend the rest of your life!
Regardless of your age, retirement planning is essential in order to be prepared and comfortable in the golden years of life. Systematic and early retirement planning can reduce your financial burden during the post retirement years and help you plan for a carefree and financially secure post retirement life.
Expatriates are Vulnerable
Expatriates are vulnerable when it comes to saving for retirement. For an expat to be eligible for a state pension, they have to pay into it. But if they then move location they risk losing their contributions in the previous country. You can only take 25% of a UK pension as a UK tax-exempt lump sum; and on your death, the residual value of a UK pension is passed to the State rather than to your heirs.
How do I start planning for my retirement?
The sooner you start to plan and save, the more you will eventually have to retire with and the sooner you can stop worrying about your future. Decide how much income you require to live comfortably in your post-retirement years, determine how much you need to save regularly, starting today, to have the right amount. Then select the right retirement plan, which will help you meet your post-retirement requirements.
Photo by Simon Whitehead, www.threebythree.co.uk
Those of you like me, who are back from their sunny destinations, will understand my aching heart… longing to be back in the arms of carefree, mindless, fun- filled activities and basking in the glow of overall enjoyment overload.
But for now my vacances d’été seem like a distant memory etched somewhere in my mind. I am desperately trying to seize these moments (on an hourly basis :-) if only to convince myself that it was neither a dream nor a figment of my imagination!
But my holiday did not start as well as I had hoped and although it was a small hitch in the scheme of things (world poverty, the euro crisis and whether the Spice girls will indeed reform again) I was irritated and concerned….
By Sarah Santacroce at Simplicity. Free image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
On my “13 Simple Techniques To Get More Leads with LinkedIn” webinar one of the participants asked:
“Should I accept invitations from people I don’t know?”
Good question. The more connections, the bigger your reach. So technically it’s a good business strategy to accept everyone’s invitation. But yet, I don’t recommend this approach. In this post I’m sharing:
My very personal LinkedIn Connections Strategy
“A contact only becomes a connection when there’s some kind of exchange between the two parties”. Click here to share this quote on Twitter
It’s not just a numbers game.
Yes, it’s true that your reach increases the more connections you have in your network. But just like on Facebook, the numbers alone won’t guarantee your success. Even though LinkedIn is a business network, don’t forget that “people do business with people”. So if you just have numbers in your network, and not real connections, you won’t get anything back from your marketing efforts.
So Sarah, what’s your LinkedIn Connections Strategy?
Photo by Simon Whitehead: http://threebythree.ch/
Bonjour, Hello, Namaste
Some interesting research has come out regarding praising children. Researchers found that children who were given too little or indeed too much praise had low self-esteem. So can children spot false praise and why does too much and too little have the same effect?
Having lived and worked in a Franco, Indo and Anglophone set-up, praise definitely has a cultural bias, each culture having its own attitudes and beliefs concerning praise. Depending on our schooling system and our parents views, our own idea of praise is somewhat shaped by these experiences and this can have lasting effects on us later on in life….
I take the example of when I worked in London. My boss, who was a great manager, was so quick to point out when the team did something wrong, but when we were doing it right nothing, nada, not a dickey bird …
Indeed, a client I once worked with told me, when discussing the importance of praise, that when things went wrong he reacted immediately and gave the appropriate feedback…but when things went well he did not respond as promptly…
By Sarah Santacroce at Simplicity
You know those messages you get on LinkedIn, telling you that “your LinkedIn profile is now 60% complete” ? Well, in order to achieve the 100% completion, your profile must include three recommendations or referrals given to you by others. These referrals can be from clients, strategic partners or even professional colleagues. For small business owners I’d like to increase that number to 7 referrals. Don’t ask me why 7, I don’t have a good reason for it, I just like that number better than 3. 3 is the bare minimum, 7 is the ideal number.
Why should you have recommendations on your profile?
- Because you get more inquiries: according to LinkedIn users with recommendations in their profiles are three times more likely to receive relevant offers and inquiries through searches on LinkedIn.
- Because people search online before they buy and will come read what other people say about your services on your profile
- Because every time you get a recommendation, it will show up in your network’s newsfeed as well.
