She’s not your typical tycoon. But when Lauren Rosenstadt, a single mother from Bethesda, MD, turned 35 three years ago, she realized she had to make more money to ensure a safe future for herself and her daughter. A former marketing director for an herbal-products importer, she came up with the idea of making organic-herbfilled pillows in animal shapes. In 1995, only a year after she started Herbal Animals, sales skyrocketed to $550,000. “I wanted a way to make a good living as my daughter got older,” she says. “I didn’t expect it to happen so fast.”

Gone are the days when women worked at home just to earn pin money. Advances in technology, such as startup market research site Launchscore.com, make it easier than ever to start a business, especially for those providing services. “There’s a prairie fire of women-owned businesses spreading across the country,” says Sherrye Henry, assistant administrator for the Office of Women’s Business Ownership at the U.S. Small Business Administration. “Women at home are doing everything from making crafts to running high-tech consulting firms.”

There are now three-and-a-half million female-owned, home-based businesses in the United States, employing 14 million people on a full- or part-time basis. While most have annual sales under $100,000, nearly 25 percent reap between $100,000 and $499,9999 – and 9 percent boast $500,000 and up.

These five women, all mothers, started with little or no capital and used their skills and …

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About 18 million Americans, two thirds of them women, suffer from depression, and most don’t seek help. That’s I largely because people who are depressed often think they can, and should, handle personal problems on their own. “Many are convinced it’s just a matter of toughing it out,” says Donald Klein, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in New York City. “Others believe nothing will help,” says Ellen Leibenluft, M.D., a mood-disorders researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, MD. “That’s one of the symptoms of this illness.”

But depression is treatable: Up to 80 percent of patients who seek help–through talk therapy or prescription drugs-get relief. These days, more people are turning to antidepressant medications, partly because increasingly cost-conscious health insurers often prefer to pay for drugs than for many years of psychotherapy. Another reason is that the newest generation of antidepressants-including fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil), and sertraline (Zoloft)-are believed to be safer and have fewer side effects than the older medications, so doctors are usually more comfortable prescribing them. (These drugs are also being used to treat disorders other than depression, including PMS, anorexia, and bulimia.)

Some psychologists (who, it should be noted, cannot prescribe drugs) have criticized the increasingly widespread use of medication to treat depression, arguing that talk therapy works just as well. Although psychiatrists agree that mild cases are best treated with talk …

Snoring is the result of some type of blockage in the airway that obstructs air flow causing the respiratory structures of the throat to vibrate abnormally during sleep. As you fall asleep and your muscles relax, the muscles of your mouth relax as well and sometimes allow the tongue to fall back into the throat and block the airway. With the tongue blocking the flow of air, abnormal vibrations occur in the throat and cause snoring, a result of poor air intake. Relief from snoring is critical for restorative rest, which is a factor in your overall health. Elimination of snoring can reduce risk of heart attack, stroke and obesity so finding a method to maintain an open airway throughout the night is necessary for your well-being. However, because snoring results from airway blockage either due to an obstruction in the nasal passage or the tongue the cause of an individual’s snoring must be determined first.

Of all of the remedies available to consumers, mouthpieces are the most effective device in eliminating habitual snoring. When snoring is a symptom of a sickness or allergies, temporary solutions, like nasal strips, are generally effective and a mouthpiece may not be. When the blockage occurs in the nose, the airway must be opened in the nasal passage rather than the throat. However, when snoring is caused by an obstructed airway more permanent measures must be taken to ensure the sufferers can get a peaceful night’s sleep.
There are two designs when it comes to anti-snoring mouthpieces, Mandibular Advancement Devices (or Mandibular Repositioning Device) and Tongue Stabilizing Devices (or Tongue Retaining Devices). Both options work to keep the tongue from falling back into the air way in order to keep the air passage clear. MADs reposition the lower jaw, advancing it forward to tighten the muscles in the back of the mouth. By doing this, the tongue is kept away from the throat and allows free air flow. TSDs function by retaining the tongue with a strip at the back of the mouth guard. It lays across the back of the tongue and eliminates the possibility of it blocking the airway to allow free air flow as well.

The top-rated anti-snoring device, according to this popular snoring mouthpiece authority, is undoubtedly the ZQuiet mouthpiece as it boasts to be the world’s number one stop snoring device. ZQuiet is a mouthpiece that was recently introduced Continue reading “Eliminate Snoring With An Anti Snoring Mouthpiece” →

Every night before her son wows the crowd with his slam dunks and powerhouse basketball in Orlando’s O-rena, Lucille Harrison arrives early enough to pass by the court during warm-up and proudly call her gentle giant over to the sidelines. “I always make sure I give him a kiss, and I tell him, Good luck, have a good time, and watch your fouls.

It’s just one of Harrison’s man roles as “Shaq’s Mom,” the woman who gave birth to Shaquille O’Neal, the seven-foot one-inch, 300-pound center for the Orlando Magic.

In return for her loving support, her s now a 24-year-old superstar who earns roughly $21.9 million a year, treats her like a queen He wrote and recorded a rap song about called “My Dear.” He says he wants to mar woman just like her. And he fills up her hi with dozens of roses at a time. “I always tell ‘Don’t buy me anything,”‘ Harrison, 42, says, “I just love for him to come by and sit down and talk.” Which he does-nearly every day.

Shaquille and Lucille have a bond that was built early, when it was just the two of them and times were tough. Harrison was only 18 when she had Shaquille Rashaun (an Islamic name meaning “little warrior”). As a single mother with no support from her baby’s father, she abandoned her dreams to become a nurse, moved in with her grandmother in Newark, NJ, …

Even after 23 years as a divorce lawyer in San Antonio, Clarence Bray’s demeanor is more that of a village priest than a courthouse warrior. He speaks in such quiet, measured tones that listeners are forced to lean forward and concentrate on his every word.

