Hey there.
It has been a while.
I tried writing scheduled emails for myself to remember what I have gone through but then I deleted all of them. I guess I am no longer the same person a year ago, few months ago, minutes ago.
Hey, keep going. Do whatever you have to do. You have no time to give up.
The invention of the Internet has brought about many changes in the way that we conduct our lives and our personal business. We can pay our bills online, shop online, bank online, and even date online!
We can even buy and sell stocks online. Traders love having the ability to look at their accounts whenever they want to, and brokers like having the ability to take orders over the Internet, as opposed to the telephone.
Most brokers and brokerage houses now offer online trading to their clients. Another great thing about trading online is that fees and commissions are often lower. While online trading is great, there are some drawbacks.
If you are new to investing, having the ability to actually speak with a broker can be quite beneficial. If you aren’t stock market savvy, online trading may be a dangerous thing for you. If this is the case, make sure that you learn as much as you can about trading stocks before you start trading online.
You should also be aware that you don’t have a computer with Internet access attached to you. You won’t always have the ability to get online to make a trade. You need to be sure that you can call and speak with a broker if this is the case, using the online broker. This is true whether you are an advanced trader or a beginner.
It is also a good idea to go with an online brokerage company that has been around for a while. You won’t find one that has been in business for fifty years of course, but you can find a company that has been in business that long and now offers online trading.
Again, online trading is a beautiful thing – but it isn’t for everyone. Think carefully before you decide to do your trading online, and make sure that you really know what you are doing!
You say you know where your money goes and you don’t need it all written down to keep up with it? I issue you this challenge. Keep track of every penny you spend for one month and I do mean every penny.
You will be shocked at what the itty-bitty expenses add up to. Take the total you spent on just one unnecessary item for the month, multiply it by 12 for months in a year and multiply the result by 5 to represent 5 years.
That is how much you could have saved AND drawn interest on in just five years. That, my friend, is the very reason all of us need a budget.
If we can get control of the small expenses that really don’t matter to the overall scheme of our lives, we can enjoy financial success.
The little things really do count. Cutting what you spend on lunch from five dollars a day to three dollars a day on every work day in a five day work week saves $10 a week… $40 a month… $480 a year… $2400 in five years….plus interest.
See what I mean… it really IS the little things and you still eat lunch everyday AND that was only one place to save money in your daily living without doing without one thing you really need. There are a lot of places to cut expenses if you look for them.
Set some specific long term and short term goals. There are no wrong answers here. If it’s important to you, then it’s important period.
If you want to be able to make a down payment on a house, start a college fund for your kids, buy a sports car, take a vacation to Aruba… anything… then that is your goal and your reason to get a handle on your financial situation now.
A carpenter uses a set of house plans to build a house. If he didn’t the bathroom might get overlooked altogether.
Rocket Scientists would never begin construction on a new booster rocket without a detailed set of design specifications. Yet most of us go blindly out into the world without an inkling of an idea about finances and without any plan at all.
Not very smart of us, is it?
A money plan is called a budget and it is crucial to get us to our desired financial goals.
Without a plan we will drift without direction and end up marooned on a distant financial reef.
If you have a spouse or a significant other, you should make this budget together. Sit down and figure out what your joint financial goals are…long term and short term.
Then plan your route to get to those goals. Every journey begins with one step and the first step to attaining your goals is to make a realistic budget that both of you can live with.
A budget should never be a financial starvation diet. That won’t work for the long haul. Make reasonable allocations for food, clothing, shelter, utilities and insurance and set aside a reasonable amount for entertainment and the occasional luxury item. Savings should always come first before any spending.
Even a small amount saved will help you reach your long term and short term financial goals. You can find many budget forms on the internet. Just use any search engine you choose and type in “free budget forms”.
You’ll get lots of hits. Print one out and work on it with your spouse or significant other. Both of you will need to be happy with the final result and feel like it’s something you can stick to.
Have you ever noticed that the things you buy every week at the grocery and hardware stores go up a few cents between shopping trips? Not by much…just by a little each week but they continue to creep up and up.
All it takes for the price to jump up by a lot is a little hiccup in the world wide market, note the price of gasoline as it relates to world affairs.
There is a way that we can keep these price increases from impacting our personal finances so much and that is by buying in quantity and finding the best possible prices for the things we use and will continue to use everyday… things that will keep just as well on the shelves in our homes as it does on the shelves at the grocery store or hardware store.
For instance, dog food and cat food costs about 10% less when bought by the case than it does when bought at the single can price and if you wait for close out prices you save a lot more than that.
Set aside some space in your home and make a list of things that you use regularly which will not spoil. Any grain or grain products will need to be stored in airtight containers that rats can’t get into so keep that in mind.
Then set out to find the best prices you can get on quantity purchases of such things as bathroom items and dry and canned food.
