Managing your Financial » money

Presentation Skills

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:53:54 +0000

Are you got problem with your presentation skills at the office? If you do then you should read this article that might help you to increase your presentation skills. Okay if you’re asking why these subject are important to discuss in here, then I’d like to answer it, its because of you only could manage your financial or money by maintaining or getting jobs.

Lets get back to our discussion, about presentation skills, as we all known lately we lose great man with his presentation skill, he is Steve Jobs. Then what is his secret of skills that eventually resulting on getting numbers of sales pile up? its the power of presentation.

Both in the office or for selling product, presentation is the key point, and of course to get it sold, it need to be attractive. So how to get it done, lets find out below:

1. Use a proper background
For some serious presentation of certain topic, its recommended not using bright color as background. And not to forget that staring at white slides for 20 minutes could affect your eyes getting tired more quickly.
But of course if your trying to sell some product, bright color could be use to attract consumer, because this kind of presentation only took minutes, while the rest is depend on your skill to persuade them.
Some pop up displays and pop up booths could help you as media to present your product, especially in booths, it would made difference with other competitors.

2. Use general font for your presentation display
Using general font that normally use by other computer certainly would giving benefit for you, especially when you need to be mobile and your presentation file could be access by another computer.

3. Animate your body language not your slides
There are many other ways to make your slides more interesting, some people are using animation as an attractive effect, but I suggest you’re not using unnecessary animation effect. It wont do any good, if your skill not level up in presenting it. So its better using your body languages to made your slides more alive, then using animation to bring it out.
Remember that your audience or consumer would staring at both your presentation display and you as the person who present it.

4. Diagram and Graphic display
Diagram and graphic display sure do help for presenting numeric data result. In a change to explain some result, I believe your audience or consumer would be more interested on seeing it on graphic display.

5. Made some printable slides
In some cases, audience or consumer would ask you for printable slides, especially for selling some product, making printable slides would certainly help you. So what is printable slides? its just about adjusting text and graphic that are common and printable.

Pop up trade show displays are considerable good as media of presentation, they are easy to set up and transported. Certain material such as fabric, plastic, even wood are offer to light up your presentation especially in trade show pop up. These media would help you to attract more consumer and hopefully it would climb up your selling.

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 Own Money

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 03:45:49 +0000

Many investors who manage their own money and their own investments have several tremendous advantages over fund managers. Investors who have bypassed the allure of the fund management industry often come to realize that through diligent research and logic, they can keep up with the returns of the big boys.
My investment business, albeit in the fund management profession, is run along the private investor’s lines. All of the advantages below are practiced by my fund.
While this may appear to be caused by superior market knowledge and over-confidence, there are in fact a number of advantages the small guy has. I advise all amateur and part-time investors to read over these structural advantages and use them to your benefit.
1. You can wait.
Private investors have the luxury of time on their side. If you cannot find anything attractive you can stay in cash. Fund managers do not have this luxury for two reasons. Firstly, they have to invest to their mandate irrespective of current market valuations (for example equity funds must have a certain percentage of their money in equities at all times). Holding cash in the fund is also a risky strategy for fund managers as they run the risk of being left behind by their peers, whom they are compared to on a quarterly, monthly and sometimes even daily basis.
2. You can invest anywhere and everywhere.
Without an investment mandate, you can invest in any type of asset in any country that offers an attractive risk return trade-off, be it corporate bonds, equities, options, real estate etc. As mentioned above, fund managers have to stay within the fund’s investment area. In the case of pension funds, there are even more severe limits that, in my opinion, limit the returns the fund can provide.
3. You can invest in any size
Similarly to investing anywhere, there are no size constraints on your investment. Fund managers are faced with ridiculous restrictions as to how much to “weight” to certain indexes in order to match their performance as closely as possible.
4. You have no benchmark
You only have one goal in mind, and that is to grow your investment portfolio each year irrespective of what the market does. I do not consider it a good year if I have lost 25% while the market has lost 40%. Fund managers are groomed to beat their benchmark and this performance is always viewed in context, irrespective of absolute return.
5. You can focus and ignore
Studying, understanding and applying what has worked in investing is all you need to do to be successful as a private investor. I advocate reading Benjamin Graham classic, The Intelligent Investor. The rest should follow. Pay no attention to market noise, alternate opinions or what the television “talking heads” say. Do your own research and arrive at your own conclusions.
6. No conflict of interest
The individual investor has only their interest to look out for. This is a big advantage when it comes to large fund managers catering to larger institutions. Fund managers have to think of keeping their jobs, increasing their assets under management and keeping clients happy, suggesting that performance is not the most important thing on their minds. Also, clashes between investment banks and fund managers are regular occurrences and sometimes result in inopportune purchases by fund managers.
7. You can have a long view.
According to a study by the New York Stock Exchange the average holding period of shares held has declined from five to six years in the 1950s to 11 months, meaning the average holding period is less than one financial year. It is extremely unlikely and almost impossible that an undervalued company can right itself in such a short period of time. This may be the largest competitive advantage you have: The ability to look at a company solely on valuation and keep it as long as it is undervalued, irrespective of what the competition is doing or market price.
8. No peer pressure.
There is no pressure to buy or sell any investments. Fund managers get compared to benchmark indices and other funds, including the individual fund holdings. If you manage your own money you have none of these problems.
9. You decide.
The private investor is in control of all their decisions. You make the final decision after you have done the analysis. You may be wrong but at least you make the calls either way. Many fund managers are run by committee which leads to inherent clashes. Try telling your boss that his investment ideas are wrong!
10. You don’t have to di-worse-ify!
Every individual should hold only as many stocks as they feel comfortable with. There is no set limit either on the low or high end. However, most mutual funds hold positions in excess of 100 stocks. My business has only 7 positions. While I advise 10 as the optimal, we won’t buy stocks just because we hold seven and need ten!
11. You control the costs
Controlling costs and fees (the friction of investing), is a very important part of realizing superior long-term results. Discount brokers provide ideal services for the private investor, so long as you are not a day trader! Calculated over a period of 20 to 30 years keeping costs low makes a huge difference.
12. You can be fully invested
This is a huge structural advantage you have and is the bane of the fund management business. Fund managers are bound to get redemption requests when markets fall, and to meet such requests either need to be in cash or sell shares. However, as we have seen in 2008 in particular, when markets are falling liquidity drops, sometimes to the point where a fund manager is unable to sell his position. This results in selling pressure on stock prices leading to further market falls, thus triggering more redemptions, and so on.
There are of course a few funds where the drawbacks mentioned below do not apply but they are in the minority, my fund being one of those. The large bulk of fund management companies are focused on growing the amount of money they manage, while the performance of your portfolio is not the utmost concern.
If you do not want to manage your own investments then find a fund manager who is not bound by parameters and can show clearly that the performance of your investment is there foremost concern.

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.