The three winners of the respective contests are:

Winners of contest on linkbuildingscool:

Camila, RohiniSeth and Stacy Lorsan

Winners of contest on UXBooth:

Tom Walters, Sophia Browne and Vinay Kashyap

Congratulations to all of the winners. They will be contacted soon by our support team to claim their free license for manageME7 Plutus 6 package.

Get in touch with us to know more about our upcoming events, discounts and offers.

Happy Financing!!!

Whatever it is meant from being financial independence, the most important thing is how to achieve it. Following tips crave your path towards a financially independent lifestyle:

Figure Out Your Financial Priorities: You may never achieve your financial freedom unless you first define it before trying to pursue it. Defining your financial prioritizes can make it easier to curb spending on those things that are non-essential to your goal. Never eliminate the financial goals you find difficult to carry out, but be honest while committing yourself towards accomplishing your target.

Align Your Expectations With Bottom Line: Another tip to help you achieve your financial freedom is to realize just how much you’ll need to save to achieve it. You may think a million dollars will do the trick. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. It all depends on your expectations. The person who truly wants to be financially free should always align his or her expectations with the bottom line.

Learn To Be Flexible: To achieve more of your dream try to bend a bit. As you map out your financial dream, consider what you might be willing to do to get what you want. Maybe it means you could choose a less expensive home in a less expensive area or doing a second job for awhile or rent out your house during the summer while you travel to visit friends and family etc.

Living Below Your Means: The time-honored way to accrue financial security is to live below your means. Never spend more than your earnings, even if you could afford to. This would save your from the risk of spending what you could have saved. Remember, the most preferred way to overcome the biggest fear of running out of money, is to play it safe.

Have Control Over Your Time: You would come to know the reality of being wealthy when you have complete control over your time. No matter how much money you make, you aren’t wealthy unless your days are spent doing the things that you enjoy so much that you would pay to do them and have control over your time.

]]> http://www.manageme7.com/blog/personal-finance/ways-to-achieve-financial-independence/feed http://www.manageme7.com/blog/personal-finance/ways-to-achieve-financial-independence http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/manageme7/~3/3xiLiV9Yvy0/manageme7-giveaway-bash http://www.manageme7.com/blog/updates/manageme7-giveaway-bash#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:21:45 +0000 shefali.dhamija http://www.manageme7.com/blog/?p=785 Managing our finances becomes an undo-able task when we all get deeply stuck in our daily routine, taking care of our jobs, business, studies and home. It becomes a worry for all of us to keep a track on the flow of our income and record each and every expense. Managing money is a task which requires great skills and lot of time.

These financial worries can be solved very easily with money management applications. These web based applications help in reducing our financial stress by managing our finances anywhere anytime. When it comes to keep a limit on our finances and budget , we need all the help we can get from money management applications only.

ManageME7 is one of the key players in online money management applications area. This money management tool enables you to manage your finances in an efficient yet easy way. It acts as a lethal weapon in combating your tangled finances with its only mission to help you overcome your financial worries.

Keeping its user base in mind, manageME7 has come with a giveaway bash in which it is running two contests to win a free license of Plutus6 package(worth $12). The contest are being hold by UXBooth.com (through its Facebook outlet) and linkbuildingscool.com. 3 winners of each contest will be awarded with the prize.

To enter each of the contest, you have to tweet the post and/or post a comment. Detailed terms and conditions of the contests can be viewed on the posts. Winners will be announced on manageME7 blog on the specified date of announcement.

Hurry!!! grab your free license today. You can be the winner of the license from each of the contests also.

Don’t Let This Golden Chance Slip Away From Your Hands.

Well, mistakes are the best teachers, as the lessons learned are ingrained by the outcome of our failures. Finances in the same way let you learn what to do and what not to do. To achieve financial goals even a single financial mistake may be a detrimental one.

This post in intended to highlight some common mistakes that need to be avoided for a better financial planning:

No Proper Financial Plan: Lack of a financial plan, and not setting any financial goals can bring a lot of financial problems. A properly written plan with all short-term and long-term goals surely results into success. Reevaluation of the plan and tracking the progress often are basic ingredients of a proper financial planning.

Improper or No Insurance: A financial plan is incomplete without adequate life insurance plan. One major goal of a financial plan is to maintain the life style of your family whether you are with them or not. A common mistake we make is buying life insurance policies such as endowment plans or money back to save tax, also hoping to reap returns. Returns from such policies are much less compared to traditional investment products such as stocks, mutual funds, gold or real estate.