You will be surprised at how much you can save by buying a twenty pound bag of rice as opposed to a one pound bag but don’t forget that it must be kept in a rat proof container.
You can buy some clothing items such as men’s socks and underwear because those styles don’t change, avoid buying children’s and women’s clothing, those styles change and sizes change too drastically.
Try to acquire and keep a two year supply of these items and you can save hundreds of dollars.
Rebates have become increasingly popular in the last few years on a lot of items and certainly on electronic items and computers. Rebates of $20, $50 or $100 are not uncommon.
I’ve even seen items advertised as “free after rebate”. Do these rebates come under the heading of “too good to be true”? Some of them do and there are “catches” to watch out for but if you are careful, rebates can help you get some really good deals.
The way a rebate works is that you pay the listed price for an item then mail in a form and the bar code to the manufacturer and they send you a refund thus reducing the price of what you paid for the item except with a time delay of several weeks.
Rule #1. Rebates from reputable companies are usually just fine.
You can be pretty sure you will get the promised rebate from Best Buy, Amazon or Dell but you should probably not count on getting one from a company you’ve never heard of. If you really want the product and are OK with paying the price listed then buy it but don’t count on actually getting the refund.
Rule #2. Check rebate expiration dates.
Many times products will stay on the shelf of a retailer after the date for sending in the rebate offer has expired so check that date carefully.
Rule #3. Be sure you have all the forms required to file for the rebate before you leave the store.
Rebates will almost always require a form to be filled out, a receipt for the purchase and a bar code.
Rule #4. Back up your rebate claim.
Make copies of everything you send in to get your rebate including the bar code. Stuff gets lost in the mail all the time and if the rebate is for $50 it’s worth the trouble to back up your claim.
Answer these questions truthfully:
If you answered “yes” to any two of the above questions, you are an impulse spender and indulge yourself in retail therapy.
This is not a good thing. It will prevent you from saving for the important things like a house, a new car, a vacation or retirement. You must set some financial goals and resist spending money on items that really don’t matter in the long run.
Impulse spending will not only put a strain on your finances but your relationships, as well. To overcome the problem, the first thing to do is learn to separate your needs from your wants.
Advertisers blitz us hawking their products at us 24/7. The trick is to give yourself a cooling-off period before you buy anything that you have not planned for.
When you go shopping, make a list and take only enough cash to pay for what you have planned to buy. Leave your credit cards at home.
If you see something you think you really need, give yourself two weeks to decide if it is really something you need or something you can easily do without. By following this simple solution, you will mend your financial fences and your relationships.
Self confidence is one of the many things we think everyone else have expect us. Don’t be harsh with yourself. Of course you are in equal footing with the person standing next to you. If he has the confidence you admire and you loath for not having the same confidence then don’t get caught with the idea that you can’t be like him. In fact, if you just set your mind to gaining confidence then you are sure to be like him someday.
People are not born with confidence. We have to develop it and there are many interplaying factors that must be put to balance before we can actually create an ideal self confidence that would guide us through our achievements.
Self confidence stems down from within and in how we think and feel for ourselves. Its development is affected by things that we normally don’t have control of. Say, the models we had who either encouraged us or who watched us fall face flat. It is also affected by the events in our life to which we either reacted positively or negatively, thus our anchors for developing our own sense of self. It is also dependent on how well we were able to maximize our potentials.
Here are some guidelines that you can follow to lead you in gaining your self confidence:
If your past bothers you and you think that it has greatly affected the level of your self confidence (which is by the way a solid truth) then just remember one thing- anyone can begin something at any given moment of his life. You can always start gaining your self confidence even if you are already staring to have those dreaded lines in the face.
The past is a stale check, the future is a blind hope. You can only bargain on the “now” that you have. Build your foundations on it and start anew. It is never too late to gain back the confidence you have lost or the confident you never actually have.
Take stock of yourself. From the moment of our birth to the day we die, our gifts would remain in us. The difference though lies in the way we were able to accept and enhance these realities. If we would only recognize the innate genius that lives in each of us then we would be able to achieve far more than our wildest dreams would command.
We only have one life and we only have one self to live with. Why waste this life because the self did not believe in the potentials he has? Now, if you don’t want to fall into history who is someone who failed to start dreaming then you must act now and be convinced that dreams don’t starts with “d” and end with “s”. Instead, it ends with reaping the fruits of your achievements and starts with believing in yourself.
Sometimes, lack of self confidence is only a product of our imagination. There are people who believe in us, only we don’t believe in what they believe. We choose not to listen to their encouragement because we find no hope in things. We make ourselves believe that we are not capable of doing anything good when actually, there are those people who stand in awe of our subtle achievements. You won believe it but sometimes, these things do happen. And when they do, the people who are caught in these instances are often unaware of their value to the other person caught in the same event.
