Mitigating Mistakes: How to Handle a DWI as a Responsible Adult

Driving while intoxicated (DWI) is a serious crime that can result in expensive fines, a suspended driver’s license, mandatory DWI classes and significantly higher insurance rates. 

There’s also the possibility of jail-time, although that is rare for a first offense. Although you likely wish you hadn’t gotten behind the wheel in the first place, there’s no way to change the past. 

All you can do is move forward and improve your situation. Here’s the best way for you to handle a DWI charge responsibly.

Hire a Lawyer

You have a few options when it comes to how you handle the legal consequences of your DWI charge. 

You can simply plead guilty right away and put yourself at the mercy of the court, which is a bad move. You can go with a public defender who is probably overworked. Or you can hire a skilled DWI attorney, which is by far the best option.




Your DWI attorney will give you the best chance at success in your case. If you’re lucky, they may find something in your favor, such as the police officer not having probable cause to suspect you of DWI in the first place. 

Even if your lawyer can’t get the charges dismissed, they can negotiate the best deal for you.

Attend DWI Classes

If you got a DWI, it means that your drinking caused you to behave recklessly and irresponsibly. While the DWI itself may seem like a wakeup call, you should still enroll in DWI classes for two important reasons.

The first reason is that the court will probably require you to take DWI classes as part of your punishment. Failure to do so could result in jail-time or other penalties. The second reason is that DWI classes can help you make better decisions in the future. 

Don’t just go to your classes to get credit for doing so. They’re a good learning opportunity, and it’s smart to pay attention.

Work on Getting Your Driver’s License Back

Your license will most likely end up suspended after you’re found guilty of DWI or possibly before, depending on your state, and it could be suspended for six months, one year or longer. 

You can get it back in as little time as possible by complying with any terms the court sets for you. This will typically include taking those DWI classes and paying off your fines.

You may be able to start driving again sooner if you agree to have an ignition interlock device installed on your vehicle. 

With an ignition interlock device, you must blow into it before you can start your car, and sometimes while you are driving, as well. Check with an Austin DWI lawyer to see if this is an option.

Understand That a DWI Can Be an Emotional Rollercoaster

A DWI is a major life event that can affect people in a variety of different ways. It could leave you feeling depressed and ashamed of yourself. 

Or, you could feel angry at the fact that you have a suspended license, especially if you need to drive for your everyday commute.

What’s most important if you experience any intense emotions after your DWI is that you understand that things will turn around. 

Even though a DWI can be a major hassle to deal with, if you do your part, you’ll be able to get your life back in order.

It’s a bit of a shock when you’re charged with DWI, and it can leave you wondering what to do. Stick to the steps above and you can resolve your DWI as painlessly as possible.

5 Ways To Make Money Using Your Mobile Phone

When you take a look at the world today, you can see how much it has been shaped by technology. Next to changing the way people live, work, and play, it has also affected the way some people make money. 

Next to serious ventures such as taking up an online business, working as a freelancer, or being a blogger with a huge following, there is also a wide variety of micro-jobs that you can do by using certain online apps, that aren’t necessarily a way to earn for a living, but if you know how to use them, they can help you get some extra cash.

Gather info from stores as a Field Agent

First, you have to download the Field Agent app, make your own agent profile. Your jobs will appear in the apps “job list” or you can track them from the “map view”. And what are you going to do? 

You are going to help businesses improve their customer service by gathering information, photos, and videos from stores and other places via your smartphone. 

For example, you may have a hob to go to a store, take a photo of a product, and then answer some questions about it. The money you’ll earn per job is between $3 and $12.

Take surveys

Companies like to learn what you think about various things that matter to them, in order to create statistics and improve various business aspects. 

Most often, they will gather information from the customer base that they have, but there are other ways that they do this too. 

In fact, there is a lot of websites that will pay for you to take surveys. Every business cares about your opinion during their development phase, and they will pay because it will help them know what to focus on.

Become a Tasker in your area

If you’re a good handyman, cleaner, mover, and the like, you can use the Task Rabbit app to find local jobs, with the ability to choose the rates and schedules that you are comfortable with. 

The first thing that you need to do is register, and then you will get an invitation to attend a local Tasker orientation or onboarding session. 

You can then begin doing the tasks by downloading the app and receiving notifications about potential jobs near you. Discuss details with your client, do the job, submit the invoice, and get your money.

Shopping rebates

There is a variety of apps and sites out there that can help you get your money back after you shop. While it’s not really a way of earning money, it can help you save more. Ebates is the most popular shopping rebate app/site. 

When you purchase something from their site, they get a commission from who made the product. But, instead of keeping it, they send you a piece of the commission, and a PayPal payment every quarter. Some rebate apps require you to keep receipts that you have to scan.

Drive people around

We asked the professionals at Personal Digital what their favorite way of making money via your smartphone is, and they suggested using an app like Uber or Lyft to drive people around. 

First you need to register and get accepted, and you have to meet requirements such as being 21+ old, owning a car, and having a car insurance that is valid. You also have to pass a background check. 

After that, you can earn money as a driver – up to $35 an hour with Lyft, and about $19 per hour with Uber.

In summation

In today’s world of technology, there is a wide variety of ways that you can make money, be it a real business or a way to get some extra cash. 

There is a wide variety of apps and ways out there that can help you earn money. Try some of the 5 listed in this article and see how they pan out.

