Balancing Your Personal Budget

If your resolution for the coming year is to look after your body, that’s admirable. Good for you!

It’s good to focus on improving yourself, but something we often look past in favour of trimming our waistlines, is actually trimming our budget.

While me may feel good about reigning in the snacks, it’s hard to close the purse-strings as spending does make us feel good. Exactly like snacking.

But while it’s high-time to balance our weight, we should also look to balance our budgets in 2017 to achieve financial security as well as our health goals.

The easiest way to do this is to cut out unnecessary purchases. Do you need that gym membership if you’re not going? Can you work out from home instead or go for a run? If you’re trying to eat healthy, you’re going to constantly question every eating or fitness decision you make. The same applies for balancing your budget. Question every spend you make and try to assess the worth of the items or services you purchase.

Do you want to kick-start 2017 with a new idea? Or get back on track? A loan could be a good option, but you’ve got to look around for the best deal for you, and the loan you can afford to take. An option like www.cignoloans.com.au/bad-credit-loans/ might not be a bad idea if you’ve got a plan and need capital to enact it. Your budget should always come first, though.

A great method of balancing your personal budget is to create a budget. Assess the value of your paycheck and the items you buy, cut out anything that isn’t needed and see what you can save. Balancing the budget is as easy as tracking your purchases.

When you start to track and acknowledge what you spend your money on, you can start to see patterns. If you keep a spreadsheet of your purchases, this converts the emotional decision of a purchase into recorded data. Data is easier to manage, analyze and track than emotional decisions and memories of purchases. By converting your budget into data, you can see where you’re leading your money and where you are going wrong with your cash.

Also, you should be watching your footing if you want to be stable with your cash. Do not sign up to finance deals and credit cards if you cannot afford them. This is a recipe for disaster. If you cannot afford products, do not entertain the idea of purchasing them. You should only ever spend what you can afford and if you must have something, why not save for it instead? It’s a more fulfilling goal and a true way to see if you truly desire something.

Balancing your budget isn’t about cutting fun out of your life, it’s stopping you relying on cash to enjoy it! Your money should safeguard your future, not define your day-to-day life. With a few easy steps, you can take back control of your money and look forward to healthy 2017, in all aspects.

Safeguarding Your Finances In The Age Of Instability

It doesn’t seem like the right thing to say, but money is everything, That can’t be true, surely? We’ve been taught that there are things in the world that exist that are so much stronger than money. Love and friendship should rule the day. The sad truth is that you can’t buy a roof over your head, or a warm meal with love.

It depends on your priorities, and maybe love and friendship are genuinely worth so much more than money, but there’s absolutely no denying that money is important.

Money is important, because what having money means is that you are not destitute and on the streets. Having a small amount of money entitles you to a small amount of success. More amounts of money mean you are not dependent on your job and living from payday to payday. Having even more money means that you will be secure, no matter what happens.

Money allows you to have some degree of control over your life; you can travel the world and seek out opportunities with cash. You can get fit and join a gym thanks to money. You can drive and have a sense of relative independence with money.

Another reason why money is so important is because money allows you to give back. Think of charities and fundraisers. Money allows you to help others that are less fortunate.

So yes, while money may not be totally everything to most, having a sense of control, safety and independence are something that shouldn’t be taken for granted and money and wealth afford you that.

But how do you get to a point where you feel like that? Most people are living from paycheck to paycheck! If that’s the case, we need to look for more opportunities to make money. It’s hard, but we should try and save money so we can secure our futures. It’s the age of instability right now. There are more freelance roles than ever, and the ‘gig economy’ is in full swing meaning the chances of a secure and locked down job are decreasing in favor for short-term employee driven roles.

Saving is the key. You don’t need to be ultra frugal and start cutting your hair in your bath to save cash, but you’ll need to employ some common sense and reign in your spending.

For example, if you have two coffees a day brought from your local coffee store, maybe you can cut that down by half? If you have three beers on a night out, why not try having two from this point forward? It’s not about cutting out the fun in life, but focusing on it with quality over quantity. Chances are you’re going to chug through beers if you know they are coming. If you know, you’re allowed two coffees today, you won’t focus on the first because it’s not the only one you’re enjoying today.

