To live the good life on limited resources, one must learn to budget wisely. A budget is nothing more than basically a monetary plan, outlining your financial goals. Having a budget, you can well establish and regulate funds, set and achieve your financial objectives, and make advance decisions as to how you want your finances to function well for you.
The main idea in budgeting is for you to put aside a certain amount of money for expected as well as unexpected costs. Simply put, budgeting means estimating monthly home expenses basing it on previous expenses and bills, and figuring out what you need so you don't have to worry about money.
The initial step to take in budgeting is to find out how long will your compensation last. Define fixed expenses like car payments, home rental, insurance, etc. Likewise follow up your expenditures thoroughly for a month so you can discover and understand where your funds are going. Through proper determination of your “spending patterns”, you can immediately identify solutions for effective budgeting. Use a computer program (there are a lot of good Open Source Programs you can find using your favorite search engine) or a paper ledger (a notebook would work as well) to track your spending for a month or two to discover these patterns.
For instance, when you have a steady monthly income of $4,000, you should subtract all your identified monthly bills from that income.
Other bills can be assessed and then subtracted from the amount of your income. The balance that remained after fixed costs can now be your budget in the household. Rather than allocating money for miscellaneous like gas, clothing, entertainment and groceries, financial planning will allow you instead to use proportions or percentages of it.
The strategic solution in order for budgeting to be successful is inflexibility as well as flexibility; there are fixed expenses so payment must be an inflexible factor. Budgeting will best work when very scarce omissions are made to greater limits. The idea here is to formulate goals and plans, then abide by it as much as you possibly can.
Here are tips on how to make a budget that you can live with:
1. Adopt a good sense of money management. Your attitude is essential in anything you do. Reach an agreement with yourself, and make intelligent compromises and know the importance of reducing unnecessary expenditures; it all involves a lot of sacrifice but will be good for you in the future.
2. Plan out your financial situation. Make a list of your income to one side and your fixed expenses on the other side. Then subtract out a percentage of the difference and make that your monthly savings for emergency purposes. The rest is what you can use for "luxury items".
3. Know the difference between luxuries and necessities. List down what you believe as luxuries, with it, split the list in half, crossing out half the list. Do you really need to buy those DVD's, CD's or video games? Couldn't you get them from the library for free?
4. Practice frugality but with dignity. You can have fun with little or without spending at all. Rather than going shopping, or being the life of the party, learn to enjoy simpler pleasures.
Budgeting is an effective and fundamental tool that is can be used easily by everyone. Consider making one, sticking to it, and benefit from eh fruits of your savings.
Mahalo.
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Need to learn how to get and stay out of debt and live debt free?
Tips and techniques outlined in our ebook “Debt Free Living”.
For more information:
http://www.renspubhouse.com/debtfree/debtfree.html
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Placing Your Real estate listings – Using The Internet Vs Newspaper Ads
Whether you are looking to buy a home for living in or whether are looking to just invest in real estate, the first thing you will need to do is get hold of real estate listings in the area you want to invest/live. There are many ways to find these listings, but the Internet and newspapers are the most common ways of getting real estate listings these days.
With internet real estate sites gaining popularity, the internet has become one of the easiest ways of checking out the real estate listings. Though the traditional method of looking for real estate listings, through newspapers, is still one of the most used methods, it is a very time consuming one. You have to read through various listings and sort out the ones that seem more suitable to you (and possibly write down the phone numbers and contact details on a piece of paper) and then call up the owners/brokers to fix an appointment for viewing the property (which may turn out to be totally disgusting in the end).
Newspaper listings generally happen on a weekly basis, and are placed at least couple of days, if not a week, in advance. So if a deal has materialized in the meanwhile, there is no way you can check it without actually calling up the owner/broker. On the contrary, the internet real estate listings (on a good real estate listings website) are updated everyday or maybe twice a week,and it is easier to contact the owner/broker through the site.
