Art of business

One of the most important steps in personal wealth building is getting yourself out of the bondage of debt, but you’ve probably found that this is easier said than done. What’s the quickest and easiest way to get out of debt? How do you get started if you barely have enough money to make your minimum payments right now? This article will give you a simple strategy for getting out of debt so that you can focus on your personal wealth building.

The Foundation of Personal Wealth Building

The foundation of personal wealth building always starts with making your financial freedom a priority, even over your living expenses. Of course, you still have to make sure that your living expenses are paid. But have you ever tried paying the first fruits of your earnings towards achieving financial freedom? Before you pay any of your bills, pay a certain amount of extra money towards your plan for getting your debts paid down.

If you wait until you have enough money left over after paying your expenses, you’ll never get started. So the first step to personal wealth building is making it a priority.

Before you start Getting out of Debt

Before you start putting the first fruits of your earnings towards paying down your debts, set aside $500 to $1,000 dollars just in case you have an unexpected expense. This is key to getting out of debt because most people get into debt as a result of financial emergencies. So before you start paying towards your debts and make a commitment to stop borrowing money and going into debt, make sure you have a cushion to cover you if something comes up. Once you have this, you’ll feel more comfortable putting the first fruits of your earnings towards paying down your debt.

Treat Getting out of Debt Like Investing

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re getting out of debt is trying to invest money AND pay down their debt. This reminds me of the old saying: “If you chase two rabbits, you’ll lose them both.” Think about this, if you’re paying off a loan (or a card) that has an 18% interest rate, what’s the point of investing money and earning only 12 to 16%? Paying off debt at 18% is actually just as good as investing your money at 18%, because you’re avoiding paying the 18%.

So make getting out of debt a priority, set a cushion for yourself and make it your investment plan. Once you’re done, you can focus all of your energy on personal wealth building.

Bankruptcy is a common term which is used by the potent debtors since a long time. This method directly refers to legal enforcement in a debt issue. A person with huge unsecured debt was always considered as non-liable debtor and the banks sometimes forcefully eliminated their financial relationship with these debtors through the legal procedure of bankruptcy. This method eliminates the debts by ceasing all the properties owned by the debtors. The properties were sold and the money was distributed among the investors as repayments. Nowadays, no financial institutions want any of their clients file bankruptcy. The situation was led by the devastating recession of 2009. Many potential regular customers were found in huge financial debt and insufficiency and with no way left they were invariably filing bankruptcy.

This situation was never expected, but the predisposing factors made the option inevitable for the clients. They were finding it hard to live with the huge unsecured debt and wanted do get rid of it; they went for the crude decision. The number of such cases increased so much that the creditors were about to face great financial trouble. The situation was adverse for the economy of the entire world. So, the government became concerned with the issue and a new idea came up from their revisited debt law. The new idea was named as debt relief hypothesis and it became immensely popular because of the offering based on a simple ideology of debt reduction.

Debt settlement is certainly an easier way if compared to bankruptcy. Bankruptcy takes a good amount of time to clear off the debts and also have numerous adverse sides with the legal procedures. Bankruptcy leaves bad remarks on your financial profile which bars you from getting any financial association from any company for the next ten years. It also takes time while ceasing the properties. So, it is a lengthy process, whereas debt relief directly enables you to talk with the creditors about your issue. In the meetings you have chance to talk about your financial condition and you can convince them for the amount you are willing. Thus eliminating the debts become pretty easy.

So, while there is a comparison in between these two ways, you’ll find debt settlement faster, easier and also potentially positive with effects. If you have unsecured debts of $10K or, more, you must choose the best option available and in the earth, the best debt option is certainly known as debt settlement.

If you are over $10,000 in unsecured debt it would be wise to contact a debt settlement company while conditions are so favorable. A legitimate debt settlement company will be able to eliminate 60% of your unsecured debt on average.

If you are one of millions of renters, a renters insurance policy is a great way to protect your possessions. It’s strange that not many people take advantage of this terrific policy type because it is very inexpensive and it provides excellent coverage limits for the things that renters own. It’s estimated that only 20% of all people who currently rent have a renters policy. This article discusses why it’s so good to have coverage and the best way to choose coverage limits.

