Saturday, December 11, 2010

7 Money Tips for 20 somethings

Are you someone who is just fresh out of school and have been receiving your paycheck for the past few years?

How do you plan and organize your money so that you will have sufficient to meet your needs as well as plan for a nice vacation every now and then?

Here's a great article on Yahoo that teaches you 7 tips to better manage your money.
20-something Money Tips

To add a few more pointers to this.

  • Build up a portfolio of dividend paying stocks that you can eventually use to offset against daily expenses. For instance, I know of someone who has been buying dividend paying stocks for the past 7 years and now has enough dividends of about $24,000 annually to pay off for basic expenses. 
  • Plan a percentage for tithing and charity. Giving to charity has surprising effects and many good things do happen to you out of the blue.This has been my personal experience.
  • Split your savings into 3 bank accounts, one for saving, one for investing to grow your wealth and another for tithing.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Do you have these 5 Bad Money Habits that are wreaking a havoc on your Personal Finance?

5 Bad Money Habits You Should Try To Break - Yahoo! Singapore Finance

The above are Five Money Habits that would wreak Havoc on your Personal Finance if you don't break it.

Check it out!

Friday, November 12, 2010

How to Beat Inflation with ETFs

These days I am reading a lot more on Yahoo Finance as their lineup on Personal Finance and investing news is really fast and up to date especially with local Singapore Investing climate.

I am currently reading on hedges against inflation when I chanced upon this article on ETFs investing.

ETF stands for Exchange-Traded-Funds and there are several ETFs in Singapore

1) STI ETF which tracks the STI Index.
2) iShares
3) Poems also has good introductory seminars for ETF investing.

This is a great article and a good way to hedge against inflation

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

How to Save a Third of Your Income and how to grow it

October seems to be the month that throws spotlight on personal financial issues and corporate finance as companies begin to post their third quarter results.

Both on MSN Mney and Yahoo, we find articles on savings and investing.

One particular article I find online seems to strike a chord with most with inflation raging and wages rising in incremental levels, this article is on "How to Save a Third of Your Income"

In this article, the author of the  book Generation Income shares

  • How to save a third of your income with little sacrifice.
  • How to grow that income
  • How to make savings automatic.
I like to add my own ideas of what to do with the one-third of income you save.
  • First one-third will go towards a savings account for long term savings such as purchasing a property, emergency cash etc.
  • Second one-third will go towards investments to grow your wealth
  • Third one-third will allow you to share your wealth to Tithe.
I have seen people who investing the second one-third of their income in substantial dividend producing stocks and used that income either to reinvest in stocks to build a larger portfolio for retirement or used their dividends to pay off their mortgage payment. There are also couples who live off dividend payments and used it for their basic living expenses.See this article on "Investment Strategy returns Dividends"