May 3, 2008
The 401(k) is a retirement plan implemented and provided to employees by their employer as a means to save for their retirement. Not only do many employers contribute to the employees 401(k) along with employee contributions (this is known as matching), but the contributions are pre-tax contributions; in other words the deduction is taken prior to calculating the state and federal taxes due on the wages. This helps not only the employee, but also the employer.
There are several variations of the 401(k) and depending upon your employer’s status as a small business, and their ability to fund a 401(k), you may operate under a SIMPLE 401(k), a traditional 401(k), or The Safe Harbor 401(k). All the plans vary as to their contribution limits, the employers required matching contributions, and the level of administration and IRS reporting that must be factored into the plan upkeep. Let’s take a look at each of the plans, and discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of each.
The SIMPLE 401(k) is best suited for small businesses that have a reliable earnings stream. In other words, their cash flow and earnings level are fairly steady and reliable, and they want to establish an easily controlled method for providing for retirement funding. Quite often, many of the family members will participate in the 401(k) as a way to fund their own retirement, and offset some of the taxable income from the family business. The disadvantage in operating this type of retirement account lies in the fact that contributions made on behalf of the employee by the employer are not optional, and some form of contribution must be made each year.
The traditional 401(k) is the most often avoided plan by small to medium sized businesses, simply because of the massive reporting requirements, and the compliance testing that must be done each year. The administrative costs for the traditional 401(k) for a company of about 10 employees costs around $2000 per year to administer, and that doesn’t include the setup costs or the costs of loan features. In addition to the optional features costs, there is the cost of offering many investment choices. Most of the 401(k) plans for small businesses that were surveyed had a much better rate of participation as well as lowered plan costs when only a few options were offered, instead of 10 or more.
The compliance testing that must be done with the traditional 401(k) are quite complex, and require much involvement by the accounting or payroll department of the business. Today, many small businesses outsource their payroll function, and include the 401(k) plan administration as one of the outsourced functions also. The greatest advantage to the small business is that the business is not required to contribute to the plan, unless there is a significant imbalance in the contributions of the highly compensated employees versus the lesser paid employees.
The Safe Harbor 401(k) is a spin-off of the traditional plan, except for the fact that there aren’t all the compliance requirements and testing that must be completed each year. The Safe Harbor plan is best suited for the small business that has a steady revenue stream, and that is able to make a required contribution each year to the employee fund. The employer must make a 3% contribution to all employees who qualify for retirement funding, regardless of whether the employee makes a contribution; also, the employer contribution level for non-highly compensated employees must not differ more than 2% from the highly compensated employee contribution rate. In this manner, the employer is required to provide the same benefits for all employees, without all the compliance testing of the traditional plan. The Safe Harbor 401(k) is simple to set up, and can be accomplished within 30 days of the new year, and is simple to administer. The disadvantage to this plan is the required contribution rates, and if the business does not have a steady cash or revenue flow, it is not a recommended plan.
After examining the different plan options available for small to medium companies, there should be at least one that fits within any small businesses scope of operations. Providing retirement funding for small business family members, as well as all other employees is one of the greatest benefits a company can offer current and prospective employees.
Dassana Jayalath is the author of WebSuperTips newsletter. Download Free eCourse : Newbie’s Guide To Profitable Internet Home Business
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There have been many significant changes to the face of search over the last several years with engines becoming more intelligent than ever before. Today’s users expect mainly fast, easy, relevant and satisfactory search results. In response to this search engines have responded by giving users more control over search results than ever through the emergence of alternative search engines.
One instance of these so-called alternative search engines goes by the name of Nutch (http://www.nutch.org/). Nutch is a two-year-old open source project, which has been hosted previously at Soundforge and backed by a non-profit organization. Since then it has been determined that the Apache license is the most appropriate, with Nutch no longer requiring the overhead of an independent non-profit organization. The board of directors and the developers both were in favor of the move to the Apache Foundation.
Nutch builds on Lucene technology, which was developed under the watchful eye of Doug Cutting, the primary developer for both of these open source projects. Doug has been working in the field for almost two decades and has spent three years at Apple, four years at Excite as well as 5 years at Xerox PARC, so it is safe to say that Doug definitely knows his stuff. Lucene is suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform. It is a full-featured, high-performance, text search engine library, coded entirely in Java to implement web search. Nutch is an application; you can download it and run it. It adds a crawler and other web-specific stuff to Lucene as well as it’s very own search algorithm and a link analysis module. Nutch aims to search the entire web like Google or Yahoo! but has a few tricks up its sleeve thanks to the beauty of open source licensing.
I recently had the privilege to interview Mel Strocen, the CEO of Jayde Online, Inc. (http://www.exactseek.com/), one of the Web’s major online publication and search companies. Mel had some
very exciting news to report on how Jayde is planning to utilize the Nutch application.
