10 Money Saving Tips!

Who doesn’t want to save money? Here are ten money-saving tips that may make it easier than you think to save.

1. Automatic Transfer

Set up an automatic transfer from your checking account to your savings account. You can start with a small amount and gradually increase t if you would like. You can set this up to transfer an amount from each paycheck or a certain amount each month.

2. Raise

If you get a raise, put that extra money from your raise into your savings account. Many of us look forward to a raise because you know you’ll be getting more money with each paycheck. Instead of using that extra money, continue to live as you have before the raise. Put that extra money into a savings account and watch it add up.

3. Loose Change

Saving all your loose change and cashing it in every month. This is such an easy task, but few people think of doing it. Every evening you can empty your pockets and put it in a jar or some type of container …

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What do banks want when you apply for a mortgage?

Sometimes I ask the folks in the office about the questions they are asked by clients they are dealing with at the time, often it will result in comments like ‘the usual’… ‘How much can I borrow? What’s the best rate etc.’ and while that is true, another question often asked is one that is implied but not directly a question.

‘What do banks want from me when I am making a mortgage application?’

The answer, in the sense of principles, is that that they are looking for a way of determining your ability to repay a debt, some mathematics is used, some gut instinct often plays a part too, qualitative is mixed with quantitative.

Banks use different general mortgage calculators and these use your financial information to give different brackets of lending outcomes. In looking at your p60 they try to establish a year on year figure for your earnings, if you got a raise in the interim (if you did recently you are a rarity!) then …

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The numbness of the bottom

When bad news stops having an effect then it is a sign that we may be approaching the bottom, if that bottom is an L shape or a U shape is down to how the crisis continues to pan out. However, the acceleration of the decline has been so rapid that unlike the depression, we are seeing wealth wiped out much faster, in the late 20’s early 30’s the drop in the Dow went from 343 to 71 over the course of three years, today the Dow went from 14,000 to 6,900 in just over a year. That same 50% drop took more than a year and a half from 29′ to 31′ (the crisis accelerated after that). However, an important difference between now and then is that the state sponsored institutions didn’t exist, such as state supported medical care and social welfare.

Bearing this in mind what can we determine of the near term future? For a start, bad news is no longer effecting share prices the way they normally would, a …

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Some past market performance figures

Naturally past economic cycles don’t tell us exactly what will happen in the future, but as Mark Twain once said ‘history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme’. And for that reason it is worth looking at some key figures from the past, showing that often the gains in bull markets are all found at the cusp of a bear market.

The stock market generally reacts before consumers and the real economy do and equally it will generally see recovery before them as well. Taking a view of the 20th century markets we can see the following:

In the recession of 1926 to 1927 the market increased by 41%. The years of 1933 to 1937 saw some of the most impressive gains ever in the S&P 500. The eight month recession of 1945 saw markets rise 19.5%, the eleven month recession of 1948-49 saw the markets go up 15.2%. Again in 1953-1954 the ten month recession ended with a market that rose 24.2%.

Any reader will note that much of these ‘gains’ did …

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Debt reduction & personal finance weekly blog Aug 25th 2008

Today I will give you a tip about the single best way to reduce and avoid debt, it is perhaps the most effective method known to man. Here it is…

“Don’t borrow any more money”

Simple enough to almost make you feel conned I bet? The fact is that debt begets debt and if you enter into a lifelong debt cycle it is something that is virtually impossible to free yourself from. The very first step towards financial freedom and a life out of debt is to realise this fact and to come up with a solution.

Some people think that if they consolidate loans that they will then have more money, but what do most of them do with this ‘extra money’? Save it? Or do they then get more debt and the extra money thus goes into the debt vortex as well?

All good ideas have an exit plan [one of the very reasons Iraq was such a terrible idea to begin with], and you can make yours. To do this you have to decide how you will …

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Debt reduction & personal finance weekly blog Aug 25th 2008

Today I will give you a tip about the single best way to reduce and avoid debt, it is perhaps the most effective method known to man. Here it is…

“Don’t borrow any more money”

Simple enough to almost make you feel conned I bet? The fact is that debt begets debt and if you enter into a lifelong debt cycle it is something that is virtually impossible to free yourself from. The very first step towards financial freedom and a life out of debt is to realise this fact and to come up with a solution.

Some people think that if they consolidate loans that they will then have more money, but what do most of them do with this ‘extra money’? Save it? Or do they then get more debt and the extra money thus goes into the debt vortex as well?

All good ideas have an exit plan [one of the very reasons Iraq was such a terrible idea to begin with], and you can make yours. To do this you have to decide how you will …

Read More →

How to beat a recession. Simple ways to avoid the pinch.

I think the point has been reached, certainly from public sentiment, where we are seeing more negative news than positive news, the see-saw has well and truly tilted, good news seems to be brushed over to focus instead on the financial equivalents of four car pile-ups on the M50. The money market stops to stare and the slowdown of the on-lookers causes everything else to back up.

One thing I might ask, is in that case, then why stay on the proverbial M50? In today’s post we’ll look at some simple ways to beat a recession and reduce costs so that you can keep a good standard of living and even profit from a downturn. Some is simple common sense, some might be about things you haven’t considered.

1. Stop driving: Oil prices have risen and they don’t look likely to fall any time soon, I am a cyclist myself, and sometimes people look at me funny when as Operations Manager of a financial house I turn up to meetings in a high-vis jacket, and admittedly sometimes I feel out …

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