No Diversification: Do not put all eggs in one basket. This mistake arises when a major part of  portfolio is invested in a single or same type of financial instrument which increases risks resulting into high losses/profits. The right portfolio should be built by optimum allocation into different asset classes.

Tax Saving Without Consideration: Many taxpayers try to withheld too much from their paycheck for income taxes. They think of it as a way to save. Investing in different financial products on the consideration of tax saving without evaluating other parameters of financial products  is one of the major financial mistakes.

Idle Money: Money lying idle in cash or saving bank accounts generates negative returns. This is one of the biggest financial mistakes which we often make by ignoring the effect of inflation on the money invested. Insufficient funds in the saving bank account for emergency purposes.

No Investment: Spending money blindly and not considering about any investment is another bad money idea. Increase the investment amount as your income increases. Don’t wait for a lump sum amount to be accumulated to invest and don’t try to time the market. Develop a regular and disciplined investment approach.

High Debt: Small amounts of debt, or house mortgages and auto loans may be comfortable but realize that these can be hard to handle if money is tight. If you do acquire new debt, do so cautiously and after researching the best loan options. Always prepare a plan to keep a tight leash on personal loans and credit card debt.

The reason behind moving your money is that the big banks don’t care about people, small businesses, and community. Smaller, community banks are supposed to be more responsible and personal because you know the bankers personally. The organizers believe that a mass movement to smaller banks will force the big banks to be more responsible.

If you are also thinking about moving your money to a nearby small bank, then it is advised do some research before stepping further as there are some factors in favor and not in favor of this.

Favorable Factors:

Control: The biggest advantage of moving your money is the feeling of control over the situation that you’ll receive from sticking to a small bank.

Support to Small Business: A small bank nearby, supports local organizations and lends to small businesses. Being in a small community, they become a part of the community.

Personalized Services: A bank with just a few branches and clients provide better personalized service when you have some problem related to your accounts. Moreover they charge less fees for their services.

Unfavorable Factors:

Inconvenience: Local banks have a limited number of ATMs that may also be far from the place where you work or live.

Over-leveraging: Big banks are bailed out for excessive leverage but smaller banks fail in much higher numbers because they over-leverage and make risky loans.

Higher Risk: Most of the community banks are failure prone. Before placing your money in a small bank, you should verify its ratings.

The decision about moving your money depends totally on you. You have to decide whether switching to a smaller bank is right for you and your financial habits.

Mobile financial services are very likely to become the next big thing that will attract millions of consumers all over the world. There are three kinds of mobile financial services:

Mobile Banking: It enables customers with existing bank accounts to get connected to their bank or financial institution over the mobile network. They can use standard banking services such as bank account management (check balance, view transactions, etc.), credit / debit card management with it.

Mobile Payment: Enables customers to make credit card payments and bill payments any time anywhere, from either a bank account or a mobile wallet.

Mobile Money Transfer: Transferring Money via international or national remittance hubs from and/or to a real bank account or a mobile wallet. It is is a peer to peer form of mobile payment mechanism which is most successful among other kinds of mobile transactions.

As the use of Internet is expanding day by day, consumers are becoming more comfortable with using their handsets for increasingly sophisticated purposes, which also leads towards adoption of electronic channels for financial services. Today’s successful payment services have been built using certain mobile-specific channels that even basic handsets could support. Moreover access to the Internet will enable providers to offer solutions that do not depend on the security solutions offered using the SIM card in the phone. The growth of the mobile Internet may cause a boom in a new generation of branch less banking providers, raising substantial questions about risks to consumers, as well as the future shape of the competitive landscape.

It is estimated that there will be more and more people within the reach of wireless communications in next few years. Devices like mobile phones, which require less energy than PCs and ATMs and which can be recharged by windup or solar power, would play an increasingly important part in mobile finance.

Financial planning Stage1: This stage is about tracking where you are now. What is your income, your assets, debts and expenditure? How stable is your income? Does it remain constant, or is it dependent on factors beyond your control? And what about prospects, are you in an occupation where you can reasonably expect your income to increase year on year?

Financial Planning Stage 2: The next stage is about identifying your goals which depend upon your age, circumstances and individual tastes. For example, the young will probably be concerned with purchasing their first home, the early middle-aged with paying their kids college fees, and the late middle-aged with providing sufficient retirement income.

Goals: Goals exist within different time frames. These can be short term that might be to save enough for next year’s vacation, a medium term which may be to pay off your mortgage and the longest term one may be building a decent pension fund.

Step1) Identify and write down your financial goals.

Step 2): Break each financial goal down into several short-term (less than 1 year), medium-term (1 to 3 years) and long-term (5 years or more) goals.