How to get self confidence is the central issue when tackling about the development of self confidence in an individual who, for long, have believed that his self worth is deficient.
It goes without saying that those confident individuals can bear themselves better than those who have lower sense of the “self”. They are the achievers, the people of the limelight, the center of the society. They walk straight, speak their meanings very well and influence people, both subtly and obviously. In short, they are those who care recognizable even from afar.
Sometimes, self confident people are very much loved by the society. It is maybe due to their charisma or they are, by nature very amiable. However, there are those self confident individuals who, just by leaving makes the room lighter.
These are two very dissimilar display of self confidence. One, destroys a person’s credibility and the other intensifies his personality. And obviously, you would not want the consequences of being too confident of yourself that the people no longer view you as effective, instead they see you as annoyance to their daily affairs.
Self confidence comes from within. Outside stimulation may help but it would all still boil down to knowing yourself and using that knowledge to gain confidence.
To get self confidence, you must realize that your limitations must not limit you and your attributes must not destroy you. Instead, use all these factors to develop a personality that would be productive for you and all those that surround you.
“Know thyself!”, says the Oracle at Delphi. Though this might have been said thousands of years ago, it is undeniably true that we still can use the wisdom it says.
Know yourself and get confidence. Recognize though that knowledge comes nowhere but inside you. Thus, you have to accept the reality that unless you embrace you flaws and perfection, the demons of low self confidence would stay forever lingering in your being.
There is a great risk in knowing too much of yourself though if your foundations of self control is not much too developed. You would be exposed to your imperfections and since control is not yet yours, it is possible that you will be eaten by your own flows. This condition is closely intertwined with thought rumination wherein you seem to go around in your circle of thoughts about your losses and failures regardless of your achievements.
Another danger of having no control of yourself while trying to get self confidence is that you might get too confident that you would forget the real value of having the sense of self. As we have mentioned earlier, over confidence is just as dangerous as having no confidence at all. This would send you back to failures or worse to eventual downfall.
Knowing yourself is one factor that may either be dangerous or productive. Self awareness often times help people realize how wonderful their creation was. They learn to give worth to their capacities and attributes that are obviously as special as those that may be found with other people. We are all unique and that is a fact. Our marks of unique can be seen through closely looking at our capabilities and our incapacities. Our uniqueness is manifested on the natural gifts that add to our greater self value. Our uniqueness can be seen though our potentials that we may either ignore or maximize at will.
All these are truths that would stay hidden to you unless you have learned to contemplate on your being and be aware of who you truly are.
Nobody knows himself better than him.
This seem incredibly true for those who can actually handle themselves and those who can actually benefit from the knowledge they can derive and use from knowing who they truly are.
Introspection is the habit of looking inward. Like most human activities, this would either assert positive or negative effects. There are times that reflection of one’s image may create healthy products in the person. That is, when he is focused on his entire being and in return, considers this whole picture as an effective juncture to find where and what is missing and lacking. That way, he would find means of compensating for such. However, introspection may also turn against a person when it has become too focused on the negative aspects of one’s personality. This then is called thought rumination.
Thought rumination is somewhat similar to that of a caged hamster. This is a way to run in tight circles by obsessing one’s self on a loss, or a problem or any form of ambiguity that hinders the moving on process.
But in order to build self confidence, one has to know where the problem truly rooted. This can only be done by reflecting one’s values and behaviors. If you find it hard to detach yourself from the actual situation or to stay away from thought rumination, you may rely on other people’s assistance.
But you see, any form of self analysis is beneficial so long as it is properly guided. Depending on your focus, you can either help take out yourself from having too low self confidence or to land on the floor face flat.
If you can redirect your focus on your attributes that will help you build yourself confidence then by all means do. Sometimes, even when people are around to help us, it is only we that we can actually raise ourselves back. Life changing routes usually happen when we pass by a path and find that path to be the right way for us. People may point us to our direction but without our willingness to drive us there, no amount of help can truly help us except when it comes from our self.
Self motivation will greatly affect the ways by which we build our self confidence. Unlike the detrimental habit of saying- “my life is messed up” or “my life is nothing but a good way to kill time”, you can use positive reinforcements and say otherwise.
You may not have realized it but you are a genius in your own fashion. A philosopher once said that all men have an innate beast within him. True and we can actually see these beasts manifesting in our daily affairs. Yet this truth does not negate the fact that all of us has an innate genius struggling to come out. This genius will always perform for our benefit if only we would recognize and help him grow.
It is not only negative to demean yourself but it is also unfair for the good person in you. Let that person shine and rule over your life and you will see, life truly has more than imaginable brighter sides.
In one way or another, you have to discover how to build your self confidence to actualize that genius. Whether you choose to have somebody else’s help or find your own way to realization.
The Power of Grit 