Our father is the partner of our mother. Fathers serve as the foundation of a family. They are strong and they love their children dearly. Like mothers do, they sacrifice a lot to provide the basic needs necessitated by their children. Our basic needs include water, food, shelter. These are provided by our parents without expecting something in return.

For those who believe in the Catholic Church, respect must be shown to our father. It is stated at the Ten Commandments of God that fathers, along with mothers, must be honored all the time. No exception! Pay respect to them by kissing their hands everyday. Call them not by their names but by saying Daddy, Papa, or Father.

There is also a special day for fathers. The special day that honors the love, worth, and sacrifices of our fathers is called the Father’s Day. It will be the best time to give them gifts that will surely paint smiles on their faces. Every father loves presents.

Do you want to know a method that will teach you how to create gifts without spending too much? If you do, then continue reading. First of all, you must secure the needed supply. Commonly used materials in creating Father’s Day cards include scrapbook papers, card stock, colored pens, glitters, glue, photos, laces, and scissors. Come up with the design you wanted on the scrapbook paper. You can use distress reinkers or any type of coloring materials to beautify the blank card. After it, you can use laces to make borders. You can also utilize extra scrapbook papers with designs as borders using decorative scissors.

Use glitter glues to paste the laces or paper borders at the card. Be sure to firmly attach those things. Afterwards, draw something that will make your card cuter. If you are not into drawings, you can just cut out pictures from unused magazines and paste it to the card. Last, but not the least, write a message to your father. It is the most important part of the card. Express what you have in mind. Show how much you love him. You can also attach a photo of your father at the card. Be sure to have the picture proportionate to the card. It will be not be good to see a huge picture in a small card. Remember, you can make cards everyday as long as you want to.

Investors who got caught in the pre-construction bubble listened to advice that described current booming situations in several areas during 2004 and 2005. As a result tens of thousands of eager speculators poured into the market just when wiser pundits were advising their clients to get out of the hot markets in Las Vegas, Phoenix and South Florida. The Investors who survived the pre-construction bust got out at the height because it was clear from analysis of market cycles that the economy would soon be in a downward slide. What comes up must come down.

No one has a crystal ball so accurate that you can take all the risk out of investing. No one could have predicted the nasty hurricane season of 2005 that led to building delays in summer of 2005 and huge construction cost increases in 2006 that further delayed jobs that went into contract a year or more earlier. Only a few naysayers were predicting a total collapse of the housing market, and it turned out those who took a conservative approach to investing in housing in 2004 and 2005 are the ones who prospered.

Those who got caught in the housing bloodbath are now often paralyzed with fear to get into the hunt again. Focusing on the past is just as devastating as focusing exclusively on the present. Let the past inform your future, but not control what you do in the future.

Once again there is a lot of uncertainty in the housing market. Will we go into a double dip recession? Will housing prices scrape along the bottom for a protracted period before a gradual turnaround happens? Who knows for sure? All we can do is watch the trends and project from there. Always have a backup plan that provides an alternate exit strategy in case circumstances change.

In this uncertain environment a strategy of flipping short sale, REO or other wholesale property makes a lot of sense. Even though prices are starting to rise in some markets, many expect further declines or stagnant prices to be widespread over the next couple of years. That means “buy and hold” properties purchased as rentals will need to justify themselves based on cash flow and not on fast appreciation. Only property that can cash flow should be purchased to hold right now. Everything else should be flipped at prices attractive to those who are in a “buy and hold” position right now.

For most Investors accumulating cash through short sales and other transactional deals is the best primary strategy. It allows the Investor to pay down debt and be in a strong position to weather any further dips in the economy. When the ultimate buy signal occurs, short sale investors will be in a great place to take advantage with a strong bank account and low debt to income ratio.

Aside from regular cleaning, the simplest way to maintain the furniture in your home in its most presentable and serviceable condition is to use them with as much care as possible.

In households that have young children and pets, this can be a very challenging task. Chairs, couches and sofas are meant to be sat on – not stood on or jumped on. It is not a venue for rough housing with the family dog. Nor is it for wiping popcorn buttered hands on. But unless you’re maintaining a spinster lifestyle, inevitable mishaps like stains and spillages cannot be avoided.

To maintain furniture upholstered in fabric, it is best to do spot-cleaning as soon as an “accident” happens. Just spray on and scrub in a cleaning solvent on the stain and wipe off with a dry cloth or paper towel. For dust and grime that seem to settle in the fabric from normal daily use, home shampooing on a regular basis is recommended.

