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Advisers have struggled with this one for years because an investor can spend years trying to save six months’ salary, and then keeping that money liquid for emergencies surrenders big growth potential.

A better rule might be to focus on living expenses rather than gross income. That would allow an emergency fund to cover its intended purpose: paying the bills, not replacing lost paychecks. The necessity of these funds can depend on a variety of factors, including disability insurance protection, the availability of credit and the potential costs a family would face from a job loss, health problems or the breakdown of cars or big-ticket household appliances.

Chances are, the average consumer will never face an emergency that requires him or her to come up with six months’ salary within 24 hours, which is why some advisers suggest that emergency funds can do double duty, being an investor’s most conservative bond investments while being accessible if the worst happens.

These are just some random cost saving tips I thought of so I shall write it here.

1. Save electricity on Air-conditioners

Use curtains or shares to block sunlight from entering the room directly through glass windows. Clean your air conditioners filters regularly as well. This reduces the workload of your air conditioners, and thus help save that bit of electricity.

2. Save electricity on refrigerators

Shift your fridge away from heat generating appliances (eg. Stove or cooker). Another common method is to close your fridge immediately once your open and grab your stuff. You don’t want to let too much cold air out, and hot air into the fridge.

3. Using your Local library to get more information before spending to learn.

This is a common tip I used to do, when I want to acquire new knowledge. There are simply tons of books in the library, and wealth of knowledge that we can read up on. There are always people who love to take out money before realizing that the knowledge they are paying for are available in the library.

Remember, these little tips can add up to lots of amount after a long time.

This is a post about comparing few types of front kick of different martial arts. Some arts do not really have a front kick, rather, a kick geared towards defense, or offensive, such as a front jab or front push kick.

The is quite lengthy, because its from Taekwondo, the art of kicking attacks. It is quite visual, with some demonstrations and a few examples on how you can execute a simple front kick. The part to take note is using the ball of your foot, which means you’ll have to “curl” up the toes at the front to expose the ball of your foot. If not, you might kick with your toes into the target, which is not meant that way.

This is quite interesting, because its Muay Thai, the art of hard martial arts, where fighters are trained to be tough. SO let’s see how they “train” to be tough. This is a nice defensive front jab kick. Though it doesn’t pose a threat due to its nature as a defensive kick, how about bringing it up to head level? Fast and swift, makes you opponent no way to attack you if you are fast and tall enough.

Next up this is a Jeet Kune Do front kick, where as you can see, its more towards the offensive side. This is slightly different, as this art emphasis real combat and self-defensive techniques. By doing the front kick this way, using the front foot, it gives you a faster time to reach your opponent. Good for ladies who wishes to signal the “Get Lost” message across.

Lastly, this is a front kick form the fitness center, not really a martial art. In this kickboxing fornt kick, you will see that its almost identical to the Taekwondo video, and the Jeet Kune Do one. The only different is the application, and I wondered how can this be used in real combat situation. Nevertheless, its fitness we are talking about here.

Do learn only if you know what you are doing!

The answer is the percentage of your investments that should be in stocks or stock mutual funds.

This rule became popular in the 1970s and ’80s with the emergence of retirement plans, as individuals tried to come up with a handle on asset allocation without necessarily trying to conquer the subject matter.

In practice, this rule is severely flawed, failing to look at the whole picture. Everything from life expectancy to age at retirement, from amount invested to expected returns and much more, affects a portfolio’s ability to last a lifetime. Most advisers seem to think this rule is ultraconservative and would be more comfortable if the number were readjusted to 130 or 140.

“This rule has completely outlived its usefulness because people are retiring younger and living longer,” says Peg Eddy of Creative Capital Management in San Diego. “People are retiring with 20 years or more to live, and a portfolio that is too conservative just isn’t going to work for them. They need more growth, or they will be too vulnerable to inflation over that longer stretch of time.”

I wrote this post because this month there were some huge changes in my life, in terms of my financial health. Some of the things that happen this month were:

- I started trading (actually I started learning how to trade near Feburary)
- I am now using all the financial knowledge I’ve acquired in 2008
- I have close my account from POSB MySavings
- I have withdraw a huge amount of $ from my Citibank Savings Account
- I have started trading daily (nightly) on the NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX stock exchanges

And so, my advise is if you want to get rich quick but not that quick (with some efforts) you should do something by converting your cash into assets, and let it grow.

Picture a game of Monopoly and play the game. If you have $5000, would you buy pieces of lands and train stations or would you keep your cash in your pockets ? You would most probably run out of cash after a few rounds if your opponents own those other assets, build houses and hotels, and you hitting their spots.

I would also take this opportunity to introduce my new website (other than my music, gaming and golf site), my NYSE and NASDAQ trading daily blogs. Here in this blog I talk about some tips I’ve discovered, some other tips by other experts, some buy and sell recommendations and my daily blogs of stocks I purchase and sell.

It shouldn’t serve as ad advice, for I am not an expert yet, but it would be interesting to see my progress (for me as a blog) and well, I just got to admit my mistakes if I didn’t perform well on this very very dangerous, volatile and face paced stocks exchange.

