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Suggest You - Lessons In Village Design
Here are some things you would want to know about your financial planner1. Is the person qualified?Anybody can say that he or she is an expert financial planner. No particular degree or experience is required. There is no department of government that oversees planners. Of the quarter of a million financial planners, only an approximate of 40,000 are CFP (Certified Financial Planner). The CFP is the most acknowledged designation for financial planning.Even with this certification, there are no guarantees. It takes experience and continuous education plus a high degree of ethics and integrity to be a professional planner.One excellent option is to check his CFP status as well as his PFS (Personal Financial Specialists) and ChFC (Chartered Financial Consultants) status.2. Is he looking after your interest or his?Professional financial planners take their duties on your retirement plans seriously. Your needs are ahead of his or hers. Unfortunately, most of the so called financial planners are just trying to sell you investments. They are not obligated to provide the best retirement plan but are only prevented from selling you an unsuited plan.The best option is to ask the financial planner to furnish you a printout of code of ethics that he needs to comply. It is a difficult read, but knowing the standards which your planner abides is a must.3. How is your planner getting paid?Several financial advisers still get most of their income through commissions. Many gracefully slide through the 'commission' tag by giving themselves the title 'fee-based' financial planners. They also simply duck the compensation subject.Commission is not really bad, but it does create a complexity of interest with the retirement planner. Your retirement planner should voluntarily tell you how he gets paid, or at least give a direct answer when asked.4. A slice of the pie or the whole thing?An excellent financial planner takes into account the whole financial situation of a client, including their plans for estate and budgets. That is the only true way of looking at a comprehensive retirement plan.Most of these financial planners simply focus on a single projection of a client's financial situation. In most cases, they focus only on the area in which they have received any training.When your adviser focuses on a single or only a few aspects of your retirement plan, get one that will take into acco
The encounter with the forest was exhilarating. This
The media, with its mushrooming news channels and minute by minute reporting has not only made the world a global village but is also fast on the move to unify public and private lives of people. The surprising fact is that even the alert and razor sharp media could do little to sober the world any better. The world with its idiosyncrasies and novelties is all set to provide grist to the Fourth Estate’s mill. But each item of news unfailingly brings with it a lesson in Higher Thinking and Better Living for us. The readers of the news have to just be as attentive as the feeders of the news.The burning issue is terrorism that has gripped the world like never before. The vulnerability and uncertainty of live stands so glaring that we doubt if we shall return home to eat dinner. No country from America to Australia has been spared by this menace. The credit of this frenzy largely goes to Osama Bin Laden, the man with ₤ 13 million bounties on his head. Our memory is not so short lived to forget the recent bomb blasts in London, Bali or the killings in the Egyptian resort. The channels keep airing the tapes of Al Qaida carrying communalized and instigating messages. But one question that comes up is, are Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein the only culprits? One Osama cannot perpetrate such cruelty or killings. He is doing exactly what he believes is right. The depressing fact is that there are lakhs of others who are thinking like him.This is “Collective Consciousness” of the planet. It is plainly conclusive that there are more people thinking like him than people thinking about peace. One Osama could have blown himself only once but we have recurring blasts. It’s a simple question of the choice we make and the power of collective choice and consciousness. This is not all, the oppression meted out to women in Taliban and the archaic and unjust rules made for them and endorsed by Al-Qaida are still fresh. But the very recent and provocative photographs of Wafah Dufour, niece of Osama Bin Laden, splashed across newspapers poses another question on our rationality.Wafah Dufour, a wannabe pop star, has adopted her mother’s maiden name after September 11 attack by Bin Laden. It is an irony that when Osama’s family rejects his fundamentalist views and he has failed to control them why he should be controlling others’ families. Has our thinking corroded so much that we let some zealot direct our lives? It is an insult to the Divine who gave us the free w
This is still our vision and to a considerable degree we have succeeded. But we’ve also tempered our idealism with the awareness that we brought human nature with us through the gate, and the laws of gravity work here just as they do in the larger world around us. Rediscovering the laws of gravity was in fact one of the important lessons we learned over the past decade, along with some other basic physical science, but I’m getting ahead of my story.
