Our finances are our bread and butter, the feature of our lives that makes everything tick. With taxes, cheques, loans, credit and mortgages, the whole thing can become slightly overwhelming. So, just what can you do to help yourself help your money?

The online space is a wonderful tool with many assets. This means there are no shortage of ways to pull your money organisation together, and here are but a few of them.

1. Online and mobile banking

It’s surprising to learn that so many people still aren’t banking online. In fact, in a relatively recent survey, it was revealed that only 51 percent of adults bank online regularly. What about that other 49 percent?!

There are certain stigmas surrounding online banking, and they’re understandable. They are generally believed by the older generations, and most of them are concerned with security risks. And while it’s true that online banking is as safe as you make it, it’s far more beneficial that just using a branch.

You can send and receive payments, check statements and open new bank accounts in minutes. In fact, it takes mere minutes to open a brand new bank account from the comfort of your laptop – I can attest to that. So, if you aren’t banking online or on the go yet, consider it. It could be the solution you need to better organise your money.

2. Receive financial supplies with the click of a mouse

The rise of online shopping and giants like Amazon has made it pretty easy to find a wide range of commodities on the internet. You can now order cheques online, buy bank books and even browse for credit and bank cards, to arrive within days. It sure beats the old-fashioned method of strolling down to your local vault and requesting some documents.

Part of the solution to organised financials is saving time. Just like online banking in point number one, you don’t have to lift a finger with the online space. You can order everything you need and check your bank statement within two minutes, while watching Game of Thrones.

3. Tracking income and expenses with ease

As many self-employed contractors and business owners will attest to, tracking finances is difficult. With the latest news that could see the introduction of a quarterly tax return, it’s never been more important to watch our money.

Luckily, it’s simple to do so. A service such as Google Sheets is a cloud-based spreadsheet creator, that can tot up your daily, weekly and yearly earnings with ease. What’s more, you can access it anywhere that has an internet connection, from the airport to the library.

4. Send invoices quickly and hassle-free

Jumping back into self-employment, businesses around the world will have heard of the dreaded invoice. If you forget to send it, you don’t get paid. It can be a hard document to organise, especially if you’re owed a lot of different amounts of cash. If your business wants to make money, you’ll need to use these documents every week – but how to do so efficiently?

Well, luckily, the internet is here to help. Using an online invoicing tool you can even schedule invoices to go out on certain dates. You could even line up your invoices for the next month, or two months. Additionally, like Google Sheets, many of these systems are cloud-based, so you can update them and send from anywhere.

Hopefully these tips have helped you somewhat. Our money is our most precious commodity, so give it the attention it deserves!

Share to Explore !!

Facebook

Digg

Pinterest

Twitter

Reddit

Linkedin

StumbleUpon

Tumblr

Print

email

Yummly

Buffer

Who said investment is only for the wealthy people? Even a few hundreds of dollars which you don’t need immediately, can help you make good returns. We always plan to save a considerable amount of money for investing in things that can promise us good returns. Money management is indeed a skill or an art which you need to master before taking the plunge. There is no single process to manage your funds and there are indeed a number of considerations which you need to take into account while investing. Irrespective of whether you’re saving for your child’s education or you’re saving for a house, you need an effective plan to keep things in place. If you’re considering investment, here are some smart tips that you can follow in order to stay on the right financial track. Check them out.

1. Don’t pay heed to the financial media: If you earnestly wish to invest your dollars intelligently, you need to ignore the facts which you get to know from the financial media as most of them are meant to deviate you from your goal and make costly blunders. Even when you hear something and that turns to be true, don’t ever get tempted to follow it immediately. Don’t allow the latest trends and media nurture your poor investment habits.

2. Let go of your emotions if you want to make money: The success of an investment is determined by the ability to manage risk and fear. Avoid buying on impulse as that always leads to bad investment decisions. Even if you can’t afford to be an optimist, you should definitely be a realist who evaluates and analyses the statistics and arrives at an objective. Don’t allow your emotions to influence your investment decisions.

