Two Ideas That Will Change Your View About Investing Forever

One day, when I was taking a shower (now readers know where all my inspiration comes from!!), I reflected on my years of working, investing, conversations with friends/family/colleague and tried to distill what were the two most important ideas or messages that I should tell anyone who was getting started on investing/retirement planning/personal finance.

You see, in Asia or in Singapore, personal finance is still pretty much a taboo topic. ?It isn't the best lunch conversation topic (unless one is talking about the latest stock picks and how who and who made a million bucks from some investment). ?But people in general tend not to reveal their own investments, savings, etc, etc. Money is almost like a taboo topic that is not discussed.

I have heard and read about so many ideas but I think these are the two most revolutionary ideas that will perhaps change the perception or philosophy of investors:

Idea #1 - Investing is for Income


I don't really recall when this idea struck me or came into my head. ?It might have been a book I read or when I was just thinking about retirement planning in general. ?But the key idea to investing is not to "earn a million dollars" or to "buy a big house", etc. ?Well, those are the material things that people want and I guess it is easier for people to relate to some kind of physical possession or numerical value to determine that they have reached financial freedom. ?However, this is probably misguided.

For most people, becoming a millionaire seems to be the ultimate goal. ?However, if you dig deeper and ask them why they want to be a millionaire, it is probably due to the pre-conceived idea that with a million dollars, they no longer have to work and can retire in peace. ?That probably explains why many people buy the lottery. The idea of having a big house is also related to the very simplistic idea that "if I own a big house, I must be rich, just like people on TV/movies. ?If that is the case, I no longer need to work". ?While these physical possessions gives many people a financial goal to strive for, at the end of the day, if you drill down deeper, you know that reaching these arbitrarily set goals probably does not put one in a better stead to achieve financial freedom.

At the end of the day, it boils down to cashflow. ?Give a big spender a million dollars and let him retire at age 30. ?It is possible that the million dollars can be spent even before his lifetime and he will have to return to work. ?And that probably explains why many lottery ticket winners end up becoming bankrupt or broke again. ?So the idea is cashflow. ?And the idea is that all that you are investing for is not for a big house or for a million dollars, but it is for the sole purpose of income. ?It is the common Chinese saying : " qian sheng qian" or "using money to grow more money".

When one invests, the million dollar goal (or two million dollar goal) is actually so that you can start drawing down on that sum of money during your retirement years. ?That is how most financial planners will actually work out how much you need for your retirement. ?They take the age you intend to retire, and the expected life expectancy, and calculate your monthly expenditure to indicate what is the $X dollar value that you need in retirement funds. ?But so many people forget that the $X dollar value is meant to provide them with income when they stop working and stop drawing an income.

So at the end of the day, all investing is for the sake of income. ?Nothing more and nothing less. ?That is the sole goal of investing. ?You are basically trying to build up a stockpile of cash that you can tap upon when you are not drawing any money. ?If you have $10million dollars invested in an instrument that gives you a 10% per annum yield, you will have $1million in income to spend every year. ?That is as simple as it gets. ?If you put that $10million in a bank with 0% interest, what you draw down on that bank account every month is basically income while the original value of your bank account just gets depleted month after month.

This idea is "revolutionary" because not many people I know of think or speak of investing in that sort of way. ?They always speak of investing as some sort of arbitrary goal or just about making more money from the stock market. ?If you realise that investing is about income, you will realise that building up that income is just one side of the story. ?What you as an individual will also need to manage is your monthly expenditure so that it does not exceed your monthly income. ?And isn't that all there is to personal finance. ?No wonder we hear the frequent maxim: "Spend less than you earn". ?Because even when you retire, you also need to spend less that you get in income.

Once this idea is firmly implanted in your head, it will then help you better strategise how you want to go about building up that income stream for your retirement years. ?For some people, it could be just a bank account. ?For others, it might be bonds or dividend yielding stocks/REITs or businesses or even rental income from property.

Here is where the 2nd idea then comes in a little much easier....

Idea #2 - If You Intend to Work for the Rest of Your Life, You Don't Really Need to Invest


I know that this idea will probably draw a lot of flak from some readers who will still think that it is important to invest. ?What I am alluding to is the hypothetical situation of a person who has no intention to retire and whose life expectancy is say at age 80. ?Effectively, a financial planner who does his calculation will realise that there is no investment product he can offer this person especially if the person is willing to live within his means.

If one is able to work till death and still draw an income, then you literally will not have the need to set up a retirement fund. ?However, there is of course all the unexpected events that life can throw at us. ?Illness, retrenchment, disabilities, etc, etc can all potentially strike us even if we intend to work for life. ?So at the end of the day, one will still need to prepare for such unforeseen scenarios either through investing/savings/insurance.

I don't intend to retire, but I still invest. ?And the reason I invest is just in case there comes a day when I am forced to retire.

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Chaka Khan to perform Houston tribute at Apollo

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Sell Your Home Faster in Winnipeg | The Editors Choice

Staging is something that real estate agents use to help sell a home faster. In the city of Winnipeg, the real estate market is extremely competitive. Any edge an agent can get by using the house staging services Winnipeg real estate investors have come to rely on would be a good move for that agent. Staging works whether the house is inhabited or not.

