Traveling overseas or across any borders really is something everyone, including students, should do in their lives. It combats ethnocentrism and helps them gain perspective on the world and their place in it. And you could help make that happen if you host a foreign exchange student.

While there are programs designed to help pair students up with their host families, going through the program here involves a lot less paperwork and gives you complete control over choosing which student you want to invite into your home. The two of you can meet and communicate through the chat rooms or through video conferencing and you both have the options of doing background checks on each other to provide peace of mind and security.

If you decide to host student travelers in your home, there are some definite positive impacts it can have on your life and the life of the student:

• Help learning English - If you or someone in your family wants to get better at speaking, writing, or reading English, bring in a student from an English speaking country and have them act as a tutor in exchange for the room and board. By teaching, the student will improve his or her skills and may even develop a desire to became an ESL teacher

• Cultural exchange - Through interactions between the traveling student and your family, you'll be able to learn a lot about one another's cultures and about yourselves. Sometimes the most fascinating way to see your own culture is through the eyes of a foreign person.

• Travel companionship - Because the student is going to want to see as much of your area as possible, you or your other family members will have an eager travel partner. The student will also benefit from the companionship, especially in an unfamiliar city.

When you bring a foreign exchange student into your home, it's a great learning experience for you both. And by offering your home in exchange for tutoring or some other service you could be opening the doors for students who might not be able to afford such a chance otherwise.

With the economy struggling and most families feeling the pinch, doing something as simple as home care and maintenance can be a challenge. If both parents are working and are feeling stressed about their finances, household chores are likely to get neglected and funds are scarce for outside help for lawn care, home repairs, or even maid service.

One alternative is to become a host family. You could provide a person with free room and board in exchange for providing some of the help you need around the home.

Here are some ways this could be useful:

• Affordable lawn maintenance - The live-in person could mow your lawn, trim the bushes, even tend to your garden if he or she has a green thumb and no pesky allergies.
• Help with laundry and other chores - If you have a large family, doing the laundry, cooking meals, even loading the dishwasher can be a time-consuming struggle. Having another pair of hands to help could be a huge asset.
• Home maintenance help - If your home is like most, there are some minor repairs that need to be made. Maybe the front door is sticking or the screen door in back is ripped. Maybe you need to replace the tiles in the kitchen or the carpet in the living room. Bringing someone in to help with these problems can save a lot of time and money.
• Maid service alternative - Instead of paying someone a lot of money to clean your home, you could be offering someone a place to stay and warm food for their services. They could be a college student, a retired person, a traveler, or a recently unemployed worker.

Additionally, you could bring them into your home to be both companions and homemakers. If both parents are working, the children may like having someone available when they come home so they don't have to go to a babysitter. Stay-at-home parents might appreciate the grown-up company and the extra hands as they struggle to keep the house running smoothly. Overall, this arrangement could be a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Several years ago, my grandmother nearly died in her apartment because her blood sugar levels dropped to dangerous levels. She had been living alone for more than two decades since my grandfather had died suddenly, and she loved her freedom. But because this was not the first time this had happened, the decision was made to place her in a nursing home. Unfortunately, this is the only choice many families have when it comes to caring for the elderly.

Thankfully, there is an alternative that could now allow for more senior home care. By offering room and board, you could find companions for the elderly relatives in your family. Imagine having someone at the house with your parent or grandparent to make sure they eat a good meal, take their medication, have someone to contact medical personnel in case of an emergency or a fall. This kind of companion help can provide many positive outcomes:

• Your elderly relative can stay at home longer and doesn't have to give up their independence
• Your family can have greater peace of mind knowing your loved one has reliable senior home care
• Your loved one's care companions can learn and grow by interacting and developing a friendship with someone older and more experienced in the world
• You will be helping someone else who needs a place to stay and food to eat, possibly because they are a struggling student, recently unemployed, or new to the area looking ot get settled

When my grandmother had to move into the nursing home, she was devastated. Most of her belonging had to be sold. She became confided to a bed in a small room for at least 20 hours every day. If we had known how to become a host home or how to find care companions for her, we might have been able to prolong that day and given her a few more great years in her own apartment.

