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Brazil is now the world’s fifth-largest market for pet accessories, according to PET South AmericaIn Sao Paulo, many restaurants now offer dog menus and a Rio entrepreneur recently introduced a “Dog Beer” There are heart-shaped mirrors on the ceiling and a lot of frisky nibbling on the bed below.But the visitors to this new Brazilian love motel are a pair of French bulldogs, Cherry and Toby.The motel is just part of Animalle Mundo Pet, a new massive pet complex in Belo Horizonte, Brazil that sells everything from chocolate dog biscuits to assisted reproduction services.A fling in the motel costs about [...]

Quick, what’s your credit score? Don’t know? Don’t care? You should. If you’ve been turned down for loans or received high interest rates from lenders, your credit may be, well, bad. The good news? You can fix it. You really can. But there’s no magic formula. There are, however, some concrete steps you can take to turn your credit situation around. Begin by understanding what contributes to your current score and follow the four steps outlined below to change course. “What is bad credit, anyway?” Bad credit means that you have negative items or limited entries on your credit report [...]

No one expects you to happily spring out of bed every weekday and run off to work, but if you dread going to the office every time your alarm goes off, it’s time to make a change. Your passion for your job can wane over the years and moving on to a new job can help keep excitement from fading. But in this economy, landing a new job isn’t always possible. “Passion is a feeling—if you can recapture that and bring it back to the job, it’s a kick start,” says Nicole Williams, connection director at LinkedIn. Every day at [...]

Your Actions Put You at More Risk Identity thieves are eager to make you one of the nearly 9 million people in the U.S. whose identities are stolen each year, as estimated by the Federal Trade Commission. Not everyone is at the same risk of becoming part of that statistic; some of us fall victim more easily, often because we put more of ourselves out there. “We have a society that is so conditioned to share information that it can get in the wrong hands and wreak havoc on our identities,” says Joe Mason, senior vice president of Intersections Inc., [...]

Long before you start discussing the invitation list, bridesmaid dress colors and possible honeymoon destinations, you and your spouse-to-be should have a heart-to-heart talk about something much more mundane — the wedding budget. In planning their dream weddings, too many couples set themselves up for rude financial awakenings. When their honeymoons are over, they start married life saddled with credit card debt.A recent Visa Inc. survey showed that 88 percent of married couples think they spent too much money on some aspect of their weddings. The most frequent budget-buster was food and drink. Fully 18 percent of the newlyweds surveyed [...]