2009 September | My Financial Corner

Personal Finances – Where Are Our Position?

September 30th, 2009 No comments

Marshall Silver in his book Passion, Profit, & Power, describe fantastic facts about money distribution among all society. These facts are:

50% of world’s money supply is kept by 1% only of world’s population.
90% of world’s money supply is kept by 5% only of world’s population.
95% of all population only keeps 10% of money supply.

He also predicts that if all money supply is equally divided to all population, everyone in this world will be categorized as rich people. But, it will not take any longer time, since within 5 years the composition of money distribution will be back to current composition.

Refer to this fact, I should ask myself about my position, where am I? The sadly answer is, in fact I am categorized as one of 95% of world’s population who own small part of only 10% money supply. How about you?

There are several reasons behind this fact:

Weird thing but its real, that mostly people are feel comfortable to become a part of 95% “unlucky” population, trapped in our own comfort zone and lazy to think, except millions of very poor society among under developed countries who fight and struggle to keep them still alive. Almost of us always say that we don’t have enough money, but deep in our heart we are enjoying this financial game. Let’s take little deep reflections about this argument; don’t you have similar opinion with me?
When hold money, only 5% of population ask the question, “How can this money makes more money for me?” On the other hand, other 95% will ask, “What can I buy with this money?” This difference of financial insight makes Marshall Silver’s prediction seems going to be accurate.
Mostly people is always thinking “in the box”, but few people innovatively thinking “out of the box”.
Not for excuse purpose, current capitalism system has brought wide opportunity gap between rich people (5% of population) and average / poor people (95% of population). Superior people have wide opportunity, but vice versa for inferior people.

I am sure that almost all of you already known this fact. The purpose of this article is just to remind us again, to make self-analysis: where are our position?

And if we have 5 years future life from now on, at which position we want to be?

I already had my own answer. How about you?

Tags: Personal Finance Management

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Basic Understanding of Leasing Transaction

September 14th, 2009 No comments

leasing Even though term of Leasing often used by most of people, but actually only limited people who really understand the definition and role of leasing, especially equipment leasing. Leasing transaction is considered as a quite complex transaction in term of tax and accounting. Even daily practitioner sometimes get into some confuses and cause additional cost for their lessee due to it’s complexity. Moreover, different country usually has different legal and tax regulation related to leasing, so that leasing practice in one country may not be valid in other country.

Even though there are some complexities in practice, but basically leasing has similar nature regardless prevailed regulation in any country. Basically, leasing transaction can be separated into two main categories: financial leases and operating leases. Financial lease represents a longer term lease commitment in which the sum of the rents due will approximate the equipment’s purchase cost plus profit of the lessor (full pay out). Meanwhile, all lease transaction which is not fitting with the financial lease can be put into operating lease category.

Within the two broad categories, are some basic variations. The most popular variation in major Asian countries is leverage lease, beside other service lease and non leveraged lease. These variations are sometimes incorrectly considered to be separate types of leases rather than descriptive forms of the basic types. For example, finance leases can be leveraged leases or non leveraged leases, and service leases can be financial or operating in nature.

This posting will briefly explain three of leasing categories, ie financial lease, operating lease, and leveraged lease.

1. Financial Lease

Financial leases are considered long term leases because the primary lease terms usually run for most of the equipment’s useful life. Typically, the total cash flow over the term—from rents, tax savings, and the end-of-lease equipment (residual) resale or re-lease value—will be sufficient to pay back the lessor’s investment, take care of the administrative expenses, pay off any equipment-related debt obligations and commissions, and provide a profit (full pay out).

Because they are entered into by lessors as long-term financial commitments, finance lessors usually impose a substantial repayment penalty for a lessee’s early lease termination in an amount that will assure the lessor of a return of its investment and a profit, at least up to the date of termination.

Under financial lease, the fundamental ownership responsibilities, such as maintaining and repairing the equipment, paying for the necessary insurance, and taking care of property, use, and sales taxes, are placed on the lessee. So, financial lease can be compared with loan in that the lessor, like a lender, is involved only in asset funding.

In financial lease, lessee bears a major risk of lease item obsolescence, so that common lease item in financial lease are the items which has quite significant resale value compared with it’s brand new price.

2. Operating Lease

When full pay out condition is not fulfilled in lease transaction, the lease is called an operating lease. Operating lease can be span a few months to a few years, although some are as short as a few hours.

