Certified Financial Planner

Job of a CFP is very similar to a family doctor. However, instead of physical problems, a CFP diagnoses and eliminates your financial problems. Being a certified professional, this guy will help you get you finances back on track, by providing you necessary tools and advices.

CFP is an expert, similar to a doctor, lawyer, and accountant, who specializes in a particular area. People come to them to seek professional advice, owing to the vast experience and expertise in the field.

They help you achieve your financial goals, which include designing your investment portfolio, planning retirement investment, debt repayment strategy, and so on. Hence, consulting a Certified Financial Planner is kind of a one stop shop for all your financial requirements.

This is like any other professional job. Why is it better then other jobs?

There are several reasons why CFP is preferred over other jobs. Here are some of them:

You Earn Good Money

CFP’s, all over the world, are paid pretty well. Most of them are depended solely on commission, i.e. they have to sell their product or service to earn money. Some CFPs, however, are hired by corporate bodies or other clients on salary. Many are even hybrid, where part of their income is fixed, and part comes from selling financial products. So, a good Certified Financial Planner can easily earn $100,000 per year. However, average salary would be somewhere around $70,000.

This Job is in Demand

Jobs that requires specialized are always in demand globally. With the increase in financial institutions, demand for CFPs will rise further, and it will continue to be a hot choice for at least another decade. So, you certainly wouldn’t lose your job for another 10 years, if you plan to become a financial planner.

Flexible Schedule

If you are a Certified Financial Planner, you don’t have a fixed schedule, or many deadlines to adhere to. You will have to work according to your client’s needs. This means you may sometimes work out their plans over a dinner together, or sometimes even early morning before office hours. If you feel like discussing work with your clients over a round of golf, do it. You can also take a mini vacation every month, without any hindrances from your employer or clients. However, before you reach this level of freedom, you will have to work hard for few initial years.

You Actually Help People

Financial problem is one of the biggest problems faced by people in the US. By taking up CFP as your career, you actually help those people while earning money. You feel good when you help someone get out of debt, or plan retirement portfolio, or children’s education fund.

What Are The Requirements To Become a Certified Financial Planner?

Different places have different requirements. However, a common way to become a CFP is complete you bachelor’s degree in accounting or finance, and take up Certified Financial Planning course after graduation.

Besides, having other additional skills would be an added advantage. A CFP should:

• Love talking to people
• Not be afraid to put forth his ideas and suggestions
• Have social abilities
• Have tremendous love for finance and investments
• Be very logical and rational

Being a Certified Financial Planner is not too difficult, but it’s simply a waste if you don’t love personal finance.

• Having a strong , competitive, and healthy workforce
• Working environment for workers must be healthy and safe
• Strengthening the economic workforce and thus protecting the economy

This means they developed a plan to provide safe and secure working conditions for an employee. Besides, every working individual must get equal working opportunity, enjoy all legal rights, receive wages according to industry standards, and have a safe place to work in.

The US Department of Labor is not a small organization. It has over 27 big divisions with their independent rights and responsibilities. Recently, they have hire additional 300 officials to ensure the above mentioned are properly given to an employee. So, we can expect more audits in the coming months.

These audits are not random. They visit a company for audit when an employee files complaint against his employer, regardless of the existing employment status of the individual filing complaint. They don’t generally audit the entire industry. It’s only against those who they are skeptical about. Some of the industries they commonly audit are garment industry, hotel industry, agriculture, health care, day care, janitorial services, etc. Compensation in these industries is quite low, and employers often violate certain rules.

Some of the very frequent acts and regulations violated by employers are:

• Violation of sections under Child Labor Act
• Non compliance of Minimum Wages Act
• Miscategorizing a laborer as exempt
• Nor providing required retirement benefits
• Not paying over time
• Deduction in wages due to unexplained reasons
• Violating Family & Medical Leave Act
• Not paying other compensation like bonus, overtime, incentives, commission, etc

If a US Department of Labor official visits your company for an audit, he will check every aspect of your company related to employment, regardless of why the complaint was filed. Payment history is first thing he might ask for. He would check if all the employees of your company would are paid on time, and ask for relevant evidence.

