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Economic downturns are never especially fun, but as Adam Smith noted over two centuries ago, these cycles of paucity and plenty are a fact of life. Although no one can say for sure when this latest slump will reverse, there are at least sure ways of stretching your cash in the meantime. Here are some penny-preserving techniques tailored to our 21st-century lives:

 

1. Plenty of people are in the habit of cutting out paper coupons, but even though many of us do some of our shopping on the Internet now, not as many of us seem to have gotten into the habit of coupon-hunting on the Internet. Sites such as CouponCabin.com, CouponMountain.com, and DealofDay.com list thousands of current offers at retailers all over the Web.

 

2. Use price-comparison sites such as Pricegrabber.com, Shopping.com, Google Product Search, and mySimon.com to find the best online deals.

 

3. When you’re at a brick-and-mortar store, send a text message to 46645 (Google’s text number) and enter the letter “f” followed by the name of the product you’re interested in. Google will reply with a text quoting its online prices. To compare prices at stores in your area, check out ShopLocal.com.

 

4. If you don’t already belong to one, consider joining a warehouse club such as Costco or Sam’s and buying in bulk. This can be especially helpful if you have a sizable family.

 

5. Buy generic instead of brand-name products. A lot of the difference is often in the marketing hoopla and not the product itself, anyway.

 

6. Withdraw your green from surcharge-free ATMs, which can be found on AllpointNetwork.com and MoneyPass.com.

 

7. Buy locally-sourced food at farmer’s markets or stores that sell local produce and meats. Prices there are usually lower because the food doesn’t have to be transported very far.

 

8. Shop at dollar stores. You shouldn’t have a difficult time finding them nearby since they’ve been turning up all over the place recently.

 

9. Buy discount prescription drugs at online pharmacies. You’ll often end up paying less than half as much for the generic pills carried by these discount prescription drug stores than you would for the same brand-name medications at brick-and-mortar pharmacies.

 

10. If your car is seven years old or older and/or worth less than $2,500, consider dropping comprehensive and collision from your insurance.  Your deductible may be closing in on the worth of your vehicle anyway, in which case a major collision would send your car to the junk yard and you to the dealership.

 

11. Keep cell-phone expenses under control. Kids today love to text message, so save yourself from unexpected high bills by paying the flat monthly fee for unlimited text messages.

 

12. Use online classifieds to buy used items. Sites like CraigsList.org and Kijiji.com are excellent resources for finding everything you need, from pre-owned furniture to baby gear. By buying from local sellers, you can save on shipping costs as well.

 

13. Go to matinees. Matinee showings are usually more reasonably-priced than peak-time showings.

 

14. Install Power Planners (see www.energycsi.com/energysmart) to lower the energy usage of your electrical appliances.

 

15. For your next date, have a romantic picnic instead of going to a high-end restaurant. Pack a blanket and a cooler full of your favorite foods and you’ve got yourself an inexpensive rendezvous. Add some zest with a bottle of vino.

 

16. Instead of spending money on software, look for (legal) free software from websites like Download.com and SourceForge.net. Depending on how you use a given type of program, the free alternatives will often be just as good as the commercial versions.

 

17. If anyone in your house is a student, get the Student Price Card from SPCLive.com. It’s only $8.50 and will get the holder 10% to 15% discounts in dozens of participating stores.

 

18. Control your thermostat. Using a programmable thermostat to adjust the temperature will reduce energy usage when you’re asleep and away. Prices range from $30 to $120, but you’ll cut your bill by 10% to 20%.

 

19. Consider leaving your health club. More economical options may include a gym at your work, in your building or community, or at a nearby park and rec. center.

 

20. Lower your water bill by installing low-flow showerheads and $1 toilet displacement bags.

 

21. When you eat out, choose waiter-less restaurants where you order up front and pick up your own food. You’ll avoid paying a tip, and these types of restaurants often have more reasonable prices as well.

 

22. Buy used books. Major online book dealers offer a “buy it used” option, where you will often find books in like-new condition at substantial markdowns.

