Fortune Watch

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I said goodbye to an old friend a few weeks ago. We’ve known each other almost thirty years, ever since I started high school really.

We were together on my first date, first kiss, and first trip overseas. We were hand in hand when I left home to go to university.

My friend was there when I started my first real grown-up job, has seen girlfriends come and go, and has been my solace when I had nobody to turn to.

We briefly parted ways from time to time but always managed to find each other. We laughed, we danced, we stressed and we wept together.

We shared our ups and downs. Some times we exercised together and every now and then we even bathed together. That’s a lot of togetherness.

In the past few months I have slowly wakened up to the fact that this friend of mine, who I thought had always been there for me, has slowly been poisoning me from the inside out.

My friend has been digging into my pocketbook on a daily basis for the past 30 years, and stealing my money at the same time as he’s been stealing minutes from my life. My friend has not really been my friend at all.

Read (more…)

The other day I read an amazing statistic? It said that as many as half the people who end up divorced had a strong feeling before the wedding that they were doing the wrong thing but they were too embarrassed to pull out at the last minute. The fear of embarrassment is a powerful influence in the lives of most people.

Imagine that you slipped over in a public street, what would your first reaction be? If you are like most people you would look around to see who saw you.

Another, well known, statistic is that fear of public speaking is the number one fear that people have, but is it true? I suggest that their fear of public speaking is really a fear of being embarrassed publicly if they mess up.

So what’s all this got to do with being broke?

In order to become wealthy you need to set a goal to become wealthy. Since having lots of money is a lot more fun than being broke why doesn’t everyone set a serious goal to be rich? The reason is that they are afraid of the embarrassment if they tell everyone that they are going to be rich and then they fail.

It seems crazy to let your life be controlled by the fear of what other people may think of you, yet that is exactly what most people are doing. What about you? Are you letting the fear of embarrassment keep you from reaching your full potential, financially or otherwise?

Read (more…)

India’s Tata Motors on Thursday unveiled its much anticipated $2,500 car, an ultra-cheap price tag that brings car ownership into the reach of tens of millions of people. But critics worry the car could overwhelm the country’s roads and create an environmental nightmare.

Company Chairman Ratan Tata, introducing the Nano during India’s main auto show, drove onto a stage in a white version of the tiny four-door subcompact, his head nearly touching the roof.With a snub nose and a sloping roof, the world’s cheapest car can fit five people — if they squeeze. And the basic version is spare: there’s no radio, no passenger-side mirror and only one windshield wiper. If you want air conditioning to cope with India’s brutal summers, you need to get the deluxe version.

While the price has created a buzz, critics say the Nano could lead to possibly millions more automobiles hitting already clogged Indian roads, adding to mounting air and noise pollution problems. Others have said Tata will have to sacrifice quality and safety standards to meet the target price.

The chairman, though, insists the car will meet safety standards and pollute even less than motorcycles, passing domestic and European emission standards and averaging about 50 miles per gallon (20 kilometers per liter).

Read (more…)

If you find yourself complaining too regularly about ‘pressure on your time’, it may be the moment to step back and try to interpret this repeated signal that seems to be flashing up an alarm. Usually just means time is controlling you.

The popular phrase ‘not enough hours in the day’ is a particular giveaway. You definitely need reminding that all hours aren’t equal. They vary widely in their effectiveness - so much so, that time management has become a formal study, keenly encouraged in corporate life. One half of time management is just ordinary good housekeeping. You look around the office and find a lot of ways you can achieve small-time savings. The coffee-machine could be closer to where most people sit, allowing shorter journeys.

Those big files could do with a bit of sorting out, to speed up the routine paperwork. Maybe put up a notice discouraging long phone calls, etc. No doubt this all adds up.

But the other half of time management focuses right in on the dynamics of time itself. And under analysis, you find that there are two completely distinct kinds of working time, which literally fight.

One of them is control time, where you control the duration of the job. The other is response time, where you react to interruptions which control you. Let’s take a typical example of control time and response time in conflict.

Two managers are working separately on a major report, which requires concentration, but are also having to allow time for dialogue with the rest of the department.

Read (more…)

He survived against all the odds; now Peng Shulin has astounded doctors by learning to walk again.When his body was cut in two by a lorry in 1995, it was little short of a Medical miracle that he lived. It took a team of nearly 20 doctors to save his life.

Skin was grafted from his head to seal his torso – but the legless Mr Peng was left only 78cm (2ft 6in) tall. Bedridden for years, doctors in China had little hope that he would ever be able to live anything like a normal life again.