Our community embraced permaculture from the beginning and it has been a crucial element in our development. In keeping with this approach, we have evolved a culture of experiment, of anarchy tempered by cooperation, and of small-scale, individual action. How has all of this come about and how has it worked to shape the village? And most importantly, what lessons have we learned from our development that may be relevant to other communities?
Pioneering in the forest
Earthaven coalesced around a vision of cooperative community in 1991. For the next two years it built up a core of members, shaped a body of agreements, and searched through a long list of potential sites in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, before locating the 320-acre parcel we now own. Then the fun began.
In 1994 we bought this wooded property. It had a road, an old hunting cabin in poor repair, and one phone line. The trees were third-growth poplar, pine, maple, and other mixed hardwoods, mostly 40-60 years old. There were streams, which the road forded, but no bridges. The property had numerous springs, none of which had been tapped. There was evidence of old farm and logging roads, long overgrown, but no cleared land anywhere. And we were to build a village for 150 people or more, here? We spent the next three years figuring out how and where to put ourselves into the landscape.
The encounter with the forest was exhilarating. This
Across the country, entrepreneurs are talking about the self storage business. The buzz is that investing in the mini storage business can be very profitable. What's more, seasoned investors aren’t the only ones with their eye on the mini storage prize. With lower building and management costs than other real estate investments and a failure rate of less than ten percent, the self storage industry is drawing first-time business owners like moths to a dazzling flame.The advantages are obvious, easy start up, easy maintenance, low risk, but what’s the catch? Can it really be that easy? There is no catch, but it does require work. An investment the mini storage business has a lot of potential, but it is an investment. No matter how you slice it, you need to be prepared to devote time, energy and of course, money to a self storage enterprise. If you’re ready to commit to the self storage industry, here are some things to consider before you invest:If You Build it, Will They Come?Before you spend even a nickel on land or buildings you’ll need to do some research into the self storage market. You should strongly consider hiring an experienced consultant to do a feasibility study in your area. Even if you have experience in real estate or the self storage industry, an unbiased opinion is invaluable when starting a new venture.Location, location, location. Those three words are everything in the real estate world. The same is true for your self storage facility. You might be tempted to use a bit of land you already own, or buy the lowest priced land you can find but you should never sacrifice location for price.According to the Mini Storage Messenger, a resource center for the self storage industry, choosing a site is one of the most difficult decisions to make. An ideal site is one that is located on a major travel corridor and is highly visible. Still, there are more factors to consider. Will you be needed in your service area? How much competition are you facing? Is the area you’re interested in already saturated with self storage businesses? If there are a lot more storage units than customers in your area you’re likely going to have empty storage units which lead to an empty bank account.Measure Twice, Cut OnceYou’ve considered where, next you’ll need to consider how. Since your storage buildings will be your business, a lot of thought should go into planning construction. The unit mix and amenities of your site can be gr
This is still our vision and to a considerable degree we have succeeded. But we’ve also tempered our idealism with the awareness that we brought human nature with us through the gate, and the laws of gravity work here just as they do in the larger world around us. Rediscovering the laws of gravity was in fact one of the important lessons we learned over the past decade, along with some other basic physical science, but I’m getting ahead of my story.
Our community embraced permaculture from the beginning and it has been a crucial element in our development. In keeping with this approach, we have evolved a culture of experiment, of anarchy tempered by cooperation, and of small-scale, individual action. How has all of this come about and how has it worked to shape the village? And most importantly, what lessons have we learned from our development that may be relevant to other communities?
Pioneering in the forest
Earthaven coalesced around a vision of cooperative community in 1991. For the next two years it built up a core of members, shaped a body of agreements, and searched through a long list of potential sites in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, before locating the 320-acre parcel we now own. Then the fun began.
In 1994 we bought this wooded property. It had a road, an old hunting cabin in poor repair, and one phone line. The trees were third-growth poplar, pine, maple, and other mixed hardwoods, mostly 40-60 years old. There were streams, which the road forded, but no bridges. The property had numerous springs, none of which had been tapped. There was evidence of old farm and logging roads, long overgrown, but no cleared land anywhere. And we were to build a village for 150 people or more, here? We spent the next three years figuring out how and where to put ourselves into the landscape.