3. Predict the trends, don’t follow them: If you have saved some money for investment, the first thing you should realise is that you should try to be different and not follow the herd. As people are influenced by public opinion, it is easier to go by the trends but that won’t be good for your investment career. In today’s market, traders should be of due diligence and if you don’t want to be among the crowd, you should always stay ahead of it.

4. Don’t spend more than what you earn: If you wish to build lot of wealth, all that you require doing is to spend much less than what you are actually earning. This might sound like the most –obvious thing to suggest but majority of the people fail to follow this advice mostly. You might look forward to increasing your income through strategies like getting a raise in your job or trying some passive jobs from home. Adopt all forms of frugality in order to reduce your spending.

Hence, if you’re trying your best to manage your dollars and use them in investment, you can take into account the above mentioned tips. You may also take a look at Banc de Binary in order to know more on appropriate ways of investment.

Share to Explore !!

Facebook

Digg

Pinterest

Twitter

Reddit

Linkedin

StumbleUpon

Tumblr

Print

email

Yummly

Buffer

Getting retailers to stock your product is notoriously difficult. The development process is often long. The money that you need to risk is high. And often the terms you end up with aren’t much to write home about.

It can be brutal for smaller players. But, as with most business operations, there’s a process than can improve your chances.

Have A Plan

Before you start out even developing a product, it’s a good idea to have a plan. In that plan, you want to map out all the usual financial metrics that will tell you how many units you’ll have to sell to make a healthy profit.

But you also want to include all those stores that you plan to approach. For many products, it’s necessary to sell a large number of units to break even. So this may influence the type of retailer you approach. If you’re looking to market a new health food product, you might want to plan to pitch to chains of newsagents.

Just make sure that your product complements their current advertising persona. It wouldn’t make sense for you to advertise health food in a fish and chip shop, for example.

Be Direct When Pitching

Getting time with retailers is difficult. Like other resources, their time is finite. They want to know immediately why they should stock your product and how it is priced.

All they care about is whether your product will improve their business’s bottom line and you have to make sure that it does.

Adapt To Their Systems

One common stumbling block in the way of getting a product into the stores is using the right systems. Often smaller companies are prevented from retailing because they haven’t completed a GS1 application.

Fortunately, there are plenty of barcode solutions out there that allow you to quickly and cheaply register. Having a barcode ready to go with your product will make it more attractive. It’s just one less thing for the retailer to have to think about.

Understand The Needs Of The Retailer

It might be the case that your product is amazing for the consumer. But is it amazing for the retailer too? Retailers want products that will sell reliably. If your product is something quite quirky and different, they may be reluctant to take it on.

This is where doing your research can help. Find out whether any of your competitors has stocked their products with other retailers. Then find retailers with similar characteristics. It’s likely that they will look at your product favourably if their competitors offer your competitor’s product.

Don’t Give Up

Too many entrepreneurs think that the only way to success is to land one big contract with a big retailer. However, this is rarely what happens, even for the most successful products.

Rather businesses start off small, using independent local stores to get their product off the ground. Then follows a long, drawn-out process that involves a lot of setbacks and rejection. Often, it’s only after many years and tremendous effort that products find their way into the big retailers. But if you stick it, the rewards are there for the taking.

Share to Explore !!

Facebook

Digg

Pinterest

Twitter

Reddit

Linkedin

StumbleUpon

Tumblr

Print

email

Yummly

Buffer

When you see the stock market in movies, it looks easy. It looks like nothing but fun and quick cash (and sometimes illegal substances). And, for sure, the real stock market can offer those things. But the films you’ve been watching often leave out the unsexy details. One of those unsexy details is capital gains tax.

Many people have heard the term capital gains tax. Many know what it is but don’t think it applies to stocks. Well, they do! Here’s a quick rundown of what you need to know about these taxes on your stock sales.

Capital gains tax: a quick explanation

A capital asset is something you own that you use outside of business. The money you’ve sunk into the initial price and subsequent costs are combined and called the basis. When you sell a capital asset, you either make a gain or a loss. If the price at which you sell the capital asset is more than the basis, then you’ve made a profit. And in the government’s book, that means you’ve made a taxable capital gain. The capital gain minus the basis is the total profit. That value is what is going to be taxed via a capital gains tax. When filing your taxes, you need to get yourself a Schedule D (form 1040).

