The Irish crisis: advice for offshore savers
The Irish crisis: advice for offshore savers
Offshore savers can’t avoid the Irish question – but is there an easy answer to their concerns?
Read more on AFP Telegraph Finance News via Yahoo! UK & Ireland Finance
Personal Finance Software to Help You Survive Financial Crisis
Do you know how to avoid getting caught in the financial crisis? This question addresses one of the biggest fears most everyone has today. If giants like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers get shaken to their foundations, how can an average person resist getting caught? The answer is simple: spend less than you earn. The era of blithe consumerism is coming to an end, and we should prepare for lean times. It’s time to keep track of all income and expenses and cut down unnecessary expenditures. These simple things will help you to stand bad times.
Part of the survival strategy is organizing your financial life using a good personal finance manager. It will help you to see where your money goes without the hassle of doing everything manually. There are many money management tools out on the market today. One of them is Personal Finances – http://www.financessoftware.com
Overview
Personal Finances is a personal finance manager that will help you to control your budget better than ever. With a glance at its summary view and reports, you will understand where your money goes, pinpoint areas of excessive expenditure and cut down unnecessary expenses. The program also provides future planning you can project expected spending and income and find out how much money you will have at a future date.
The program is ideal for beginners as it keeps budget management simple and intuitive. The program has a simple, uncluttered interface and a lack of advanced features, which are rarely used by ordinary users. For example, Personal Finances has no college or retirement planner. However, when it comes to managing financial accounts, designing and tracking a family budget, the program outshines many others.
Getting started with Personal Finances is a matter of a few minutes. Simply click around to familiarize yourself with the functionality and refer to the program help file if there’s anything you do not understand at first glance.
You’ll also be pleased to discover no advertising “bells and whistles” that could be found in other money management software. Personal Finances is calm and keeps you that way as you focus on organizing your budget.
Getting Around the Interface
When you run the program, it opens into the main window that puts the financial details, tools and options that matter most to you up front. At the top of the window you can see the main commands. A list of transactions – income and expenses – is displayed in the central area of the window and all accounts are in the left area. The icons at the top of the main window let you quickly go to any part of the program, create an account, category, view calendar and create reports. In the left area, there are buttons that let you add, edit or delete transactions.
There are two views for transactions – Account and Summary. By default, the program opens into the Account tab where you can see the transactions associated with a particular account. However you can click on the Summary tab and see all the transactions, regardless of the account they are associated with.
Setting Up Accounts
Accounts in Personal Finances describe where money comes from. The program supports different accounts, such as real bank account, credit card, cash and pocket money. Setting up an account is a breeze to do. Click on the Accounts icon at the top of the main window, click the Add button, then enter the properties of a new account – name, currency, comment. Personal Finances also allows you to set up an account budget for any period of time, so that the user doesn’t overspend. Existing accounts can be edited or deleted.
Entering Transactions
Entering transactions is just as easy. It requires a click on the Add button in the right area of the main window. In the dialog that opens, you need to select the type of transaction – income, expense or transfer between accounts, then enter all details associated with this transaction such as the account, amount of money, and date that will appear on the calendar or in the list of transactions that are due. Transactions can be defined with categories, family members, and tags. Tags provide a way to differentiate between similar transactions that fall into the same category. Categorization by family members will tell you about spending habits of each member of your family.
Transactions can be scheduled, which makes Personal Finances very handy for repeating transactions – tax payments, electricity bills, etc. The frequency for which you can set up a scheduled transaction is weekly, monthly, and annually. When the due date for the scheduled transaction comes, you should select the transaction in the scheduler list, right-click its record and select the Apply Now option to enter the scheduled transaction into the account used to pay the bill. You should also remember to make this payment in the physical world.
Reporting
Personal Finances helps you to understand the flow of your money and control expenditures with handy graphs and reports. You can see the reports generated by categories, family members and tags. Clicking on any item in the report you can drill down to transactions associated with the item. You can generate reports that cover any period of time. Results can be printed out or saved to HTML, CHM, or TXT.
Security
For your peace of mind, Personal Finances allows you to protect the budget database with a password so that no one will get access to your confidential financial information except you.
Portability
If you want to keep tabs on your budget on the move, you can get a portable version of Personal Finances that will run from a USB flash drive. The program can be run from any computer, without leaving any tracks behind.
Personal Finances has a free version and a full-featured commercial version with a 30-day free trial, so you can download the program to see if it will meet your personal finance management needs.
Keeping a budget with Personal Finances (http://www.financessoftware.com) provides big benefits in the form of savings and elimination of unnecessary expenses. This will definitely help you to survive the financial crisis and step into better times.
