Financial discipline is a matter of personal choice. A person with good discipline may strive to live within his monetary means without any debts and make his finances grow at a healthy rate. A person with not a very impressive discipline may depend a lot on debt and will not know how to utilize and save his monetary resources. Financial discipline is not related to the amount of monetary resources that you have at your disposal. A person earning much less than you, can be more disciplined than you. Many affluent people were seen to spend all their resources unwisely and get into huge debts leading to their fleeing their homes to avoid repayment to their lenders! If financial behavior would have been strictly shaped by legislative initiatives, then some people might not have got the freedom  [...] 

The recession has made us wiser in our financial planning and we don’t want to repeat the mistakes that have led to this crisis. This is the reason we feel the necessity of teaching our children money management so that they can eventually protect themselves during any such crisis in future. Government and private financial institutions are trying their best to make school and college children financially literate. Apart from that, parents are trying to teach their children money management by opening bank accounts and teaching them how to budget. However these efforts are not enough. Kids should be taught other skills too. This is because the young generation of today is faced with financial challenges which their parents might not have encountered. For example, the older generation might  [...] 

If you are planning to invest major chunk of your funds in real estate, it’s time for you to hire a financial consultant. Real estate, which was once considered a safe investment, is not topping the priority list among investors in US since 2007. The world saw a tremendous business potential in the mortgage market in early 2000’s. The ever increasing pool of new homeowners and rising real estate price attracted numerous consumers to invest even more. This led the residential mortgage market to reach a tremendous size nearing $10 trillion by late 2007. However, since 2007 the same market has witnessed the biggest fall ever in US. Since US has attached itself to most of the financial markets in the world, the dilemma is now global. The UK’s Independent has predicted that the “UK mortgage  [...] 

No human is perfect and we do make mistakes when deciding upon what to buy and what not to buy; and that might cost you a fortune, especially when the times are so very financially tough. Here are some examples of such blundered investments that you could well avoid making. Buying Fancy Vehicles Many of us go crazy over new vehicles. College students are especially very prone to the temptation of owning the best car or bike in town. I’ve come across many of my college mates being obsessed with the idea of possessing the latest limousine or bike in town. One of my friends did buy a dandy car a couple of years ago. In a hurry to own the vehicle, she bought it at an auction for quite a bit. But the honeymoon with the car lasted for only a short time. After a year, one by one, the parts started  [...] 

This year, festivities seem to be impacted by the economic recession. At least a third of us seem to be affected by it and 88 % of us from this group intend to slash our festive expenditure. Some sectors of the market like those of greeting cards, decorations, costumes and candy are expecting a 15 % drop in sales from last year. They are trying to woo their customers with some really attractive discounts. Want some great discounts on your purchases? Then heed the words of Dan de Grandpe, sales tracker, Dealnews.com, who says that from the 14th -20 th of October you could get the best bargains. You might get a discount of almost 65 %. Old Is Gold Here are some tricks that you could apply when you buy things to save costs. When shopping for clothes, you can buy 2008 models, can’t you, unless  [...] 

The Obama Administration is coming up with a lot of financial reforms which are intended to protect the customer to save the country from repeating the blunders that they’ve done in the past which has led to the recession. This reform is calling for more accountability in financial behavior from the business people, the government and the consumer, so that fairness is meted out to all the three parties involved. Specifically, the consumers are protected well under this law. One of the foremost benefits that you can expect from this CFPA is that banking or credit card lending agencies cannot ask you for unfair payments. Unfair credit card terms and charges call for penalty under this law. Next time when you go to make an investment, make sure that you are disclosed all risks by the company  [...] 

Hey all employers, I know you’ve suffered the recession too, and are hard-pressed for funds. Naturally, you have no option but to slash your human resource costs. Fine! But who’s told you that you’ve got to be cruel to your employees while doing that? Don’t you know that apart from cutting off their vital source of materialistic sustenance, you are also causing them mental agony? You must remember that a laid off employee is distressed in so many ways. Your cruel ways will only increase the distress. Well, think it over, an oversensitive employee might even commit suicide and then you’ll have to face the legal music. Here are a couple of examples of employee layoff that enrage me: Laying Off a Person for Health Reasons What do you do when a person attends off ice despite being seriously?  [...] 

Listening to the symphonies of music legends such as Beethoven, Mozart and Mahler has been my passion for long while working. Recently, I’ve added, Pundit Shiv Kumar Sharma and Pundit Ravi Shankar, world renowned Indian instrumentalists, to my list of all time favorites. The music is so mystic and gives an out of this world experience. It converts work into pleasure seamlessly whereby you are not actually working but entertaining yourself for hours together. You will agree with me friends that when you sit to work you might be in different moods. You might be happy, sad, angry or excited. The very nature of the human mind is to be in one or more emotional states every waking moment. But your work demands an emotional disposition suitable to your work. As a computer programmer, I need to listen  [...] 

One of the primary reasons that I started blogging was because a blog is a weblog, i.e. a kind of a personal diary where you write your heart out on any issue or happening occurring in the world around you. A blogger is a free bird, who puts forward purely personal opinion uninfluenced by any external agency. But as social opinion on the cyber forums started gaining importance as the biggest communication mode, blogging also came under the roving eyes of business people, politicians and other influential members of society. To an opportunistic eye, every thing that draws its attention is a resource for making money or getting fame. So it did not take these highly ‘innovative people’ to use bloggers to endorse their products. Just like celebrities and models the bloggers too became the tools  [...] 

Nothing in this world can be called good or bad. Everything depends on the context and is so very conditional. Take debt for instance, it can be both good and bad depending upon a number of conditions. Though usually debt is looked upon with a prejudiced eye and is usually considered happening due to poor financial status of the debtor, it need not always be so. You can always take a loan when you are not having sufficient funds in hand to further your ambitions which may be a career upliftment, or business expansion or setup. You should have a clear plan of repaying your loan and should be able to stick to it. Taking debts is an art and you should exercise your judgmental skills while doing it. Never be over optimistic while taking a debt even for a positive purpose. When taking a loan the  [...]