More people and their relatives could benefit by looking into this type of an option for the ones they love the most.

As parents, we have to make some tough choices in life. We want to provide the best we can for our children but sometimes we also need to have that second income to pay the bills - not for luxuries but just to cover the mortgage, put food on the table, and maybe save some for college. But working usually requires child care for our little ones and that can cost a fortunate, as well as requiring your child to stay in a stranger's home.

A better solution is free in home child care. Now you're probably saying that would be an obvious solution but not necessarily a practical one. Where are you going to find free child care?

The answer is through a work in exchange for rent program. If you have a spare room in your home and can spare enough money to feed an extra person, you could have the child care you want for your child at no additional cost and done in your home.

Obviously, there are some risks associated with bringing a stranger into your home to care for your children. However, you can do background checks on people and other criminal history checks to ensure your child is safe and receiving the best home care you could want. Plus, since you'll be receiving free in home care for your child, you could take additional steps, such as placing cameras in the home (this is not something I would recommend because it can be an invasion of privacy for both your child and the caregiver).

Take your time and get to know the person who will be providing the care in your home before they arrive. And make sure your children meet them, too, and get along with them. Whether the babysitter is living in your home or has a place of their own, you are still trusting your child to someone you don't know very well. But with this type of arrangement, you can get to know the care provider better and take precautions to ensure your child is going to be save while also receiving child care for a price you won't find anywhere else.

Every person should travel out of their country for at least a week in their lives just to get a taste of another culture. We all get so wrapped up in our own culture that it's hard to imagine people doing things any other way. But traveling overseas can be costly. One way to cut the costs though and to end up staying overseas longer is by teaching English in another country.

You wouldn't believe how many countries want people to come there and help them learn this really important skill. And you can earn a decent amount of spending cash while you do it but you'll also need a place to stay with many of these teaching abroad jobs so that's where a host home could come in handy.

Let's say you're going to be teaching English in Japan. You might find a family willing to provide you with room and board in exchange for working as a language tutor for their family or at their school. Or you could plan on teaching English in India and make the same type of deal.

Basically, you provide your skills as a native English speaker, and the host home offers up a place for you to stay and live at no additional cost just for providing those services. Think about some of the benefits:

• Experience an entirely new culture with people from that culture who can make the shock a little less scary

• Learn a new language - just because you're teaching English doesn't mean you won't pick up a few things from the primary language of the culture

• Have an incredible vacation-like experience that goes on longer than most people could ever imagine their vacation lasting

• Return home with a broader perspective on the world and a new confidence in what you can accomplish

If you have kids in college or if you're about to graduate from college, this is a great opportunity. It's a much safer and cheaper way of exploring the world while also helping other people learn more about our people and our culture, too.

One of the luxuries most of us can't afford is a companion. Who wouldn't love having someone around for conversations when we get lonely? This becomes a worse problem as we get older or as our family members get older and need their own companions.

Companion services seems to be one of those areas that most people think is for the well-to-do - not something they or their loved ones could benefit from. But that's not the case. By doing an exchange (room and board for companion help, for example), you could have this type of service in your own home.

There are several forms of these services:

• Companion for seniors - After my grandfather died, my grandmother was extremely lonely for years because he really was her best friend. By bringing in a companion, we could have helped her not feel quite so lonely and could have more easily got her involved in other aspects of society, such as movies.

• Travel companion - I know lots of single people who hate traveling or going on trips alone. It can be scary but also very boring to have this great experience but no one to share it with. By doing an exchange, you could bring someone along to be your travel companion. They could see some fabulous sights and you'd have someone to keep you company along the way.

• Free Child Care - Most parents, myself included, don't like the idea of our children being at home alone even when they are clearly capable of doing so. My daughter is 17, and I worry about her even if I'm only going across town to do some shopping. Having a companion around for your child can be a real plus in this way. They can be a friend, confidante, etc.

• Helpers - Companions and homemakers make a great pair, too. A stay at home parent whose children have started school or left for college could probably benefit greatly from a companion to help ease her that loneliness.

Basically, with these are the types of services you don't want to have to pay for. But when you're making this type of exchange, it's much easier to see each other as a friend and less like an employee/employer.