On average, a policy will run you about $10 a month. For this nominal amount of money, you will receive coverage for all of the things that you own, and are being stored in your place of residence. A $10 a month premium will get you a coverage amount of about $25,000. Compared to other types of insurance, this is a great value.

In order to protect your things properly, make sure to figure out what the full replacement value of all your things are. In other words, don’t insure your stuff for the amount that you bought the items for. Figure out how much it would cost to replace the items today and whatever the total is, opt for that amount of coverage. If you need more coverage than $25,000, you can add coverage for not much more per month.

Lastly, if you have items that are very valuable, like artwork or jewelry, you should probably look into getting a separate policy to cover them. Most renters policies are not the best insurance option for very expensive things.

Getting a proper education costs money, often a lot of money. Few people have the resources to pay outright for a college education and borrowing is often the only option. Fortunately there are plenty of sources to go to for a student loan. If you truly want to get an education, money should not hold you back.

The first thing to do is come up with a realistic plan for how much money you will need to finance your education. First you need to come up with a detailed list of all possible expenses. Once you have this, compare it to your sources of income. The difference is what you will need to borrow each semester to make ends meet. Avoid the temptation to borrow more than you need just because it was offered to you. Unless the loan is subsidized by the government, interest will continue to add up even though the money is just sitting in your account. Don’t borrow the money until you need it.

Once you have an idea of how much you need, you next need to go to your school’s financial aid office. They will help you fill out the proper application for a loan and will also advise you on some issues of handling school expenses.

A couple of weeks after you apply for the loans you will receive a detailed list of what you are qualified for. These will usually be a mix of grants, subsidized loans and unsubsidized loans. The ratio will depend on your need as determined by the government. For a subsidized loan, the government will cover the interest payments as long as you are in school. For unsubsidized loans the interest begins to accrue as soon as you accept the loan and can add up quickly.

Now that you see what is being offered you can make your decision. Make sure your total budget will cover all expected expenses but try not to over borrow. Many students leave college burdened by huge debts and you want to avoid this if at all possible.

When an individual purchases a home there is a host of many different factors that they need to take into consideration. One of the primary tasks of a home owner is to ensure that you are protecting your investment. A good way to do this is to procure insurance policies and warranties for your home.

A home warranty is generally a policy that is usually in effect as an option for a full year after the initial purchase of a Home warranty and is renewable yearly as long as there been no lapse in coverage. A home warranty is a coverage that pays for any repairs or replacement done with appliances and systems that are covered by your chosen policy. The policy usually covers any mechanical and electrical equipment found in the home including washers and dryers, home heating systems like furnaces and air conditioners as well as refrigerators and any other equipment that is not usually covered by your home owners insurance. The coverage of the damage should only be generally through normal wear or abnormal breakdown of any appliance. The plan can be procured during closing and is paid for a full year in advance.

Options For Buying

There are several options in procuring the warranty. It is generally offered by warranty companies or if the previous home owner or builder of the property already procured it for the property

There are also different warranties for new homes and old homes as well. An old home can procure a warranty that is renewable every year while new homes can procure upto a ten year coverage plan. You need to negotiate with the policy issuers in order for you to get the best deal out of the whole lot. Usually a home warranty will cost anywhere from $300 to $900 annually, depending of course on the type of coverage you procure.. Advantages of A Home Warranty

There are many advantages that can be had for getting a home warranty. Many real estate agents advise their clients to get one for their new homes. This is particularly beneficial for repair coverage of major home appliance systems like the heating and cooling system of the home which can be really costly when it needs to be fixed. Once a covered appliance stops working you can claim from the warranty immediately to have it fixed or replaced.

Although home warranties are usually advised, it is also advised that you read the ‘fine print’ on your policy so you can be sure of the policy you are getting. Some policies don’t include a particular appliance or puts a cap on how much of the repair expense will be covered by the policy, everything will usually be placed on the warranty contract.