The encounter with the forest was exhilarating. This
Article marketing is my favorite form of traffic and lead generation. I initially discovered article marketing when I was looking for a way to generate inbound links to my webpages (which I did, extremely effectively, I have several top 10 webpage listings). I began to use article marketing for the purpose of disseminating inbound links to my website on other high ranked webpages.But what I discovered is that out of about one hundred online article directories to which I was submitting only one was producing a consistent direct response to my webpages, and I discovered that the visitors coming from that one online article directory were spending as much as 10 to 20 times as much as visitors coming from other sources.Immediately, I began to change the way I do article marketing and began to submit to primarily one of the online article directories, and began instead of spending my time submitting articles to multiple directories, to write multiple articles and submit them to this one article directory.As proof that I place high stock in article marketing, you can easily verify I have written and submitted over 975 articles in approximately the past year, and if you continue to monitor my writing, you should find more over the next few months as I continue to write multiple articles.Article writing and submitting is time-consuming, therefore it can be assumed that if I am willing to spend the time to do just this to send this article marketing traffic to my high conversion rate squeeze pages, it must be effective for me.So what are my article marketing techniques?1. You must write articles that contain information that people looking for online when they search for your primary keywords.2. You must include relevant text anchor links to relevant webpages in your website, preferably relevant squeeze pages.3. You must submit your articles to the top ranked online article directories, preferably the one or ones with the very highest traffic volume, in order to get the highest traffic to your website.
Our community embraced permaculture from the beginning and it has been a crucial element in our development. In keeping with this approach, we have evolved a culture of experiment, of anarchy tempered by cooperation, and of small-scale, individual action. How has all of this come about and how has it worked to shape the village? And most importantly, what lessons have we learned from our development that may be relevant to other communities?
Pioneering in the forest
Earthaven coalesced around a vision of cooperative community in 1991. For the next two years it built up a core of members, shaped a body of agreements, and searched through a long list of potential sites in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, before locating the 320-acre parcel we now own. Then the fun began.
In 1994 we bought this wooded property. It had a road, an old hunting cabin in poor repair, and one phone line. The trees were third-growth poplar, pine, maple, and other mixed hardwoods, mostly 40-60 years old. There were streams, which the road forded, but no bridges. The property had numerous springs, none of which had been tapped. There was evidence of old farm and logging roads, long overgrown, but no cleared land anywhere. And we were to build a village for 150 people or more, here? We spent the next three years figuring out how and where to put ourselves into the landscape.
The encounter with the forest was exhilarating. This
I talk to many Network Marketers in my daily life. I noticed that they all have something in common. They each claim to be in the best, newest, most innovative, youngest, oldest, fastest growing, or whatever the case may be in their world, as a selling point. I have no doubt that their particular company is an incredible opportunity for the right person. But is that person you? Aren’t you already in a Network Marketing organization? If not, is this the right one for you? The opportunity may have its high points, but what about the one you saw last week? You like both of the product offerings, but would it be a conflict to support both? A resounding NO!I know a ton of people who have done very well with Network Marketing and/or MLM. They found the right company/product/program to fit their needs and beliefs and they built their organization of people with like minds. Most of those people stay at “doing very well”. Rarely do they rise to stardom in their particular organization. So, how do we get from doing “very well” or “OK” or “so-so” to “spectacular” or “phenomenal” or “extraordinary”? Multiple Network Marketing or MLMs!In my opinion, joining multiple organizations is a key. I have seen it done many times and I have done it myself with great success. The trick is to find products and or services that compliment what you are already doing. You still have to believe in and support the company that you find, however, with the wide array of companies out there today, you shouldn’t have any problem finding a match.For example, if you are in an organization that sells health and nutrition products, you may look for a marketing MLM. To go along with it, you could find a company that deals with personal growth, phone service, and/or conferencing services. All of these types of Network Marketing companies would support you in building a business that feeds into itself for success. These are all services that benefit you in building a business and chances are you would probably purchase some of these things anyway in some form.Be careful, “a dog that chases 2 rabbits catches neither”. Have a primary focus; the one business that is your foundation. Also, make sure your budget can allow for expansion into a direction such as this. Build you foundation business daily, and then find the companies that fit what you are doing and support you in building your foundation. Introduce the support businesses to your downline so they can capitalize on your eff
Earthaven coalesced around a vision of cooperative community in 1991. For the next two years it built up a core of members, shaped a body of agreements, and searched through a long list of potential sites in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, before locating the 320-acre parcel we now own. Then the fun began.
