Monthly Archive for February 2010
Insurance companies are hiking the rates for auto insurance
2009 turns into 2010, the winter ice and snow has been particularly hard this year. It even affected Florida which shows how climate change is related to local weather patterns. Needless to say, the number of traffic accidents has been at an all-time high. No-one is ever ready for ice on the roads. Yet, all round the country, ice is coming through the mail boxes. The insurance companies are sending out notices chilling our desire to drive – premium rates are being hiked. And this time, it’s not just a few percent. In most states, it’s averaging at around 10%. So we are not talking peanuts. This is serious money while the US is in recession and millions of people are out of work. What’s the result? If it comes down to a choice between food on the table and an insurance policy, food wins every time. Everyone has to eat and everyone needs a vehicle – even in the bigger cities, public transport is a joke. So, when push comes to shove, more people will drive uninsured. That’s bad news for the rest of us. Our premiums will rise with fewer policy holders sharing the rising costs of claims. If only the insurers would hold the premiums steady, more people could pay, and rates would stay lower for longer. If only. . .
So why are insurance companies hiking the rates? There are two common problems. The first is the broken healthcare service. Whenever there’s a more serious traffic accident, most people go to hospital. The obvious injuries are treated. Bodies are examined to ensure there are no other injuries. Except, the moment anyone steps through the door of a hospital or clinic, the medical expenses meter starts to run. Despite the recession, the drugs industry and healthcare service suppliers have been increasing their prices. There have been some high-profile disputes between insurers and hospital groups in California and Connecticut. The current fight is between the Continuum Health Partners of New York and United Healthcare. The hospitals have agreed pay increases with the labor unions, new technology is expensive to instal and operate. They want more money. The insurer is looking for a reduction in charges of between 7 and 10%. It’s painful to admit but, in this fight, the insurers are actually protecting us policy holders.
The second problem is equally easy to explain. When we claim, the insurer should have the money to pay. This money comes from cash reserves and all the different state Insurance Departments monitor the amounts held to ensure there’s always sufficient set aside. It’s standard for insurers to hold this money on investment so, when the recession came, they were slow to move out of stocks and bonds, and all the larger insurers lost a slice of their capital. Commissioners are offering their local insurers a choice. Either reduce the number of people holding policies or add more to your cash reserves. This forces companies to raise premiums and so, sadly, it’s getting more difficult to find affordable auto insurance. Even with the use of this site’s excellent search engine, it’s hard to find policies with lower rates. When you get the multiple auto insurance quotes, check through to find those with lower premiums. For good terms, look at the discounts available from these companies. Think about accepting a higher deductible. Using the auto insurance quotes as a starting point, negotiate directly with the insurers. Affordable policies are out there. You just have to work harder to find them.
How to find a good online wholesaler
Finding an online wholesaler is a difficult and time consuming task for both first time entrepreneurs and experienced internet marketers. From dealing with picky customer support to planning out order sizes and pricing, finding a trialing a new supplier can be frustrating at best and incredibly stress inducing at worst. With many wholesalers unresponsive to small businesses and new clients, it can be very difficult to get your foot in the door with the best and brightest wholesalers. Fortunately, with just a few small changes, your search for an online wholesaler can go from stress inducing to possibility opening.
When picking an online wholesaler it’s fundamentally important to go with one that offers services that scale to meet your business needs. Many location independent business owners, and marketers shipping relatively small amounts of stock, go with dropshipping wholesalers. These providers take responsibility for both providing the product and managing delivery and order fulfillment. All you need to do is make the sale. Unfortunately, getting in the door with one of the major dropshippers can require a large time commitment, and a massive amount of paperwork.
