Fortune Watch

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Does it sometimes seem as though you cannot afford to do things because your financial obligations are holding you back? If you find that you are asking yourself these sorts of questions, perhaps you should take a look at your financial situation and assess whether you are practicing good personal finance management or not. Good personal finance management spends within their income, plan for the future and solve financial problems as they arise. Poor personal finance management pay more, do without and fall behind. If you find yourself in the second category, you can do something about it. You can learn to take charge of your finances by planning your personal finances.

Planning your personal finances doesn’t always come naturally, and even if you’re just beginning to take your financial matters seriously, then you likely need a few personal finance tips.

Evaluate your current financial situation. One of the most important goals for most people is financial independence. Collect accurate information about your personal financial situation. Calculate your net worth which includes the real estate, saving and retirement accounts, and all other assets. This will help you decide how much money you can set aside for meeting future needs and goals.

A basic personal finance tip is to make a budget. A personal finance budget is information made up of your income and expenses and the more accurate this information is, the more likely you are be able to meet your goals and realize your dreams. A personal finance budget should be made for at most one year at a time and include a list of your monthly expenses.

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Does your spouse or partner complain that you’re spending too much money? When your credit card bill arrives, are you surprised to you find that you charged more during the month than you thought? Does your closet contain lots of shoes or clothes that you almost never wear? Do you own every gadget known to man (or woman)? Do you come home from the mall with items you had no intention of buying? Do you spend money on things that you didn’t realize you needed until you saw them on display in the store?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably suffer from impulse spending. When people are unable to save money for the things that are really important to them, like a house, a new car, a vacation, or retirement, impulse spending is often the culprit. If you don’t have specific financial goals, it’s more difficult to resist spending money on items that don’t really have any meaning to you.

Once you’re already saving regularly towards your most important financial goals, you may want to have a fund to use specifically for occasionally spending money on unplanned items. Then you can indulge in occasional impulse spending without jeopardizing your financial future.

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Are you short for month at the end of each month? Do you have 5-10 credit cards, all maxed out to the limit? Do you forget to pay your bills on time? If you have answered, “Yes,” to any of these questions, don’t feel bad and don’t worry. I have some tips that can help you improve your financial picture: Create a Bill-Paying System

The first thing you’ll need to do is to go out and pick up some colored hanging folders. If you don’t have a file cabinet, get a file box that you can find in any stationery store or discount department store. They’re very inexpensive. Then, make a folder for each expense. Use one color for your bank statements, another for your utility bills, and another for credit cards. Keep the system pretty simple or complexity could let procrastination) take over.

Each day when your mail arrives, separate it immediately into what you don’t need and want to throw away and your bills and other things that need attention right away. Do the things that are needed and either pay the bill right away or put them in a central place where you can retrieve them when the money is available for paying the bills. This could be the front of a desk drawer, for instance, or even a basket on top of your desk. Just be sure that nothing goes into that basket besides your bills.

Online banking is a great way to streamline the bill paying process. Bank security is top notch, so the question of you having a problem online is really out of the equation. The chances are very slim. So, what you do is you take each bill that you receive and you put the information needed into the online banking account. You don’t have to do this all at once. Wait until your next bill comes in and do it one or two at a time. That way, it seems less daunting, and remember, you only have to do it once. After all the information has been entered, paying a bill becomes as simple as clicking a button, a mouse button, that is.

When you’re finished paying your bills, be it online or off, put the paid bills with the date of payment written on the front, into one of the colored file folders. That way, when tax time comes around, all your financial records will be at your fingertips.

Don’t carry around huge wads of cash or a debit card linked to your bank account, either. If you prefer the convenience of plastic, open a separate bank account and put a monthly “allowance” into it for yourself. When the money’s gone, you’ll just have to wait until next month to get more. This should help you to budget your spending and hold back on those impulse purchases a little.

And if you want to buy something, decide whether you need it or just simply want it. If you think you need it, just walk away and take 25 hours or longer to consider the purchase. Once it’s out of your site, you may find that it’s really a want, disguising itself as a need.

Before you pay any bill, any expense for the month, you should always be paying yourself. Ten percent of your income, every time you get money or a paycheck, should go into a savings account. If you don’t have a savings account, get one and never, ever use it except for depositing. Your savings account is for huge expenses, like buying a house, repairing your car, or retirement.

Put at least one of these tips into practice and see how well it works for you. I guarantee that you’ll be back to try another.

Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) offers a host of benefits to both your business and your customers. Accepting payments electronically allows your customers to avoid using credit cards by having the funds directly debited from their bank accounts. In addition to the convenience this provides your customers, electronic funds transfer also saves your company money by eliminating the high fees associated with credit card transactions and replacing them with a much lower per-transaction fee.

Electronic funds transfer also has several advantages over accepting paper checks. You’ll receive the funds much more quickly and save time and money over processing paper checks.

Electronic billing is also a great tool for recurring payments. If you charge your customers on a regular basis, electronic funds transfer deducts the funds from their accounts automatically. This will save your business the time and costs associated with sending and processing bills.

You can set your business up with easy-to-use software and services for electronic transfers. You can accept electronic payments online, by phone, or by fax. You simply need to get the customer’s bank routing number, account number, and authorization for each transaction. You then submit this information each day through the network, and the funds appear in your account within 48 hours.

Banks can provide your company with a customized package that allows you to integrate electronic payment services into your existing payment processes. In addition to accepting electronic payments from customers, electronic funds transfer also allows you to pay employees and suppliers electronically with direct deposit.

The time to pay up for last years holiday has come around again, but you may have came back from holiday only to find that there a few items on your credit statement that you don’t remember paying for.

Here are some tips on the direction you should take if this occurs. My friend Jag from MyPeculiarThoughts has also compiled Tips to transform yourself into a Savvy Card user is worth reading.

The first thing you should do is to contact your credit card company. If someone has illegally cloned your credit card details, you could find more of the same type of credit card transactions on your next bill.

The next thing you should consider is contacting all the providers of the other credit cards that you took with you on holiday. You should let them know that you think that one or more of your cards has been jeopardized and that you will need to have your accounts checked for abnormal transactions. The simplest way is to let them know when you returned back home from holiday and that any purchases from abroad should be thought of as suspicious.

Tell the credit company to cancel any cards that are thought to have had any suspect transactions performed, and instruct them to send you out new replacement cards. It will usually take a couple of days to receive your new plastic, so in that time you will have to use other arrangements to pay using cheques, cash etc.

The credit card company that you use will investigate any suspicious transactions in part to make sure that you didn’t make any of the purchases and just forgot about it, and they might be capable of plotting out a pattern of transactions from somebody that is travelling from region to region while using your card.

You should ask that your credit company send you out an amended account of your transactions and that they don’t ask you to pay on you disputed credit card bills.

One last thing, you might receive some calls from someone who claims to be from your credit card company, and they want to check your newly issued credit cards for security reasons. If they ask for any secure information, don’t let them have it, it could be the criminals calling you, and they know that you have probably been issued with new cards. They do this in an attempt to obtain entry to your new accounts.

Remember; just make sure that you can account for everything on your next bill.

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Credit Card Users & Financial Planning

With interest rates still on the rise, now is the time to take a good look at your finances. You may find that there are some things that you need to change.

If you have debt that is affected by interest rate, you need to look at where it is going to take you. This is a good time to make an effort to start eliminating your debt.

Interest rates are raised to stimulate savings and slow down borrowing. That is exactly what you should be doing.

You may find that a substantial portion of your money is going towards credit card debt. With interest rates on the rise, you will be paying more to your credit cards.

Start with a little financial planning. Make a list of all of your credit cards and other unsecured debt. List each account including the payoff amount, monthly payment amount and interest rate charged.

There are two ways to start paying off your debt. If you need a boost to get you started, start paying off the smallest debts first. This gets you on a roll. It feels really great to mark off each account as it is paid off.

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Credit cards can be an excellent tool to help you manage your finances. But sometimes we make poor choices, or sometimes the events in life take us beyond our expectations and we are left to foot the bill. Perhaps you have had a few months of extra, unexpected expenses that you are now paying for. What can you do?

Gather together all of your credit card bills and add up the amount that you owe. Factor in the extra expenses you haven’t heard on your credit cards since you receive those bills. Add to that about ten or twenty per cent, which is the “whoops, I forgot about that” factor. Then, with that figure, start shopping around for a loan.

Get the loan and pay off your credit card bills. If you think that you may still use your credit cards, you may want to hide them away so that you reduce the temptation to use them. Now, instead of having several credit card bills at a high interest rate due by the end of the month, you now have one bill that is due once a month at a lower rate. This is called consolidation. At first glance it may not seem obvious why you’d want to do this but there are two reasons:

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