Employ the practices of mindfulness to your spending and really drink in your purchases. Take your time and enjoy them for what they are, not how much you can get into you. So, if you’re saving a few dollars here and there by cutting out quantity, you need to immediately plant these savings, however small, into a savings account. If you don’t do this, you’ll allow your savings to build up, and it will only be willpower stopping you from an end of month splurge. Willpower isn’t a factor we want to bring into this discussion, and if you can automate your savings to put two or three dollars away a day to represent your savings, you’ll have done your job admirably.

Insurance is key to safeguarding your finances. If you’re a freelance worker, it’s likely that gadgets like your laptop, phone or mobile tablet are helping you complete your work on a daily basis. Even if you’re not a freelance worker, it’s probable that you cannot afford to replace your phone if it’s broken. On a larger scale, what about investment insurance? Can you afford to lose your savings? If you can’t afford to lose a phone, than losing your money made via investments or savings will be a nightmare you cannot afford. What about if you’re a business owner? You need the right solutions, and there are many insurance options on the market (like www.bswllc.com/captive-insurance/, for example). The bottom line is that insurance might just be your best friend in a time of trouble.

If you’re fortunate to have saved enough to invest, you can’t go wrong with property investment. Putting your cash into a physical presence enables you to hire or rent the site out to a tenant. What this means is that the mortgage and loan will be paid off by the rent paid to you by the tenants. Any excess is your profit. It’s as simple as that, and it’s worth a look at if you want to push your money further while keeping it secure.

Safeguarding your finances will involve a considerable amount of admin, and it’s always worth speaking to an accountant to make sure your business or personal cashflows are working for you.

The threat of scams and hacking is ever-present, no matter your income. Ensure that your information is kept secure and that anti-viral software are used on your laptops. Make sure that any financial information isn’t stored on the cloud or noted down. This information is always for your eyes only and shouldn’t be given out. Look after your debit and credit cards and ensure that you take the time to pore over your transaction history to make sure it’s all above board.

Above all, the easiest step to safeguard your finance is to just apply a conservative mindset to your spending, whether it’s business or personal purchases. Reigning in your spending and putting your savings away is the best and easiest method to secure your financial future. It might seem hard at first, but after a while, it will become second nature, and you’ll never look back.

The Biggest Mistakes You Can Make In A Settlement Agreement

With legal recourse being more accessible than ever, more and more employees are finding themselves in a position where they have to negotiate some kind of settlement agreement with their employers. If you’ve been offered one, and you’re pretty inexperienced with these kinds of negotiations, then naturally you may be wondering what the next step is. If you feel you’re being sold short, or you’ve got some wiggling room for getting more from your employer, here are some big mistakes to avoid.

Not Planning Ahead

If your boss calls you into a room, sits you down, and offers you a pre-planned settlement agreement, then you may feel pressured to give them an answer immediately. If you know this situation is coming up, then I advise you to ask for a few more days to mull it over. Official guidelines recommend that employers give their employees several days to consider a settlement offer. This may not be a legal requirement, but it’s something all responsible employers will take into account. Give careful thought to what you actually want to get out of the settlement, along with the best and worst possible ways it can play out. You may be able to get much more out of the settlement than you first thought, or experience some delays and have to look into settlement advance loans.

Failing to Consider the Employer’s Incentive

Before you walk into your boss’s office and ask for more on your settlement agreement, consider why they should give you more. Obviously, no employer is going to want to pay out any more of a settlement than they have to, so you’re going to have to make some smart moves to set the gears in motion. Let’s say that you refused the original settlement. You could then attend an employment tribunal where you aggressively seek compensation. In this case, the main incentive for your employer to pay you more is that in return, you’ll agree not to pursue any other claims. Naturally, your employer is also going to be somewhat concerned about the confidentiality of the proceedings. With most settlement agreements, there’ll be a clause requiring you not to disclose the terms on which your employment is ending. This can also be leveraged to secure a more favorable settlement. 