Because the lease terms are relatively short, an operating lessor usually cannot earn much of its equipment investment back through the rents from one lease transaction; thus, it must either sell or re-lease the equipment on attractive terms to be profitable.

Their short lease terms and easy cancellation provisions make operating lease attractive to users in several situations, especially if the user has planning to use the lease item in short period only. For this kind of transaction, it seems similar with rental transaction.

Other benefit for using operating lease to lessee is if residual value of item is very much depreciated or the item is related to fast changing technology. By using operating lease, the risk of obsolescence is born by lessor instead of lessee. So that, lease rent of operating lease is usually higher compared with financial lease.

3. Leveraged Lease

Both financial lease and operating lease can use this kind of variation. In a leveraged lease, lessor only cover some major percentage of purchase amount, let say 60% up to 80% of it. This leveraging generally enables lessor to provide a lessee with relatively lower rents while at the same time maintaining its return.

This kind of lease transaction is commonly used in Asian countries. Since the country risk is considered higher compared with other developped countries, lessor only take some portion of financing, and lease term will be set for shorter period (usually 3 years only). As consequence, credit risk will be lower and lease rent doesn’t reduced significantly due to shorter lease term.

There are a lot of variation of lease transactions, but in basic those three lease categories already covered the definision of leasing.

Tags: lease, Leasing

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Forget Our Money for Enjoyable Retirement Age

September 7th, 2009 2 comments

personal finances I believe that nobody wants to burden their children or family, if they have, when they are getting old and cannot make money anymore, and I also believe that everybody want to have their enjoyable retirement without any worry about their financial life. So, if we now having sufficient active income to cover all monthly household budget and can set aside a part of them into saving, lets calculate the amount to be saved for our retirement age. After calculation, its good if we can fulfill our monthly saving for this purpose, but we have to make efforts to save less amount even though by calculation we find out that too much money have to be saved for financial-free retirement.

Let say our calculation resulted $500 monthly saving, but from our current monthly income, seems that we will only be able to save $100 for our retirement. Don’t let this $100 cancel our intention to the retirement, but just easily start with $100. It will be better instead of surrender then we don’t even do any saving and all will be disappear.

Since saving purpose for retirement age is long-term habit we have to do, the handling of this money a little bit differs from other purpose. I try to give some clues how to handle this kind of saving :

Just start with choose well reputable bank with long experiences as a place to save our money, even though they offer lower interest rate. During uncertain long-term economic situation, a lot of small to medium bank will face difficulties once upon a time, and I think we don’t expect to get into hurry, queued at bank’s teller with other thousand of people, just to get our money back. Long established big reputable banks usually have passed several similar time, and time has proved their ability to overcome hard situation.
If we have found the bank, open one saving account under our name. This will become a special and particular saving account for retirement purpose, separated from others. Don’t to apply for any ATM card which can make us to withdraw the money easily, but just keep the saving book. Save our $100 every month, then forget our money as if we don’t have any saving at all !
Do similar thing every month at the beginning of the month (remember, don’t do it at the end of the month or we will oftenly find that we have nothing to save). If in the future the amount of money we can save is increased (let say become $150), then increase our saving amount, and also forget it for long period.
Slow but sure, we will have significant amount of forgotten money, and bank pays some interest to us. After several years, let check our saving balance and judge whether the amount already sufficient to be converted to time deposit or not. If the amount is sufficient, then convert them to time deposit with monthly roll over (please use monthly roll over instead of semester of yearly roll over, even though under lower interest rate).
We will have one time deposit certificate and one saving book then. Nicely forget our certificate, by place it in our safety box. Start again to save in our saving account from zero balance amount.
Please do it as a habit instead of an obligation for us. Do it for years with discipline, increase monthly saving amount step by step. After more than 10 years, we will have several certificates and one saving book.
If the amount already quite huge, and I expect our age already 45 or 50 years, try to find one good mutual fund, fix income mutual fund is better, and invest our money amount. Let the fund manager manage our money, and just forget it for 10 years. Meanwhile, keep continue our habit to save any amount in our saving account, still; convert them into time deposit when the amount already sufficient.
At the beginning of our pension age, we will have one saving account, several certificates of time deposit, and also mutual fund certificate. It’s a time to use them for our remained whole life. Post them all back to our saving account, and I believe we already had significant money amount for enjoyable retirement age.

This kind of scheme shall be implemented in flexible ways, and for sure we will need financial calculator to review time by time how many amount we have to set aside for securing our pension age.

So, forget our money, and enjoy our retirement age then !

