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[ad_1] Wow! This is a great deal on these Women’s Cozy Sleep Bottoms! Today, Zulily has these Women’s Cozy Sleep Bottoms for only $6.99! Choose from several options. These are guaranteed to arrive by Christmas and these would make great gift ideas. Shipping starts at $5.99. But if you place one order today, the rest of your orders will ship for FREE through 11:59 p.m. PT tonight! [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] European Stock Futures Higher; Fed Decision, ECB and BOE Meetings in Focus [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] A latest research on the air pollution in the national capital has found that open burning of biomass has been the largest contributor behind the hazy surroundings. The research found that open burning of biomass was the single largest contributor behind the hazy atmosphere in the city not only in the winter period (November-January) but also in the post-monsoon period that is between late October and November. The crucial linkage of open burning of biomass with the hazy surroundings in the national capital and nearby regions was found in the research conducted by the scientists from IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Delhi, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) among others. As part of their methodology for the research, the scientists studied the composition of PM2.5 at two crucial sites in the national capital between the period of October 2019 and January 2020. The two sites namely- IIT-Delhi-Hauz Khan area and Pusa forest region- were studied and analyzed to gain insights about the sources of hazy air in the city. The scientists, during their research, segregated four distinct periods of hazy lighting in the national capital namely post monsoon period(also known as agricultural burning time), haze 1, haze 2, and haze 3 period in the winter season. In all four distinct periods, the levels of PM 2.5 were different, the research found. Significantly, the scientists found that organic aerosols which are emitted during biomass burning played a dominant role in all the four haze periods. The study also said that after the conclusion of the post-monsoon (end of October to around mid-November) period, the haze was largely a result of open biomass burning particles likely emitted from “agricultural residue burning in the upwind states of Delhi. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Layoffs swept through Freedom Mortgage’s Fort Mill, South Carolina office last Friday, sources familiar with the situation confirmed to HousingWire this week. The exact numbers have not been publicly disclosed, but laid off employees said it’s in the hundreds. A manager at Freedom, who requested anonymity, told HousingWire that the sales side of the Fort Mill office was let go. The source also noted that some operations people also received pink slips last week. The layoffs are believed to have taken place in Roundpoint’s headquarters—a subsidiary of Freedom. Freedom Mortgage, the top FHA and VA lender in America, did not respond to HousingWire’s request for comment. Roundpoint, an originator, servicer and subservicer, was acquired by Freedom in 2020, but the initial courtship was not amicable. Roundpoint sued Freedom Mortgage after it tried to back out of the transaction in response to a credit facility Roundpoint took out in 2018. In response, Freedom countersued, resulting in the two companies voluntarily settling the matter. Earlier this year, Roundpoint announced the addition of a new leadership team. It installed Patrick McEnerney as CEO, Joseph Gormley as chief administrative officer, and Scott Bristol as executive vice president of retail lending. In statements to the press, the company spoke of its growth trajectory. McEnerney told the Charlotte Business Journal that Roundpoint was building out its retail mortgage operations with a particular focus on first-time homebuyers. It led to a rise in originations and refinancings, but some existing customers refinanced with other mortgage firms, he said. The company in April said it was planning to add 90 retail offices nationwide, with the South Carolina office providing corporate support. The news of the layoffs in Fort Mill comes amid rapidly thinning profit margins and a big decrease in refinancings. Industry insiders have been forecasting for months that a wave of layoffs will follow suit once the refi wave ends. Meanwhile, a Mortgage Bankers Association‘s finance forecast found that the share of refi activity in the market has dropped from 64% in 2020 to 59% in 2021. Furthermore, the trade association predicts that refis will continue plummeting in 2022, dropping to 33%. Thus far, Better.com and Interfirst Mortgage have gotten ample media attention after laying off hundreds of employees at their shops. The post Freedom Mortgage cuts jobs in Fort Mill, SC office appeared first on HousingWire. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Love shopping at Dollar Tree? You won’t want to miss this RARE offer from TopCashBack!! TopCashBack is offering $15 cash back on ANY $15 Holiday Decor purchase at Dollar Tree, making it FREE! Here’s how to get your FREE $15 Dollar Tree purchase: 1. Head here for the special Dollar Tree offer and sign up for a new Top Cash Back account. 2. Make a purchase on Holiday Decor valued at $15 or higher. Choose free in-store pickup. 3. Within 21 days, your TopCashBack account will be credited with $15 — enough to cover your purchase! 4. After you receive the $15 payment in your Top Cash Back account, you can choose to transfer it to your bank account or request a Paypal payment. This is for new Top Cash Back members only. If you are already a member, you are allowed to sign up another adult in your household. This deal is valid through December 22, 2021 — or while supplies last. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] MMG to halt Las Bambas copper production as talks to end blockade fail [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] After unveiling the Rs 76,000-crore incentive scheme for semiconductors, minister of electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw told FE’s Kiran Rathee that over the next 6 years, 100 companies in semiconductor space, will get benefits under the scheme. Excerpts: Q) Other countries are also offering benefits for semiconductor manufacturing, so what makes India different? A) Many countries have capital power, have strong manufacturing capabilities, what is special in India is three things – first is a big design ecosystem. Over 20,000 odd engineers are designing for the world, they can create their own IPR. So, supporting design ecosystem is a critical component of the policy. Second is the roadmap for 20 years. Our Prime Minister has kept a vision of 20 years. Third, is the talent pool, which no country has but we have that capability already. We will create 85,000 engineers as part of chips to startup (C2S) scheme through partnership with 60 institutions like IITs, NITs, exchange programmes etc. Q) Which companies, big or small, are likely to get benefits under the scheme? A) Big firms along with small companies will get benefits under the scheme. Big firms will be involved in silicon and display fabs. But there is a very large segment, like the compound semiconductors, which go into automobiles, power electronics, railway engines, telecom towers, etc. This kind of technology is medium scale, which requires investments to the tune of Rs 200 crore, Rs 500 crore, etc. In this segment, we are targeting a minimum of 15 firms or we might reach 70-80 plants being set up in this segment. Q) How many companies will be part of this semiconductor policy? A) We are looking at 100 companies in design, packaging, compound, display and silicon over a period of 6 years but immediate action will be seen in next few months. Q) When will the first fab start manufacturing? A) First compound semiconductor fab’s foundation stone is expected to be laid in 12 months. Q) Since semiconductor manufacturing is very complex, will the suggestions or requirements of the companies will be taken into account? A) We will think in a very flexible way. There was a very extensive stakeholder consultation with the industry, supply chain firms like in gas supply, ultrapure water, state governments, academia, diplomats etc. Q) When will the government start taking applications for the scheme? A) Within a few weeks. We are doing very fast work. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Housing inventory remains persistently low, home prices are at all-time highs and affordability is becoming out of reach for more people with every passing day. These dynamics are creating a perfect storm for potential homebuyers who are quickly running out of options. HousingWire recently spoke to Finance of America Mortgage President Bill Dallas about viable alternative options for homebuyers and the innovative products FAM offers to meet the unique financial needs of today’s modern borrowers. HousingWire: What are the current challenges when it comes to affordable housing? Bill Dallas: As construction and labor costs have climbed, so, too, have home prices. The same trend is seen in existing-home sales due in large part to a lack of inventory of available homes for sale. Median new-home sales prices rose 17.5% to $407,700 in October compared to the previous year, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Meanwhile, the median existing-home price for all homes in the U.S. in October was $353,900, up 13.1% from the previous year, marking the 116th straight month of year-over-year existing-home price increases, according to the National Association of Realtors. Despite persistently low mortgage rates, many potential homebuyers who fall in the middle- to lower-income tiers are being sidelined due to a lack of affordable housing options. That’s because home-price gains have galloped far ahead of income growth. The national price-to-income ratio is 4.4 as of 2020 — the highest level since 2006, according to the State of the Nation’s Housing 2021 report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Twenty years ago, the ratio was less than three times income in two-thirds