If you don’t have all the records in place or if some employee has filed a lawsuit against you, make sure you employ an attorney and get things straight as quickly as possible. It would certainly be expensive. But if you are found guilty in the audit, you would have to pay much more.

You want your girlfriend to be happy

Of course, everyone wants their girlfriend to be happy. As soon as you have a girl, you always ensure that she is happy, and the reason, as Hooberstank sung, is you. You do everything that’s humanly possible like bring her roses, regular surprises, make her laugh, etc. However, if you inspect properly, having a job is quite similar. You always ensure that your employer is happy with your work. And during appraisal times, you toss surprises like extra work, innovative ideas, or sometimes working overnight.

You are rewarded if she is happy

You go for a date with your new girlfriend and you have been very funny, nice, and caring. And if she likes it, it’s very likely that she would invite you home after the date, and we all know what that means. However, what you do there – and how you do – highly influences the chances of being invited next time. Nevertheless, if you were quite boring during the date, and had asked her to pay the bill, she would definitely not invite you home, or for a next date.

Quite similarly, if you are handling the work, as your employer expects you to do, you will be nominated for a promotion. But if you don’t fit their criteria, or don’t fit well in the culture, you would be lucky to have your job.

Everything was perfect until you realized she doesn’t care

This happens very often in a relationship. You try to give her everything you have. However, after a while you realize she doesn’t love you or worse, she is hanging out with another guy. It may seem that you are left with nothing. But it isn’t the case. You have two options: talk to her about your feelings or check out other girls.

Correspondingly, you may have done everything you can for your employer. However, one day you realize he doesn’t even know who you are. The most viable options, in such case, are either talk to your employer about your contributions or search another job.

In both the above cases, second option may be quite tempting. However, remember, you have to do it all over again: being funny, giving surprises, working hard, etc. Make sure you select the right option.

Cheap Labor

Labor is available for paltry amounts to US,UK employers in poorer countries. Why will a US employer hire an employee from US if he can get a job done by an Indian or Chinese for less than half the amount and that too without compromising upon the quality? Many times the quality turns out to be much better too! The third world employees are thrilled about working for foreign companies from the rich countries and put in their best. What you’d pay to his/her US counterpart may be cheap according to US standards, but for the third world employee, it may be one of the best rates according to the industry standards of his/country.

Not all jobs can be outsourced, but for those that can be, you as an employer is saving up on money you’d otherwise have to spend on hiring labor from your own country at a higher rate. So this employee mix does help in your saving up quite a bit of money.

Tax Perks

If you want yet another way to dodge taxes, after trying out your usual strategies, outsource your business. You do save up on taxes by doing this. Also you can take advantage of the tax benefits that you get from “unrepatriated earnings” i.e. your earnings from the outsourced business that remain in that country.

No Employee Insurance Or Other Costs

When you hire a US local employee, you’ve got to pay up for Health Insurance, Social Security, FICA, OSHA etc. Added to this are licensure laws for employee maintenance for licensed businesses. You don’t have to shell down even a single penny on these expenses to a worker from another country. So you are saving up on all these costs aren’t you?

Sizing Flexibility

By outsourcing your business you have greater flexibility of sizing the human resources according to your requirement. Downsizing has never been favored by US employees and cases of employee lawsuits against employers who downsized their human resources are on the rise these days in the US. You are answerable even to your third world employees, but as they are not protected by the US employment laws, downsizing or upsizing is a more flexible issue with them.

Then the same media represented glittering faces of murky politicians that declared our laudable comeback with healthier statistics of economy and new jobs. We contently fell for such pranks and kept believing in the fidelity of our hypocrite society. Now let’s check the ability veracity updates to hoodwink us on unemployment status.

Recently, a sum of $15 billion was provided (as a loan) to 24 states that were unable to grant unemployment benefits to the jobless population.

More than five hundred thousand unemployed citizens, North Carolina has borrowed over $1.4 billion from the federal government, with no idea how it will be repaid. However, this amount seems to be a petite figure as it is expected to reach $2 billion by the end of December and $4 billion by next year. The overall state budget is, may be a printing blunder, $19 billion.

