Beginners Guide

The basic fundamentals about money and personal finance

Saving Money or Earning Money Where to Put your Priority?

April 30, 2012
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Saving Money or Earning Money Where to Put your Priority?

Many times this question arises in our mind that which is good, saving more money or, earning more money? First of all, this is not a competition between the two. In-fact to reach financial independence, you need to practice both efficiently. The problem comes when you are choosing one over the other (or, giving priority on one over the other) due to limited time at hand. Let’s see what are the main time-taking tasks involve in a typical saving money venture. Creating budget Tracking every penny Analyzing spending pattern to figure out cost saving opportunity Family education and encouragement Having a lot of manual labor to cut cost Its true there are certain money-saving activities that can be performed without spending much time, for example, buying a generic store brand instead of name brands does not take any extra time, but saves some money. Still, th overall money-saving exercise is in-deed time taking. Now let’s see what are the various tasks involved in earning more money which take time to accomplish. Gather skills, take training, educate yourself Involve in side income venture Take a second job Working perhaps longer hours at work for a raise/over-time. Clearly it’s often a  raise against

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How to Start with Managing Personal Finance

April 25, 2012
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How to Start with Managing Personal Finance

If you ask a wealthy person how much money he/she needs the reply would be – Just a little bit more – We never find there is enough money. Problem is, having money does not end financial concerns. Managing your money effectively, does! Money management skills and good financial practices are needed no matter how much or how little money you have. While it’s difficult to think about planning for the future when pay-day is a week away and your wallet and bank accounts are empty, it pays later if you plan and learn to manage your money carefully. Note: Using the image without first contacting us is prohibited. Managing finance will help you: • Know what you want to do with money. • Know where your money goes. • Know how to save money for your goals. • Plan your spending in advance. • Know exactly where you need to put control. • Organize your financial records. people get caught up in thinking they have to do all these things the right way making managing personal finance too complicated to start with. Getting started is perhaps the most tricky and complicated part of the journey. In reality, actually you can

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Basics of Insurance: Why we Need Insurance?

April 18, 2012
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Basics of Insurance: Why we Need Insurance?

This post is inspired by a reddit discussion. The topic was on insurance, the basics of it. Do we give proper value to insurance in our life or we just go on routinely on insurance? When you earn a bonus at work, do you consider increasing the insurance amount to have more coverage. When you get a raise do you consider increasing your premium and cutting on the out-of-pocket expenses? What is insurance and why we need it, is rarely discussed on personal finance websites and blogs. Those who want to just know how much insurance they should have maybe disheartened, as this post is to guide decide that on your own. We will not talk about how much insurance you should have, we can’t do that as everybody is different and what works for me may not work for you. We would rather talk about and set a general guideline that can help us determine our insurance need on a high level. This post does no way suggest your specific insurance coverage amount. Let’s start with ‘what is insurance’. What is insurance Insurance is all about playing defense, where as an investment is an offense. You protect yourself and your

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Managing Personal Finance is All About Making Choices

February 29, 2012
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Managing Personal Finance is All About Making Choices

This article was written by Ashley over at Money Talks. Her passion in life is to help you get control of your money. If you like this article you can stop by her site or subscribe to her feed. Someone said to me yesterday “If you make great choices today, you will have a great tomorrow.” Isn’t that the truth? Then later in the day I heard something along the lines of “Yesterday’s choices created today. Are you happy with the life you’ve created?” The quotes emphasize what we know to be true. Our choices affect our lives. If we want better lives we have to make better choices. If we want to be fit and healthy we needs to exercise and watch what we eat. If we want to have better relationships we need to spend more time with our loved ones. If we want to be better off financially we need to spend less money than we earn. Since this is a personal finance blog and I’m a personal finance author let’s take a deeper look at our desire to be better off financially. We can make better financial decisions by tracking, measuring, and analyzing our spending and

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A Beginners Guide to Commodity Trading

December 9, 2011
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This, I think, is a fitting followup post after the post on Spread betting. I think commodity trades offer an alternate approach to trade your money for gains. A stock price fluctuate depending on the economy same is the case with commodities. Other important factors in commodity price fluctuation are weather, demand, supply etc. What is commodity trading Let’s begin with the definition of commodities trading. It’s actually self-explanatory: it refers to the process of exchanging commodities in the market. Commodities are usually resources, such as mineral or produce, that are considered to be of high value for a lot of investors, are produced in massive quantities, and possess attributes that remain the same all throughout the years. A good example is gold. Gold is a commodity since it’s a very precious metal and valuable. In fact, the price of gold can be worth thousands of dollars in the market. There are also several countries that are currently offering, selling, and buying gold. Lastly, the characteristics of gold haven’t changed ever since it’s been discovered many years ago. Investment options in commodity trading Commodities can either be traded on spot market or futures market. Commodity trading is not particularly complicated.