Finally I’ll have a big update near July on my monthly money management stuff !

“If you love money, forget about the job. If you love the job, forget about the money.”

I thought of this quote while I was thinking if I had a job that I love. A job that I have passion in, a job that is stressless, and one that I enjoy doing (probably because I have a pretty colleague)

Well but that’s not the case because I love money more than anything. Or should I say I need it more than anything else. Hmm in that case I am prepared to work any job that gives me the highest income, be it being employee, self employed or an employer.

 
 
In the recent years, internet websites and resources has transform into something different.

We are see a few types of internet websites that can be grouped into a few categories.

They are :

- Ecommerce
- Informational Content
- Lead generation (Corporate)
- Help and Support sites

Ecommerce

These are basically websites that people do go and buy stuff. Some of the examples includes Amazon.com or a more popular one, to jazzgift.com (which is currently under my ownership and construction).

What this means is a business to consumer type of market. As for Ebay.com, it is a consumer to consumer type of commerce, with a proper platform to buy and sell there. These sites often attract online shoppers, and needs a high traffic in order to sustain.

Informational Content

These sites usually contain information like current news, technology updates, information of anything that you want to know more about. It can be a blogging site, like this site or http://singwithpiano.com (offering some singing and piano tips), some organization’s website (http://goodspeedcybercafe.com), or Wiki. By the way, those 2 websites are under my ownership.

There are tons of people sharing information, whether you are a geek or a newbie. These sites often attract a special or specific group of people that needs information. What it means is that people like me who needs help on “how to do wordpress this” or “how to do programming in language X” will tend to like them.

Lead generation (Corporate)

The reason I put a corporate is that nowadays, the corporate site don;t just sit there as a PoC (Point of contact) for clients and customers to get phone numbers or emails. Actual transactions work there. For example, DHL or fedex, where their services are offered online.

The type of website requires a custom design web application, where the business logics are inline with the information systems. Thus they represent a critical function in a business model. These sites attract users who are in the business and consumer market, because apart from giving information, it also provides an offline service.

Help and Support sites

Help and support sites generally meant sites that provide help, and especially help. They are usually sites where a company publishes their help for a product or service, as to lessen the number of service calls required. Some example are microsoft’s support and Yahoo! Answers.

These sites also generate a high traffic rate because it is community driven, meaning people helping each other out, and if you have a similar question, they are more probably answered. Forums can be in this group or under the information/content, depending on what type of information it serves

 
So there you go, a summary of the current sites on the www

In this video the developers at Google’s Android developer team shows us some of the power features of what Google Android can do, with the help of combining applications together to create a much more useful device, by the use of camera, GPS, and internet access.

This question has been asked many many times throughout working adults. Just how much should we save ? This is also a popular topic among financial advisor or wealth management agents.

Unlike the US financial advisors, who are really advisors, Asia’s financial advisor are slightly different. Insted of really advise you on how to manage your wealth, they actually look at your income and assets status, and then try to sell you a product. It may be insurance or wealth linked, but that’s not the point. I guess 9 out of 10 advisor does that.

This is real bad for us, as we don’t already have enough money to be in the comfort zone. Besides, there aren’t many people who can manage wealth very well. That is why we need to learn how to do our own money planning. (Hate to use this “wealth” word, because not many are rich enough to be wealthy.)

Like they say, a general rule of thumb is to save 10% of what you earn. I do reckon that this is adequate, but do we have the discipline ? A simple way is to treat that 10% as a kind of expense, and pay it to somewhere else.

Trick your mind to accept the fact that it is always necessary to first pay yourself, park it somewhere. With that in mind, then we are able to move on to where to park that 10% of your income. You might think that 10% is very little, but if let’s say you earn between 3-5k a month, that will amount to 300-500 a month, which is enough as a form of disciplined saving.

In summary (% of your income):

Single:

20% - Normal Savings
10% - For short-mid term goals
5-10% - Insurance

Not Single:

10%-20% - Normal Savings
10% - For short-mid term goals
Above 10% - Insurance for you and your family

 
As for me, I prefer a higher percentage, roughly 20-40% of your savings, if you are aged between 20-28 or so. In other words, if you are a graduate who just came out to work, and you don’t have a family yet. In some of my money management posts, I have posted a $500 monthly savings to Citibank savings account, and a $300 to a local bank savings account. That is between the range of 20-40%.

But, depending on situations, saving your money in banks won’t make you wealthy. It is always better to put the money into good use instead of earning low interest from the bank. Still the bare minimum is 10%, and we should always practise that.

Just to add on to the good news, its not just any update. Its a major one where many improvements were made to the phone.

The two most significant improvements were the on-board keyboard (similar to Chomp SMS), and the Video Camera that’s added to this version of the release. Upgrading / flashing the firmware would be tricky, because users might not get access to the develop mode for this phone.

Click on this next official video release from Google’s Android Dev team and see what are the other improvements over the older firmware (Damn I must get the upgrade!)

This is another Android review from a another reviewer. Apparently he had a copy of 1.5 release on his phone already and demonstrating some of the cool features that we (old users :< ) don't