Cheap Ways to Travel the World

Most people fancy the idea of traveling around the world, sketching a memorable picture of all the enticing, alluring and scintillating locations they wish to visit but always deter from actually doing so in reality, owing to mounting travel expenses. However, traveling can be expensive. There are costs that need to be incurred and without working, it is hard to keep your bank balance up. It takes a lot of work and good budgeting. In order to travel long term, you need to find ways to travel cheaply and save money.

To kick start your journey of a cheap budget vacation to destinations all over the world with minimal costs, look for tour operators who offer attractive packages to varied locations. Since tour operators muster various discounts while booking in bulk with certain airlines and hotel resorts, it is recommended you get your holiday booked through them as well. It will be relatively cheaper than booking the entire holiday yourself. Make sure you are an early bird and buy these packages well in advance from the date of departure as they tend to be cheaper then.

Another alluring opportunity to travel cheap around the world is to participate in a home exchange. This could be made possible by surfing online and does not require a travel agent but is still a cheap and a one in a life time chance to see countries that you would be only dreaming of otherwise. A home exchange program is primarily characterized with tow families interchanging homes for a holiday period, provided both the families have agreed unanimously on this program. Most attractively, it does not involve any hotel costs and the food and beverage expense is not tantamount since most of the times you cook at home. A home exchange program is an ideal way to sneak a glance around the world, its inhabitants, dig at their culture and encapsulate all your experiences in your memory book at an affordable cost.

For most of us travel begins with an extensive hunt for cheap and discounted international flights to get you to your holiday destination. Once you've reached your destination, you can then book low cost regional airlines within the country or region. Train travel, far cheaper than air travel though, is also a thrilling experience, a one of a kind opportunity to watch the country side cruising by like slices of life in motion. Single train journeys are invariably more expensive than train passes, however they still do a seamless job of making train travel a reality. Distant towns and villages can be accessed very often by buses that are an excellent and cheap substitute to other forms of public transport.

There are many ways to travel around the world cheaply. It simply requires good planning and budgeting. Not all tips work and each area and you need to be versatile and flexible. If you use these tips where they best apply, you will maximize the use of your money and save a lot so you can travel longer. Those like me who travel long term do it by good research and proper planning.

Women's Self-Defense Classes - The Fallacy of Women's Self Defense

There are many who say women learn self-defense better in an exclusively women-only environment. The so-called "experts" say it is less intimidating if women don't have to compete with the men, or, it is easier (more comfortable) to discuss subjects like rape without men present. So, the new trend in self-defense programs is "Women's Self Defense" classes.

I don't agree with this line of reasoning, because the overwhelming evidence suggests that this is the wrong approach. I can't tell you how many times I have heard, "I took a women's self-defense course once. But, I went home and tried some of the stuff on my husband (or boyfriend), and it didn't work!"

There is nothing more confidence-shattering than to spend the time learning all the techniques and starting to feel good about yourself, only to have the bubble burst the first time you try out your new-found skills. Women then begin to feel there is nothing they can do to protect themselves when they can't even make it work against someone who isn't really trying to hurt them.

The real shame is when someone is really attacked, and after repeated attempts, can't make their self-defense techniques work. At that point, they simply give up, and won't fight back no matter what. I can only imagine that someone in that situation would look back on the time or money spent for self-defense classes and feel that they had been victimized twice!

Why "Women's Self Defense" Programs Don't Work!

Most of the people who take my self-defense classes are women. Sometimes, I even have a class that is all women. However, that is by coincidence, not design. Women who sign up for my classes know that there may be both men and women in the class. Whether there are actually men in the class is not important, after all, I am instructing the class, so there is always at least one man in the class.

The point is, if a woman is so intimidated by men, that she will not even take a self-defense class with men, she will never survive an attack by a man. Why? Because "intimidation" is just another word for fear. Until she can prove to herself the techniques work on a man, she has done nothing to help her get over her fear of men.

If she is ever attacked, it will probably be by a man! If she hasn't gotten over her fear of men, she will immediately panic, no matter what she has learned. If she hasn't learned how to deal with the bigger, stronger, more aggressive male, she will not understand how the dynamics of the situation will change in the real world!