5 Tips for Creating a Financial Risk Management Plan

Business, like life, is full of unanticipated risks. This doesn’t mean your business can’t prepare for them. Coming up with a financial risk management plan requires you to look at the different risks that your business has and then come up with concrete plans and policies to reduce that risk. 

There are myriad of things you need to think about when coming up with a financial risk management plan, from making sure to monitor financial risk to keeping your employees protected, but here are five tips to help you get started down the path.

General Business Risks

One of the first steps in coming with a financial risk management plan is to take a look at your overall business risks. Ask yourself some questions like, what will happen to my business in a recession? 

How will my business handle new competitors? How will my company manage the normal ebb and flow of business? Depending on the nature of your business, you might find that you have times when sales are high and things are going well, but then run into days, weeks or even months when sales are slower. 

You need to make sure that your plans take into account these slower times.

Employee Risks

Good employees can help your business expand and generate more revenue, but they also can introduce financial risk to your business. Before hiring anyone to work at your business, you need to check their references no matter how good their resume is or how qualified they seem. 



Not only is it imperative to check references, but it’s very important to properly train your employees on company policies. This includes safety policy. If your employees are working with machines then it’s important to ensure that they have industry-specific safety training. 

Fortunately there is industry-specific safety training available online from OSHA.

Liability Risks

Liability risks can sink many small businesses. Reducing or eliminating these liability risks are an important part of developing a financial risk management plan. 

Not only is their property and product liability concerns, but your employee risks can give you liability exposure. It should go without saying that you need to get liability insurance for your business. 

Talk with a business liability insurance agent. He will give you an idea about the industry-specific liability risks that you might have and ways to mitigate those financial risks.

B2B Risks

Every business has B2B business, even if they are solely a consumer-facing business. They have vendor arrangements that can include both buying and selling. Not everyone runs their business well and some businesses have problems managing credit. 

It’s very important that your business has a robust credit and risk analysis policy when dealing with any other business. 

Just like there are tools to check personal credit ratings, you can also check the credit reports of other businesses with tools like CreditRiskMonitor. This is should be a standard practice before initiating any transactions that could lead to financial risk for your business.

Fraud Risks

Fraud costs businesses billions of dollars every year. Fraud comes in many different shapes and forms from cyber fraud to retail fraud to B2B fraud and everything in between. 

Your company needs to put into place policies to limit your fraud exposure. Training employees on how to recognize phishing emails and how their internet safety can reduce the risk of cyber-related fraud. 

Likewise, training retail employees how to recognize credit card or check fraud can reduce those instances as well. Make sure employees know the policies and know their frontline importance in the battle against fraud.

With the right financial risk management plan, you can protect the financial interests of your business. Instead of worrying about financial risk, you can focus on doing what you do best.

How To Do Quality Competitor Analysis for SEO

It is a fact that SEO is one of the pillars of success for your business. A crucial step for starting to develop an SEO strategy is competitor analysis. 

Competitor analysis provides you with the data that you need in order to know what industry trends are currently booming and how you can improve your keyword rankings. 

What you learn from it can help you realize the tasks that you need to focus on, and is the main factor for the development of your campaigns. 

You will get to learn your competitor’s weaknesses and strengths and be able to find a way to outperform them.

Who are your competitors?

For starters, you are going to have to find out who are the top four competitors that you are going to use for your analysis. 

It might be a good idea to use a mix of direct business and online search competitors. The reason for this is that you’ve got competition that is local, as well as the one that is investing in online search ads. 

So, while you may be worrying about a business nearby, your actual competition may be in another town or state.

A good tool for searching competitors is SEMrush. Input your own domain name, go to “organic competitors” and look at the full report. 

Then focus on metrics such as common keywords and total traffic in order to determine who your biggest competitors are.

How technically optimized are they?

When it comes to technical optimization, you will be checking for a number of things. For example, you will check whether their title tags are technically optimized (one title tag per page, correct placement within head tags, few to no extraneous tags in the title). 

You will also check whether their internal linking allows indexation of content, and if there is an error-free schema markup present. The quality of the schema is also important (whether there is customized markup such as BlogPosting, for example). 

You should also check whether there is a “home” for new content (is there a content hub, and is it easily noticeable). 

While you can’t run a complete technical audit for your every competitor, you need to keep in mind your own website’s technical SEO performance and the issues that you need to focus on.

How good is their content?

When it comes to content, you will be checking title tags again, but from an editorial point of view. 

Check whether they accurately represent the content on the page, if there are any duplicates, and are the titles shorter than 80 characters. There also has to be a unique H1 for every page, and represent its content. 

Next thing that you should check out is whether internal linking supports organic content. This is based on the quality of the links. 

Basically, it means that they should lead to informative pages, such as tutorials or research, be a natural continuation of the user’s journey through the website, and vary the resources that they link to.

The quality of content, while subjective, is important for comparing brands. You need to check in how many words are informative pages dealing with complex topics. 

You should also evaluate whether you really want to read the content, does it look well-written, and whether it contains valuable information. Originality is also important, so, from the experience of a web design agency, competitor analysis is the best way to find the best trends to follow. 

The quality of images and video is also important. They have to be unique, be in proper resolution, and not be repeated on multiple pages.

In summation

By analyzing these factors, you will be able to locate opportunities where you can excel with your own website. Through competitor analysis, you will be able to find the trends that exist among the competition. This way you will be able to make the best out of them in order to stand out amongst the competition.