Sam Francis Fitness

Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category

Credit cards have become an almost indispensable thing that everyone seems to hold with pride and use it as regularly as one can in almost every place. All this is fine if you are sure that you will be able to pay off debt in time so that you are not sunk completely in your debts at some point of time. So, in order to get yourself to safety in case you run out of resources to get yourself out of credit card debt, the one most common thing that most resort to is to get another loan from some other source and clear yourself for the time being.

But this is no permanent solution as what you are going to end up doing is that you will be paying more interest than you actually took loan for and at the same time, your position will worsen to the case where you cannot even imagine about how to get out of this credit card debt at any point of time. This is where you may need expert advise in handling these situations. So, credit card debts are serious issues and you must definitely be cautious in handling them.

A successful business is usually the ones that move products as fast as they come in. This usually means that the demand for the products exceed the rate products are made or delivered. Although already a money earning situation, this is also a waste of opportunity as the demand is not fully met. There are two ways to deal with this problem. The first is to purposely maintain status quo. High demand with limited supply drives prices up which means higher profits with the same capital outlay. However, this create a negative feeling to customers as there needs are not met. This will just prompt other enterprising individuals to provide similar products, creating competition and therefore, through market forces, bring prices back to normal.

The second way is to increase inventory by increasing production or buying more products. Either way, this will require capital infusion, money which may not be immediately available. It usually takes sometime to save money from profits. This produces a similar situation as above, although not as purposefully. Thus, Small Business Financing loans may be the solution. Business Finance is a standard method for raising money for expansion. Thus, Small Business Finance can help provide for people’s needs immediately at a slight cost in interest payments.

My family and I were watching TV on a Saturday afternoon, when one of  my kids went to the kitchen to get some water, and when she came back, she told us that the kitchen sink faucet was leaking.  We did not pay much attention to it, and after a few hours, our kitchen was flooding! It wasn’t a simple leak, and what I did was close the main water valve and called a plumber!

After a few hours the plumber came and went, and when the faucet was taken care of, I now faced a new problem, the leaky faucet cost every penny I had, and now I barely had enough money left to last the week! Thus, I had no choice but to avail of personal loan, I did not need a big amount so a payday loan or payday advance was what I needed.  Availing of payday loans is very popular at work and luckily, a friend referred me to a great site! The site had easy qualifications and fast release of money, thus availing of their cash advances was a great experience for me, since the next morning, the money I needed was already in my account! Now, I had enough money to last the week, and I don’t have to worry about all of money getting washed down the drain!

Once you’ve gone through the process of understanding where your money goes every month, it’s time to start thinking about saving for your future. Everyone needs a rainy-day cushion to soften the impact of unforeseen life events such as illness, accident, or loss of a job. This comes under the heading of “first things first.” Therefore, before you become an investor, make sure that you build up an emergency reserve that will cover at least two to six months of living expenses. This is the portion of your assets that you don’t want to lose—ever. As you’ll see later in this chapter, my father and I believe that cash-equivalent investments such as money market funds are good places to stash this cash. It’s crucial to realize, though, that saving for the future and investing for the future are two different things. Saving implies putting money aside in a safe place, such as a federally insured bank account. Investing, on the other hand, generally refers to uninsured brokerage accounts and products. As strange as it may sound, you can save too much. If you focus too much on short-term safety and limit yourself to savings accounts, you could end up depriving yourself of the long-term growth potential the stock market can provide. Inflation can eat away at your purchasing power if you don’t put that money to work. That’s why we say that saving is smart, but in the long term investing is smarter.

Sharing the ABCs of investing can be a wonderful way to home in on your family’s dreams and financial priorities. As you probably already know, however, simply bringing up the topic of finances can easily be misconstrued by family members as a lack of trust. So getting your loved ones to the table to talk about investing and money requires that you clearly articulate what the discussion is designed to accomplish (getting everyone to participate in planning for the future) and what it’s not (taking anyone to task). The toughest part will be getting over the initial hump. Not many people are comfortable doing something for the first time. Co to a new aerobics class, and you feel like a klutz. If you’ve never taken an aerobics class at all, figuring out the steps seems that much harder. But when you hang in there, you soon find that it gets easier. Then you realize that it’s not
so bad after all, especially in light of achieving your goals. Puffing a face on investing by defining those values and dreams you want your money to support will help overcome the inertia most unseasoned investors experience. So will avoiding technical jargon. The concepts are really simple when the investment-speak labels are omitted. So keep it simple—but not too simple. Just because your friends or family aren’t familiar with investing doesn’t mean they’re stupid, so don’t talk down to them. Respect will get you a lot further than condescension. Finally, whether you’re talking to your spouse, your best friend, your parents, or your kids, avoid assuming an advisory role. In her book You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation (Quill, 2001), Deborah Tannen warns that providing counsel effectively puts you in a power position. And that will do absolutely nothing to propel the conversation forward. A better bet: Ask whomever you’re talking with for their opinion on the subject at hand, or to state their desires or concerns. Listen to what they have to say. Answer any questions. Then create a plan together.

In a study reported in Beisky and Gilovich’s Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology auctioned off a pair of hot basketball tickets to two groups of volunteers. In both cases the auction was sealed, and the tickets went to the highest bidder. But here’s the difference: The first group was told that the winner would have to pay for the tickets in cash, within the next twenty-four hours. The second group was told that the winner could put the expense on a personal credit card. If you guessed that the second group bid higher, you’re right. But did you guess that they bid twice as much? Does this kind of reasoning sound familiar? Join the crowd. Most of us tend to devalue the money we spend on credit—a familiar but dangerous trap.

As Lauren found out, sometimes the hardest part of investing is “putting your mind to it” and just getting started. Most of us don’t realize how much money regularly slips through our fingers, money that could be invested in our futures. Not long ago one of my colleagues realized that he and his wife had been paying $50 a month for a DSL connection that they never installed and therefore never used. What with work and family, the couple was so busy that they simply hadn’t taken time to carefully examine their bills. They just paid them. ‘that’s six hundred dollars a year!” he confided in an appalled voice. “If we invested that, it could grow into a tidy sum!”
Most of us are guilty of that same lack of attention—if not about bills in particular then about where our money goes in general. Many of the day-to-day “needs” in which we indulge may be day- to-day luxuries that are sapping our bank accounts of potential investment funds. The Schwab Center for Investment Research calls this the “Doughnuts to Dollars” savings theory. For example, let’s say that instead of buying an eighty-cent doughnut twice a week (at a savings of $83.20 per year), you invest that money. If you did this for twenty years and got a hypothetical 10% return, you would earn about $5,240. Or as another example, let’s say you save $13 a week by not ordering an appetizer and dessert when you go
out to eat; that amounts to about $675 per year. If you did this for twenty years and again earned a 10% return, you could have close to $42,000. Of course, all of us have spent unwisely from time to time. For one thing, it’s easy to get distracted by our immediate desires. Caught up in the moment, we can lose sight of our long-range goals, so we buy on impulse. We figure that the purchase is insignificant, and that the amount spent won’t change our lives or our fortunes to any great degree. That’s where we’re wrong. All too often the little things become missed opportunities to invest, and consequently our ultimate dreams remain unfulfilled. The bottom line? By reviewing your outgoing cash with your family members, you too can save money without giving up too much in the way of enjoyment. The returns could be well worth the negligible sacrifice.