Damaging Good Will

If you’re in a genuine redundancy situation, and your employer has no choice other than terminating your employment, then you may not have much leeway for convincing your employer to pay a larger settlement. Having said that, you may be able to persuade your employer to pay you more on the basis of good will. These kinds of grounds could be based in factors which won’t come up in an employment tribunal. You might be able to leverage the fact that you’re going to be in a very difficult situation after losing your job, evidence that you’ve contributed a lot to the business over the years, or even personal sacrifices you’ve had to make for the greater good of the company. Good will is more important than you think, so don’t tarnish it!

The Best Ways To Manage Your Money

With Christmas fast approaching many of us are likely feeling the pinch. It’s a time of year where all senses of financial management seems to go out of the window, but it is important, to be successful with our wealth we need to manage it wisely, here are some tips to get you started.

Track Your Spending

Sometimes we just buy on impulse, and before we know it we’ve bought all sorts of stuff we don’t need or regret, so start tracking everything you buy, if you do this you can see it all adding up and it’ll stop more needless spending. Once you’ve started to do this you can start using a budget, I know a budget may sound complicated, but if you do it religiously it saves you a lot of time and money in the long run. Keeping a budget may sound complicated but it's easier than you expect.

Consider Hiring An Expert

If you have money in a few different accounts and really don’t know how to make the best of them then you could potentially hire an expert. Everyone wants the best money and investment tips, what better than to have your own, Ian Filippini is a great example. Experts can manage your wealth and come up with budgets to help you function. They can ensure you save just the right amount and come up with strategies to make sure you’re making your money work for you.

Make a Bill Calendar

Knowing when each company will bill you for services rendered is vitally important. You can budget your finances accordingly and know what to keep back ready for a payment. It also makes sense to combine finances with your partner. Doing this makes paying mutual bills much easier and ensures transparency. You could potentially phone your providers and ask them to change the billing date, this can spread out your outgoings over the month of if you’d prefer lump it all together at the month’s start so you know exactly what you have to spend for the rest of the month.

Build An Emergency Fund

Put money into an Emergency fund. You never know what life is going to throw at you, perhaps you or your partner could unexpectedly lose their job, or your house could become damaged in a storm. Whatever happens, it's always great to have an emergency fund in back up. It can stop you getting into trouble if you have any unexpected bills at the end of the month and ensure you don’t end up paying overdraft fees.

Use The Right Saving Accounts

There are many savings accounts across the land and each are vying for our custom. Do your research. If you’ve got some savings you know you’re not going to touch then it may be worth investing into a cash ISA. It means you can’t touch the cash for a set period of time, but you get much better interest rates. You should also keep an eye on the terms, they may only give you great interest rates for one year, after which they’ll significantly drop, so be sure to keep swapping your ISA to the next best provider, this will keep the interest pouring in.

Financial Sages Weigh In On What Seniors Should Be Doing With Their Money

There’s a lot of advice out there from financial experts about what seniors should do with their money. And there should be, after all, from a financial perspective, going into senior life can be one of the most challenging times. You have to think about your investment portfolio, your maturing annuities, how you’ll finance life in retirement, how you’ll pass on your wealth in the future, and the money you should be putting aside for healthcare.

Because of all these complexities, we’ve put together a curated list of financial advisors and experts, giving their opinions on what seniors should do with their finances. Let’s take a look.

Don’t Overallocate Stocks

Bob Klosterman is a senior partner at a wealth management company. Over recent years he’s seen an investing trend among seniors away from bonds and CDs to stocks, thanks to the low rates of interest in the bonds market. Because retirees should be saving for the long term, Klosterman doesn’t think that this is a good idea. Bonds tend to go up in value no matter what, whereas stocks jump and bounce around all over the place, making returns unpredictable. Back in 2008, millions of retirees lost vast amounts of wealth, primarily because they had bet on the stock market, and their bets hadn’t paid off.

As Klosterman points out, a market decline of just 20 percent means that it has to rise by more than 33 percent to just break even. If you do invest in the stock market, Klosterman’s advice is to keep some money in cash so you can ride out the storm should there be another crash in the market.