 

23. Have a friend or family member cut your hair. This works best for men and boys who like to keep their hair short and simple, because someone without any experience can do as good a job as a barber using a set of clippers. Professional clippers are sold in department stores for less than the price of some high-end haircuts.

 

24. Swap babysitting responsibilities with neighbors. Instead of paying a teenager to talk on the phone, send your children to the neighbors on your nights out and take their kids into your place for a few hours when they need some couple-time alone.

 

25. Replace your incandescent light bulbs with CFLs (compact fluorescent lightbulbs). They use about 1/4 as much electricity, last about 10 times longer, and can now often be found on sale for only about $1 each if you shop around.

 

 

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The most valuable part of any style of investing, is knowing what your risk tolerance is. Without a good knowledge of this, the chances of you loosing everything are very high. Every Forex trading strategy carries its own risk parameters and these will closely relate to your risk tolerance. Then there is your trading approach, conservative, moderate, and aggressive.

 When you first come to Forex trading you may decide to trade a day chart. The bar movement over a day can be hundreds of pips, so when you determine your stop position you have to assess what your drawdown limits are. If your money management is set at a 3% funds exposure, you will encounter problems on day charts unless your account is significant.

 The 5M or 30M charts maybe more tradable since the pip movement tends to be less, so your stop positions can fall within your management criteria.

 Yes, we all want good returns from out trades, but exposing ones account to wide stop positions and excessive draw-downs is going to wipe out your account and trading career in the blink of an eye.

 A practical risk level is 3% or $300 on a $10,000 account.  Change this to pips, 1 standard lot ($100,000) has a pip value of $10 so if you trade end of day and your stop loss establishment, whether count-back or support and resistance or any other, indicates a 100 pip stop position, then you are not risking 3% but 30%! Three wrong trades and your account has gone!

 An aggressive trader is willing to take riskier trades that a conservative trader. They will expose larger amounts of money in riskier trades with the hope of achieving larger returns – often over extended trading time frames but they may still use the similar strategies for shorter times as well. Very much the ‘out in a blaze of glory’ trader.

 So where do you think you sit? Are you a highly controlled trader with correct money management and risk rates, or a trader that will take exaggerated risks for big gains? If you are the latter, you won’t be around for long, that’s a guarantee.

 If any of this leaves you a bit bewildered, you need to gain some knowledge, so commence your Forex training with Top Dog Trading, you will learn a considerable amount and it will help you trade with safety to win pips not risk everything.

 Never trade without having all of the facts! Click Here To Get Your FREE Five Day Video Trading Course

Worried about the current economic climate? Wonder why so many people are turning to online trading? This article will seek to answer those questions. You need to have an alternative to your main source of income, because in these uncertain economic times, you can never be sure of what forecasts may be ahead for you. Already, many large conglomerates and companies have laid off hundreds of thousands of employees all over the world and these are just the reported numbers. SME’s and private business owners have also been hard hit – and in some regions where the recession has not fully hit, the future is bleak.

It is always good to have an alternative source of income even if you are blessed with a hefty pay cheque every month. Massing up risk capital is always good – there is no argument against it and online trading is a great way for anyone to do this. The best of all is that you can do all these from home, provided that you have enough practice and excellent money management skills. Some extra income will definitely help to secure your loved ones further. Online trading is also extremely simple to do – it is unlike the initial systems and set ups that were required when it was first introduced more than a decade ago.

This time, you have a plethora of financial companies and brokerages who have tailor made online trading to the casual home user. From easy to sign accounts, interfaces made for the casual investor in mind, support structures that help you every step of the way, investment programmes that help you make complicated calculations to augment your investment decisions and the existence of dummy account setups for you to practice with as much as you want – going online to trade has never been easier and you will always be assured that there will be someone around to help you make that investment decision for you.  The potential to make money online is phenomenal; with online trading in commodities like futures and the Forex trade.

