Insego

Why Your Roof Is A Missed Environmental Opportunity

You may think your roof is simply there to keep you dry at night, but it can do so much more than that. In fact, your roof can be a major contributor to the environmentally-friendly nature of your entire home.

Your roof can add significant environmental value to your home. If you are interested in making your roof work for you, try one of these ideas to make your roof earth-friendly.

Prevent Leaks

Stopping leaks does more than keep you dry. Preventing leaks in your roof can actually contribute to the environmental friendliness of your home. Much of the air that cools and warms your home eventually ends up in your attic. If you have leaks in your roof, the air generated by your HVAC system escapes from your home.

This causes you to spend more money and energy cooling and heating your home each year. The more energy you use, the more drain on the environment you cause. Simply by stopping leaks in your roof you can cut down on energy use by up to 40 percent.

Add Insulation

If your roof is not insulated, even if you no longer have any leaks, you will also use more energy than necessary. Attics and roofs act as heat traps in the summer, which leads to a large increase in the amount of energy that you use. The opposite is true in the winter.

5 Hot Apps Helping Us Stay Healthy

Everyone has a smartphone these days, but for some of us, having all this technology at our fingertips is doing more harm than good. Fortunately, there are tons of apps out there changing people’s lives for the better. I’ve weeded through new releases, version updates, and makeovers throughout the past few weeks to highlight five incredibly useful apps.

1) Argus by Azumio

Argus was released last week, gaining lots of attention as an all-inclusive data app. It tracks fitness, diet, and sleeping patterns, simultaneously pulling data from other apps in the Azumio network. The goal of Argus is to combine all health and fitness data (per user), making it one of the fastest-growing apps on the market. Here are some quick facts about Argus:

Free; however, Azumio’s other apps run $1.99 if you are considering integration
4 Star Rating
Track hydration, vital signs, caffeine consumption, heart rate, movements, quality of sleep and sleep cycles
Automatic tracking via iPhone’s built-in sensors
Pulls data from Azumio apps and third-party as well

How technology helps with global investing

In the world, we can find some 40,000 publicly traded companies of which almost 80 percent are stationed overseas, and this is a good indication that there are interesting investment potentials outside the borders of the United States.

Looked at this in a different way, over 50 percent of the global $38 trillion overall market capitalization is owned by the worldwide arena, and American mutual funds keep nearly $500 billion in international investments.

With all these potential investments outside the U.S., international investments have become an excellent vehicle to diversify an equity portfolio, even in countries such as Belarus with its tradition-steeped culture. A number of people claim that there’s definitely a growing connection in performance between international and domestic markets.

But while international markets usually tend to react in the same way to news or developments taking place around the world, after a while, global and domestic markets have a tendency to behave in different ways, and this helps to keep the balance in a diversified portfolio.

These days, you even have better options and monitor new investing developments thanks to many (investor relations) IR apps.