If this still seems to be petite, don’t fret because 5 other states have scrounged more than North Carolina. 7 states received funds more than $1 billion and the rest was snatched by remaining 11 states. Collectively they have exhausted currency more than $15 billion which the federal government, as yet, expects to receive.

After such a huge lending and optimistic attitude, the Federal Government receives statements that a part of $15 billion should be considered as bad debts, if not the whole amount. Some amount that it receives back would be repaid by Indiana, the loan of which is almost similar to North Carolina, which has started levying additional tax to the business owners that provides unemployment benefit. Similar malicious method could be adopted by most of the states under debt. However, the virtuous officials of North Carolina are much bothered about the already despondent condition of the entrepreneurs.

Clegg has no hopes to get the funds back in the fed piggy because, I guess, he doesn’t believe in Obama’s vision of generating over 3.5 million employment opportunities. How rude Clegg.

Neither Clegg nor Obama and fed knows what is to be done next. The state government is still paying unemployment benefits even after the uncertainty of North Carolina and other states in repaying $15 billion.

However, there sources other than Fed funds by which the state can continue paying these benefits. It is through the funds paid by employers for unemployment insurance tax. Employers have to pay certain amount which is purely based on the number of employees laid off by them. This is a quarterly payment which is also depended on the unemployment benefits that were earlier provided to the jobless.

However, the loan taken from the Federal government is so high that it cannot be repaid by collecting negligible amount from unemployment insurance tax. If someone really wants to know how it can still be managed, ask the state government that is planning to increase the tax burden till the employers almost wither away.

Employers cannot resist what’s being laden on them by the government. But they can choose their own path when it comes to hire people. They can hire in huge quantities if they are left with anything after employee health care costs, such huge tax burdens by the government, and the blessing economy. I don’t know about increasing hiring trend, but these reasons are enough for small business to lay off more people or simply declare insolvency.

The employees that would be laid off would not contribute much to the existing economic condition except for adding their figure with the population of around 9.3 million that are surviving on a temporary basis with minimum salary earned by part time jobs. 9.3 million? Were we duped even last year when the number was just 6.8 million?

And most of the employees are forcefully depended on quite stable part time work which will last just till the finalization of road construction, where they work. With shrinking number of small business and even the giants, the number of dejected and misfortunate faces on the streets seems to be increasing to which the official might say “at least something is boosting, if not the economy.”

Laying Off a Person for Health Reasons

What do you do when a person attends off ice despite being seriously? Adore her commitment or just kick her off? Here’s a woman who kept attending office even though sick until her condition worsened and she was put in hospital emergency. Listen to what the employee has to this from the Gawker report, “I had been working for several months for a company that deliberately kept me just under full time to avoid having to offer me benefits. I got sick, and because I didn’t have health insurance I didn’t go to the doctor (and kept going to work). By the time I was finally dragged to the emergency room by a friend, my illness required a five-night hospital stay. The day I got home from the hospital, my manager came to my house to ‘check on me.’ I was surprised at her thoughtfulness until I found out that along with flowers, she had also brought a severance check. I’m still paying off that hospital bill.”

So is this the kind of inhuman treatment that we are trying to mete out to our employees?

Making a Lay off Announcement Public

Nobody wants to be laid off. Its bad news and many people are embarrassed when it is conveyed to them in front of their subordinates and colleagues. But some employers don’t seem to be sensitive enough to these understand this. Here’s an example from the High Definition that tells about how an employee’s dismissal letter was put on the company’s folder on a shared drive of the computer. Hear it from Sylvia, the employee herself: “My boss didn’t know how to save anything into different folders, so it all went into her “Annie’s Stuff” folder on the shared drive. I had access, so I spent many merry months reading her Christmas letters, letters to an ex-baby daddy, and the performance reviews of my coworkers. One day I saw a new file with “Sylvia Fired.doc” on it. The dismissal form she’d filled out was full of misspellings and grammatical errors—I spent my last few hours at work copyediting my own dismissal letter. It was the most fulfilling project I took on during my time there.”

For more such horrifying examples visit the Gawker website