Take Forex markets for example, a trillion dollar a day turnover market that is easy to trade in and is extremely liquid. With brokerages giving exceptional deposit margins as well as breadth of play to invest in any market 24 hrs of the day, your options are only limited by how much time you choose to put into the market. The Forex market is an investment wonder, because of its largely predictable market psychology and the fact that you can turn a downturn into a profit making session. Online trading can be the turnkey for anyone who wants either an alternative income, or even a full time solution to their real life economic problems. Thousands out there have joined the FX market, and you should not be the last.

 

If you have no idea what trading, much less day trading, is all about, then you might be wondering if there is such a thing as night trading. Doesn’t everyone trade in the day? Well, traditionally yes, but the day trade is the financial term for when a trader or investor does his buying and selling of commodities or financial instruments on a single market day. It is, literally trading on a day-to-day basis, as all positions and transactions made on that day will be closed before the market closes on that very day. All sorts of commodities can be traded this way; they include futures, interest rates, commodity futures, equities, stocks and bonds and even the Forex market.

In terms of the 24-hour Forex market, a trader day trades by choosing a particular currency pair to invest in, and then closes his position and liquidates whatever investment he made for that particular day at the end of the day – for example, someone in Europe could be trading the Asian market exclusively in the EUR – USD commodities (currency), and thus wins or loses on a daily basis. His trading begins again on the following day and so on and so forth. While the day trading option is the mainstay of casual investors who usually do this at home or on leisure time, it is also the gold standard of banks and financial institutions. While day trading is a good option for a low risk, starting guide to investing, there are some pointers to learn to day trade the smart way.

The first thing you need to be able to do is to pinpoint the frequency of trade of a particular commodity you’re interested in investing in, and work out strategies ahead of time in order for you to be able to spot trading setups you can possibly capitalize on as you speculate in the market. Having a good strategy and knowledge of aspects like market frequency and psychology will help you have more and more trades (increased volume of trading) within a single day, sometimes over several markets, which means you can have a higher potential of making more profits. Don’t believe the hype that you can make tremendous amounts of money in day trading and start pumping in huge amounts of money on speculative commodities like futures or even the more dangerous Forex.

While huge profits are possible in day trading, treat it like poker and start small. Remember, with day trading, you do not want your profits to run and that doesn’t mean that you should let your losses run either. You should trade in something that is almost certain, and with a smaller profit margin, you should always have good discipline and stick to tried and true strategies (while being flexible enough to change at the flip of a coin) and you should always have ‘risk capital’ on the side for a market bailout (to cover your losses); racking up bad credit in the market will only serve to get you barred from trading.

At the end of the day, it is about money management and it is slightly harder because this is when the market is more dynamic and the long term is not in the question. Once you have the discipline to run the market in the day trade, only then will you be successful.

One of the ways to improve business profits is to practice great money management. In most cases, new business always ignore the daily expenditure and if they were to take notice of this, they could in fact save a huge sum of money. These are called the ‘not critical’ aspects of the business, or certain things that can be replaced with cheaper and just as effective techniques. There are entire companies that are dedicated to this, called damage control.

 

The damage a business does to itself is not tightening the tap on the money tank, their employees or even their basic infrastructure seems to be spending on things that are totally unnecessary and totally inconsequential. Therefore, it is important to examine all your business proceedings and its accounts. Sit down with your partners and your employees and bring out the accounting sheets, tracking every dollar down. You would be shocked and surprised at the sheer amount of money that you would be saving. Some business have found that they were over spending in excess of $30, 000 a year – money that could have been diverted more efficiently to improvements in productivity or even for future expansions.

 

Another way to improve business profits is to diversify. Business models that are stuck in a single dimension paradigm often see profits stagnate because they are hooked on a single market and refuse to trying new things. Diversity, try new projects and even venture into riskier areas of the market. However, with that comes a risk. You need to have the ideals of effective money management and a good head for seeing threats on the horizons. Many large and booming companies like Microsoft, Apple, Virgin Airlines and Google are known for taking calculated risk. Their businesses had always been based on taking risk even when they were still at their infant stage. They have also expanded into every aspect of the market.  Think small scale and apply it to your business. If you do so, your business will definitely expand and your earnings will escalate due to the greater source of revenue.