So this applies to stocks?

Yes. Capital assets include land, vehicles, real estate and securities, among other things. Securities include bonds and stocks. If you own stock for personal investment purposes, then it’s a capital asset. The profit you make from the sale of a stock can be taxed by your national revenue agency. So if you want to work out the total money you’re going to pocket after an exchange, you need to calculate capital gains tax.

Are there different types of gains?

There are indeed. There are what we call long-term gains and short-term gains. Short-term gains are the taxable profits you made from the sale of stock you held for less than a year. They don’t benefit from any special tax rate. The value, minus the basis, is usually taxed depending on your income. Long-term gains are the taxable profits you made from the sale of a stock that you held for over a year. The tax rates on these are much cheaper. In fact, if your ordinary income tax is less than 15%, there’s a chance you’ll pay no capital gains tax at all.

Keeping a record

When it comes time to file your taxes, you need to have everything in order. You’re not going to be taxed for every single stock; that’s unreasonable and will hurt the IRS’s calculator fingers. What you need to do throughout the year is work with your stock broker to record all of your gains and losses. These should be arranged into short-term and long-term. Oddly enough, this is when you find out whether or not you actually made a short-term gain or loss in the long run. If all your short-term losses outweigh all your short-term gains, then you’ve made a short-term loss. Whatever the result, put the calculation on Schedule D when you’re filing your taxes.

A loss isn’t a total loss

Revenue agencies aren’t completely heartless. Keep a record of your losses. You can use these losses to offset any future capital gains tax you incur!

Share to Explore !!

Facebook

Digg

Pinterest

Twitter

Reddit

Linkedin

StumbleUpon

Tumblr

Print

email

Yummly

Buffer

These days it seems everybody wants to be a trader. Despite the financial crash and all of the negative press, trading on the international markets is still trendy.

What’s more, because interest rates are so low, it’s not just regular stock brokers and traders tradings on the forex. Now there are hordes of amateurs looking to make a return on their savings and get in on the action.

The problem however, is that very few of these amateurs know what they’re doing. They’re not following the bet trading practices out there, often because they’ve jumped in too soon. If you decide to start trading, make sure that you do the following.

They Practice Using A Demo Account

Starting a demo account and trialling out forex might seem like a no-brainer. But thousands of people start trading with real money from the get-go, without ever having put in any practice.

Demo accounts will give you an idea of whether the forex is for you. You’ll be able to play about with different financial instruments, like binary options low deposit options and so on. And you’ll eventually get a sense of whether the forex market is a market in which you want to spend time trading. If you like sitting eagerly at your computer all day following the markets, it could be for you. If you’d rather be doing something else, or the thrill just isn’t there for you, you can learn that lesson without having blown any of your money.

They Do Their Research

All investors know that their job is fundamentally about the flow of information. After all, if all information were known, then prices from now until forever would be known too. The real world is, of course, full of uncertainty. But if you can gain insights using historical data or the latest trends, you may be able to predict future price trends. And predicting future price trends is what it’s all about in the foreign exchange markets.

Short term trading tends to depend more on the sentiment of investors in any given moment. If you expect the sentiment towards a currency that you own will soon worsen, sell now and buy it back when the price has fallen.

Underlying fundamentals tend to affect the value of currencies in the long term. So if you’re a long-term investor, you’ll always be on the lookout for political and institutional factors that might adjust prices.

They Don’t Bet All Their Cash At Once

Most investors have portfolios outside of the forex. That’s because the market is notoriously volatile. Yes, there are dizzying highs. But there are also devastating lows.

It’s important to limit your losses by only using about 2% of your funds per trade and incorporating a stop-loss order on your account. Taken together, this will reduce the amount of money that you can lose and afford you sufficient capital to cover your downside.

Remember, you only lose money on a trade when you decide to sell, so having enough capital in the interim is essential to keep your position open.

Share to Explore !!

Facebook

Digg

Pinterest

Twitter

Reddit

Linkedin

StumbleUpon

Tumblr

Print

email

Yummly

Buffer