Managing your Financial » car

Your Financial Health

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:00:40 +0000

Checking your financial health is as important as visiting your doctor for routine health checks. By doing health checks, you also will feel calm or relieve when the results are good. If, for example, found undesirable conditions, then you also can take steps to fix it.

The same also applies when making a financial health check. These checks will help you determine if financial condition is fine, or there should be increased or considered.

Where do we start it? You need spend special time in conducting financial health check. Depending on the scale of financial assets and liabilities you have, you might also involve other people to help do that, and some even use the services of a private accountant. Whichever way you will use, is more better to do than nothing.

Be honest when performing the check. Do not hide debt and hope that this obligation could disappear as if by magic. Do not wait to be dealt with later-later. By hiding things like that, just get yourself exposed to great financial risk.

Begin by listing the value of your assets. In this case, assets including home or property, financial products, stocks, bonds, deposits, cash, etc.. Then make a list of obligations such as credit house / apartment, car loans, credit cards, and others. Reduce the value of your assets with a total amount of liabilities, then the result will show a net worth.

Make sure all your documents are in prime condition. Separate archive documents in some parts, for example there are sections for portfolio investment, property documents, deposits, current account statements, savings, insurance, etc..

Review your insurance.
The main benefit in reviewing your insurance policy is to make sure you have enough protection for the next period. In some cases, it may be that you have too much insurance and paying premiums is too big, although maybe it’s because you have an additional child or get a raise. Whatever it is, do the analysis on the re-insurance policy will help ensure you have adequate protection for important things.

Review your financial goals
It is important to review your financial goals regularly, because there may be situational changes. It could be that you are expecting a child, or will change jobs. Perhaps there is also intending to continue studies stopped working, or interested in a property cheaply. Whatever the situation, these things can impact on your financial goals, because now your financial status will change with the payments you have to do to the things that have not been planned in advance, thus changing also the dynamics of your financial plan.

Instead of these ways, of course some tutorial on your financial health you could seek it on the internet, plenty of them are good. Some good financial sites could be seen from its traffic and good connection from its server, this is possible if they do list their sites into good webhosting.

If you thing you have succeed with above tips, you could share it either online or offline, for online, I suggest you to read some hosting guide before you choose.

4 things every new business owner should know

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:42:43 +0000

When you’re just starting out in business, particularly if you’re operating from home, there are a hundred things to think about and do. Somehow, insurance often ends up on the bottom of the new business owner’s list – but if you’re setting up a new enterprise in the Lone Star State, business insurance should be given a high priority. And it may not be as simple as you imagined. Here are 4 important things you should know:

1. If you’re operating from home and will have clients attending your premises, the liability cover on your home insurance policy may not cover you if you’re using the home as your ‘business premises’. Your business equipment may not be covered either. You’ll need to clarify these issues to determine if additional cover is required.

2. Similarly, if you’re using your personal vehicle for business purposes, your private car insurance may no longer be sufficient. Do you travel to client’s premises or deliver completed work or stock in your vehicle? If so, it’s likely you’ll need to upgrade to a business auto policy.

3. Are you a consultant, a professional, or a new media business? Liability comes in all shapes and forms. Whether you’re a social media management business or an architect, there’s always the risk that something you do (or don’t do) will negatively affect a client and result in a law suit. As your business probably represents your major source of income, it makes sense to take out insurance to cover this risk.

4. Taken on your first employees? It’s your responsibility to provide a safe working environment – and to take out workers’ compensation insurance.

If you’re unsure what the needs are for your Texas general liability insurance or other types of business insurance our professional agents are just a phone call away, so find out what you need to know, sooner rather than later.

Cutting your cards

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 04:47:39 +0000

Continuing last article on managing your emotion to be free financially, this time we’ll discuss about credit cards and its effect on your financial life’s. These days almost every grown up people on this world having cards, either its an credit cards or debit cards. Those two has its own function and benefit, but having both of it are good as long as you could use it wisely.

Some people more like using debit card rather than credit cards, its simple, they just don’t want to be trapped on lots of debts. For some credit cards are think to be temporary savers, they use it to get instant cash immediately. Both of them are good, but its better to know their functions first. A debit cards are withdraw directly from your account, while credit cards are withdraw in the next month.

Now that you know its function, its start to cut your cards, its not necessary having lots of cards, ideally you have one credit cards and one debit cards. Use credit cards only when its urgent, while debit’s are use on daily basis. The purpose is you’ll now your cash flow, when you know you only have little money on your account, you will try to adapt your life style so that its enough till the end of the month.

What was the urgent stuff, and why we’re using credit cards instead of debit cards? Urgent stuff are some unpredictable things such as an accident, or suddenly your car were crash, or your children / parents need money for their medical. For you who have sufficient funds in your savings, you could withdraw it immediately, but for some, its time to consider using credit cards. Play wise on your cards and use it only when you need it the most.

The less your needs, the less you’ll spend. Cut your cards, use it wisely, finally you’ll be financially free.