Think About Life Insurance

Life insurance is a financial tool that people can use to make sure that their families continue to be looked after once they’re gone. Essentially, you pay the life insurance company and they agree to pay out upon your death a certain sum of money to family members. Getting life insurance without the exam, however, can be difficult. Insurance companies want to know whether you are in good health, or whether your health is failing you. According to Chris Walter of Policy Genius, having a life insurance plan alongside your will is essential for making sure that your family is well looked after when you’re gone. Your children should know where the plan is and how to activate it, should the worst happen.

Get A Medical Improvement Plan

One of the biggest concerns for seniors right now, according to Whitney Lee, an analyst at a finance firm, is the rising costs of health care. Health care costs are now double what they are in most developed countries and still rising fast, despite attempts to curtail prices. At the moment some health care is available to seniors through Medicare, Lee points out, although the amount of cover that seniors qualify for is usually very limited. She suggests that seniors look into Medical improvement plans which don’t cost any additional money up front. These plans are mostly helpful for seniors who require ongoing cardiovascular care, people who have diabetes or those who have chronic illnesses that typically push up the price of their bills. The great thing about these plans, Lee says, is that they cover the costs of some of the most expensive and long-running medical conditions.

Balance Your Portfolio

Thanks to the fact that seniors are living longer into retirement than any generation that came before them means that planning is now more important than ever, according to Eric Nelson, chief financial officer at a wealth management company. Nelson says that elderly people will need more long term investments to provide a longer period of income while in retirement. He suggests using two particular approaches to accomplish this. The first is to put a substantial proportion of assets into low-risk assets. This includes things like government bonds, gold and physical plant. These assets should be short-term, says Nelson, to protect investors against sudden crashes in the stock market, allowing them to get at their money in case of an emergency. The second tactic, he recommends, is to maintain a lifelong commitment to nurturing a broad base of global stocks using index funds. Although the market is prone to crashing, Nelson points out that the stock market has a track record of producing real returns on investments over the long term.

It’s important that seniors regularly review their financial position and make sure that their portfolios are working for them. There are various pension income calculators and tools online that allow you to see how much income you are likely to receive as a result of your various pension plans and investments.

How To Keep Your Online Business Financially Secure

The internet has made payment very easy. No longer do you have to trek down to the bank every time you want to cash in money or pay a client. That said, there are dangers to dealing with money online. All the crooks that used to plan their time breaking into banks have now moved onto the web. Protecting your business against these hackers and scammers can be easily done by following these steps

Be careful of suspicious emails

One of the main ways fraudsters get people to divulge their account details is through emails posing as charities, loan companies and sometimes even your bank. Having a spam filter should filter most of these out. If an email seems suspicious, avoid clicking on any links as these could lead you to virus-filled pages.

Install digital security

Some people will try to get away with not having to pay the cost of anti-virus software. You shouldn’t do this with your personal computer and you most definitely shouldn’t do this with a computer that you’re using for business, which is likely to not just have your details but the details of staff and clients too. Buy yourself the latest internet security and make sure that it is constantly updated and renewed. Most reliable antivirus software will update and renew automatically.

Protect yourself against all types of payment

Some forms of payment can be more risky than others. Cash should be exchanged in person when possible to prevent receiving counterfeit money. When dealing with credit cards, look into merchant services to ensure a secure transaction. Some companies have been recently accepting bitcoin, which can come with extra added risks. Don’t accept this form of payment unless you’re familiar with bitcoin already.

Regularly change passwords

An obvious one, regularly changing passwords will put off hackers. At the very last, you should have different passwords for different log-ins and different PIN numbers for different accounts. This way of a hacker does discover one password, they cannot get into the rest of your personal information. If you have colleagues or employees of whom you communicate with online, do not share passwords with them online.

Encrypt financial information

Encrypting files is the best way to put off would-be hackers, as the effort of then having to decrypt them isn’t generally worth it. Some services such as VISA USA and Mastercard, will only work with companies that have taken the step to encrypt their files. Encrypting files can be done simply on most Microsoft and Apple computers although you can download additional software to do it too. All files can be encrypted including those stored on the Cloud. Make sure that other staff members are aware of necessary passwords to decrypt these files if they need them, but again tell them in person – not in a message.