Women MUST practice self-defense techniques against a man! Otherwise, how will she know they work against a man? This is what we call "realistic scenario training" (more about this later). If she has only practiced self-defense techniques with other women, she gets a false sense of security that her techniques will work in the real world. But, an even bigger problem is that most of what is taught in these so-called "women's self-defense" classes wouldn't work anyway!

Poor Teaching Methods

Much of what is taught as "women's self-defense" is not only ineffectual, but insulting as well. Courses intended only for women assume they are weak, less capable of defending themselves, and therefore need different methods from men to counteract violence. Women have been told to "yell 'FIRE', carry a hat pin or umbrella to jab at him, do something vulgar to gross him out, like tell him you have VD." If any of that junk worked, we'd be teaching men to do the same thing.

The following sample of bad advice still shows up in high schools and women's self-defense courses:

"Confrontation always makes everything worse. Don't react-it might be an overreaction. Don't add to the violence by becoming violent yourself. Don't make him mad. Trying to escape risks escalating the problem."

These ideas are wishful thinking or blind optimism. Experience at real crime scenes teaches you something very different.

Imagine if the percentages of women and men raped were 50-50 instead of 98 percent women and 2 percent men. [Outside of prison, those are the true percentages.] Now imagine someone telling men, "Don't overreact to rape, guys. Go along with his demands so you won't be hurt." I think you can see there might be a double standard that is completely unfair to women.

Doing Nothing

Doing nothing against a violent attack is the biggest risk of all because it makes resistance and escape later far more difficult. Worse, statistics show it actually increases the likelihood that violence will escalate, especially when the crime is rape. The most profound example involving resisting (doing something) versus submitting (doing nothing) was a Department of Justice study of rape published in 1985:

Rapists do not normally pre-arm themselves with weapons. Only 23 percent of 1.6 million cases studied involved knives or guns. [The major exception to this are rapists who break into a residence; 96 percent grab a knife from the kitchen.] Approximately 51 percent of women resisted in some form, ranging from screaming to fleeing, to fighting back; the remaining 49 percent did nothing. When broken down between resistance or submission, there was only an increase of two percent in the injury level to the women who resisted.

Yes, there is always a risk involved in fighting back, but there is just as much risk in doing nothing. If you face a rapist and do nothing, he'll rape you. If you face an armed criminal forcing you into his car and do nothing, he'll kidnap you. The "do-nothing" group believes that in doing nothing, they risk nothing.

Doers, in contrast, have simple and direct reasons for taking action: "If I don't do something fast, it's going to get worse."

False Claims

Another problem is the false sense of security given by unsubstantiated claims. One direct-mail women's safety device provides an "instant and easy self-defense" video for women.... "Can you point your finger?... Can you raise your hand?... If your answer is yes, you can instantly escape anything from rape to severe attacks.... It's quick and easy." The product being mentioned here, pepper spray, almost never works this way in the real world.

One television commercial for a women's self-defense program promises "two-minute, guaranteed knockout using your feet. When your assailant tries to grab you, use the heel of your shoe to strike into his head over and over." Could you really learn to do this in two minutes? It takes years of training in karate or taekwondo to learn to effectively kick someone in the head, and even then, it's a risky move. It's just a marketing ploy to get your money.

If you buy a police radar detector that is guaranteed to work, but doesn't, the result is a speeding ticket. If you pay for "self-defense classes" or videos that don't deliver as promised, the result can be severe injury or even death. Relying on someone else's guarantee is only a false sense of security that will only have bad results!

Anti-crime gadgets, and martial arts self-defense programs marketed to women, are often too simplistic and come with unrealistic guarantees. The fact is, surviving crime requires far more mental toughness than physical abilities. Size, weight, conditioning, and upper-body strength don't make the difference. If they did, a lot of men would be in deep trouble. Crime survival takes tough-minded mental conditioning, the same for both men and women.

What Does Work

What works, as proved by the results of both police and military testing, is "realistic scenario training". Scenario training consists of learning techniques, rehearsing them in realistic scenarios, and then visualizing these actions in your mind. It is a method used in many fields, from sports to law enforcement, military to medicine.

