Prices Going Crazy

Before the tough economics nowadays, I will have a full bag of snacks for USD 15 on grocery store, but now my bags getting thinner at the same amount of money.

I could only buy less with the same amount before. Due to the crazy increasing oil prices, everything gets much more expensive.

But what can I do? I don’t have the authority to determine the oil prices, neither you, I think.

So, what can we do to survive?
I hate to say this, but true, we have to be savvy, only buy what we need and not what we want. And at the same time we should try to get more extra income, because what we earn might not enough anymore.

But I get asked once by a friend, ”How can you earn more? Who would hire you now for a higher salary? Company fired people, not hire people anymore to survive themselves.”

Really? Is that so? I mean you should think out of the box if you think that way. You born not only to be an employee, you have more potential to be somebody else.

Here I will give you some idea to drive more ideas from you:

• Sell your home made cookies, puddings, pies, whatever you could do best at your home kitchen. Maybe at the beginning you just let your friends and neighbors know that you are able to make something nice for them at a fair price. It will bring you fun, you could do your hobby and it brings you money at the same time. Who knows that someday you will sell your pudding across the region?
  


• If you like pets, I believe people would like to ask you to look after their dogs & cats while they are out of town.
  


• Do you like gardening? Why don’t you put a banner on your gate saying, “We Sell plants & flowers, free delivery on certain areas.” Who knows they will drop by to buy some from you?
  
  
• If you like blogging, browsing or another internet activities, go ahead, start your own sites & blogs. There are lots of internet programs you could make money with, like: Parked.com, Kontera, Chitika, YouSayToo, and so on.
  


• If you think you are a pretty good writer, try to sell your articles to some media or media sites. If it’s a good idea & useful for readers I believe they don’t mind to pay you.
  


• Be a mentor, Nowadays lots of student needs private teacher to help them with their school lessons, be that one.
  

Basically just do what you could do best, then be creative. You could earn more by being creative at your best area. Start the steps. One mile journey starts from a single step.

Good Luck Guys, You Can Do It.

Make Different Account

Do you know exactly how much you spend for your internet provider this month? Or pay for your domain hosting? And how much you pay for your grocery? Have you paid your rent for the next 6 months? How about your car insurance, is it paid for this 3 months?

How much money do you exactly have in your account right now? Is it enough if you need some emergency funds in the next 3 days? And wait, do you still remember how much you paid for last week lunch with your client?

If you feel you can not answer to those question or questions like that, I think you need to manage your cash book once again. Can not answer such question meaning you might have a mess money management. Maybe you spend too much, maybe you mixed your personal expenses with your business account, which is not good.

Imagine if you mixed your personal account with your business account. You might be forget how much exactly each account has, and then when you feel you still have some extra money, you just don’t realize it is your business money and you should pay some business cost next week using that money….. You will get trouble next week I believe.

Actually it is so simple to manage your accounts if you have your own business. The very first step is having different account for each usage. Open different bank account for your business and your personal money, thus will be best if you have one more account which is your savings (don’t touch this money unless there is a certain emergency).

Have your own policy for each account, like:

1. For your business account, you will never use the money for your personal use, it only use for the business inflow and outflow. You only pay your business cost, and every business income goes straight to this account. And if you need some money for business emergency, of course you could borrow from another account of yours, just don’t forget to pay it back ;)
2. For your personal account, you will live only from this money; you cannot borrow money from another account of yours to buy grocery or other personal needs. You must discipline yourself to live with the amount (so calculate how much you need and live with it)
3. Make an extra account for your savings, the money can come from your business profit (you could take certain percentage from your profit for your savings, beside some profit you might put back to develop your business) and also you might save the rest of your personal money if you could save some.

Having those personal account might be sounds some paperwork, but believe me, it worth. You only have to put the certain money on the right account. It’s like you have a different shoes for different occasion, it’s that simple.

The extra job you should do is periodically prints your book and monitors the amount and the book keeping, it’s that simple, once you get use to it, it will like riding a bicycle.

Having a business meaning you have a responsibility for reaching your goal, this only a small tip that might help you.

Accelerating Your Retirement: Start Your Own Business (2)

By Michael Masterson

8 Important Things to Know About Business

Apart from starting (and sticking to) a what is already working (and not getting too fancy), I've discovered eight secrets to making a start-up business work.