of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas and above five times the income in just a few metros, according to the Harvard report. With higher home prices, potential homebuyers — particularly millennials who are grappling with student loan debt and increasing rents — are struggling to save enough for upfront costs to buy a home, such as down payments and closing fees. HW: How can LOs and brokers serve more borrowers in spite of these challenges? BD: We have to meet borrowers where they are today, and that means avoiding the one-size-fits-all approach in qualifying them for a mortgage. It also means we have to get back to the basics of building relationships with our clients and being their loan adviser for life instead of treating them as transactional customers. Loan officers and brokers need to reconnect with past clients and show their value. That value lies primarily in our knowledge and expertise. We’re mortgage and home equity advisers who can show borrowers how to take a holistic approach to understanding how their home financing decisions impact their overall financial wellness. In 2022, we’re all pivoting to serving the purchase market, and it’s going to be a lot different than 2021 given the affordability headwinds facing potential homebuyers. Even homeowners who’ve amassed significant equity might be reluctant to tap it given muscle memory from the Great Recession. So, to serve more borrowers, we need to do more outreach, educate more, follow up more and connect with referral partners more to ensure consumers understand the integral role we play in helping them reach their homeownership goals. HW: What does the future of affordable housing look like? BD: In my opinion, there are two major areas we need to focus on to create more affordable housing opportunities for American families: zoning laws and building costs. The cost of acquiring land and building a new home is expensive, and it’s helping drive up housing prices across the board. I believe we need to increase access to new housing in areas that have higher density and build homes in a more cost-effective way. A key way to make housing affordable is to loosen stringent local zoning regulations. These local zoning laws make it illegal for developers to build anything other than single-family detached homes. This takes more affordable options like townhomes, high-density condo buildings and duplexes off the table, especially if there’s strong political and resident opposition to adding those home types into neighborhoods with existing single-family detached homes. One exception involves recent policy changes that have warmed up to the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs). ADUs can generate additional income to homeowners who rent them out and they serve as an affordable alternative to traditional rentals. They can also be a cost-effective arrangement for multigenerational households. HW: How is Finance of America Mortgage meeting borrowers’ unique financial needs? BD: Potential borrowers who’ve been priced out of the housing market need to be able to compete with an increasingly growing share of cash buyers and investors who are beating them in bidding wars. Finance of America Mortgage offers innovative loan products to help borrowers, particularly those who are self-employed or earn income in nontraditional ways, stay in the game. Our proprietary Two-X Flex suite of mortgage loans, including jumbo and non-qualified mortgage, or non-QM, borrowers, puts more borrowing power into the hands of borrowers who might otherwise be shut out of a conventional loan. FAM’s ADU refinance option allows borrowers to refinance their primary mortgage and certain ADU financing into a single, new conforming mortgage loan. This helps borrowers reduce their monthly interest payments if they financed the ADU construction at a higher interest rate. This is a game changer for homeowners who wish to leverage their property to generate rental income, and it can increase housing supply by providing access to a new, low-cost form of housing in an ADU. The post How lenders can continue to serve borrowers despite housing affordability challenges appeared first on HousingWire. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] As a regular reader you know how much I love blogging. My blog is a major factor in achieving financial freedom as early as I did. While the financial rewards have been life changing, the other amazing benefit of starting the blog is the quality of new connections I’ve made over the years. Normal people with a “super hero passion” to help others through their blog, podcast, or YouTube channel never gets old. I can listen to these stories non-stop! One of these amazing success stories is Larry Ludwig who founded InvestorJunkie.com right around the time I started my blog. Larry went on to sell his site for a cool $5.8 million in 2018 and is now on to his next project teaching others how to build a successful online business on his personal site LarryLudwig.com. Larry recently made a hefty investment into an “alternative investment” and I wanted to bring him on the Good Financial Cents podcast to share his journey and what led him to choose the investment he did. You can read the text version of the interview here or listen to the podcast here: You started Investorjunkie.com back in 2009, is that correct? Then you sold that blog? Larry’s Investing Blog Yes. I started in 2009 and sold the blog in 2018 for 6 million. 