Step 3): Learn through a money magazine, or a book, or surf the Internet, for how to take wise decisions that will increase your net worth many times over. Then identify small, measurable steps you can take to achieve these goals, and put this action plan to work.

Step 4): Evaluate your progress by reviewing your monthly, quarterly, or at any other interval progress to determine if your program is working. If you’re not making satisfactory progress on a particular goal, re-evaluate your approach and make changes as necessary.

Finances can be improved by by saving money and investing carefully without any specific targets but it is a good idea to have some general goals.

For this you need to to follow or try at least these things:

Improve your vehicle’s efficiency:

Keep your tyres correctly inflated and get correct amount of pressure in tyres as low pressure needs more fuel.

Clear out junk from the boot to make it lighter in weight and reduce less effort to speed up.

Turn on air conditioner only when required otherwise turn it off to save a large amount of fuel

Fill only the adequate amount of fuel.

Drive smoothly and efficiently:

Accelerate slowly to stay under 3,000 revs. Remember ‘the harder you press accelerator, the more fuel you spend.’

Always apply the correct gear.

Let your car slow down naturally to use its stored momentum rather than using the brakes always

Take care while filling up the fuel:

Do not overfill the fuel tank so much that petrol nozzle ‘clunks’.

Always refill at least fifty miles before the tank is empty.

Fill up at night when it’s cold and you get some extra bit of fuel.

Pay Wisely:

Always try to pay with a cashback/fuel credit card to get some of your outlay back.

Check out for the new petrol schemes and promotions regularly to get worth out of a single penny.

Use a combined service: These days many companies are offering combined services for cable, internet and telephone that not only cost less, but also provide you the convenience of a single bill.

Slow down your internet service: It may sound strange, but you can save up to $15 per month and you wouldn’t notice any difference when surfing internet.

Read stuff online: You can save money and paper as well by reading books, magazine and other stuff online. You can get a lot of stuff online and can save on your spending. Even some magazines now offer their content for free online.

Buy products over the internet: Almost each and every product whether it is for commercial or household use, can be bought online. This would save your petrol cost your should have spent in driving to market for shopping. Moreover, various discounts are also availed if you buy products online.

Use internet phone service: By doing so, you can save a substantial amount of money. Internet telephone service costs as little as $9.95 a month and service providers offer the best price to you.

Swap books online: You can very easily swap the books you’ve read via the internet with others. Various websites are providing this service which can help you exchange and trade your collection with others online.

Use revenue-sharing websites: These websites serve as portals to other shopping websites. When you make a purchase at one of the listed sites, the revenue-sharing sites make a commission off of each sale and share the commission with users. In this way, you can earn refunds by making ordinary purchases from online retailers.

Running Your Office

• Outsource few services to avoid increase of headcounts.
• Negotiate with vendors to save even 5% of the total money.This can turn into big saving in the year-end.
• Keep a check on stationary utilization and ask for discounts from the vendor.
• Watch at utility bills and don’t let computers, lights or air conditioners running overnight.
• Reuse the paper by printing double-sided to save cost on paper.
• Install electric hand dryer in wash rooms, as paper towels prove more costlier.

IT & Finance

• Buy reasonable PCs, they work similar to the expensive branded HP and Dell desktops. If purchasing laptops, don’t fall for expensive warranties offered by the supplier at the time of purchase.
• When we can get decent functionality from free open source operating system like Ubuntu, Star office for free, then why we pay for a costly softawre license for each system?
• Use VOIP services like skype for making long distance calls.
• Go for specific schemes for taking the service of cellular phones like corporate schemes are comparatively cheaper.
• Make negotiation with the banks you deal, for better rates on your FDs.
• Give food vouchers to your employees. This way you can give them more after-tax income even if you are paying them lower salary.
• Avoid overspending on your credit cards or incurring overdrafts.

Business Travel

• When travelling for work, look for options where you can stay, with your relatives, friends or if you want to stay in hotel, look for options that are located nearby your meeting location.
• If possible travel during noon, as air tickets are often cheaper this time.
• If you can, get a hotel industry association discount card from your friend or anybody you know. This will give you discounts in hotels and restaurants during your stay and meal respectively.

Official space

• Ask relatives and friends if they provide you a free space to set up your business. This would save your money on office rental expenditures.
• While designing your office, do not really hire a fancy interior designer when a carpenter at your neighborhood can do the trick.
• Design a frugal office with the use of sub standard flooring, as expensive carpets require high maintenance cost, more use of glass rather than having wooden partition, etc.