So, what’s the best way to start your wholesaler and dropshipper business relationship? Generally speaking, it’s best for newbie entrepreneurs to select their wholesalers and dropshippers from a pre-selected list of quality providers. This provides several key benefits that going at it alone doesn’t:
- Low quality providers are automatically filtered out
- The barrier to contact providers is much smaller
- Providers are easier to find and compare
These benefits make it much easier to simply pick providers from an established directory than to search independently. With the many different directory services on offer, choices are wide, although the biggest and best wholesalers and dropshippers are almost always the wisest choices in terms of convenience. Make sure to research and stress test any dropshipper or wholesaler before you commit to a long term contract and buy a large amount of stock – you want a stress free business relationship, and those are best tested through rigorous micro-tests and analysis.
The barrier of contact is something that can turn many first time entrepreneurs off instantly. Many wholesalers aren’t renowned for their customer service, preferring to work alongside a retail outlet that handles customer enquiries. Perhaps due to the nature of their business, they’re somewhat difficult to get masses of information from. This is where the wholesaler and dropshipper directory comes in highly valuable. By taking away the most stressful part of any business relationship — the initial contact — the directory provides a unique chance for entrepreneurs to contact dropshippers and wholesalers and create a relationship that will produce long term results for any online business. By saving time in the research phase, online marketers and entrepreneurs can focus their time on creating the most successful business possible.
Posters and Color Offset Prints
Posters are the most staple printed materials that you can use in your marketing and advertising campaigns. time and again they have proven their worth and are very effective when you need o capture an audience’s attention and interest.
Posters are an indispensable tool that occupies many public and open spaces. Just look at walls, in the stands and on windows. Posters come in a variety of different shapes and sizes. They also come in different sizes: big or small. Some are printed on one side while others are printed on both. They work best as color offset prints that have vibrant colors, great resolution and attract as much attention as possible.
All kinds of business can use posters in different fashion – in large format for promotion, in standard sizes for trade shows. They use them as motivation posters and advertisements. With its different uses, posters are very practical in a number of ways.
Color offset prints mean more prints at lesser costs
Color offset prints are your best bet when in comes to bulk printing orders. They can handle printing large amount of orders at a very fast turn around. Not only that, the more you order, the lesser the print cost per printed piece becomes. This means, you don’t double what you are paying for 500 posters just to avail of 1000 posters. Only a fraction of the cost is added to make twice as much posters since bulk of your printing cost is placed on the production of plates.
They are versatile materials
You can use your poster in a variety of ways and you can print them in different ways also. die cutting allows you to form them into any shape that you can think of. You can also print in different sizes. Some printers even allow you to print up to 60 x 100 inches.
You can also use the different paper stocks available. The stocks many printers use involve 100 lb. Gloss Text and 100 lb. Gloss Cover both paper stocks are brought white and are of optimum quality to give you the best colors – allowing you to have eye catching posters for your product promotion or service promotion.
How to make posters effective:
o Never look at the size of the poster. Do not think that the bigger the poster, the better or more effective it is. Contrary to popular belief, size does not matter. The message is what matters. It should be clear and not cluttered.
o Edit anything that will not help you in conveying your message. It should be prominent and clear – the headlines, the dates, the venue and such.
o Always use a single message for every poster. One message is much mire effective thatn trying to convey many messages in one poster.
o Your company logo should stick out and be prominent so that the people remember who you are and what you do. That’s the main point of your poster right? To make your products, services and company known.
These are just some of the possibilities that you can explore with color offset printing your posters. Experiment different options and create a poster design that is uniquely your own.
Basalt Stone Massages
These days’ stone massages have become very popular and are in active demand. Most of these massages are carried out in day spas and therapeutic healing centers. It revives and relieves the body muscles and tissues in a very comforting way. The stone massage is now being used with a combination of the very famous Swedish massage.
The most often used stones are known as Basalt stones which are a resultant of volcanic eruptions and contain a proportion of oxygen and silica being their combined element. The stone also contains iron and magnesium which is a very popular element used by pharmacies for healing medications. When basalt is in its lava form it is usually very soft and delicate to contain. When volcanoes erupt, they release substances which contain 90% of basalt only.
