Car Negotiation Coach

This site usually focuses on the financial side of negotiation.  As it should…the “bottom line” refers to money for a reason.

But negotiation involves so much more than money, and it touches upon almost every area of our lives–whether we realize it or not. Almost anything is negotiable–and that includes a lot of decisions within a marriage.

How often do we hear someone say, “marriage is all about compromise.”  And so it is, but isn’t compromise just another word for negotiation?

Let’s go out on a bit of a limb and consider negotiation within the context of a marriage (we’ll use the word marriage for ease of use, but this can refer to any romantic relationship).

Now, I’m not professing to be a marriage therapist, so this post is going to focus more on what can be negotiated within a marriage rather than providing specific negotiation techniques.  That said, loyal readers of this blog should be aware that most of the techniques we generally discuss (including “do your research”, i.e. know the person you’re dealing with) can likely be used in negotiating within the marriage setting.

Negotiating Chores

Is there anything worse than divvying up chores in a marriage?  No matter what, each party is almost always convinced they’re getting stuck with the worst tasks.  Chores can include everything from changing diapers, to cleaning the toilet, or visiting the in-laws.  Perhaps you’ll decide to alternate chores around the house.  You might also allow each person to perform their roles according to who is better at performing each task, along a set routine, or old-fashioned as it may be, even along traditional gender roles.  That said, almost any chore can be negotiable.

Money

It can be tough to determine who gets to splurge on themselves and when.  Some spouses are more accepting of their spouse making a purchase without getting to purchase something equal for themselves than others.  Perhaps you’ll be more accepting of your husband buying season tickets to his favorite team, if he agrees to take over making the bed each morning.  Or perhaps you will both agree to give up a costly vice and instead put that money towards your retirement.

Without realizing it, a lot of our financial decisions within a marriage involve give and take.  In other words, negotiation.

Time (Allocating Time)

Another, more limited resource is our time.  For example, when your wife wants to go out with her friends, some husband’s may be upset about not being in their wife’s company that night.  As a wife, now is your time to start selling the beauty of a concurrent “guys night out” for your husband.

Or, perhaps you can negotiate taking a less time-demanding (and lower salaried) job by stressing the additional time you’ll have available to spend with your children and your spouse.

Major Decisions

What to name your child.  What type of dog breed to purchase.  Whether you really need to put in a patio out back.  What sports and activities you should sign your daughter up for.

These are all examples of important–and yes, negotiable–decisions.  For example, “we can use your favorite first name for our daughter if you let me pick the middle name.”  ”We’ll go with your favorite dog breed if I get to choose the dog breed next time.” “We can put in a new patio if you allow us an extra six months to save up for it.”

Every time a major decision comes up there will likely be some give and take.

Ideals

Is smoking acceptable around the children (or at all).  How much positive reinforcement should we use with our children?  Do we want to stress academics or sports with our children, and to what extent?

Our ideals and values are generally not 100% the same–even though we’re married to each other.  The give and take in making decisions can, and likely will benefit from, negotiation.

The Little Things

What television show to watch.  What to have for dinner.  Whether to spring for cable or not.  Will we stock Coke or Pepsi.  Again, almost every decision can touch upon elements requiring some negotiation.  A healthy marriage is generally rich in compromise and negotiation.  It’s not about taking advantage of your spouse–but rather learning how to negotiate, communicate, and compromise in a mutually beneficial manner.

How do you negotiate in your marriage?

You bet your ass I would!  If I was renting a car in a strange town and I could save a couple hundred bucks by driving a moving ad,  I’d do it in a heartbeat.  Who cares what people think!  I’d even try to get paid to drive a wrapped car in my own town.

A car wrap is simply an enormous advertisement that can cover the doors, hood, roof, or trunk of a car.  The car rental fee is subsidized by the advertiser in order to have a travelling ad rolling throughout major metropolitans areas. 

Between August 10^th and November 8^th, Budget Rental Car is offering wrapped rental cars to Atlanta drivers.   Budget is offering 15 full-size sedans and 10 intermediate SUV’s in the discount program.  The cars are covered in ads for Sheets Brand Energy Strips.

I went to the Budget website to see just how big a discount I could get.  I entered two identical reservations for Labor Day weekend picking up at Hartsfield airport on 9/1 and returning on 9/5.  For a full-size car, the estimated fee for the weekend was $433.  For a “sponsored rental”, in this case a wrapped Kia Optima, the weekend would cost $165.  That’s a savings of $268 for a 4 day rental!