 

Lastly, newly established companies can improve business profits by getting a virtual office. Starting a business is essentially starting a risk, no matter how air tight your plan is and what you need to do before committing tens of thousands of dollars to leasing a physical office and getting office equipment, is to go virtual and see how your plan works out. If your product or service has astounding success and the response is magnificent, then you can consider obtaining a physical office for you to do you business dealings. It is all about reducing the risks in your plan and cutting costs through avenues like a virtual office is a great way for you to test bed your ideas on the living market and see whether it will reap you the rewards you deserve.

It’s real essential that you cut back your debt via debt management if you wish to amount to anything in life.There is just no way people can make headways in life if there is a extensive debt weight hanging on their necks.

But intelligent people don’t seem to worry too much about being in debt because such folks have mechanisms of offsetting their debts.It is doubtful, however, if you can afford this luxury.

People who have accumulated huge debts must endeavor to do all they can to reduce such debts.Skills in debt management becomes imperative.

By adopting any of the following ways, you can easily reduce and manage your debt:

Scale down your expenses. You can only reduce debt by a wide margin if you adhere strictly to this.You can only have more money to repay a debt if your spendings on commodities is very low.

This practise, if strictly adhered to, will assist you, not only in debt management, but in both business and your personal life.

Also, when you commit 10% of your earnings as savings regularly, then no debt will be too big for you to reduce.When money is put away as savings it does nothing but grow, and this can later be put to use for debt servicing or floating a business venture that would eventually start repaying your debts. The concept is christened as “pay thyself first”.

According to the book called “The Richest Man In Babylon”, it is still possible to reduce one’s debt if one saves very well. This can effectively be used to gradually pay up your debt and the extra channeled to your business.

You might think that the methods look too simplistic to have any effect, but if you give both a shot you will be surprised how effective they are in debt management.

Here are some tips to start your own business on a low, low budget. If you want to start your own company and you don’t have enough money to think about entertainment rooms or even a simple cubicle, here is a way to get your company lifted onto its feet with a low and sometimes even no budget at all.

{The first and most important tip of all is to think about starting online.Starting your business online is the first and most important tip to come up with.} The internet is the last haven of the cheap entrepreneur and is the ideal place to get your marketing strategies going and selling your service online, and looking at the responses, you can then reformulate strategies or even change your product cycles to fit the needs of your market. Don’t sweat the internet, is truth that people are earning huge amount of money from the online business. Reaching up to and over $50, 000 a month in revenue is not unheard and the internet is the place with the potential to reach sky rocket profits and lift your brand up and over for everyone to see. The internet has many ways that you can make money.

To start, you just need to get yourself a website which cost only a just dollars per month.Plus some hosting websites will provide email service. With the website you have access 6 million people who are online at any one time. Use it as an online store and start selling products. Direct marketing on the internet is one the biggest booming businesses on the internet and the thing is you can sell anything online, from property all the way to perishables. Another thing, the online money maker is affiliate marketing and this is something that everyone should know about. It is big business on the internet and it is basically representing another person’s product and using all the backend and frontend channels of the internet to drive volume to your website selling this very product and taking a cut everytime someone decides to purchase it. With affiliate marketing, you are able to represent many products at once, and once you get the hang of it ,you will be able to open up several revenue streams and watch as your PayPal account grows with every waking and unwaking moment.

The internet is the ideal place for anyone to start a business and with it; even the person with the lowest budget in the world can bring an idea into fruition. Cyberspace is a lot like the real world, only it is more fluid, more dynamic and you are unlimited in most senses in access to the millions of people online.

This is how to start your own business on a low budget and the internet has advanced to such a level that 60% of the worlds traditional businesses have online counterparts. The internet is a turnkey for anyone to start a business with a shoe string budget.

money management skills

In general, the success of a business is judged, to a great extent, by the profits the company is able to generate through its standard daily business endeavors. In order to make the most of their profit-making activities, companies should do their utmost to make sure that they have a reliable and effective financial management system that can help to safeguard and maximize their hard-earned profits.