These volcano rocks which are also called basalt stones are use in massage therapies due to their capability of containing heat at an extremely high level. This lava rock is very smooth and its surface is free from roughness which makes it a more ideal tool in massage therapies.
If you tend on finding the basalt stones yourself, you should consider and keep in mind a few factors:
1. The quality of the basalt stone must be to such an extent that it may hold and preserve heat for longer durations.
2. You should find stones in a variety of shapes because they have to be positioned on certain parts of the body where every stone might not be applicable.
3. You should take into consideration the weight and density of the stone to form an ideal collection for different types of massages.
4. Most of the perfect massage basalt stones can be purchased in a kit, which contains a complete range of massage stones which have been polished and are ready to imply in anyone of your massage techniques.
5. Once you have found the stones you were looking for, it is now time to maintain them for their best performance and result. You will have to rinse them after every massage in hot water and treat them with a variety of essential oils.
Cleaning these stones is very easy and should be a daily practice after every massage session. Why is this very important, though they are just stones? Because a great deal of aromatherapy oils are used during every massage therapy.
If you plan on boiling the stones, you should use river, sea or rain water, which allows the stones to absorb all the natural ingredients to regenerate their optimum strength. These stones are usually supposed to be heated at around 120 – 150 degrees Fahrenheit.
Hot stone massages are a great help in healing certain internal injuries, muscle injuries, insomnia, back aches and depression attacks. These basalt stones should be used in different sizes, shapes and colors to experience their highest healing properties and pleasurable feel during any massage!
If you have yet to experience a basalt stone massage- what could you possibly be waiting for? On your next day off go down to your local spa and book one!
TENEVIS Tips – Is walking really a workout?
You may be surprised to learn that brisk walking can be almost as challenging as jogging. Here’s why. When you walk at speeds faster than 3.1 mph, your stride length naturally increases (you don’t necessarily want it to for efficiency but inevitably it happens). Lengthening your stride is inefficient because it requires additional energy to move your legs forward, which in turn requires more arm and torso movement, which leads to increased torso and hip rotation, which amounts to higher aerobic demands and more calorie-burning. This has been confirmed in the laboratory. The research shows that at maximal levels of exertion, oxygen consumption (the bottom line to cardiorespiratory fitness) is only slightly lower for racewalkers than it is for runners, and at submaximal or moderate-intense levels of exercise, oxygen consumption levels between race walkers and runners are almost equal. Racewalkers can reach speeds as high as 9 mph!
What are the biomechanics and types of foot strike?
Foot strike is the term used to describe the moment that your foot hits the ground when you’re walking. The normal biomechanics of foot strike are that your heel lands first (heel strike), followed by midfoot strike and flattening of the arch to absorb impact (very important), then the forefoot strike (front of your foot), and finally the push-off to the next stride. Soft heel strikes with a smooth gait pattern and some flattening of the arch will reduce the impact on the foot and cause less stress in joints as high up as the hip (the ankle bone is indeed connected to the hip bone!). There are three types of foot strike:
1. Pronated foot strike. Pronation is the term to describe when your arch flattens on foot strike (for example, when you have flat feet) and causes your foot to invert, or roll in. Excessive pronation will cause your ankle and leg to twist and can lead to stress fractures, shin splints, and other lower-extremity injuries. You’re probably a pronator if the inner edges of your shoes wear out.
2. Supinated foot strike. Supination is the term to describe high arches that don’t flatten. This is a problem because if your arch doesn’t flatten and your foot doesn’t roll in at all, then you lose shock absorption on foot strike. Excessive supination can lead to ankle sprains, Achilles tendinitis, plantar fasciitis, and iliotibial band syndrome. You’re probably a supinator if the outer edges of your shoes wear out.
3. Neutral foot strike. An efficient amount of flattening of the arch is called “neutral” foot strike. This provides plenty of shock absorption and enough energy for you to have a powerful push-off.
Go walking with TENEVIS FDA approved walking shoes! http://www.tenevis.com
Source: http://www.medicinenet.com/walking/page3.htm