Marmaris Kultur

Archive for January, 2010

Though my paternal grandfather made only $100 a month as an attorney during the 1930s and 1940s (which would equate to about $1,200 a month now), he saved enough money to buy a small ranch in the Sacramento Valley of California. Focusing on a specific vision of what he and his family had agreed they wanted made puffing money aside every month more meaningful and a lot easier.
To make your family’s dreams (and the benefits you’ll reap from them down the line) as tangible as possible, you might want to start a dream scrapbook—or even several. If you and your loved ones dream of owning a vacation home, then have every member of your family rip out magazine photographs of great homes and paste them into your scrapbook. Add vacation photographs and decorating ideas. Jot down any and all notions about how the place would look or feel, or why it’s important to you in the first place. In short, use your dream scrapbook as a repository for anything that will remind you of the goals toward which you’re striving. Should you and/or your partner feel yourselves weakening, actually seeing an image of your goals can help to strengthen your resolve.
Creating, expanding, or simply revisiting your scrapbook should inspire and encourage you and your family to discuss your financial situation as it relates to your dreams, and to reaffirm both your intentions and your commitment. So start gluing and gabbing!

If investing has always seemed like a dry, alien concept that has nothing to do with your life, I have a quick solution for you. Simply put a face on those potential earnings, so they represent a dream instead of a bunch of numbers. Because that’s what investing is. It’s a tool that enables you to create the life you want for yourself. And that’s about as personal as you can get.
But like any tool, it won’t do the work by itself. You need to guide it by discussing the vision you want to realize, then setting firm goals. If you don’t, you won’t be moving toward anything concrete, which will slow you down, if not stop you in your tracks. Let’s say you haven’t been saving enough money to invest, or you’ve neglected to invest the money you do have. It is difficult to shift your priorities if you haven’t actually defined them.
So think about what you and your family want and why, then challenge yourselves to make it happen. Commit to your vision by making a point to tell family, friends, and even coworkers about your dream and how you plan to achieve it. In addition to clarifying and cementing your vision, making your plans known will make it harder to let them fall by the wayside later on.
Of course, your dreams need to be realistic. It doesn’t help to set up a target that you can’t possibly reach. If you have several dreams, you’ll probably need to prioritize them. You may not be able to buy a boat, acquire a second home, send your three kids to a private college, and retire at age fifty. But when done according to a long-term plan, investing can help you realize the important dreams, the ones that reflect your core values.

While growing up, my colleague Kate’s father, Eric, never talked about money. The subject was simply off limits, and the household was ruled by an ironclad mantle of financial silence that no one in the family dared to crack. But that didn’t mean that Kate’s mother or siblings didn’t wish things were different. “We’d have done so much better if only your father had invested our savings,” Kate overheard her mother lament years after Eric’s death. Not that the family was doing poorly. To the contrary Eric had managed to save a healthy sum, allowing the family to live quite comfortably. But aside from a few perfunctory attempts from time to time, Eric hadn’t been an investor. And that cost the family he loved. “We had a very nice lifestyle, but we could have had so much more,” says Kate.
Why did an educated man who was successful in so many aspects of his life fail to take control of his finances? “I guarantee you that he was afraid of investing,” says Kate. And because he didn’t want to reveal his lack of financial acumen, he didn’t consult a financial advisor, either. As a result, his hesitancy about money and investing wound up compromising his estate. That unfortunate legacy is now being perpetuated by three of his five children, none of whom invest or even talk about money. Clearly not everyone is fortunate enough to obtain financial knowledge in a way that he or she can hear and understand. I hope this book will help fill that communication void in your family. For in addition to providing you with information, it’s intended to fuel your family’s conversations about where you’re going, how much money it will take, and which investments might get you there.
This is a chapter for beginners. For those of you who are new to investing, want a refresher, or are introducing a family member or friend to investing, we start at square one and cover the basic concepts. We then launch into a primer on stocks, bonds, and mutual funds: the vocabulary and building blocks you need to talk about to build your financial future. Finally, we discuss professional advice and what you should look for in an advisor.
More experienced investors may want to skip to Chapter 3, where the focus is on putting these basics to work. That’s fine, but I urge you to use the information in the following pages to open what I hope will be an ongoing and worthwhile family dialogue about money.
As I hope you’ll see in this chapter, investing isn’t a sprint to an endless series of finish lines. It’s more like a family marathon, with all of you reaching the ends you’ve identified together, through steady and systematic discussions and planning that allow you to work toward your financial goals.

From cannibalism to floating markets on the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, here you’ll find a comprehensive bibliography listing hundreds of incisive and engaging studies of the foods of peoples around the world, and how they are impacted by and in turn impact culure. Topics include ecology and food systems, eating attitudes, fasting and body image, festivals and feasting, famine and starvation, malnutrition and disease, meat-eating vs. vegetarian diets, the nutritional anthropology of nonhuman primates, food rituals, and food taboos. Regions covered include Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, East Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America (both European and indigenous), Oceania, South America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West and Central Asia. Articles address subjects that range from the dialetics relating to the sacred cows of India to the typical American diet of 100 years ago, from scholarship on contemporary American “foodways” (as opposed to folkways) to “soul” and traditional Southern food practices, customs, and holidays. Here you’ll also find references to such interesting articles as “Chinese Tables Manners: You Are How You Eat,”“The Origins and Ancient History of Wine,”“Food Classifications and the Diets of Young Children in Rural Egypt,” and “The Folk Foods of the Rio Grande Valley and of Northern Mexico.” As language, climate and history are to culture, so too is food—an engaging and appetizing area of study, to say the least.