Personal Finance and Investing

Lets start off with a simple explanation of how insurance works. In the good old days before those kind men got together in the Lloyds coffee shop, people were responsible for their own losses. If the horse pulled their cart into a ditch and this broke the wheel, the owner had to put his hands into his pock’ets (which fortunately had already been invented) and pay someone to repair the wheel. But once people could share the risks, life was suddenly better. If you gather together a big enough group of cart owners, each will only have to pay a small amount into the central fund to cover the losses of the few who have accidents. Those men at Lloyds were on to a winning business formula. Moving into modern times, the idea of spreading the risk is the same and, with thousands of people in each group, the cost of loss is divided into small premiums. But, with profits under pressure, the insurance companies came up with a new variation on the old theme. Suppose they could persuade their customers to accept the risk of some of their losses. This would then become self-insurance for part of the risk. The rest would be paid by the insurance companies. So the deductible was born. You agree to pay the first portion of any loss. In the case of traffic accidents, most of the fender benders are minor and don’t cost much to repair. That means you pay for most of the repairs yourself and the insurance companies get richer. Ironically, if no-one opted for the deductible, the increase in the premium for everyone in the group would be trivial.

So let’s get to an actual example to see how it works. If you agree to accept a deductible of $1,000, you will be given a discount on the premium. Say you save 10% over the year. Now that’s a good saving if you manage to get through the year without having an accident. But suppose your luck is not good and you have an accident. The bill for repairs is $900. You put your hand in your pocket (pockets are such useful things – always seeming to have money in them) and pull out the dollars. Was your 10% saving over the year more than $900? If not, you are making a loss, not just on the insurance policy but, if you had to use your credit card, on the interest added to the $900 until it is paid off. What would happen if your run of bad luck continued and you had a second accident in the year? Do you have another $1,000 as savings or available to borrow? Perhaps we should not be so pessimistic. Worst case scenarios are always better applied to other people and never to you.

The higher the deductible you accept, the more of the risk you are accepting. Cheap car insurance is a wonderful thing to have so long as your luck holds up. But if your luck fails, the maximum deductible is going to empty that magic pocket of yours. And here’s the thing – you can be the safest driver in the world, always super careful, always following all the rules, and then you meet a dork behind the wheel of another vehicle and suddenly you’re wrapped round a tree. So look for cheap auto insurance, but always look at your cash position and ask yourself how well you would cope if the worst happened. Deductibles are good for people with a margin of financial safety.

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Poster printing is as much an art as it is a science as well. Print posters can be considered as art, individual, creative and free, but they are also bound by theories of beauty, aesthetics, proportion and other concepts that are science-like. So it comes as to no surprise that there are a couple of basic formulas on the layout design when it comes to poster printing. Human psychology and perception play a big role in defining these common layouts making them attractive, easy to understand and effective in advertising.

Below are a few of the common layouts that you can consider adhering to when creating your color poster design. Using these layouts should help your design become as attractive and as effective as possible when dealing with a human audience.

The Wanted Poster – Some Poster artists may not be aware of it, but most poster designs gravitate to a “wanted poster” layout or a similar variation of it. The “wanted poster” layout basically has the main poster title or header on top, the main design object in the middle and then the other details of the poster at the bottom. If you can imagine an old western style wanted poster, you should have a pretty good idea of what the layout should look like.

This layout is one of the most common and best layouts for poster printing because it is the easiest to notice and it is also the easiest to read. The big header text immediately draws our attention to it (i.e. WANTED!). Then, most of us have the tendency to look downwards, just like you are ascertaining a person. Looking down from the header, we see the main poster image which will attract us further. This causes us to look for supporting text typically by looking downwards more. Once we read the text and other details, the poster’s work is done. As you can see, all the relevant information is given to the viewer in a step by step process making the color poster easier to understand. This makes the wanted poster layout the ideal layout for most poster printing occasions.

The Streamer Poster – A streamer layout for a poster basically involves stacking up all the poster details in one central column. This includes the main header or title, and all the supporting details. Typically the main object is relegated to the background or it is placed at the bottom of the stream. Again this follows the human tendency to look from up to down as we look at something. The difference here is that the layout relies on the text details itself to keep a person’s attention.

The Framing poster – As the layout’s name suggest, the framing poster has a “framed” layout. This can be done by actual frames on some or on all four sides of the poster. However, the frame can also be a person, tree or other object which frames the poster artistically. Framed posters will center people’s attentions on the center of the design. If you have a great centerpiece in your design, then this layout may be a good choice.

The Column/row Poster – The column and row poster layout is typically used in informative posters, such as scientific research posters, or awareness posters. Their layout basically involves content that are organized into rows or columns. This caters to our tendency to read text in books or newspapers. Basically we read these types of printed material either left to right by rows or top to bottom by columns. If you are creating an informative poster, this layout is the most efficient to display your data so that people can read them well.

As you can see, with just the top 4 common layouts for posters, you can already manage to create a lot of types and designs. Of course these are just major guidelines in a layout, and you can make a few changes to them to make your poster more unique, or you can completely throw them out the window and make a layout from scratch. However, take note of how these layouts are effective because they take into account how humans view and read posters. So learn what you can, and design the best layout for your full color poster printing.

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A Laptop is a portable computer small enough to use anywhere. When you decide to shop for a laptop you’re open to find that you’ve got numerous choices. But first you consider comparing its various specs, reviews, features, ratings, discount and prices by brands to be able to come up with the best deal that meets your requirements. There are great all purpose latest top best laptops in the world today that allow people to take their work with them and have the ability to do many things. If you are constantly working on the move then your choice of laptop is probably crucial to your happiness. The main features to view when choosing mobile laptop computers are size, weight, storage capacity, screen size and battery life.

The ‘Netbook’ normally a smaller laptop is a sub notebook computer that is built to be lightweight and very portable, they usually aren’t very powerful, but get the basic jobs done online and offline. The name ‘netbook’ of course came from the fact that they’re primarily for accessing the internet, browsing websites and checking email. Netbooks usually have smaller storage space compared to their laptop counterparts, and many will have some variation of a Linux operating system installed. The netbook have become very popular for their portability, ease of use and very low cost. They have actually been around since about 1999, but haven’t genuinely taken off in popularity until late 2007 with the various manufacturers introducing several models. Specifically the introduction of ASUS EEE PC was really when this type of netbook started to gain momentum in the marketplace, several other companies soon followed with their own variations. Netbooks commonly weigh in at more or less 1.5 to 3 pounds, which makes it really man-portable to journey with.

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