Leather and vinyl only need to be wiped clean with a sponge dipped in a soapy solution. Use a soft bristled brush to get stubborn grime off if necessary. Wipe off with a soft dry cloth. Leather needs to be moisturized to retain its sheen. In lieu of commercially available leather moisturizers, colorless shoe polish may be used. Apply the polish evenly, then buff and polish thoroughly. On the other hand, oil-based products should never be used on vinyl as these may cause the material to become brittle.

To avoid nicks, scratches and snags, make sure the furniture have ample space around them. Do not place them flush against the wall or other furniture unless they were designed to do so. Maintain a fair distance from heating vents and direct sunlight. Try not to eat messy, dripping food around upholstered furnishings. Otherwise, be prepared to soot-clean right after your meal.

Of course, hiring a professional cleaning service is always the best choice. Most services have a pick-up and delivery option. Some services will clean your furniture right in your home. If the cleaning required is a hefty task, like a major spill on light-colored upholstery, these are the people to call. They’ll know what cleaning agents or solvents to use that won’t damage the fabric’s design and color. But still, unless your home furnishings are the expensive heirloom type or made by a known designer, these services may also cost a paltry sum.

How to correctly price a product has always been a bit of a black art for most product managers. The goal is to not price a product so high that nobody is willing to buy it, while at the same time not pricing it so low that you end up leaving money on the table. It turns out that the correct way to price a product has to do with its parts, not with its cost…

What Do Your Customers Value?

Pricing for a product comes down to two things: what are your customers willing to pay for the product and how satisfied will they be with the amount that they ended up paying for it? In order to create a price that will meet both of these customer expectations, product managers need to find the best way to present their product’s benefits to their customers.

This is where the problems first show up. All too often product managers spend their time (often at the request of their senior management) focusing on the cost of their product when instead they should be worried about communicating the product’s benefits.

The correct way to go about pricing your product is to view it not as a complete product, but rather as a collection of components (product, accessories, support, configuration options, documentation, etc.). Each component does not have the same value to your customer. This means that product managers need to take the time to carefully price each component so that it closely matches the value that the customer places on that particular component.

What Customer Pricing Experiments Show

Researchers Dr. Rebecca Hamilton and Dr. Joydeep Srivastava have studied how customers value different components of a product. They used auto repairs as the product that was being offered and they identified three different components of this product: parts, labor, and shipping (of the parts).

In their studies, the researchers discovered that customers valued parts more than labor, and parts more than shipping. The take-away from this research was that customers assigned a higher price to those things that they viewed as providing them with a higher benefit.

An important lesson for product managers came from the second part of the researcher’s study. Here they dropped the price for labor to nothing. That made customers nervous – somewhat surprisingly they preferred to pay at least something for this component. Clearly, dropping the price of a product’s component below an accepted threshold doesn’t make the product more attractive – it actually makes it less attractive.

Three Guidelines

The end result of the studies were the creation of three guidelines for product managers who are getting ready to price their products:

It’s All About Needs: Product managers need to make sure that they fully understand their customer’s needs. If your car battery needs to be replaced, you will be willing to visit a store and pay full price for a new battery and a big discount on the motor oil that you’ll need later instead of visiting another store that can offer you a small discount on both.
Bundles Work: The researchers found that product managers who can combine both high-value and low value components together in packages do the best. They also caution that a product manager should only take the step of offering low-value components for free if that is what the current market will allow.
Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: If a product that you are responsible for has a benefit that you think that customers should be placing a greater value on, then it is the responsibility of the product manager to do something about it. Specifically, you need to find ways to clearly communicate the value of that component to your customer in order to boost its value.
What All Of This Means For You

In the end, what your customers are going to be willing to pay for your product is going to depend on how valuable they view it as being. Product managers need to understand that their customers don’t see their product as a blob, instead they see it as a collection of multiple components that they place different values on.

In order to price a product correctly, product managers need to break their product up into the components that their customers see. Then those components need to be matched to your customer’s goals – what do they really value? Finally, high and low benefit components can be grouped together in order to boost your customer’s willingness to pay for the product.

Nobody ever said that pricing a product correctly was going to be easy. However, taking the time to understand how your customer views your product and the value that they put on the different components of your product is the key to doing pricing correctly. Get this right, and you’ll have found the secret to being a successful product manager!