Thai SET Index Rises to Highest Since 1996, Before Asian Crisis
Thai SET Index Rises to Highest Since 1996, Before Asian Crisis
Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) — Thailand’s benchmark stock index, Asia’s best performer this year, rose to the highest level since 1996 as easing political tensions and improving earnings boosted c…
Read more on Thailandnews.net
Budgeting Business Finances in an Economic Crisis
In these tough financial times, more and more businesses fall into financial despair and need extra funding in this bad economy. Many of these businesses could change their financial position somewhat by focusing on their budget and cutting it THE BONE.
The first step to take, which is the easiest and fastest, is to cut out that unnecessary spending.
At first glance, you might think that your budget is very tight and there is nothing in there to cut. As a business owner and financial consultant for over 20 years, I have found that this is seldom the case. There are almost always ways to cut costs and save money.
A big mistake most businesses make is not taking the time to prepare a budget when times are good. Typically business owners tend to take an interest into budgeting money once they’re in financial trouble. Their debts have piled up, their income doesn’t seem to cover their bills and habits, and they are stressed out as a result. Does this sound familiar? If so, you probably need to learn the usual budgeting techniques.
Budgeting and financial planning are the cornerstones of responsible money management. Not only that, but they are vital in developing a workable plan for the future, and can even reduce stress. While many businesses shy away from the accountability and responsibility required to create and maintain an accurate budget, buckling down and building a budget can ultimately help reduce stress and worry, and lead to a more pleasant and fulfilling life.
Before getting started, it’s important to define what a budget is, and what it is not. It is not just a list of where your money goes each month. A budget is a comprehensive overall picture of your financial situation where money comes in, where it goes out, and what it’s spent on. A budget is a plan, a map of the financial future. It should include salaries, bonuses, bills, insurance, savings, and other expenditures. It should be divided into wants and needs and should be organized as a line-item list, with each item
categorized and accounted for.
Most importantly, a budget should be accurate. Creating a budget that is inaccurate is a complete waste of time. People often create budgets that reflect where they want to be financially, or that ignore certain one-time-only expenditure this is not going to be effective. Instead of focusing on where you want to be and fudging the lines of where you are, make your budget an accurate and honest reflection of your current economic situation. Once you have that in place, you will be able to more easily identify where changes can and should be made, and you can begin to transform your financial situation by spending and saving responsibly.
Just as a budget should be honest and accurate, it should also be flexible. While, whenever possible, we try to plan for the unexpected, it is a fact of life that there will be times you need to go beyond your budget, a financial crisis, for example. This is understandable, and does not indicate some failure on your part to plan. In such situations, simply keep account of your spending and adjust your budget for subsequent months, where possible, to make up for the extra expenditures.
The most important thing to remember about a budget is that it is a living, breathing thing “well, not really, but it should be treated as such. A budget will do you no good if you create it then put it aside and never look at it again. A budget should be updated monthly and kept on hand for quick reference and revision. Keeping your budget up to date will allow you to see not only where you are financially, but will help you see how to get where you’d like to be.
Creating an accurate budget is important not only because it helps you see where you are financially, but also helps you map out the road to where you’d like to be.
What makes up a good budget? What expenses should you include in the budget? What can you do about variable expenses in your budget? How can you personalize a budget?
Where are you going?
The key to a good budget or spending plan is knowing where you have been and where you want to go. Knowing where you have been is done by insuring you have written down where all you money has been going. You can find this information by categorizing and reviewing your last 6 months of check registers or other accounting methods you have been employing. If you have no such method in place, you have just uncovered your main budgeting problem which is the first item to be corrected.
If on the other hand you use a check register or other means but have numerous general entries such as “cash” or “miscellaneous” or other unidentifiable labels, this too must be corrected. You MUST know where your money is going before you can divert it. I recommend carrying a small spiral notebook for at least 2 weeks (longer is far better) and recording every cash transaction. You will truly be amazed by what you learn from this experience.
Are Annuities One Option to the National Economic Crisis?
Are Annuities One Option to the National Economic Crisis?
OVERLAND PARK, KS. The economic crisis is weighing heavily on Americans, leaving them to question financial factors such as retirement, savings and spending. With social security on the decline and Baby Boomers reaching retirement age, it’s hard to see a bright financial retirement.
Read more on dBusinessNews.com
Weekly Spotlight – Europe’s Debt Crisis Remains in Headlines
Weekly Spotlight – Europe’s Debt Crisis Remains in Headlines
The markets faced another rough week as European woes continue to put downward pressure onto the euro. Adding onto Greece’s debt contagion concern, the Bank of Spain took over management of troubled savings bank Cajasur after the bank failed to complete a merger with another savings bank, Unicaja.
Read more on Daily FX via Yahoo! Finance