Steve Gillman

Several Creative Ways To Make Money

As children, we were always looking for creative ways to make money. One of my brothers collected golf balls from the bottom of a pond and sold them back to the golfers. Another sold candy in school from a hollow book. I ran casino and carnival-style game... Read >

Lying With Statistics - Politics as Usual

Lying with statistics has always been part of politics, but it has perhaps become more prevalent as we have become more mathematically illiterate as a people. In fact, 65.7% of statistic are just plain false. Okay, I invented that one - but to make a poin... Read >

Is it a Good Time to Buy a House?

It's a constant question now in the real estate market: Is it a good time to buy a house? Of course it is difficult to answer in an article since you may be reading this years after it is written, when conditions have changed. But whenever you find this a... Read >

Flip This House - A New Strategy

The television program, "Flip This House" was very popular for a while. Each episode usually followed a new investor or couple as they bought a fixer upper, renovated it and sold it - hopefully for a profit. That strategy worked well when prices of homes ... Read >

Hiking Shoes - Light And Cheap

A dozen years ago I went from using hiking boots to lightweight hiking shoes. It was a part of my move from mainstream backpacking to lightweight or "ultralight backpacking." I stopped getting blisters and have perhaps one or two in the years since. Ap... Read >

A Money Saving Strategy

There are hundreds of money saving tips I could offer, and many of them might be useful in your particular situation. But there is a strategy for spending less which will make you far more secure than any number of tips on how to buy things for less can. ... Read >

Ten Test Taking Tips

Here are some of the best test taking tips for students facing an exam. They cover memorizing the material, getting ready, and what to do while taking the exam. Develop a routine that works for you using one or more tip from each category. 1. Better te... Read >

Three Easy Meditation Techniques

Why look for easy meditation techniques? After all, doesn't good meditation practice take time and effort and self discipline? Perhaps, but before a person is ready to make that commitment he or she may want to have a little taste of what the results migh... Read >

Cheap Real Estate - Ten Ways To Find It

How many ways do you know to find cheap real estate? Whether you are looking for a home, rental house, land or other property, at least a couple of the suggestions here can help you pay less for it. 1. Talk To Your Bank Now more than ever (this is b... Read >

Following Hidden Trails

I am a follower of hidden trails. In fact, on at least half of the hiking trips I take lately, I'm off the trails altogether, bushwhacking into the unknown. What do you get for doing as Walt Whitman suggested, and taking the "road less traveled?" A bit of... Read >

Surviving Hard Times - How To Do It

Surviving hard times is not so much about learning how to be tough or eating cheap noodles as it is about careful planning and self control. First, lets consider a worst-case scenario. Suppose we are entering another great depression. It's worth noting th... Read >

How To Use A Job

Before you start that job search, let me ask you a question: Why would you want a job? Just for a paycheck? Instead of assuming that a job is a necessity that we all must have (it really isn't), consider what is actually important to you. Once you have... Read >

Buying Insurance - Does It Make Sense?

Buying insurance for everything from automobiles to mortgages has become so commonplace that it is natural to assume insurance is a necessity of modern life. But is it really? Is there a better way to guard against life's unexpected occurrences - and save... Read >

Product Innovation - How To Have Ideas

The easiest route to creative product innovation is to start with something we already have and ask some simple questions about it to suggest new ideas. For the sake of demonstrating how this can be done, we'll suppose that we want to design a new kind of... Read >

How To Get More Website Traffic

It used to be that you could actually get more website traffic by simply throwing a bunch of good keyword search phrases on your pages and in the HTML "tags." Of course search engines got better, and so the "experts" began to tell us that we just needed h... Read >