Money Release: Making, Saving, Investing and Debt Management » earn

Personal Finance Tips #7: Educate Yourself

Victorino — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:08:58 +0000

Knowledge is power! That is why if you want to strengthen your personal finance, you need to gain knowledge. Our seventh personal finance tip is to educate ourselves. Education doesn’t only mean you need to go to a school or a university to acquire it. It also includes education outside from schools. Education can also be our personal asset that cannot be robbed from us by any theft – though it can be shared and make yourself useful to the community. Knowledge or wisdom can be acquired from listening, reading, experiencing or from reflecting one’s self. It serves as our light in every direction we are heading. It also makes our market value increase. When you are an employee, you are considerably more valuable if you got a master’s degree or a prestigious certification than if you are not.

As we can be our best assets, we need to improve ourselves. We need to increase our market values. But how can we do that? We can do that by increasing our knowledge and education – formal or informal depending on our necessity. If you are an employee, it is just advisable that you get higher education (master’s degree, certification, etc.,) to aid your promotion. If you are an entrepreneur, you can also get higher education like MBA or the like, attend trainings and seminars or just conduct your own research to develop your business.

The fruits of education are these: if you are an employee, you can get a higher salary and if you’re an entrepreneur, you can bring your business into progress. Moreover, if you don’t have the both (business and employment), you can gain the capability to have one of them or both if you become educated. Knowledge also brings skills. Skills can give us opportunities to earn money and solve financial problems.

Education helps us reinforce our finances. It can also boost our earning capacity, orient us the discipline to control our spending, and teach us how to save and invest our money. Sometimes our financial world is dark and uncertain. But because of knowledge, we have light and calculations that give us almost precision. Therefore, education cannot be ignored. It should be prioritized just like how we prioritize our selves. There are many books that can be read. There are many reliable articles on the Internet where you can get the wisdom to manage your finances. We should not stop from learning. We should not stop and claim that we are already wise. We should be like that if we don’t want to be called fools. Remember that foolishness can lead anyone to shame.

Wise people are humble. They also live in modesty. These attributes keep them away from excessive expenses and unwanted debts. Apparently, foolish people are boastful and live in extravagance. Consequently, they lose most of their money and they fall into the trap of debt. By having wisdom and knowledge, we can have the information and cautions we need to plan strategically. We can set effective procedures that will help us achieve our financial goals. Finally, we can learn the principles and behaviors that will fortify our personal finances.

Personal Finance Tips #6: Forget the Money

Victorino — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:42:10 +0000

The title of this article may sound absurd. How can we become financially stable if we forget or ignore money? But what most of us don’t know is that too much attention on money can bring us financial disasters, and even a whole life problem. Many people have loved money more than anything else. They even sacrifice their real treasures and assets for money. They have forsaken their loved ones and even God for the love of money. Other people give up their integrity, honesty and good name just to not lose money. Aren’t they aware that the love of money is the root of all evil? And evil can lead us to destruction – even financial destruction?

Now, why I am saying that one practical personal finance tip is to forget about money? I’m telling this, because I want everyone to focus on becoming great instead of concentrating on money. The Bible even said, seek first the kingdom of God and all these things be will added to you. This means let’s seek first for greatness rather than things which do not last forever. Becoming great is a combination of being humble and one who serves God and His people. But how can greatness (humility and service) can help us stabilize our personal finances? Simply, if you become great, you will bear greatness.

By becoming great, we can avoid financial troubles – even long-term and permanent troubles. In earning money for example, when you work great in your business (serving your customers well, treating your employees the right way, and becoming responsible to the government), you will be assured that your financial condition and operation will have a bright future. Just imagine if you will just concentrate on money. For example, if you deceive your customers to have bigger profits, give unjust compensation to your employees just to cut your cost, and practice tax evasion just to save more money – what will happen? Do you think you will prosper? But of course you can be financially successful. But that will only be temporary. You customers will not return to you, your employees may leave you, and the IRS may impose tax penalties on you. The consequence will be a great financial tragedy for you and your business.

How about if you are not a businessman? Let us say you’re an employee. The virtue of greatness still applies. If you concentrate in doing great to your job, performing well and having the best results, there will be a huge chance that you will be promoted and will receive incentives and bonuses. Thus, helping your financial capability to be strengthened. Moreover, if you will not boast and will stay humble, you will be exalted and win bunch of good friends. These true friends that will be yours will help you in any aspects of your life, including the financial aspect of your life.

If you wish to get out of debt, greatness also applies effectively. Often, people, because they don’t want their money (even their last money) to leave them, they don’t pay their debts responsively. A responsible person does his promises, including his promises to pay his dues. That’s why if you want to really extinguish your liabilities, you should do great in doing your vows. You should not just focus on keeping that money in your hands, but you should concentrate in preserving your word of honor, as well as your credit score, which are beneficial to both of you and your creditor.