One of the keys to a good business financial management structure is controlling the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly expenses of the operation. This comes down to simple math and cash management principles. Companies will not be profitable, and therefore won’t stay in business long, if they spend more than is required to produce and deliver their product, and end up trimming their profit margin so that it is just too thin to make the business viable.

A good financial management system for any business can help to keep the operating expenses from ballooning out of control and also to make sure that the cash flow is handled as effectively and efficiently as possible. When cash flow is not under control or when overhead gets to be too much, it becomes extremely difficult for a company to stay competitive and retain its customer base.

One of the most important people involved in good business financial management is the treasurer of the board. He or she is typically charged with the responsibility to oversee the money management for a corporation. The person in this role should come to the job with a wealth of business cash management experience, a strong level of wisdom and a firm understanding of corporate financial management. With the treasurer strongly armed with these money management skills, the corporation stands a much better chance of being strong financially and being able to ride out the storms of business and economic challenges.

Another key person on the team that oversees the entire business financial management practices for a corporation is, of course, the accountant. It is the corporate accountant and his team, depending on the size of the company, that will deal with the minute and detailed money management for the company on a daily or sometimes hourly basis.

The accounting department of a company will keep the books for the organization, will generate the various financial statements that are required both by government agencies and by the board of directors, and will conduct the financial analysis of the financial reports. This is the department that is entrusted with managing and enforcing departmental budgets, which is such an essential part of financial management systems, and essentially handles and accounts for every penny that flows in and out of the business coffers.

Nowadays, with the ubiquitousness of computers at every level of business and commerce, there is no doubt that any company that takes advantage of a complete financial management system for their operation will also be using sophisticated money management software as well. Even though the people in the organization bring the expertise and knowledge to the task of business financial management, the software chosen to help them do their jobs is critically important and much be chosen only after careful research and comparisons, with regard to the options available.

and money management

Anybody who has ever stressed, worried and fretted about the state of their personal finances has likely gone to great lengths to do their best with budgeting and money management. Good money management skills are an important part of being able to enjoy a life that is not in constant turmoil over the flow of money into and out of the family coffers.

Learning the ins and outs of personal financial budgeting and management is something that is ideally taught to youngsters at an early age so that they can develop good money management skills right from the start. The later someone begins to take financial management seriously, the more potential there is for them to get into personal money management problems and even into serious financial straits that can be difficult to recover from.

It is always best when children and teens are able to learn about budgeting and money management because this education and turn into a set of money management skills that will be with them for the rest of their lives. When people don’t have the chance to learn how to manage credit and their personal finances, they will most likely waste money and burn through it as soon as they earn it, and they may get themselves into debt way over their heads.

There are many people who enter adulthood without having learned about budgeting and personal financial management. They find themselves exhilarated at the money they make at their first full-time job, and often such exhilaration leads to overspending and a lack of preparing for the future, of not being prepared for emergencies and of overusing credit cards and other credit vehicles that can soon lead to serious debt.

If a person sinks deeply into debt when they are still in their twenties, because of immaturity and poor money management abilities, then they can end up spending the next twenty years, or more, trying to dig out of the hole of consumer debt that they put themselves into. Even worse, poor money management and significant debt can also lead to bankruptcy all too easily and this is a blemish on a person’s credit record that lingers for over a decade.

The ramifications and consequences of bankruptcy are more than just a matter of clearing away excessive debt and having your credit damaged. There are many other underlying issues that arise and filing for bankruptcy can affect your ability to get a good job, affect the insurance rates you pay, affect the interest rate on a mortgage, auto loan, and other types of loans, and can be an embarrassing thing to have to try to explain every time someone needs to pull your credit report.

The good news is that people who take the time to learn the principles of budgeting and money management stand a much better chance of avoiding bankruptcy or personal financial crisis. Of course, it is never too late to learn and implement good financial management for yourself and your family, but the sooner you start the better your financial future will be.