Business Generation

My wife and I recently accomplished a major milestone, we paid off all of our consumer debt! We made sure not to carry balances on our credit cards and we didn’t let our debt get out of control. But we did use our credit lines to buy a car, help pay for our wedding, get renovations completed for the HRTC and to prepare for our newborn.

With my wife’s parental leave coming to an end soon, we knew we would need to eliminate our debt to be able to afford for her to stay home to look after our son. To both pay off our debts and prepare for living on one income, we simply used the maternity leave and parental leave payments to reduce our debt. Sin

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A reader asks:

I’d like to start an Internet dating site. Where can I get hold of the software to be able to start one?  How much is web dating software likely to cost me?

A quick Google suggests there’s quite a bit of free dating site software available, although how good it is, or how well it will fit your needs I can’t say.

If you’re prepared to pay for such software then pretty much any web developer should be able to put together a basic dating site. In their most basic form they are not particularly complex. My brother and I once built one in a little under six hours from concept to workable system. That sai

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No small business owner wants to cut employees. Providing a means to earn a living to your workers can be one of the biggest satisfactions from being a business owner. However, when the economy tightens up and cash flow slows to a trickle, layoffs always come up as an option just to stay in business.

Thankfully, there are ways to hold off layoffs that can help a small business survive until happy days are here again and still retain all the great workers you have. Here are a few tips.

1. Be Straight With Your Employees

   At the first consideration of cutting back expenses, hold a company meeting and let everyone know the situation.

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When you think about retirement plans, you don’t tend to think IRS. But if your business operates a retirement plan for its employees then the IRS, and of course your employees, expect that you keep it in good shape and optimized for the best financial return.

Giving your business retirement plan a check-up, whether it’s a 401(k), IRA, SEP, or 403(k) can also help you save time, money and paperwork – as well as increase tax return accuracy. Some

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Social media and more specifically blogging have become increasingly important to marketing a small business in today’s evolving business world. But probably no part of running a small business has evoked more debate or created more stress for entrepreneurs unsure just what their blogging and social media campaigns should look like. And how can small business owners grapple with a specialization often so distant from their core competency? Still, social media and blogging give small businesses a great reach, a literally global reach. We hope this small business news roundup answers some questions and perhaps raises some for discussion too. Read on.

Tools and Trends

Managing your social media. O

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It’s been a couple of months since we bought our car. Since I bought my car, I’ve been keeping track of our mileage, as well as how often we fill up in gas. The point of this is twofold. First, I am genuinely curious as to what type of gas mileage I am getting out of our vehicle, driving it the way that we drive it. Second, with that information, I want to be able to create a gas mileage budget – an approximation of how much it is going to cost to drive our car each month.

There’s two bits of information that you need in order to create this type of budget. The first is the number of kilometres you are driving in between filling up your vehicle. There’s two ways to do this. The next

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