It’s always strange to realize just how much we spend on things that we don’t consider regular, heavy expenses. American pet care is a $50 billion dollar industry and growing. As infrequently as vet visits seem to come up for my family, the bill for most any procedure is at least $200. Pets are a part of the family, and I’m certainly not one to cut corners, but some of our spending is very unnecessary.

BRITAIN’S young people are becoming a generation of part-time professionals, balancing careers in areas such as finance and law to please their parents with “conscience” jobs to satisfy themselves.

The number of people aged 25-34 in part-time employment has risen by 24% since 2008, according to an analysis by the Office for National Statistics for The Sunday Times — more than three times as fast as the wider workforce. This group accounts for nearly half of the rise in part-time employment over the past five years.

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More than a quarter of workers are planning to change the direction of their career in the next five years, research has indicated.

A survey of 2,030 adults found that of those who are currently working, 26 per cent wish to embark on a new career path. The research by Invest in Cornwall, a regional development project, found that, of these, 24 per cent wished to fulfil long-term ambitions, 23 per cent were dissatisfied in their current role and 23 per cent wanted to earn more money. Only 5 per cent said that they were looking to change jobs because they feared redundancy in the near future.

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The recession has left many looking for fresh opportunities and the call for advisers to help them on their way is growing The climate is changing for those looking to offer guidance counselling

There are careers. And then there are careers in careers. You can be a guidance counsellor in a school, an MBA consultant from fortunaadmissions.com or other similar consultancies, an internal coach in a big company, or set up on your own as a specialist in career coaching or career management.

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Legal aid work is tiring, frustrating and, at times, emotionally difficult – but worth pursuing, says Lizzie Dilks

With multimillion-pound cuts to the legal aid scheme, you might think that there’s little point going into publicly funded work. But if you can land a placement, then there’s still a good career to be had, even in some of the less fashionable areas of law.

Lizzie Dilks, 25, is halfway through her training contract with Hereward & Foster, a law firm in the East End of London. She read psychology at the University of Nottingham, then took the Graduate Diploma in Law and the Legal Practice Course (LPC) at the College of Law, Bloomsbury. She worked as a paralegal for a year at Hereward & Foster before she was offered a training contract.

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Like many single women in their early thirties, Jean Twenge worried that she would miss out on motherhood. Recently divorced, she would be hit by bouts of full-on baby panic. She remembers having conflicting emotions when friends gave birth, casting longing looks at toddlers in the street and anxiously reading a magazine article about the state of her biological clock. The message was loud and clear; time was running out.

Today, at 41 and remarried, she is the mother of three beautiful daughters. “I needn’t have worried after all,” she laughs.

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