The best way to get the Winnipeg interior design of a home to stand out is by using professional home staging Winnipeg solutions. Staging is when furniture is added to a home to make the home look more appealing to prospective buyers. It is most common in homes that are abandoned or have sparse furniture. But house staging services Winnipeg agents call on can help any home to look more appealing.

It could be that the furniture in a home is in need of being replaced or there is simply not enough furniture to create the atmosphere that the agent is looking for. That is when the home staging Winnipeg experts are called in to help a home look more appealing to buyers. When a home is staged properly, it can almost sell itself without much help from the agent.

Winnipeg interior design professionals understand the importance of making sure that a home stands out to a buyer. That is why the best real estate agents in the area call on staging experts to help make a house look more like a home. It is a small investment that can make the house sell faster and for more money.

This entry was posted in Services and tagged home staging winnipeg, house staging services winnipeg, interior decorating winnipeg, interior design winnipeg, staging home for sale in winnipeg, winnipeg interior design by proartlelisting. Bookmark the permalink.

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JUST HOW SMS REALLY WORKS ? Google Chrome Extensions

More about this extension

In the past 2 full decades, one of the industries which have greatly changed is which of mobile telephony, and it is now quite common to see people using phones on the run. Making calls and the sending of text messages are the primary functions from the cell phone, and in recent occasions, it seems like all that people are doing is actually sending SMS, with calls being restricted to emergencies or official issues. However, not many are well versed in how the characters that you simply put in the message get relayed out of your handset to the handset from the receiver, and this is what we will look at.

SMS is an acronym with regard to ?short message service?, and from this we get to understand that the approach to communication between the sender and recipient would be by means texts. The message is also supposed to be short. The maximum number of characters that amounts to some single text is a hundred and sixty, and characters would make reference to numbers, letters and symbols of the Latin alphabet, and also the areas. When it comes towards the Chinese alphabet, the maximum size to have an SMS is seventy figures. Should you go above this limit, the SMS would end up being sent as two texts. This should not worry you though, because, the cell phones would seamlessly link in the two messages.

Now, when it comes to the way the SMS is relayed in one mobile phone to another, first of all, you need to know that even on standby mode when you are not talking on your phone, it is continually receiving and sending information. This is done between the phone and its mobile phone tower, over a pathway that is referred to as a control channel. This is done so the system of the mobile phone knows in which cell you?re in and allow for easy change of cells as you go from one place to another. This is a way of registering the presence of the cell phone, meaning you can help to make or receive calls as well as texts.

Thus, when a message is actually sent, it first goes through the SMS centre for your mobile service provider, then to the mobile phone tower, and this tower would then forward the message to your phone through the manage channel. One receipt of the actual message, a reverse action would occur, if it is activated, and give the sender feedback that the message has gotten in order to its destination, what we call the delivery report. All this usually happens in quite a few days, hence showing you just how much technology works to your advantage. If the phone is not on, the message would be saved to the SIM card number of the recipient, and would then come up in the internal memory from the phone when activated.

The message is not the only data that is sent, but also time it was sent, the number it was meant for, length of the information, amongst other things that many senders never take keen note of.

sms

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Weotta Go: An iPhone App That Suggests Activities For Right Now

Here's an iPhone app for those moments when you're wondering, "Okay, I've got some free time right now ? what should I do?" Weotta Go is actually the latest product from Weotta, a startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. At the time, the company had built a website that helped people make plans, such as figuring out where to eat dinner tonight. The iPhone app, on the other hand, is more focused on spontaneity ? say you're at work and want to find somewhere nearby to grab a sandwich, or you've just met up with some friends and don't know where to head next.

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Phys Ed: Cancer Survivors Who Exercise Live Longer - NYTimes.com

Can going for a walk improve cancer survivors? long-term prognosis? It may, according to new research showing that exercise can lower survivors? risk of premature death, not only from cancer but from any cause. The findings are likely to resonate widely at a time when about 14 million Americans, and many more worldwide, have survived cancer.

In one report, a major new review published this month in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, scientists at the agency gathered available studies examining exercise and cancer survivorship, dating to 1950. Most had been published in the past five years.

?This is an area of growing scientific interest,? says Dr. Rachel Ballard-Barbash, the associate director for applied research at the National Cancer Institute and lead author of the study. ?Exercise is an accessible, low-cost intervention. But before we can suggest that cancer survivors become physically active, we need to understand what effects exercise has? on the bodies and life spans of those who?ve been given a cancer diagnosis.

To date, messages about the effects of exercise on cancer patients have been mixed. Some physicians have worried that exercise might exacerbate the fatigue that is common after cancer treatment. Others have raised concerns that the physical stress of exercise could even create conditions within the body that might contribute to tumor recurrence.

A 2010 roundtable convened by the American College of Sports Medicine concluded that exercise appeared to be safe for most cancer survivors, but anyone whose treatment had involved drugs harmful to the heart muscle or bone density should be closely monitored. But those recommendations didn?t directly address the issue of whether or how exercise might affect tumor recurrence or to what degree exercise could affect a survivor?s overall life span.