Moreover, new real estate listings go up on the internet everyday (i.e. they don’t wait for the newspaper to get published). So, if you have been using only the newspaper as your source of real estate listing information, you might end up getting stale information. You might lose out on a deal that was out on internet, say 2 days before. As such, making the first offer can make a big difference when it comes to winning in the real estate game.
Further, you don’t need to read through all the real estate listings in order to determine the ones that look suitable to you. You can specify various search criteria/ filters in order to get only those real estate listings that you really want to look into. This is a big advantage when compared with newspapers where listings are generally classified just on the basis of location of the property. Thus you can save a lot of time here by browsing only through the real estate listings that are of interest to you. Moreover, there is no need to note phone numbers etc; you can just take printouts of the listings you want. Some websites also provide tools/ facilities to track those real estate listings.
You could even contact the sellers by sending a message through the website (some websites provide such email type of facility). Another important benefit from real estate listings on internet is that some of them also contain images of the property. So you can have a look at the images and see if you like the property at all. Of course nothing will ever take the place of actually going to the property and physically walking through. True Virtual Reality is a good tool, one can only get the true vibes and feel of a place by personally being on the ground. Besides VR and images don't always show a lot of detail.
So, real estate listings on the internet do seem to offer a lot of convenience. However, whether one uses the internet or a newspaper is really a matter of personal choice. Each are good tools, and should have a place in your arsenal.
Mahalo.
******************************************************************
Need to learn how to get and stay out of debt and live debt free?
Tips and techniques outlined in our ebook “Debt Free Living”.
For more information:
http://www.renspubhouse.com/debtfree/debtfree.html
******************************************************************
With internet real estate sites gaining popularity, the internet has become one of the easiest ways of checking out the real estate listings. Though the traditional method of looking for real estate listings, through newspapers, is still one of the most used methods, it is a very time consuming one. You have to read through various listings and sort out the ones that seem more suitable to you (and possibly write down the phone numbers and contact details on a piece of paper) and then call up the owners/brokers to fix an appointment for viewing the property (which may turn out to be totally disgusting in the end).
Newspaper listings generally happen on a weekly basis, and are placed at least couple of days, if not a week, in advance. So if a deal has materialized in the meanwhile, there is no way you can check it without actually calling up the owner/broker. On the contrary, the internet real estate listings (on a good real estate listings website) are updated everyday or maybe twice a week,and it is easier to contact the owner/broker through the site.
Moreover, new real estate listings go up on the internet everyday (i.e. they don’t wait for the newspaper to get published). So, if you have been using only the newspaper as your source of real estate listing information, you might end up getting stale information. You might lose out on a deal that was out on internet, say 2 days before. As such, making the first offer can make a big difference when it comes to winning in the real estate game.
Further, you don’t need to read through all the real estate listings in order to determine the ones that look suitable to you. You can specify various search criteria/ filters in order to get only those real estate listings that you really want to look into. This is a big advantage when compared with newspapers where listings are generally classified just on the basis of location of the property. Thus you can save a lot of time here by browsing only through the real estate listings that are of interest to you. Moreover, there is no need to note phone numbers etc; you can just take printouts of the listings you want. Some websites also provide tools/ facilities to track those real estate listings.
You could even contact the sellers by sending a message through the website (some websites provide such email type of facility). Another important benefit from real estate listings on internet is that some of them also contain images of the property. So you can have a look at the images and see if you like the property at all. Of course nothing will ever take the place of actually going to the property and physically walking through. True Virtual Reality is a good tool, one can only get the true vibes and feel of a place by personally being on the ground. Besides VR and images don't always show a lot of detail.
So, real estate listings on the internet do seem to offer a lot of convenience. However, whether one uses the internet or a newspaper is really a matter of personal choice. Each are good tools, and should have a place in your arsenal.
Mahalo.
******************************************************************
Need to learn how to get and stay out of debt and live debt free?
Tips and techniques outlined in our ebook “Debt Free Living”.
For more information:
http://www.renspubhouse.com/debtfree/debtfree.html
******************************************************************
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