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What is Personal Finance? The Basic Principles

November 16, 2011
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This is back to the basics, reminding things over and over helps the concepts get deep in to our minds. This is a self reminder as well to keep myself on track and remain debt free for as long as I can. Personal finance is a wide subject, it consist of behavior and practices to control spending to provide maximum and sustained value out of the money throughout the life. This practice should start when we start our career. Spend control and delay gratification at early stage are very much important if we want to live a happy and contented life in future. The day people understand the importance of managing personal money the journey towards financial freedom would start. I had previously written about 50 money rules that every one should follow this can be a good starting point. These were what my father taught me by his actions, more than spoken words, during my early days as school going student. To date those are the best lessons I learned on personal finance. According to Investopedia, the definition of personal finance “All financial decisions and activities of an individual, this could include budgeting, insurance, savings, investing, debt servicing, mortgages and more. Financial planning generally involves analyzing your current financial position

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Personal Finance Basic, Finding Balance Between Earning and Spending

October 24, 2011
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This is a guest post by Ashley from Everything Finance, a fellow yakezie blog. Everything Finance is a site about just that, everything related to finance. You can get information about investing, saving money, shopping, blogging, and making money online. If you like what you see here, make sure to stop by or better yet subscribe to their feed so you don’t miss a thing. With budgets becoming more strained as economic times become more stressful everyone from your neighbor down the street to your favorite corporation is doing one of 2 things and they are increasing earnings or cutting cost. Generally it is much easier to cut cost than it is to increase earning so many people automatically gravitate to that method, but the way to handle things is to find a balance between both of these methods. It is always a good time to increase your earnings, and I am sure that we all have some fat that we could trim to make our finances leaner and meaner to help us achieve our goals. Finding ways to earn more money It is not as hard as you may think to find ways to make more money and boost your income. There are multiple

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10 Pieces of Financial Advice For Young Adults

September 8, 2011
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As I mentioned on my About page, I received sound financial advice from my parents. I had a middle class upbringing but we never had too much money to spend. My parents didn’t use a budget; instead, they always tried to save a certain percentage of their salary. My dad lost his job in his 50′s and has lived on his savings ever since. Today, I see a lot of people clueless about their money. They blame the system or they blame the government. Any discussion on the economy and finances will invariably lead to statements that the President is at fault. We fail to notice what we did wrong as individuals. The sooner we figure it out, the better our future will be. One of the ‘sooner’ days will be when you start making your own decisions, in your late teens or early 20s. Earlier, I mentioned teaching kids about money and using garage sales to teach your kids about money, but those are only few basic lessons that parents could impart on their kids. What will a young adult possibly do when he/she has to start making independent financial decisions? You are out of college and saved money

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Finance Is Simple, Keep It Simple, 50 simple Money Ideas

July 28, 2011
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This will be a different post in comparison to my other posts, the idea for today’s post is simplicity, so let this write-up be simple too. Your finance can be overwhelmingly complicated if you let it be complicated, otherwise, it will be as simple as eating your daily lunch if you are on top at it. Keep these simple fundamentals in mind starting from the day one of your working life. They are valid for every one, for people with debts and for people with billion dollars in bank. Simple Personal Finance Fundamentals Always spend less than what you earn. Practice simple living and consume less, get rid of clutter. Earn more and invest more. Pay-off credit cards in full every month. Use credit cards wisely. Spread your risk by diversifying your investments. Don’t let a single penny go out of your pocket due to negligence. Prepare a budget, and stay within. Use every stuff you buy, don’t buy things you don’t need. Pay all your bills on time. Always shuffle your investments, take out money from investments with lowest return and re invest in something else every year Be prepared to adopt forced hardship to avoid debt or to become

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The Complete Guide To Understand Credit Score

July 12, 2011
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This weekend I was doing some de-cluttering exercise at home. Many unwanted papers I got rid off. While doing so, I came across a hand written note at the back of my old bank statement, probably it was the first bank statement I received after opening an account in Bank Of America. The title said “A complete Guide to credit score”. I came to America in August 2005, I belonged to a country where there is no system for maintaining credit scores. There, Lenders, and probably government too, believe in the fact that money can be re claimed by force. Any ways, that’s another story, which I will touch upon bit in various upcoming blog posts. Today’s topic is about that handwritten note. I don’t exactly remember which online sources I used to put the notes together, it had three headings, what it a credit score, why it is important to have a good credit score and how to improve credit scores. I wrote these on the back of my three-page bank statement, which showed a bank balance (and my net worth at that time) of $2600 (August 2011). So many things have changed since then, 6 years have passed

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