Therefore, concentrate on becoming great in everything you do. Sometimes or even most of the times, you must forget that money. Be great and be righteous, and money will not leave you – even if you will not focus on it. Don’t hold your money too tight, so that it may flow freely, and return to you voluntarily – giving you the freedom you have first given to it.

How to earn more profit: 5 ways to succeed

Victorino — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:22:56 +0000

So how can we earn more profit? How can we achieve more income to cover our costs and expenses? Earning more net profit is not impossible. However, you must bear in mind that it cannot be done overnight. It takes a lot of knowing yourself and knowing your surroundings. Placing ourselves from financial security lies in our own hands. But a total victory for our financial freedom lies not only in our hands but also in the favor of our environment. This means to achieve our every financial goal, we need to find every opportunities that can be found within ourselves and within the things that surrounds us. The following are some ways and tips to maximize our income, minimize costs and expenses, and increase our net profit:

1. Maximize talent, skill and knowledge
Increasing our earning potential means enhancing our capabilities. This means we need to maximize our selves. If you are currently an employee and enjoying being such, you can study further to increase your self’s market value. Completing post graduate courses and passing professional certification examinations are two best ways to uplift your professional worth and chance to demand more salary to your boss.

Now if you are an entrepreneur like me, we can all join forces to increase our skills and knowledge by training, researching, enhanced learning and networking. Entrepreneurs and business owners need innovation to continue and increase profiting.

2. Invest more time
Time is an essence for every goal that we want to achieve. Hence, if we want to maximize profit, we should maximize our time in attaining that target. To input more time means to save and gather more time. For business owners and entrepreneurs who enjoy flexibility in time, this could be an advantage. One way to save time is to outsource tasks that consume most of our time but offer only few returns. These jobs include routine functions which we can delegate to other people so that we can have more time to concentrate on our core activities that give us higher returns. The logic is… we pay for less to save time, and we use those times to earn more.

For employees who work for eight hours a day, there are still a lot of hours to engage in money making activities. They can choose from a variety of extra works they can take, depending on their interests and passion. These may include online money making, working at home, baking, selling products, and other jobs that can be done in their extra time.

3. Utilize resources
Outside from our selves, are the tangible assets in our possession such as land, building and equipment. To earn more profit, we need to utilize all our idle resources. If you have a land or a building which are left unused, you may consider finding tenants and enjoy revenue from rents. If you have other equipment (car, office machine, et cetera), that are not fully utilized you can reckon any business activities that can make them profit making machine. Finally, if you have money sleeping under the sun, you can invest them into low risk income yielding investments such as, time deposits, debt securities and mutual funds to earn more in the form of interest and dividend income. And if you really have a business idea which you are confident to succeed, make that money your equity.

4. People
No man is an island. That’s why we have an island so we may live better. Our relatives, friends, affiliates, allies, and anyone who are somehow linked to us can also become our assets or advantages. If you want to gain more profit, you must capitalized your network of people. The bigger your network is, the greater products or services you can sell. The more you can sell the more revenue and profit you can have. Just think of your several followers in Twitter or friends in Facebook. Make them useful and help them by providing them their needs. That means selling them relevant products and services they really need. Just don’t solicit them too much if you don’t want them to leave you.

If you’re an employer, your employees can be your best assets. If you want to maximize productivity and profit, you need to make them more motivated and productive. A demoralized and discouraged group of workers can make your financial results fall down. Hence, you need to know and do the best things that will make them happy and bring your company into profit success. In short, you need to have a better Human Resource Management and leadership skills to earn better comprehensive income.

5. Minimize cost, charges, waste, risk and losses
In the financial sense, if you have a stable revenue, the less cost and expenses you have, the more your profit. For this reason, we need to identify costs and expenses that we can eliminate without affecting the level of our gross sales or revenues. In trading goods, we can reduce our cost of goods sold by reducing gross purchases or increasing purchase discounts. With regard to expenses and charges, we can reduce or eliminate those which cannot affect our revenue and we can avoid in the first place. The following are examples of those charges and expenses:

Excessive entertainment expenses
Unimportant travel expenses
Penalties for non-payment of dues and taxes on time
Interest expense on delayed loan repayment
Bank charges on accounts falling into minimum balance
Credit card charges on buying on account even if cash is available
Loss on fire (in the absence of insurance)
Loss on theft and fraud because of non implementation of strong internal control
Other cost, expenses and losses due to the absence of strategic planning, internal control and risk management.