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Business and Investment

Learn about local business and entrepreneurial programs. Hear from our Business Librarian on how to be a savvy consumer and protect your credit. Plus, business book reviews! Valuable online access to Business Plans Handbook.

Recent Business and Investment Blog Posts

taxes

Lessons to Learn From Tax Season for Less Pain More Gain Next Year

If you’re feeling a bit of a tax hangover and still wondering what hit you after the tax season that just ended, you’re not alone. Many people wait until the last minute to file or to start figuring out their tax liability and end up with a lot of stress and frustration. Even getting a [...]

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Great By Choice by Jim Collins

Ten years after his groundbreaking bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with new focus and a new question to ask: “Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty – even chaos – and others do not?”  This time, with the help of his colleague Morten Hansen*, Collins enumerates the principles for building a truly great [...]

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Don’t Let These Mistakes Damage Your Credit Score

Your credit score is a quantitative measure of you creditworthiness, ranging from 300 to 850.  It is based on the following five categories: How much debt you have; your payment history; your debt utilization ratio; how far back your credit history goes; your mix of various types of credit. Here are five things that can [...]

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Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

We’re taught from an early age to use certain procedures and rules to analyze and solve problems to come up with the right answers. The emphasis is, of course, on minimizing errors. But what happens when we don’t even know what problems we’re trying to solve? It happens a lot. In his book, Little Bets, [...]

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The Real Cost of Living

Every decision – from buying a home to grabbing a latte on the way to work – has costs and benefits, personal and financial.  In her new book The Real Cost of Living; Making the Best Choices for You, Your Life, and Your Money, Carmen Wong Ulrich shows us how to make better decisions, and [...]

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Five Cool Business Apps for Your Smart Phone

If you are a business person and own an iPod, Blackberry, or Android, you can benefit from a few of the thousands of  business apps available for your smart phone.  The following five downloadable applications are particularly helpful for businesses of all sizes in terms of improving your productivity, profitability, and time management: SQUARE – [...]

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When it Comes to Household Money, Both Partners Should Share in Financial Responsibility

Couples often structure their household finances where one partner takes care of all the bill-paying and investments.  But all too often, the non-financial partner is left widowed or otherwise alone and has no understanding or knowledge of household expenses, investments, or what it takes to live on month-to-month.  That is why both partners need to [...]

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New Rules for Today’s Workplace: Strategies for Success in the Virtual World

In her newest book, communications expert Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts delivers timely advice for anyone in business – owners, managers, employees – on surviving and succeeding in today’s technology-dependent workplace.  She focuses on the trend toward a virtual workplace and emphasizes that excellent communication skills are more essential than ever to keep up with the pace of [...]

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Entrepreneur’s Top 10 Small Business Predictions for 2012

Entrepreneur Media has offered up a list of Top 10 predictions for changes to expect in the small business climate in 2012.  After sifting through predictions by a handful of forecaster pronouncements and government reports, here is what they came up with as the Top 10: Volatility ahead. With Europe now teetering, economic uncertainty will [...]

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DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

In this latest offering from Daniel H. Pink, the author argues that the secret to high performance and satisfaction is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. The problem that most business have in motivating employees is that [...]