When Bray married 31 years ago, he was thrown by the fact that his wife expressed herself so much more forcefully than he did. If something was bothering her, she’d say so – firmly and at length. Bray realized that in order to take care of himself in the relationship, he was going to have to learn to fight. “The first step was to realize that I could say no quietly. Even though I didn’t have all the words and emotion she did when she said it, it meant the same thing.” In time, he learned to be more forthcoming about his feelings, and she learned to give him the time he needed to express himself. “I guess the biggest reason we stay married is both of us feel safe showing the other who we really are.”

Bray advises couples to expect the best from each other. Because of that philosophy, he’s reluctant to prepare prenuptial agreements, which, he says, usually focus on what might go wrong, instead of what can go right. “The idea that `what’s mine is mine, and you can’t have it, may be an effective way to make financial decisions, but …

America’s divorce lawyers preside over the breakups of millions of marriages every year. With their behind-the-scenes view of couples on the brink, they have a special understanding of why unions unravel.

The fundamental causes, say the lawyers here, are as old as Shakespeare’s tragedies: Love is born, and for reason of accident or fate. love is betrayed, sacrificed, thwarted, or, in some other heartbreaking way, simply dies.

What has changed over the years is what people are willing to tolerate. Two decades ago, many wives put up with alcoholic husbands or looked the other way when their mates had affairs. But as women have become more economically independent, they’ve become less sanguine about such behavior. “When I first started practicing law, it was almost always the man who initiated the divorce,” recalls New York City lawyer Eleanor B. Alter. Now. she says, slightly more than 50 percent of the time, It’s the woman.

Laws have changed too. In the 1960s, in many states, the only grounds for divorce was adultery. Today, drug or alcohol problems, physical or emotional abuse, or simple incompatibility is often enough.

But increasingly what tears couples apart is more subtle – and more sweeping. Alter says she sees many husbands and wives who are so confused about what matters to them – in life and in marriage – that there is no way their partners can meet their expectations. That’s why, she says, it’s so important …

When you’re saving for the future, how should you invest the money? There’s a wide range of possibilities, from safe-and-steady bank certificates of deposit (CDs) to risky-but-fast-growing stocks. Each type of investment serves a purpose. Choosing the right mix isn’t hard, once you understand the rules.

First, two big questions to think about. How you answer will suggest the most appropriate types of investments for you today.

#1: When will you need to spend the money that you’re currently putting away?

Savings needed in four years or less should be put in an absolutely safe place: money-market mutual funds, bank CDs, Treasury bills, or Series EE savings bonds. Although these investments earn low returns (at this writing, about 5 percent), your money will be there whenever you want it. In this category, I’d put emergency savings, money for a down payment on a house, and any college tuition payable within four years. This is your “cash portfolio.” Savings you won’t touch for four years or more should be invested in stocks and bonds. Big-company stocks have returned an average of 12.6 percent annually since 1950, assuming all dividends are reinvested; five-year government bonds earned 6.2 percent. This is the kind of growth you need for a young child’s college fund or for your own retirement nest egg. (By stocks, I mean well-diversified stock-owning mutual funds. Individual stocks are a much higher risk.)

Why the four-year rule? I asked Ibbotson …

It is one of life’s supreme ironies that when Katherine Gross-Williams needed to cry the most, her tear ducts wouldn’t allow it.

The year was 1975 and Gross-Williams–then a 27-year-old newlywed–was six months away from becoming a doctor, one of only five African-Americans in a class of 177 students at Northwestern University Medical School.

After clearing some daunting hurdles, she had her eye on the prize: a residency in anesthesiology. “Success was so close I could almost taste it,” she says now. Then, Gross-Williams was struck by a mysterious ailment that started as a rash and escalated into a 106-degree fever. Six days after it began, she learned she had Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a rare illness that had caused lesions to form on her corneas–destroying her tear ducts and robbing her of her vision.

As a black woman in medicine, she was accustomed to uphill climbs. “But blindness made me a triple minority,” she says, from her sunny Chicago apartment. “It pushed me way out onto the periphery, and I had to struggle to pull myself back into the mainstream.”

Indeed, for the next three months, Gross-Williams grappled with feelings of vulnerability and depression. “I couldn’t understand why this was happening,” she recalls. “But eventually I got to the point where I didn’t want to wallow in it anymore. I wanted to overcome it.”

The only way to heal, she thought, was to scrap any thought of becoming a doctor, a …

Thinking of starting a business at home? You’ll find out fast that making money is your second-biggest challenge. The first is learning how to run a professional operation that customers and clients respect.

I learned the hard way. I remember the day I was interviewing a prominent financier by phone when tile puppy I’d stupidly parked in my office suddenly, loudly, had to go out. And the time I was running errands and my 6-year-old took my business calls. (Even worse, he didn’t tell me about them.) A lot of women start a home business so they can be with their children. But many discover they need some form of child care, just as office workers do.

As for setting up the financial side of your home-based business, finding a good accountant is a must. You need to know how to keep your books, what’s tax deductible, what taxes your business is liable for, and what personal expenses your business can legitimately cover.

Other smart moves:

Open a business bank account. Mixing your business and personal accounts makes it harder to do your tax returns. Get a vendor number from your state fill most places, you apply to your state’s retail sales tax division). The number enables you to save money by buying supplies wholesale.

Apply for a merchant card, which lets you accept credit-card payments. Banks don’t give merchant cards to home-based businesses unless they have long track records. …