Managing Your Money

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 03:39:21 +0000

It used to be that people shied away from sharing intimate details about their financial lives.
Now, amid the rising popularity of social-networking services such as Facebook and MySpace, a crop of new personal-finance Web sites is letting users post their private personal-finance details and share advice with each other on tracking their spending and making better investment decisions.
Some of the sites, such as Wesabe.com and Geezeo.com, include many of the same features offered by popular software programs such as Intuit Inc.’s Quicken and Microsoft Corp.’s Money, such as the ability to track spending in different categories and from different sources in one place. But they also allow users to get feedback from peers that is tailored to their specific circumstances. Some allow users to rate the quality of other members’ tips or provide feedback on various products or services they’ve used.
Josh Young, a 26-year-old environmental engineer from Cincinnati, decided to try out Wesabe after reading about it in various blogs. He wanted to pay off his credit-card debt and the two car loans that he and his wife shared, and he expected the site would help identify areas where he and his wife were overspending. But he also got help from other users who shared their own tips on reducing debt and cutting spending. “One of our goals was to pay off all our debt, and we’re almost there,” says Mr. Young.
Some consumers may have security concerns about sending their personal financial information to a Web site. In general, the sites say their systems are protected against identity thieves and are just as safe as banking online. Wesabe, for its part, stresses that it doesn’t store users’ login information on its servers and screens out any personal information from the data to protect users’ privacy.
The type of information you need to enter into these sites — and how public that information becomes — depends on the site and what you want to get out of it. At Geezeo, for example, users provide their passwords for their bank and credit-card accounts, which the site uses to automatically pull users’ data into its systems. At Wesabe, users download a software program onto their computer and then enter their passwords. The program then pulls their data from the banks to users’ computers, and then uploads it to Wesabe’s computers.
At both sites, users’ data is kept private, although members can voluntarily share more information about themselves with other people. The sites will also aggregate user information to reveal spending patterns in the community — such as the average amount users spend on gas — but will not disclose individual data.
At other sites, such as the just-launched Covestor LLC, which allow investors to share their portfolio information, members manually input transaction data for their brokerage accounts or provide their account passwords to have the firm automatically track their trades. Members can choose to remain anonymous, and the actual dollar values of trades and specific holdings of each member always remains confidential, with only percentages displayed.
Still other sites, with names such as Buxfer.com and BillMonk.com, help college roommates, friends and family members keep running tallies of shared expenses. At the same time, some smaller brokerage firms, such as TradeKing and Zecco Holdings Inc.’s Zecco.com, are letting clients share information about their holdings, recent trades and investment strategies with other users if they choose.
Users of the sites can reveal as much or as little about themselves as they want to. At NetworthIQ.com, a site run by Portland, Ore.-based Fourio LLC, users’ information is kept private until they choose to create a public profile, at which time only their general net-worth statistics are made public and any personal information, such as email addresses, remain private.
An estimated two million households are expected to use these sites by the end of next year, says Jim Bruene, editor of Online Banking Report, who published a report on the sites last week. That number is expected to jump to about 16 million households in 10 years.
The sites could remain niche players, however, if they aren’t able to attract enough users, he says. “Not everybody wants to see their bank-account balances,” he says. (Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and IAC/InterActive Corp. are jointly developing a personal-finance Web site.)
The target audience for these sites is younger users. “The idea of looking at a ledger and seeing a check number, that’s really boring,” says Harper Reed, a 29-year-old software engineer in Chicago, who uses Wesabe to keep track of his spending. “But being able to say, ‘I’m trying to spend less money at Amazon,’ and seeing how many people are also trying to save money at Amazon is a better way to quantify the numbers to me.”
The ability to share and compare one’s finances with others can also help motivate people to build their wealth. NetworthIQ lets users create profiles based on their actual net worth. They can then compare themselves with others by age, income or occupation, link to other users, and track their progress on a blog. About one-third of the site’s 9,000 registered users choose to make their net-worth figures public, although the data are self-reported and the users’ identity is masked.
On Geezeo, members can create discussion groups with other users about specific financial topics. The site lets members create a consolidated view of their financial accounts and use text-messaging technology to get quick balance updates from their mobile phones. Starting this week, users will be able to provide feedback on financial products, such as student loans, credit cards or savings accounts.
“This totally makes sense for the 20-something crowd,” says Brian Jones, a financial adviser in Fairfax, Va., and author of “Getting Started: The Financial Guide for a Younger Generation.” “There’s a lot of utility here because their situations aren’t that complex. This generation is very comfortable with online profiles and is very open with sharing information online.”
Katie McCaskey, a 33-year-old New Yorker, likes the anonymity of being able to discuss her personal finances online. “I recently went back to graduate school, and I freaked out about how much this degree cost me,” says the freelance artist, who now uses Geezeo to keep track of her finances. “After frustrating everybody in my family and social circle with my concerns,” she started writing a blog to swap advice on paying down debt.
Some sites also allow users to keep track of shared expenses between friends and family. Mike Zazon, a 23-year-old student in Columbus, Ohio, previously used spreadsheets to keep track of expenses that he had to split with his roommate. Now, whenever they pay bills, they post the transactions on Buxfer, which automatically divides up each person’s share and alerts others in the group by email or text message that an expense has been posted.
“It takes away the awkwardness of going to collect later,” says Mr. Zazon.