1. Business doesn't happen until you make the first sale.Buying office furniture and printing cards doesn't make the business go. Selling product does. Yes, there are some initial preparations you need to make - but until you have that first check in hand, all you're really doing is spending money.
2. The single most effective way of entering a new market is to offer a popular product at a significantly reduced price. In every industry, there is a good market for specialty and high-quality product producers - but capturing a reasonable share of those niche market segments takes money, time, and experience. When starting a new business, you are usually short in these three essentials. That's why it's better to resist the allure of high-priced, prestige products in favor of selling the most desired products and services at ludicrously cheap prices. If you can figure out how to undersell the giants, you will be in a very happy starting place.
3. It's ultimately about selling. Conventional business wisdom says you make money when you buy, not when you sell. I disagree. Great businesspeople make their fortunes by increasing the perceived value of their products, thus inflating prices and measurably increasing profit margins. (Think Chanel, Rolex, Range Rover.)
4. When choosing a business, select one that can be grown without your personal involvement. Many businesses - especially those built around the personality or drive of a single person - depend for their growth on the commitment of the founder. Avoid this type of business. It severely limits your growth potential. Make sure your business can expand with the addition of more money, property, or people - but not more of you.
5. Have an exit plan.Before you invest your time or money in any business (or anything else, for that matter), know exactly how much you are willing to lose - and get out if you hit that stop-loss point.
6. Focused effort is more effective than a diversified approach to business building. Ambitious people tend to fall into two groups: those who focus on one project at a time and those who spread themselves out on many projects. The focused approach allows you to acquire mastery faster. The diversified approach gives you more balance. I've done both. And although I'm naturally inclined toward diversification, I've had the most success and made the most money from the focused work.
7. Let your winners run and cut your losses short. Most business ideas or ventures that begin poorly, fail. This is a very important to learn. It's easy to get emotionally attached to projects/investments we believe in. But, when the marketplace tells you that your great idea is a loser, you shouldn't keep pushing. Close the project and minimize your losses. If you really have a good idea, it will come back to you in the future in another, perhaps better, set of clothing.
8. Pareto's Principle (the 80-20 Rule): 80% of your success comes from 20% of your resources.Most of the success/income/satisfaction you will get in your career will come from a small portion of your skills/projects/efforts. Make it a habit to ask yourself, "Where am I getting most of the benefit here?" and compare that to where you are putting in the most work.

Having your own business is the fastest (and most satisfying) way to a happy, wealthy retirement. So if you don't already have a good idea for starting a side business spend some time thinking about it.

To give yourself the best odds of being successful, either start a business that is already very close to the work you do now, or get a job working for a business in the industry you want to enter.

Accelerating Your Retirement: Start Your Own Business (1)

By Michael Masterson

How to Make Your Start-Up Business Profitable in Year One

You can invest a small amount of money (and a lot of hard work and well-spent time) in a small business and see it grow into a business that is worth a million in seven years. And you'll greatly increase your chances for success by having a plan - by knowing exactly what you need to do.

A typical start-up business that's close to what you already know should break even or lose a little money in year one, make a decent "salary" for you in year two, and provide a substantial bonus for you - in additional to a good, arm's-length management salary - in year three.

To make your business profitable in year one, figure out what you need, in terms of new customer revenue, to bring a profit to the bottom line. Then devote at least 80% of your resources - your time and money - to achieving that new customer revenue goal.

The key is to follow a program that breaks long-term goals down into shorter-term objectives and finally specific tasks. Each individual task should be something that can be accomplished fairly quickly. In terms of your marketing objectives, for example, individual tasks might look something like this:

1. Stop by three offices and leave brochures.
2. Call up such-and-such group and see if they would like to have you give a talk.
3. Buy a quarter-page ad in the local newspaper.

Put all of these small achievements together and you can achieve remarkable success in a very short period of time.

(continue)

Accelerating Your Retirement: Start Your Own Business

By Michael Masterson

While many people fail in business, many more succeed. If you subtract the foolish failures - restaurants being the most foolish, followed by any sort of glamour business (think travel, bed & breakfast, sports, celebrity) or retail business - the number of successes far outweigh the failures.

