Month: February 2007

Categories
Personal Finance

10 Foundations of Personal Finance

To start my personal finance series I thought I would start with the following foundations on personal finance. I will follow up with a post on each of these individual topics:

#1 Spend less than you make

#2 Create and stick to a budget

#3 Make savings automatic

#4 Accumulate assets that appreciate in value

#5 Avoid assets that depreciate in value

#6 Invest your savings early and often

#7 Live almost debt free

#8 80% of personal finance is behavior 20% is knowledge and the numbers

#9 Your retirement is YOUR responsibility

#10 To be successful you and your partner must agree on these principles

Most personal finance topics can be attributed back to one of these principles. Did I miss any?

Categories
Photography

Digital Photography & Smugmug

I got my first digital camera in 1999, it was a Kodak DC290 with 2.1 Megapixels. I don’t even want to remember how much it cost. I think it was close to $800! Yikes! Although it was expensive, that camera got me hooked on photography and Photoshop. Over the years I have upgraded and now use a Canon 10D DSLR. The great thing with digital photos is that you are only limited by storage. The downside is that the more photos you take the harder it is to manage them. This is where Smugmug comes into play.

Smugmug is a photo sharing site that a lot of people still have not heard of. I signed up for Smugmug a few years ago an instantly became a huge fan. For $40 a year you get unlimited storage and bandwidth. That alone makes it a great deal, but throw in LOTS of great tools to manage your photos and share them with friends and it becomes a GREAT application! If you have not seen Smugmug I highly recommend them!

Here is a photo we took at Stone Mountain a few weeks ago:

Categories
Technology

WordPress is Awesome!

WordPress is the blogging software I am using for this blog. I had dinner last week with Sam Decker at eTail and he told me to go with WordPress or Typepad, WordPress is free so I thought I would try it out first.

All I can say is WOW! These guys know what they are doing. I read through the setup instructions and was VERY skeptical of the 5 minute install claim but I had it up and running in 5 minutes! I think I had never paid attention to WordPress because it is a PHP/MySQL solution. I was a Microsoft ASP developer for 5 years and never played around with PHP so it was never on my radar.

After getting the base install up and running I added on a few other helpful plugins like Google Analytics and Akismet. The neat thing about WordPress is that there is such a great development community to extend and customize the application. I am going to have to break open the code and learn PHP so I can do some customizations. So far I am super impressed!

Categories
Personal

First Post!

After reading lots of blogs over the past couple of years I have decided to start my own here at AndrewKnight.com. I have moved the pages about my consulting business over here.

I am still working on figuring out what topics I will talk about, but here are some of my first thoughts:

Ecommerce
This is my day job and what gets me up every morning. I love the industry and how it has fundamentally changed the way business is done around the world. The pace of change is incredible and the growth rates of internet businesses are far out pacing the off-line world. It is an exciting time to be in this business!

Personal Finance
Over the past couple years personal finance has become a topic I have become more interested as I have become to understand it. The more I know the more I want to learn. I hope to help share some of my learnings here.

Career Coaching
This topic has evolved as I have moved around in my career and learned a lot from some very bright people around me. Since I don’t have 20 years experience I will focus my thoughts on tips and tricks for those just starting out.

Technology
OK I admit it. I am a closet computer nerd. Every once in a while I will be having a conversation with someone and it will just come out. Watch out, it can catch you off guard 🙂

Marketing
Online marketing and Ecommerce go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. Look for this blog to highlight innovative marketing programs that online retailers are using.

Lots more coming!

Andrew

Categories
Personal

My Archive Project

I am writing this post on 12/17/2019, but I have dated it 2/16/2007 which is the day before my first post and the launch of this blog.

I have not written a lot of content on the site since it launched in 2007. As I get older and my memory starts to fade (ok my memory is terrible!) I wanted to start documenting and publishing some of the key events and milestones in my life. One of the reasons I got into Photography was so I could capture these moments.  I love going back and looking through my SmugMug Albums and reliving so many of these great memories.  Over time, I will hopefully build on more of these posts to fill out the archives.