I think this program is a huge win for the consumer, the advertising agency, and Budget Rental car which is getting quite a buzz.

How much would you need to save in order to drive a car wrapped in ads?  Would you only do it on vacation or in your home town too?

While you’re here, why not read some of the latest and greatest from my Yakezie friends:

• Home Exchange – Pros & Cons of Swapping Houses for Vacation @ Money Crashers
• Firing Your Doctor @ Squirrelers
• How to hire a staff writer (or ghost writer) for your blog @ Don’t Do It Yourself
• 5 Tips for Making Your Side Hustle Work @ Personal Dividends
• Start Thinking Like A Wealthy Person @ Canadian Finance Blog
• Still Paying for Cable? @ Broke Professionals
• Car Insurance Basics For Dummies @ Financial Samurai
• Are Your Ready For Space Travel? It’s Coming @ PF Firewall
• The 10 Most Economical Sandwiches @ Len Penzo.com

Photo: Wrap Media Group

Image via Wikipedia

Selling a blog is a difficult decision. And I often see people abandoning their blogs too hastily and ignoring their potential value. Even if your blog has not been monetized or you have little traffic, there might still be some value to that web property. Perhaps the domain is worth money. Perhaps you have a large archive of well-written articles. These things have a value whether you initially think so or not.

Although it can be daunting to sell a blog (or to buy a blog for that matter), it’s almost certainly a better option than letting your blog fade away without bringing you a dime in return.  

Decisions, Decisions

First off, I urge you to take some time to sleep on it and consider keeping your blog.  If you don’t have enough time to keep posting on a regular basis, just take a break for a few months and re-evaluate.  Many people have a very personal relationship with their blogs and readers and once you sell your blog there’s no going back.

And if you’re selling your blog for another reason like it’s under-monetized or it doesn’t have enough traffic, consider what it would take to change that.  You may be able to turn things around and make more money from ad dollars than you could in a sale.

Understand the Market

As with any type of negotiation, one of the main keys in successfully negotiating the a sale of a blog is knowing the market. Flippa  is probably the biggest marketplace for buying and selling blogs and a great place to do your research. Browse through completed listings to get a feel for how much you can expect to earn in a sale.

There are certain parameters that can be helpful when you’re starting out to get a basic feel for the terrain. One is that the sale price is typically worth 18-24 times the monthly income of the blog. Other metrics used in evaluating the value of a blog include: pagerank, monthly revenue, monthly unique visitors, blog age, and % of search traffic. When selling, try to play up the metrics that are favorable to your blog and downplay the others.  

Selling Your Blog

Before listing your blog, be sure to ask any bloggers you know if they might be interested.  A lot of bloggers are trying to build up portfolios of similar blogs and buying one with existing content and subscribers is much easier than starting from scratch.  If you can make a friendly deal with someone in your network that already values your work, you may get more money than listing your blog for strangers.  Also, you may be able to work out a deal where you can stay on as a staff-writer if that interests you.

If you can’t find any takers, Flippa is probably your best best for listing your blog.  Keep in mind though that they do have a $19 listing fee and take 5% of any successful sales.

Once you’re ready to sell, you’ll need to separate your emotions from the deal.  The hours you spent fine tuning every post and toiling over the design mean little to a potential buyer.  They are typically looking at your current statistics and how much money can be made.  With that in mind, try to focus on the numbers and set realistic goals for how much your blog is worth.

Have you ever sold a blog? What is your advice for negotiating the sale of a blog?

If you’re a regular reader, you know I always talk about getting values on big ticket items.  Well, if you are a blogger or small business owner, hiring freelance help certainly qualifies as a big ticket item.  If you have an online presence, sooner or later you’ll probably need a website or logo designed (or redesigned).  But if you look in the wrong places, you can easily drop a couple grand.  Fortunately, if you look in the right places, you can get a new logo for under a $100, a qualified programmer anywhere between $5 and $25/hour, and a virtual assistant for $3-9/hour!

There are lots of intricacies to hiring programmers or designers, even for small jobs that only require a few hours.  You need to find someone qualified, cheap, who can communicate properly.   And you’re probably not an expert in the arena which you are hiring, otherwise you might be tempted to do the job yourself.   As a result, you need to know where to look and how to evaluate candidates in different fields.  I’ve hired a fair share of programmers and other types of freelancers over the years so I have a lot to say on this topic.   In fact, I have so much to say that rather than fill up this blog, I decided to create an entirely new blog devoted to the subject. 