I know what you are thinking now, “Well Mr Robin Bal, what’s all this got to do with Personal Finance, Investing, Debt Elimination etc.” A LOT, go on continue reading, get the message.

Read (more…)

Carlos Slim, the Mexican tycoon and the world’s richest man, scoffed at Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for “playing Santa Claus” to cure poverty’s ills. But that’s where we are. Our guys—Bill Gates and Warren Buffett—are all about giving it away. Carlos Slim? Not a chance.

A few months earlier Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world, made an assertion. In an interview that was widely reported, he stated, “Our concept is more to accomplish and solve things, rather than giving; that is, not going around like Santa Claus…. Poverty isn’t solved with donations.” In a recent two-hour interview in his office, Mr. Slim promised that there would be no ceiling on his donations. “We want to get to the root of problems, no limits,” he said.

Because Mexico’s income distribution is severely skewed, Mr. Slim has come to personify the small elite who control vast sections of the economy. So he has been feeling the pressure to give much of his enormous fortune away. Some time ago, he pledged to increase the endowments of his companies’ foundations to $10 billion from $4 billion in the next four years. He promises to spend money on education and health.

Very few would argue with Mr. Slim’s assertion that poverty cannot be ended by donations. Slim wants to build huge hospitals in northern Mexico where the country-region can ship tens of thousands of Medicare patients for health care that can be delivered at much cheaper costs.

Slim was unimpressed at how Buffett and Gates vowed late last year to combine their entire fortunes into the world’s largest foundation to do good works.

Read (more…)

“If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”

Admit it. You’ve said that at least once to someone going through a rough time–we all have. Matter of fact, it’s much more than a well-worn, well-meaning phrase that we instinctively say before hanging up the phone, anxious to our friendship duty. Do we ever question if we’re doing the routine rounds or do we feel a pull in our heart?

Let’s face it–how many of us, while in the midst of a crisis, can really get it together to tell exactly what we need? Unless of course it is an injection of a dose of money. So that brings us to the million dollar question–How do you deal with friends who need Financial help?

This could be a delicate situation that can perhaps degenerate itself into a difficult situation, as compared to your own financial status at that moment. If you’d like to help a friend who’s in a financial mess, just keep in the back of your mind that “Money really is power.” And it’s your responsibility to be sensitive to that.

Should you lend money to your friends? Shakespeare said, “Lend money to a friend and you lose both, money and friend.” My dad educated me a bit on this; his advice was that if at all you must help a friend financially, never lend more than you can afford to lose. That’s also my advice for people who are out to make a killing in the stock market–never invest more than you can afford to lose. And that’s what they call the “risk capital.” How much risk capital do you have after all your savings for the rainy day?

Read (more…)

Get real about money. Let’s face it: Most people spend way too much money on things they don’t really need. The more money we make, the more we tend to spend. This endless cycle of materialism has led many people to confuse the word “need” with the word “want.” As in, “we need a big-screen TV for our new home theatre.” Or, “I need a new pair of shoes to go with my new outfit.”

If you want to achieve your vocational passion, where every day you jump out of bed and can’t wait to go to work, then you need to re-order your priorities. Stay away from the purely material.

The pursuit of material success often is the root cause of burnout at midlife. In fact, a recent study found that people primarily motivated by the love of their work grow dissatisfied as they begin to make more money. The first step to breaking free from the materialism trap is to understand the difference between “need” and “want.”

We need food, clothing, shelter, reliable transportation, education, enrichment, and the technology necessary to do our work. Also, we need the occasional small indulgence to treat our children and ourselves.

Read (more…)

If you are like most people, you do not feel that you “deserve money”. The simple fact is that most people are broke. Most people are broke because they do not feel that they deserve money.

To be financially successful you must: save prodigiously, invest wisely, and act like an entrepreneur. If you don’t believe you are capable of financial success, figure out why.

OK, maybe now you are thinking, “I deserve money…right?” Well, here is the thing, if you have the thought that “It takes money to make money”, or “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”, or “Money is the root to all evil”, then you do not deserve money…well, maybe not yet, but there is hope for you.

There are two sides to every coin, people can look at money as good or bad and often at times people look at money as bad to justify why they do not have any. I dont know, maybe someone with money or someone that was thinking of making money was with someone that did not have any and did not have any plans to make any. What they thought about having lots of money and they gave off one of the lame excuses as suggested in the previous paragraph.

Why do you deserve money? The answer is simple…because you deserve money! Look, making money is simply the result of exchanging your efforts or ideas for money.

Read (more…)

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:

Read (more…)