So those became the concerns that Dr. Ballard-Barbash and her colleagues set out to examine in more detail.

In the end, they found 45 studies that looked at physical activity among people who?d received a diagnosis of cancer. The types of tumors studied included prostate, ovarian, brain and colorectal. But a majority of the studies, ?as in most cancer research,? involved women who had survived breast cancer, Dr. Ballard-Barbash said. ?There?s a lot of research money in that field,? so, in general, there is more available science.

Most of the studies also were observational, meaning that patients completed questionnaires about their activities, which can be unreliable since people may not accurately recall their true activity levels. Only a few were actual experiments, during which volunteers were assigned to exercise or to remain sedentary. And although none were designed expressly to determine what biochemical or genetic effects exercise might be having on cells within the body, several did look at various biomarkers that have been found to play a role in cancer recurrence and progression.

As it turned out, virtually all of the studies, whatever their methodology, showed that regular physical activity ?decreased the risk of cancer-related mortality and of all-cause mortality,? Dr. Ballard-Barbash said.

Exercise, in other words, made it less likely that a survivor would subsequently die from a recurrence of his or her cancer. When Dr. Ballard-Barbash and her colleagues teased out specific information about biomarkers related to cancer recurrence, they found that exercise tended reliably to improve insulin levels, reduce inflammation and increase populations of the very immune system cells that are thought to attack tumors.

Exercise also lessened the chances that a survivor of cancer would later succumb prematurely to other common diseases like heart disease or diabetes. ?We live in an era when cancer has moved away from being generally fatal to being itself a chronic disease,? Dr. Ballard-Barbash said. People can live many years after a cancer diagnosis. ?If they are inactive,? she continued, ?they risk developing other chronic diseases.?

Exercise made the cancer survivors in the studies she and her colleagues examined healthier and far more likely to enjoy a longer life span than if they were sedentary, although she cautioned that the patients who exercised may have been in better health or faced a less aggressive cancer to begin with.

Interestingly, exercise did not seem to increase fatigue among most survivors. More often, it lessened it.

Researchers found similar results in another new study published this month, this one involving colorectal cancer survivors in the Netherlands. Those who exercised reported much less exhaustion and, in general, greater health-related quality of life than those who did not. ?Fatigue and the fear of tiredness may be a barrier to physical activity for some people? who?ve survived cancer, said Laurien M. Buffart, a professor at VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, who led the study. ?But more and more evidence suggests the reverse,? that exercise energizes people who are undergoing or have completed cancer treatment.

And the exercise does not need to be intimidating or vigorous. ?In our review, the most common activity was walking,? Dr. Ballard-Barbash said, ?which happens to be an activity that is within the scope of almost anyone.?

She added that many more experiments are needed to determine the ideal dose and type of exercise to improve long-term survival after cancer treatment. Survivors also should consult a physician, of course, about the effects of treatment on the heart or about their readiness, in general, to exercise. But if you get the go-ahead, she said, ?it appears that any activity,? in any amount, ?is beneficial for those who?ve had cancer.?

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Finding companies that offer the most affordable car rental prices ...

Finding affordable rates and the best deals is something that drivers are always looking for. Rental rates often seem somewhat mysterious. Myriad factors are included in the rate calculation used by car rental companies. The more you know about the different rate factors, the better prepared you are to negotiate with your current rental agency or simply find a new one that offers more competitive rates.

Reservation Fees

You will be assessed a fee when you reserve your rental. If you are unable to follow-through on your reservation, you may still be required to pay this fee which will be charged to the credit card you used to make the reservation. Some agencies drop the fee if you honor your reservation while others add it to your bill.

Rental Fees

Each rental company calculates their fees differently. Some base rates on distance traveled while other rental vehicles by the hour. Fuel expenses may or may not be included in the fee structure. The rates charged will be higher if the rental agency deems the areas you plan to drive in as high-risk.

Taxes and Surcharges

Added to your rental fees, these can be the hardest to understand. You may have multiple taxes depending on the particular rental agency as well as its location. Even if you ask for clarification, the counter representative may not be able to fully explain the surcharges. Do not accept a vague response. If they do not know why a particular charge is included, ask them to remove it.

Rental Insurance Costs

Not all renters buy the additional insurance offered by car rental companies. Those that do will have that added to their rental cost. Not everyone needs to purchase rental insurance. If you already have this included in your regular car insurance policy, it is not necessary to also purchase it from the rental agency.

Vehicle Damage Fees

What happens if you are involved in an accident while driving a rental car? Who is responsible for the damages? You need to know this before signing a rental contract because if the car is stolen or damaged and you are held responsible, it can cost you.

Discounts

When rate calculations are made these are the last to be applied. You might get discounts because you belong to AAA or another membership organization. Special offers may be given by car rental companies during slow rental times to encourage drivers to rent from them.

This entry was posted on May 16, 2012, 10:32 am and is filed under Car Rental. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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