In 1994 we bought this wooded property. It had a road, an old hunting cabin in poor repair, and one phone line. The trees were third-growth poplar, pine, maple, and other mixed hardwoods, mostly 40-60 years old. There were streams, which the road forded, but no bridges. The property had numerous springs, none of which had been tapped. There was evidence of old farm and logging roads, long overgrown, but no cleared land anywhere. And we were to build a village for 150 people or more, here? We spent the next three years figuring out how and where to put ourselves into the landscape.
The encounter with the forest was exhilarating. This
Child custody laws vary from state to state. However, when looking into child custody laws, there are some general laws that apply. It is important that when dealing with a custody case, you have a full understanding of how the different laws will affect your individual case.Most often, the court that has jurisdiction over the divorce proceedings, also has say so in the custody of the children. Whenever a child is born to parents who are married, they both have equal legal rights to the custody of the child should they separate.The most important consideration in a child custody case is what is in the best interest of the child. The child's well being takes precedence over the parents wants and desires. Some states believe it is in the best interest of the child to maintain frequent contact with both Mom and Dad. Often times, the parent who is able to be the most supportive of this notion is appointed as the custodial parent.The custodial parent is the term used for the parent who spends the majority of time with the child. Therefore, a non-custodial parent is the term used for the parent who spends less time with the child. Most states have an arrangement is place, should both parents disagree on custody of the child. Often times, the parents are required to attend mediation in order to work out a visitation plan that both Mom and Dad can agree upon. With mediation, the parents meet with a neutral third party, who then helps the parents to try and resolve their differences, as they relate to custody.However, if mediation fails, the parents can then take matters into court. They can present both sides of their cases to the judge and let him or her make the final decision as to the custody of the child.Child custody cases can be extremely difficult and expensive. A mutual agreement is preferred, since joint custody is more likely to be utilized, than if a judge were to make the decision for the parents.There are many factors that come into play in the case of child custody. Since the laws vary from state to state, it is important that a local lawyer be consulted. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the laws of your state, before going forward with a child custody case.
The encounter with the forest was exhilarating. This was to be our home, and it was beautiful. It was also a slow-motion collision. Like a great wave, our hopes, expectations, and needs broke over the wall of wood all around us. For us to live here, trees had to come down, buildings go up. Sunlight was needed for heating homes, generating electricity, and growing crops. (For more on the trees-to-homes conversion story, see“Seeing the Forest and the Trees” pg.25, by Diana Christian.) We agreed we wanted to leave most of the land in permanent forest, but that we would clear home sites as well as ground for village buildings, for agriculture, and to extend a few connecting roads into the main sections of the land.
Where to build?
The community employed me and Chuck Marsh, both permaculture designers, to develop a plan of neighborhood placement. We set out to identify the areas with good solar access, potential for water supply, and to which a sound road could be built. We were inspired by Max Lindegger’s example of Crystal Waters in Australia (he had been a teacher to us both at different times) which was planned with small clusters of houses (3-8) built on ridges between and around dams in the small intervening valleys. We also borrowed a pattern from Christopher Alexander and colleagues, “Agricultural Valleys,” (1) itself inspired by the work of Ian McHarg (2), which suggested that the bottoms of valleys were too valuable as agricultural land to be covered with buildings, and that therefore houses and settlements should be placed on the slopes above these valleys. Our landscape fit this pattern to a “T.” Steep slopes crowded narrow valley bottoms. Flat farmland in the southern Appalachians is scarce and was being rapidly developed all around the area. We didn’t want to make the same mistake as conventional developers.
In late 1997 Chuck and I presented our conclusions and our maps to the community council. We had found 15 areas we felt would be suitable for building clusters of homes or publ
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