Today, we're all aware that the economy has really gone downhill. A lot of people are suffering because they are trying to carry huge amounts of debt and that's not something you can pay off easily. You see all types of debt scams on the Internet and in ads but there is one way you can get debt-free.

Imagine you have free room and board. How much money could you put towards your debt then? Without having to pay for food, rent, or utilities, you'd have a lot of extra cash that could help you pay down all of the rest of your debt, even student loan debt, very quickly. And then you'd be completely debt free and able to start over with a higher credit score and more available money at your disposal.

You can do this by connecting with a host family who has a need you can meet that won't interfere with your other work responsibilities. For example, if you work at night, you might be able to help provide quality home care to kids before and after school or provide companionship to a lonely elderly member of the family. You could provide free home care that would include doing chores around the house or cooking dinner or a combination of other services that the host family needs but can't afford to pay someone to do.

With this type of exchange, you both end up benefiting. The family gets the private home care they need without having to expend much more in terms of financial resources. Giving up an extra room or feeding an extra mouth is not going to stretch their budget as much as day care or a full time caregiver might. Plus, you'll have your expenses reduced so you can spend all of your extra income on paying down your debt.

Of course, this type of arrange won't be perfect for everyone but if you work out the details ahead of time and are dedicated to helping one another then you'll see some real payoff in the long run. And who knows this might be the perfect solution for recent college graduates.

Five of the best benefits for using a host home for your job search.The story about the friend of the family made me decide to write down some of the great reasons I can see for choosing to live in a host home and to be part of a work exchange program like this one.

• Expands opportunities - With these programs, we don't have to be limited to just looking for work in our own backyards. We can go almost anywhere in the world to look for a new career or a new experience.

• Provides freedom - Most people don't have the luxury of waiting for the job they want. To support themselves, they need a job even if it's not a great one. But that means they have less time to look for the job they do want. With this free room and board situation, that's not the case.

• Helps you enter the community - No one likes being alone in a strange place. If you're living with a host family, however, you have a connection in that community and you can build a long-term relationship with people who may be able to help you in other ways down the road, such as by offering a reference for employment or introducing you to someone who could help your career.

• Gives you experience - Getting rent in exchange for some type of work can also expand your experience on your resume. Whether you're taking care of an elderly person or teaching English, you can use these experiences on your resume which can be a real benefit to recent graduates who don't have much of a work history.

• Changes your life - Because you are going to be working closely with another family in another city, your life is going to be changed in ways you might not be able to imagine. You'll have more confidence. You'll feel as if you have more freedom.

The bottom line is that doing a work exchange can not only help you find a job but it can really make a difference in your life - and in the life of the host family. The potential for your future through one of these exchanges is enormou

A work exchange program changed the life of a college graduate my family knows. In December, our friends' son graduated from college with a degree in radio and television. But we live in a mid-size community and there's not much work available for on-air personalities which is what he wanted to do. There really wasn't much work of any kind for him to do except McDonald's which was hiring. He didn't want to keep living with his parents until he found a job in his field so he decided to move to find work. The problem was how would he support himself until he did?

Gary started learning about this host home concept in which he could be paid for some type of provided service with free room and board. I thought, at first, he was crazy for wanting to share space with strangers and offer some kind of free in home care for them. But then we heard about his success.

A couple of nights ago, Gary's parents came over for dinner and were talking about his experience. He moved to the capital of our state which was about six hours away to a host home that needed an elder care companion. Apparently, the patriarch of the family had recently lost his wife to cancer, and he wasn't taking it so well. He had to move in with his kids, give up the home he'd shared with his wife, and spend hours alone while everyone else was working or in school.

As Gary was providing in home elder care for the family, he was also able to start submitting resumes. He could have done this from back home, too, but traveling six hours to get to interviews would have been impractical. Now he was just a hop, skip, and a jump from lots of potential jobs. And the family understood if he needed to leave for an hour to hit an interview. Plus, he didn't have to worry about taking on another job that would interfere with his job search. He provided in home elder care for this man who really needed a friend.

In this economy, the host home makes sense for lots of people. It seems like a win-win experience for everyone.