Floating Ideas About

In 1879, the Proctor and Gamble company's best seller was candles. But Thomas Edison had just patented the electric light bulb. Within a short space of time, the market for candles had collapsed and the company were in trouble.

However, destiny turned their fortunes around. At their factory in Cincinatti, a forgetful employee had one day gone to lunch and forgotten to turn the candle-making machine off. When he
returned, he found a mass of frothing lather filled with air bubbles. Rather than discard the batch, he decided to turn it into soap. To his surprise, he found that the soap floated.

At that time, many people still bathed in the Ohio river. The idea of a soap that floated and never got lost appealed to them. Thus Ivory soap was born and became the mainstay of the Proctor
and Gamble company for many years to come.

Moral: Many innovations are the result of chance discovery and customer need.

Destroy Debt

1. Collect your bills.

Gather up all the records of your unpaid debts so you can take a good look at what you owe and decide where to start. Make sure you include your mortgage, car loan, student loans, credit cards, and any other debts you have, including personal debts. You should have current balances and rates, either online or on paper, but you can also find most of your debts on your credit report, which you can get free once a year from each of the three major credit reporting agencies – just head over to AnnualCreditReport.com.

2. Choose a target.

Now it’s time to choose a debt to destroy. There are two ways to go about this. Which works best for you will be determined by your personality and approach.

The first, which Stacy advocates in his book Life or Debt, is to prioritize the debts with the smallest balance, or fewest payments left to make. Why? Because you can pay them off faster and see the strides you’re making. Fewer due dates to track and fewer payments to send out leads to peace of mind, a sense of accomplishment, and the motivation to keep shrinking balances. If you’ve tried and failed to bail yourself out in the past, this method might provide the extra push you need.

The other approach is to focus on the debt with the highest interest rate, because that’s the one costing you the most money over the long-term. If you’re the kind of person to get worked up about getting worked over by interest charges, this may be a more motivational method – and it’s certainly the one that saves the most money. Plugging your numbers into this debt calculator can help you decide between the two methods: You can find out the difference in total cost by toggling between “balance order” and “interest order.”

3. Divide and destroy.

Regardless of the method you choose, the way to maximize your damage to debt is to snowball your payments.

In other words, you’ll devote every dime you can lay your hands on to your target debt until it’s dust, while making only minimum payments on the rest. When you polish off the first one, take those extra resources and old payments and apply that cash to the next debt down the chain; repeat this strategy with every debt you have. As you progress, debt payments from retired debts, along with whatever extra you can come up with, will snowball into more financial firepower to face the big ones.

Do this until you’ve paid off every debt you care to destroy. Then take those old debt payments and convert them into a money machine by investing them instead.

4. Find the money.

Note the paragraph above refers to devoting “every dime you can lay your hands on” to your target debt. This is a critical step. In Stacy’s book, he recommends you try to devote 10 percent of your gross income to debt destruction – not easy to do if you’re living paycheck to paycheck.

Finding the money to swell your debt payments is the hardest part of getting out of debt. But it’s critical. That’s why tracking your spending with a budget is so important: it allows you to analyze and plan your spending so you can find your “debt destroyer.” But it’s also important to find as much as you can without making sacrifices in your quality of life. You may not have to scrimp as much as you think – just do some research on our site and others and get creative. Here’s a list of our most popular saving posts that might give you ideas:

Source: Money Talks

Risk vs Return

Steps to Saving More in The New Year

People don’t save like they used to, but they may be realizing it’s a good idea to start. Saving more is often among the most popular New Year’s resolutions
 
Saving more isn’t about getting a big raise or changing your entire life. It’s about taking step after step toward getting the things you care about. Here’s how you do it…

1. Set a specific goal.

The best way to prioritize long-term goals (getting out of debt, buying a car/house) over short-term ones (eating out, seeing a movie) is to come up with something compelling and make it as specific as possible. If you don’t map out your road to success, you’re bound to make a wrong turn somewhere. Choose something that fits your priorities and finances; an emergency fund adequate to pay all your bills for at least three months is a good place to start. It’s time to stop the hand to mouth syndrome of living from pay cheque to pay cheque.

2. Pay yourself first.

A common approach to saving is “keep what’s left at the end of the month.” If you’ve ever tried it, you know it doesn’t work well – there’s rarely anything left. Try this instead: Treat your goal like your most important bill. Think of it as money you owe yourself, due on a certain date.
Want to make it even easier? Enroll in the retirement program at work and have the money taken out of your paycheck automatically. You’re less likely to miss what you never see in the first place.

3. Find extra money.

As Stacy said, saving soon is more important than saving big. Think about all the little fees you pay, grumble about, and then forget on a daily basis.

4. Grow big.

You work hard for your money, but when you save, your money works hard for you – if you put it in the right places.

You Never Know...

Good day all the good people out there. Its the 17th Day of 2012 and I just came across something interesting today. If you or your business are facing major uncertainties in 2012, I wish you all good fortune and offer you the following story to help you through. It is a reminder that, unlike the certainties of life where we all buy in to only one possible outcome, the uncertainties of life open up the possibility of many outcomes. It's called "You Never Know..."

The Sultan of Persia had sentenced two men to death.
One of the men, knowing how much the sultan liked his stallion, offered to teach the horse to fly within a year if the sultan would spare him his life.
The sultan, fancying himself as the rider of the only flying horse in the world, agreed.

"You're mad,” said the other prisoner. “You know that horses can't fly. You're only putting off the inevitable.”
"Not so,” said the first prisoner. “I have four chances of escaping my sentence.
First, the sultan might die.
Secondly, I might die.
Thirdly, the horse might die.
And fourth…I might teach the horse to fly.”

Moral: Never be too certain of what the future holds. Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year

Hello, once again, dear readers. Today I will expand more on a simple concept of wealth. Please do read on!

The road to financial freedom starts with making the choice to be rich. Once you have made the decision to be rich, next follows how you are going to be rich. A person's worth or wealth is measured by how much possessions in money terms the person has less what that person owes others.

Wealth is often a build up over time of possessions. You aquire possessions from your income. Income is the amount of money that a person earns over a given period of time. To earn an income one must spend time and to accumulate wealth, one must increase income and reduce expenditure.

A bit of economics here income equals expenditure, in simple terms. I personally don’t know what economics is – or are! All I know is that expenditure is simply money spent on consumption, savings or investments. In the book You Can Choose to Be Rich, Robert Kiyosaki gives a 3-step guide to wealth accumulation. Be sure to read this book or listen to the audio book as it has a lot of guidance to financial freedom.

Till later.

Beating The Markets