I’ve started out by putting together several in depth hiring guides to help you find a freelance web programmer, a graphic designer, or a virtual assistant and I plan to keep adding more.  I also created an honest, no holds barred breakdown of the best freelance websites.  I couldn’t find an objective opinion on the web about freelancing sites so I decided to start making my own reviews, some not so flattering.  And starting this week, I’ll be blogging both here and on the new site with tips about finding and managing resources, creating websites and blogs, and living an entrepreneurial lifestyle.

I named the site Don’t Do It Yourself because I’m a strong proponent of focusing on your strengths and outsourcing everything else.  I don’t advocate that you go out and hire a big staff right away.  I just explain that it makes sense to look at where you’re spending your time, and where you could be more productive.  By using low cost freelancers to do things like SEO, social media promotion, coding, and graphics, you can work on what’s important and tied to bringing in the dollars. 

On an interesting side note, I decided to go with a very short domain and it’s a .co extension instead of a .com. FindTheBestCarPrice.com and Car Negotiation Coach are both so painfully long to type that I vowed to never choose a domain that long again!  So I went from 23 characters down to 7, pretty sweet.

Anyway, go check out the new site and if you think it’s useful, please spread the word!

In the current economic climate, everyone is looking for an additional way to make money. Many people decide to make money from decluttering their lives, getting rid of clothes they don’t wear and selling items they can do without. There’s also households who declutter by getting rid of their car, opting instead to travel using public transportation or just using one car in the family instead of two. We all know cars depreciate in value the moment you drive them off the lot, but you can still get a good price on selling your vehicle if you choose the right place.

Usually you would expect to go to a used car sales place to sell your car, and others decide to donate their vehicle to charity. What if you could sell your car from the comfort of your home? You may not think it’s possible but WeWillBuyYourCar.com is looking to purchase your vehicle if it’s less than 6 years old and under 80,000 miles. Previous customers describe them as excellent, professional, friendly, and highly recommend their service.

So how does it work? You first decide, “I want to sell my car” and enter your vehicle’s registration number. Your car’s information should be available on the DVLA database. You get an instantaneous online offer, and if it sounds good to you, you accept it. Once you accept the offer, a rep will contact you, find a convenient place for you to release the car, and you can receive your payment within 10 to 15 minutes, a transfer made from their account to yours that’s free of charge. Worried about fraud? Your car won’t be released until the funds are safely in your account, confirmed by the Bank of Scotland. Finally, your car’s pick up is free. This service is based on making things easy for their customers.

WeWillBuyYourCar.com operates in all mainland United Kingdom locations, including Birmingham, Manchester, York, Plymouth, Liverpool and more. If you’re wondering “can I sell my car London“, the answer is yes! The company is always looking for a variety of vehicles. They accept cars from over 40 different manufacturers, including Audi, BMW, Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, Jaguar, Chrysler, Fiat, Saab and more.

If you still have financing left on your car, WeWillBuyYourCar.com can take care of that for you in their transaction. If you prefer a cheque over an instant transfer, that can be arranged. Referring a friend can even get you both £25 in Marks & Spencer vouchers.

Whatever your reasoning may be for selling your car, it pays to shop around and try to get the best deal for your vehicle. You can save yourself both time and money by doing business with WeWillBuyYourCar.com.

This post was brought to you by WeWillBuyYourCar.com.

If you’re looking for a lawyer to support you in your legal actions, look no further than the UK’s leading personal injury claim specialist: First4Lawyers. They specialize in an abundance of claims including car accidents, work accidents, slips, trips and falls, criminal injury, accidents abroad, and medical negligence. You can even file your claim online. First 4 Lawyers is committed to putting the clients first. They have a 100% guarantee that you receive 100% of your compensation. They also have no win no fee solicitors, meaning you pay a fee to make a claim.

The First 4 Lawyers website is extremely helpful, giving you lots of information about accidents and the process of a claim. Their Compensation calculator gives you an estimate of what you can expect if you win your personal injury case. Head injuries can range anywhere from £7,000 for minor injuries to £220,000 for very severe brain damage. They also list teeth, knees, arms and legs, hands and feet, and even compensation for your hair!