Scenario training is a way of planning our responses. We do something similar every day in our regular lives. We plan what to say if the boss criticizes a report we've submitted, or how to appease our spouse if we've done something irritating. Often we actually rehearse the words we'll use, we do it constantly. It doesn't always get us what we want, but it gives us a better chance.

Face-to-face with violence, your first split-second problem is not what is he going to do, but, "what are you going to do?" Scenario training against violence answers that question at the right time... before it happens. You can make mistakes and learn from them before it becomes a life or death situation! Scenario training to survive violent crime draws on real-life crime cases, which allows us to analyze our own mistakes, as well as the mistakes of others, learn from them, and decide how we will respond differently.

Without realistic scenario training, people panic and freeze up; they have no way to cut through the overwhelming fear that boxes them in during a crisis. Everyone needs to train for the same scenarios, and everyone, men and women alike, need to train the same way: to develop the mental toughness needed to survive a real attack!

Summary

This is the bottom line that must be adopted by every woman, every women's self-defense teacher, and every parent of a daughter: If the how-to-survive-violence technique and advice is not acceptable to men, it's not acceptable to women.

Knowing how to handle yourself when confronted with violence is your only insurance against becoming a victim, or just another statistic in a police report. You have car insurance, home-owner's insurance, life insurance, health insurance...

What insurance do you have against being the victim of a violent crime? A long-term self-defense program offers the most comprehensive training, and therefore, the best opportunity to learn to handle almost any situation that may occur. However, if you don't have the time to commit to a long-term program, at least some form of weaponless self-defense training is better than none.

But women MUST practice techniques with MEN! The idea that women can learn to defend themselves against men, without training with men, is simply false.

Resources:

Strong, Sanford - Strong on Defense; Simon & Shuster, Inc.; 1996

Federal Bureau of Investigation - Uniform Crime Report; 2000

The Bum Marketing Course - Make Money on the Web the Easy Way

Do you have a website that just doesn't seem to be generating the traffic it should? Are you tired of wasting money on worthless web marketing techniques? Have you been accused of spamming to the point where your ISP is threatening to drop you like a hot potato if you don't cease and desist? Been kicked out of Internet forums for trying to post affiliate links? Have you tried every technique under the sun to try and improve your search engine ranking? Then you need to take a serious look at The Bum Marketing Course.

The key to Internet marketing success is not how much money you spend, and it's not about driving traffic to your website. You need to entice, not force people to come to your site. This keeps them happy so they keep coming back for more. The Bum Marketing Course got started when a fellow named Travis from Arkansas claimed he could take any bum off the street and teach him how to make money in a week. Now you can learn these same techniques just by visiting our website. If a bum off the street can make money in a week, just think how little time it would take you to be on your way to Internet riches.

The great thing about The Bum Marketing Course is that you don't even have to enjoy writing to make money. In Part Two of the course titled "Ghostwriters-How to Hire a Good One" you'll learn how to "hire" qualified authors to write articles for you that will entice prospects to come to your site. Or if you prefer to do the writing yourself, Part One, titled "The Dirty Secrets of Bum Marketing" will show you not only how to write the articles, but how to get them listed on sites like EzineArticles.com.

And the best part about it is that you don't need to be an Internet expert, or even own your own website to get started. But you do need to take the time to read through the 125 jam-packed pages that make up The Bum Marketing Guide. You'll learn valuable information like how Google really works, how to be regarded as an expert in your field, and how to add content that brings people to your website.

Professional Debt Relief - Manage Debts Despite Zero Experience With Online Help

Most of us never realize that we have zero experience in managing finances. When we are young, we are encouraged to earn pocket money and are expected to manage our expenses with the same. As we grow older, we may be given a credit card to manage our monthly expenses. However, most parents keep a strict eye on the usage of the credit card. So much so that the card is used just like any other debit card.

All this may increase the confidence of the parent but the youngster never really understands how to make proper use of a credit card. Once the individual starts earning, he or she is given complete financial freedom. If fact, it is considered rude for parents to include in the personal finances of their children once they have got a job and become independent.

The end result is that persons find themselves being flooded with credit card offers. Unsecured lenders talk of getting personal loans in a single day. Advertisements that talk of preapproved loans worth hundreds of thousands of dollars is enough to entice even the most disciplined person.