6 million.  – Just want to make sure everybody read that because for those that don’t think that you can make money blogging or you can’t start a blog and sell it for a premium, it is possible.  What got you into blogging and also what got you into the personal finance investing space? I started developing websites back in 1993/94, and I actually worked for an ad agency creating some of the very first websites out there for a lot of the Fortune 500 companies. I’ve been developing websites, both for other companies and for myself, for many years. In 2009 I was frustrated developing sites for other companies, seeing how they were making money off of them, seeing how they were profitable.  I was interested in investing and personal finance. So I put those together and said, “Why don’t I create a blog on investing”, because of really looking out there in the investment space blogs, there really weren’t that many that spoke to me both in terms of having decent sizeable assets already, and then something that was just wanting to review the various services out there. This was kind of the start of FinTech really in 2009. I saw the opportunity just to mix all that together and create a blog and grew it from there. I think a lot of people may suffer from imposter syndrome. Was it difficult for you when you first started? Did you ever have to work through those barriers? Yes and no. I mean, I’m not going to lie. There’s definitely that imposter syndrome that went on a little bit with myself. Either you create a blog as an expert or you create a blog as a helpful tool for others. Let’s all go down this path, ourselves, this journey, and let’s figure this stuff out. I kind of went that second route. That’s not to say I didn’t talk about investing in what I knew. I’m not an active day trader as an example, so I can’t speak about technical analysis and stuff like that, but I could talk about the fundamentals of asset allocation, just basics of investing, and could talk more intelligently than others out there. Because if really, I mean you know as well as I do that the lack of knowledge in personal finance is just pretty lacking and it’s not really taught anywhere, formally, or informally. So where do you learn it? And it’s usually through friends and family. In my case, again, going back to the early nineties when I was still in school, in fact, my parents weren’t really great at finance and I really didn’t know anyone to speak about it. So I really turned to books and radio programs to help educate myself. And nowadays it’s via blogs, and YouTube channels such as yourself. I mean, that’s really the key is people are looking in mass. I mean, same thing with TikTok, even. TikTok is huge now into personal finance investing. The reason is because people actively want to figure out how to get better at finance. And there’s really no good way to do it. Was this your full-time gig at the time or did you have a full-time job? No, I had my web hosting business, web development business besides that. So I started technically part-time as a side hustle. Initially I created the blog at minimum, again, I thought of the idea of affiliate marketing, be the way to monetize it. But I thought, at minimum, to showcase what I could do to others. Here’s a blog that I was able to create and build and design. And therefore I could build one for yourself as well, meaning for other customers, not necessarily for affiliate marketing base, but for other corporate websites. Again, it really turned into a business on its own in about a year and a half where it started making more money than my web hosting business. Check Out The Blog Guide! At what point were you done with the web hosting business and I’m ready to do this full time. Around that year and a half, two years. I’ve had a few people ask me like how long does it really take before you get over that hump, so to speak, of building a blog, and building a website. It’s about, I think, one to two years, and from my experience and from others. And a lot of other bloggers, I think give up honestly much earlier than that. I was at one point almost giving up myself, in that sense of, I didn’t really see it go anywhere. And it just