Jayde has been developing a customized version of Nutch for the last eight months and is planning to launch a search engine based on the Nutch technology within the next few weeks. The initial beta version will consist of a network of dedicated servers with an index of between 20 and 30 million website listings.
The real potential of this new search engine, and others using the Nutch technology, lies in the fact that it is open source and uses a “Plug-In Architecture”. What this means is that the engine will be perpetually evolving and constantly improving to better facilitate the needs of searchers. One terrific example that shows us just how beneficial this type of open source plug-in technology can be is the FireFox web browser (http://www.firefox.com/).
FireFox, in its short existence has eaten up a significant portion of the once all mighty Internet Explorer’s market share. The popularity of this browser is due to the fact that it is constantly making itself smarter. You can now find a plug-in for virtually anything that you require , ranging from web developer, downloading, and search tools to privacy, security, website integration and humorous plug-ins. You name it, there is an extension for it. The extension library consists of nearly six hundred different plug-ins and is growing daily thanks to the help of contributors everywhere.
Now just imagine implementing this type of plug-in technology to a search engine, with one type of plug-in for say searching MP3s and another plug-in for downloading PDFs. The possibilities of this new open source search technology are infinite. Now the term “open-source search engine” may make a lot of people’s minds wander towards the idea of Black Hat search engine optimization. The primary developer of Nutch, Doug Cutting, feels that the closed-source advantage is not nearly as much of a factor as one might imagine it to be. The fact that the search engine is open-source allows sp@mmers to be detected far faster than that of closed-source search engines latest sp@m detecting algorithms. Either way, you know that the sp@mmers will eventually figure out how it works, the only difference is how quickly. So the top anti-sp@m techniques, closed or open source, are those that continue to function even when their mechanism is known.
Another type of alternative search engine technology has just recently been released to beta version is “Relevancy Rank” from the Claria Corporation (http://www.claria.com/relevancyrank/about/), the minds behind Gator. I had the pleasure to conduct an interview with the Vice President and Executive Chief of Marketing, Scott Eagle. He had some very interesting things to say about the launch of this new product and what exactly the benefit of Relevancy Rank has to the user. This unique search technology takes the results from the top search engines and applies its very own algorithms to output to the user the most relevant results.
Relevancy Rank is a combination of personalization, localization, time spent at any one site, click through rates as well as conversions. These are all taken into account to provide the most relevant results. “For an example, if you happened to be a zoologist who loved to search for different animals and information relating to animals and you entered the word “Jaguar” you would be returned far different results from say a car enthusiast who searched frequently for different types of vehicles and also typed in the word “Jaguar”", noted Scott. Relevancy Rank helps to provide you with the most relevant results based on your previous search behavior.
With the end users expectations continuing to grow, these twists on the way that results are gathered and displayed are an enormous help in satisfying the user’s hunger to get to the results that they are looking for. I am quite anxious to see how these new forms of search technology fair out over the next several months. One thing is for sure, these new technologies are sure to revolutionize the way that web search is conducted and pave a new path for the evolution of search.
Tyler Huston is the SEO Manager for Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning Inc. Beanstalk is proud to offer their guaranteed SEO services to clients from around the world. To keep updated on the latest going’s on in the search engine world watch for Tyler’s posts on the Beanstalk SEO blog.
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Sport is perhaps, the best way for students to experience and
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We all know that time is one of the most valuable resources that we do not have the luxury to waste for. Unlike money, gold and other material things, the time we spend can never be recovered. It is therefore important to use and manage our time wisely.
One of the biggest time wasters in people’s lives is procrastination. We all know what it is. Most people tend to delay doing things that should have been done a long time ago. When we continue to procrastinate, success will always be elusive in our lives. People who take action are those that will usually get ahead in life.
It may be hard to break procrastination because it is a behavior learned early in life and is hard wired into our subconscious mind.
To break the habit of procrastination, start doing the task at hand immediately. When there is something that needs to be done, start doing it right away. Do not wait until you are “in the mood” for doing it…that time will most likely never come.
Starting to do things immediately will effectively break the old habit of procrastination. You can start with the easy tasks and finish these first. Once the easy tasks are out of the way, you will start to feel good about your accomplishments and this will spark your mood to do more.
Do not aim for perfection when doing the task at hand. What matters most is getting started and then you can gain momentum to finish the greater jobs ahead. Always pursuing perfection to great detail is a waste of your time.
Write down your plan. It is very effective to have a daily plan because you can see which things are most important and which need to be addressed immediately. By writing down your plan, you can be more productive and actually save time by not doing the unnecessary and/or less important tasks.
And be sure when writing down your plan to make a schedule of what you will be doing for the entire day. This should include all the activities that you will do from the beginning to the end of the day.
Finally, set a deadline for your planned activities, making sure that you can finish the job at hand within the established time frame. Don’t let a few small failures along the way derail your plan. Put procrastination where it belongs…under your feet!
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