All it takes is one mistake to fall into the debt trap. With the universal default rule applicable in the country, you just have to default on one credit card or unsecured lender once and you will face problems from each and every service provider in the market. The sheer effect is overwhelming. All those friendly credit card issuers and unsecured lenders quickly become rude and hand over the accounts to even ruder debt collection agents.

This mistake is compounded by another mistake - bankruptcy. The first thing that you should do is skip all thoughts of running away. Instead, you should use your head and try to learn how to manage your debts. How to overcome the existing problem? How to overcome thousands of dollars of credit card debt and unsecured loans you have against you name?

Employ the services of a professional debt settlement company, get a 50% waiver, get installment facility on payment of the balance amount and start managing your finances from scratch. This is not easy. A person who has never had experience in handling finances will find it very difficult to make 36 monthly payments without fail.

However, if you succeed in this approach, you would have averted a huge problem and you would have successfully laid the foundation for proper financial planning and management.

Teleseminars For Profit - 9 Tips on How to Hold a Profitable Teleseminar and Build Your Business

You can make money with teleseminars if you know how to do it correctly. I routinely make anywhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars every time I do a teleseminar, and these are completely free calls. Here are some ways you can make money whenever you hold a call and get people to listen to what you have to say.

Give your teleseminar a title that will attract people who are interested in your topic. This title must be catchy and tell the prospect what the benefit will be if they choose to participate. Begin to invite people to attend your teleseminar about a week before it will take place. This will give them time to schedule your call as part of their weekly engagements. Remind them the day of your event so they will not forget. Although many people will mark their calendar, even more will forget about it completely. Be sure to include your social network contacts when you are inviting people to attend. Your list is not the only source of prospects, now that Web 2.0 is here to stay. Provide good, solid information during your teleseminar. If you build a reputation for giving people information and content they can use, they will be more likely to attend your calls and trust you to give them valuable advice. Prepare a study guide for people to follow during your call. Even if it is only two pages long, people will appreciate having something to print out. Be sure to include your name and contact information on each page, so that they can stay in touch with you or email you for more information. You will be surprised when someone contacts you months later, but this typically happens if you follow these suggestions. During the call, make recommendations to affiliate products and services, as well as anything you have to offer. Make sure the things you recommend are directly related to what you are talking about during your teleseminar. Allow people to submit questions that you can answer during the call. Say their name and website so that others can contact them if they feel it is something they can use. This is all part of creating a community where people can begin to know and trust each other. At the end of your teleseminar, invite people to email you with more questions. You will find that the twenty to thirty minutes after the call is the time more people are likely to sign up for your recommended products and services.

Follow these 9 suggestions and you will have a profitable teleseminar and begin to build your online business quickly.

What Is a Badminton Drill?

A Badminton Drill is quite simply a practice.

No, not practicing by playing or knocking a few shuttles across the net to your partner. A Badminton Drill is a practice. It's a practice of a specific skill or element required to play badminton. The Badminton drill can take many forms but will usually focus on taking a small and specific area on which to work.

Let me give an example from my own style of play, I invariably have my racquet 'down' either to the side or in front, even when at the front of the court. But a far better position for the racquet and me as I'm well over six foot, is to have my knees slightly bend and the racquet head raised to shoulder or head height. I need to Drill this habit into my head. So my partner and I play the 'patty cake' game, both stand just back of the front service line and try hitting the shuttle as horizontal and as close to the net tape as possible.

It becomes a 'game' when there are no rules, i.e. freedom to hit shuttle on either forehand or backhand. It becomes a Drill when you continually just do forehand. It can be further broken down into say, near forehand and far forehand.

Badminton drills are better than practise as they are more specific to particular areas and should be done over a considerable amount of time. An hour spent on a particular Badminton drill is nothing, and what's more it should be regularly repeated throughout the training regime.

Another Badminton drill might be 'mid court backhand cross net return', bit of a mouthful that, but if your partner can deliver the shuttle to the right area this is easily practicable, but the main purpose of the drill could be to get you to change from a forehand grip to a backhand grip!!..

A Badminton drill is a very useful training technique and is simply a repetition of a small but necessary skill.