[ad_1] The post Get Paid to Watch Movies – The Ultimate 2022 Guide appeared first on Millennial Money. Get paid to watch movies? That sounds like a film-buff fantasy. But believe it or not, there are many ways to make the dream come true. If you love to watch movies, you could turn your passion into a full-time job or a side hustle. You could even make money by watching videos for just a few minutes a day. In this guide, we’ll show you our favorite ways you can get paid to watch movies. How to Get Paid to Watch Movies Here are twelve ways to get paid to watch movies. Become a Netflix tagger Start a YouTube channel Write movie reviews Become a film critic Edit movies Produce movies Teach film House sit Sign up for Nielsen’s Computer and Mobile Panel Do theater checks through Market Force Watch movies through survey sites Enter the CenturyLink Holiday Movies Binge Contest 1. Become a Netflix tagger  You can watch Netflix and make money at the same time by working as an editorial analyst or “tagger” for the streaming service provider.  Netflix taggers watch movies and shows and assign specific metadata or descriptions. For example, this might entail watching a movie and entering the language, release date, or genre into a database.  To work as a tagger, you need to have expert knowledge of movies and an ability to accurately categorize video content.  Having a Netflix job as a tagger may seem like a dream come true. But as a word to the wise, this full-time job has the potential to become a slog.  Read the job description and make sure you’re comfortable with the role before quitting your day job to watch movies.  2. Start a YouTube channel Movie lovers live for hidden Easter eggs like Yoda breakdancing in Revenge of the Sith. And they depend on YouTubers like Mr. Sunday Movies to find them. If you’re a true movie buff and comfortable on camera, why not consider launching your own movie channel? You can write movie reviews, talk about upcoming projects, offer predictions, and discuss characters or plot holes.  Of course, you’ll face stiff competition. But if you can produce high-quality content at a consistent level, you just may attract subscribers and start making some money.  Top movie reviewers make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just talking about films. How cool is that? 3. Write movie reviews  One of the downsides to running a YouTube channel is it requires a lot of work. You’ll have to produce episodes on a regular basis, and you’ll also need to have a strong camera presence and top-shelf video editing skills.  At the same time, producing video content leaves less time to actually study movies and produce engaging material.  But all hope isn’t lost: You may find it easier to put your ideas into writing.  One option is to launch a blog on WordPress and make money through AdSense and Amazon affiliate links.  Another option is to link up with a site like Animation Arena, which pays $15 for reviews. Each review needs to be at least 550 words long. The main downside to working with a site like Animation Arena is you receive a one-time fee for your work. You may want to consider writing for a site like Vocal.media instead, which can lead to passive income. This site will pay money each time someone reads your story.  Either way, writing movie reviews is something you can do in your free time as a side hustle. You don’t need any qualifications or experience to start. If you know movies and can write quality content, this option is worth exploring.  4. Become a film critic  Think you have what it takes to become the next Roger Ebert? Consider taking your game to the next level by pursuing a career as a professional film critic.  It’s a good idea to land a degree in film to polish your skills and gain some expertise. You’ll also need advanced writing skills, a solid portfolio, and some entry-level experience before you start to make real inroads as a trusted film critic.  According to Glassdoor, movie critics can make anywhere from $49,445 to $89,000 per year. How much you make depends on your skill and your ability to market yourself and create opportunities.  5. Edit movies  Behind every great movie is a solid team of editors who dissect footage and splice it together to make an actual film. Editors work behind the scenes, pouring over raw video and transforming it into a final product.  As an editor, you can work independently or with a media or production company. This is a highly collaborative position — and one that requires strong creative and communication skills.  You don’t necessarily need a bachelor’s degree to become an editor, but it can help you learn the basics. That said, it’s more important to gain hands-on experience by taking internships and helping with professional projects.  If you’re interested in this line of work, focus on building a portfolio and improving your skills first and bigger jobs will follow as you progress.  The national average salary for a film editor is $59,095 per year. 6. Produce movies  A movie producer is a bit like a general manager in sports. Producers plan and finance projects and hire creative professionals like directors, actors, and production specialists. They see projects through from initial planning to release.  Movie producers typically follow the same path as editors and critics at first, studying film, building connections, and gaining hands-on experience in the industry. This is not an overnight profession, and it takes a lot of hard work, a bit of luck, and usually a lot of cash to break through as a producer.  The average film producer salary is $58,857 per year. But you can easily earn double or triple this amount as you make a name for yourself.   7. Teach film As a disclaimer, making it in