Most people involved in auto accidents that receive injuries at the very least have whiplash. According to First 4 Lawyers, whiplash compensation is suggested to be up to £4,250 for minor whiplash, up to £7,750 for moderate whiplash, and up to £82,000 for severe whiplash. Symptoms of whiplash include persistent neck stiffness, headaches, dizziness, difficulty swallowing, shoulder and back pain.

For those who have been in a car accident, you know how stressful it can be. You forget to take down the necessary information, pictures, audio, etc. First 4 Lawyers made it easier by creating a free iPhone app called the Accident Toolkit. The app is broken down into 4 simple steps to follow: your information, the other driver’s information, photos, and witness statements. You can send the information straight to your insurance carrier, or one of their many Accident Specialists. They even have a list of approved repairers for your convenience.

When you start your claim online, First 4 Lawyers first asks you for the details of your accident. This includes the type of accident, whether or not you were injured, and a brief description of how you received your injuries. Next, you enter your contact information, and you’re on your way to filing a claim, where you’ll be contacted by a solicitor and walked through the steps.

First 4 Lawyers should be your first choice when it comes to personal injury accidents. What other lawyer guarantees 100% payment to you? Give them a call or check them out online for more information.

This post was brought to you by First4Lawyers.

Given my recent post about negotiating legal services, I thought it’d be interesting to follow up with a post about how to find a lawyer.

If you’re still finding lawyers through the Yellow Pages, from a billboard or a park bench, then you may need to rethink how to find a lawyer. All a big advertisement proves is the attorney has a big marketing budget. Some of the best attorneys never have to pay for an ad. They simply network and receive strong word of mouth referrals.

Whether you like their profession or not, lawyers are important, so it’s essential that you retain an attorney that’s right for the job. She should be professional, intelligent, and possess specific experience in the area of law for which you need help. Their price should be commensurate with experience and in line with expectations for the type of job they will be hired to perform.

Attorney Search Through Word of Mouth

Word of mouth is the best place to start a proper legal search. Ask your colleagues, family, and Facebook friends if they know any quality lawyers they can recommend.  And when looking for specific types of lawyers, take advantage of people you know in that industry. For example, if you’re looking for a real estate lawyer be sure to ask your realtor and if you’re trying to find a patent lawyer, ask other entreprenuers who may have filed a patent, etc. etc. Referral candidates are already a step above a lawyer you would find in an advertisement–because at least one person is vouching for them.

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The Following is a Guest Post by Chris Thomas of BusyGiftGiver.com

Is it ethical to negotiate items that you will be giving gift?  Of course! What else would you expect to hear at this site?

You should negotiate as aggressively when purchasing gifts as you would when making a purchase for yourself. Perhaps it’s something you won’t bring up to the gift recipient, but it’s certainly something you should be doing to save money.

Why It’s Ethical to Negotiate Gifts

First off, why shouldn’t you be able to negotiate gift purchases?  Think of it this way, when you negotiate, you are oftentimes able to save money.  If you want to pass along the savings to the gift recipient, then do so.  But either way, it’s a win to save money.

For example, perhaps through negotiation, you can purchase a gift you otherwise would not be able to afford. Although conservative gift etiquette “experts” may disagree, particularly in these tough economic times we must try and make our dollars stretch any way we can.

If you don’t feel quite right about negotiating price, then consider negotiating extra features that the gift recipient can enjoy. Get the computer store to throw in that extra software package. Get that car dealer (if you’re going for a huge gift) to upgrade the car so it has power locks.

Resources for Saving Money on Gifts

Again, the same principles apply as when making a purchase for yourself. Do your homework and go in with a plan. This website is filled with suggestions on how to save money negotiating everything from cars to puppies. Again, the more money you save the more you will be able to give.

Conclusion

I understand the initial hesitation at negotiating a gift for somebody else. However, when you think about it passing along the savings or even keeping the money in your own pocket makes much more sense than allowing the profit to be retained by the company or corporation making the sale.

I agree with the unofficial motto of this blog: you should be negotiating just about everything you can.

What are your ideas for saving money on gifts? Have you ever attempted to negotiate an item you will be giving as a gift?

The following was a guest post by Chris Thomas of Busy Gift Giver.com. Unlike most gift suggestion websites that offer thousands of suggestions. Busy Gift Giver provides only 5 great options for every holiday or occassion. Most of the gift’s suggested are budget-friendly and sold through Amazon so the deals are often great. Each review is original and creatively written, and the site was created by Chris Thomas, a blogging friend of mine, so I hope you will go check it out.