Tags: retirement, saving

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One Million EC Contest – List of Sponsors

September 2nd, 2009 1 comment

personal finances One Million EC contest, one of the the biggest Entrecard contest just started a while ago. As one of the sponsor, I have to attach the list of all sponsor in my posting every month.

So, here is the list. Just enjoy the game to everybody who participate in this contest, both sponsors and participants.

25 $ cash prize from

Business Sphere – Business Advice, Entrepreneurship, Consulting, Real Estate

20 $ cash prize from

My Financial Corner

15 $ cash prize from

10 $ cash prize from

5 $ cash prize from

25.000 EC

EzGreatLife – Family, Fitness and Finances

20.000 EC

15.000 EC

10.000 EC

7.000 EC

5.500 EC

Guilty Pleasures

5.000 EC

4.500 EC

OTHERSIDE of my LIFE

4.000 EC

3.500 EC

3.000 EC

2.500 EC

2.000 EC

1.500 EC

1.001 EC

Time!

1.000 EC

500 EC

125 x 125 ad space (4 months until 31st December)

125 x 125 ad space (3 months)

Text Link ad (3 months)

Better Interpersonal Communication

125 x 125 ad space (2 months)

Text link ad (2 months)

Work At Home (worth $ 50)

Text Link Ad (1 month)

After cancer, now what
Gossip Mom (5 text links!)

468 x 60 ad space (1 month)

The Nexus – Feed your brain

125 x 125 ad space (1 month)

Blogmakeover

Momgen Designs

Blog review (200 – 300 words)

Customized Bloglayout (Blogger-Platform)

my Web-Blog Designs

DOMAIN (1 year)

LAINY’S MUSINGS

5 GB Hosting space (without domain)

angelic-melody.net

My own contribution (if someone beats my contribution, i have to top up ):
25.000 EC + 1 ad space Cornymans Moneypage
25.000 EC + 1 ad space Cornymans Blogreviews
25.000 EC + 1 ad space All about babies and kids
25.000 EC + 1 ad space The One Minute Guide

Tags: EC Contest

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Why Retirement Planning is Important ?

September 1st, 2009 8 comments

personal finances When we are talking about retirement, a lot of people especially young men will think that this issue doesn’t so important, or even never been in their mind, since we have to talk something far in the future. In nature, people like to live and think for today, instead of thinking about something unclear, moreover if the issue is 25 years ahead from now.

But, on the other hand, all financial advisor always ask us to think and make some personal finances planning for our retirement age. Why this topic is crucial as one of our financial mission ?

For us who still enjoy your 20th years period of our life, we may think that retirement planning is something that can wait. So many thing to do and to think such as social life, romance, entertainment, and other ways of enjoy the life. Then, there’s a time when we get old and start to think about our retirement. At that time, may be the planning is too late and we have to work very hard to achieve our goal.

So, how important is retirement planning for all of us actually?

Let’s find the broad and simple answer. Assume that we started our career at our 25 years of age, then how many years time we have before retired? Up to 55 years old, there will be 30 years. Yes, we have 30 years to prepare. After that, if we can live up to 75 years old, how much time we have to spend without any significant income but just continuous monthly expenditure ? 20 years.

It means, we have 30 years to secure our next 20 years life (2/3 of productive life period). To be emphasized here, 20 years is not a short time, and at that time we will need something to spend for our daily life.

So, begin our retirement planning on 40 years of age is little bit too late unless at that time we have quite huge income to allocate. But, who can grant that our 40 years age will become our financial golden age ?

If we now 25 years old, and have 30 years to prepare our another 20 years life, I think such 20 years is quite important and fair to be included in our life planning. Otherwise, we will burden our children or family when we get retired without sufficient amount of money to spend.

So, just keep invest our money when we are young. If we are still under 20 – 30 years period of our life, we can learn all investment instrument and don’t be scared to take some investment risk. When we are under 40 – 50 years period, please calm down and save conservatively. Just bear in mind, that we will have long 20 years road to walk when our body is too weak to work, our brain is too tired to think, and the most appropriate thing to do just to enjoy our life.

Personal finances is sacrifice something in our current life for our better future life. Just make it as a natural process, enjoy our today’s life but also make a plan for our future life, so we will be able to enjoy our whole lifetime. That’s a dream of every human being, isn’t it ?

So, once again, retirement planning is important just because we all want our whole life become enjoyable and valuable for us.

Tags: Investment, Personal Finance Management, retirement, savings

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