When starting a business, you can drastically reduce your risk of failure by becoming an expert in two areas:

1. First you must understand everything you can about the products and/or services you will be selling.
2. Second, you must become competent (and eventually masterful) at the specific marketing skills you need to sell them.
   

How do you become an expert in two things simultaneously?

The best way I know is to get a job working for the type of business you want to start.

Think of your employment as a paid training program. Work fifty or sixty hours a week (even if they don't pay you a nickel extra) absorbing everything you can. Pay particular attention to people and situations that help you understand how the business works.

By learning "on the job," you'll develop skills and accumulate ideas that will make starting your own business a hundred times easier. Some of these skills will be of a more general kind, like writing effective memos, pitching ideas at meetings, handling troublesome people, etc. Some of them will be more targeted: such as how to write persuasive copy or how to select lists of names to send promotions to.

The same will be true of the ideas you get. Some will be small - a clever way to run a meeting, a useful technique for following up on delegations, etc. And some will be big, powerful and very exciting.

The more you learn, the easier it will be to add to your knowledge and the more eager you'll become to start your own business. Try to resist that temptation until you've invested at least 600 hours in learning the product/service side of the industry and another 600 learning the marketing.

Remember, any complex skill takes about 1000 hours to learn and even if you have good teaching, you still need at least 600 hours before you know enough to avoid the obvious mistakes.

When it comes to launching your business, don't reinvent the wheel. Come up with a product and a marketing position that is 80% to 90% the same as what your most successful competitors are doing.

Remember, there is a good reason that they are successful. By investing 600+ hours into learning the product/service part of the business and another 600+ hours on the marketing, you should already have a good idea about why things work. But you aren't yet an expert. It takes much more time (about 5000 hours) to do that.

And that's why you have to proceed with caution - one small step at a time. Yes, you should try new things, but as I said they should be only 10% to 20% new. Taking this sort of conservative approach will not limit your growth because you will be able to "catch up" later. If you aren't careful and try something entirely new and different, chances are it will fail - however good you think the idea is. Remember: the key idea is this: until you've had 5000 hours of experience, you are not an expert. Don't act like one.

(continue)

Now, I am going to share one of my favorite article from Michael Masterson’s Newsletter.

I will plainly put what he wrote without any editing, and I will post it into 3 times, because the article is quiet long, so I hope it will be better and easier to be read in pieces.

Hope you can find something useful for your own “Financial War”.

HOME-BASED BUSINESS

women in business

Women nowadays will not give up their children for working outside, although they still need the income to help their husband running the household.

What these women do to solve this problem is by running a home-based business, or doing freelance job as now a lot of companies are looking for outsourcing to do some details for them.

The question now is, what home business are you going to do and how do you start it?

Experts will suggest you to start with something you like as the based idea. If you like children and have the ability to handle them, you may consider opening a day care at home.

If you like animals, you can run a pet centre at home. Even you can do business from your kitchen by selling cookies and other specialty foods to other people.

There are a lot of home business opportunities, and what is popular now is doing internet marketing. You can sell things in the internet for a company and you will get commissions if you succeed.

For you who are doing home business as a part time job, it is recommended to do something different from your everyday job to avoid getting bored as you will deal with the same things all day.

You can start your business from your passion. What are you interested in? Are you interested in sales, writing, gathering people? Multi Level Marketing is a good business but you may sacrifice some family time as you have to go out to get down lines.

You can look for a forum to learn about some possibilities. There are a lot of cooking forum, writing forum and others in the internet.

An idea is still an idea unless you run it into practice. Get started as soon as you make your decision.

Why many women cannot earn much doing home business is because they forget that a business is a business. They need to do it consistently. Having a home business does not mean that they are going to have plenty of leisure time.

You can earn as much as you want because you are the one who takes control on everything. Do not give up on your first failure, keep yourself motivated, focus and continue your business until you get what you want. Business is a process.

Doing a home business will challenge you to beat the temptation of losing your own schedule. This can be your biggest challenge. Your kids may ask you to take them swimming, going to the zoo or just playing with them. That is why it is very important to have a schedule on when you spend time with your kids and when to work on your business.