Finally, a home warranty can be very beneficial for you most especially if you want to save up on costly repairs. Most appliances will surely need repair in due time, no matter how careful you are with using them and taking out a home warranty will surely save you a lot from repair cost.

If you’ve never advertised your product, service or business before, you might find the world of advertising to be daunting. You have a variety of media to choose from, each with their own advertising products, prices and lingo that aren’t necessarily intuitive.

You’ll find some basic information here that will help you wade through these waters.

Television and Radio

Broadcast media have a finite space (i.e. just 24 hours a day). That space is divvied up among programming content, public service announcements and ads. The ads you’d be buying are called “spots” and you pay for a fixed amount of time (e.g. 30 seconds). Although you could buy a single spot, it is much cheaper for you (on a per-spot basis) to buy a bulk of spots. Especially with TV, where the cost of producing an ad is so expensive, it wouldn’t make sense for you to run the commercial just once.

The cost of a 30-second spot will vary greatly among stations (based on the number of listeners), and among the time of day. Drive time for radio and prime time for TV will cost you a premium over ads in the middle of the night, for instance. So when you buy a package of spots, you’ll probably get your ads spread out over the course of a day, with a spot or two during more desirable times (or programs), with the majority of your spots being at less-desirable times. Be aware that even though you think you’ve purchased spots for a specific time, if another advertiser comes in and is willing to pay more for those spots, they can bump your ad out of that time slot. Because of the finite space for ads in broadcast media, the law of supply and demand are in full swing.

Outdoor Advertising

Like broadcast media, outdoor advertising has limited real estate. They can’t easily add a new billboard if they are running at 100-percent capacity. However, with billboards you can lock in the duration of your ad, so you don’t have to worry about another advertiser with deeper pockets bumping you off halfway through the month.

Billboard rates are determined by the number of eyeballs they deliver. So a billboard on a busy freeway will cost a premium over a billboard on a less-busy street. You usually buy billboard space a month at a time, and you can also get discounts for committing to run longer.

Print Advertising

Magazine ads are pretty straight-forward. They typically have just a handful of sizes that you can choose from. So a full-page ad might cost $X, a half-page ad would cost a little more than half of $X, and a quarter-page ad would cost a little more than a quarter of $X. Magazine ads usually include color in their prices because color ads visually enhance the overall look of their magazine.

Newspaper advertising is probably the trickiest to understand because there are so many options. The ads you typically see scattered throughout news pages are called display ads, also known as run-of-press (ROP) ads. Newspapers typically charge per column inch for those ads. A column inch is one column wide by one inch tall. So an ad that spans six columns and is ten inches tall is called a 60-inch ad. If the newspaper charges $X per column inch, you’d be looking at paying $60X for that ad to run once. If you want the ad to be in color, you will probably have to pay extra, either as a flat color cost, or an extra color cost per column inch. You can get discounts if you agree to run a certain number of inches over a specific period, or if you agree to run an ad a certain number of times.

In addition to running display ads in newspapers, you can run classified line ads (paying per word, per line, etc.) or classified display ads, which price more like display ads but run in the classified section. You can also pay for advertorials that are written to look like news content (the front page of a real estate insert, for example) but are written by advertising people, not the editorial folks.

You can also put pre-printed inserts into the paper. Newspapers will charge you a fee per thousand inserts. So if you decide to have the newspaper put in 10,000 of your inserts, and the cost is $X per thousand, you will pay $10X. You will also have to pay to have the inserts created and delivered to the newspaper.

Online Ads in Traditional Media

As you know, newspapers and broadcast stations also have websites. They run the same types of ads as other online publishers (e.g. banner ads and text ads), but they don’t always price the ads the same. Since traditional media companies are used to telling their advertisers what to pay for ads, they’ve adopted the same approach for ads on their websites. They usually charge one of two ways: per a fixed period of time (e.g. a month) or per impressions served.

The nice thing about these pricing structures is you’ll know about how long your ad will be online. If you pay for a month, you’ll be up for a month. If you pay per impression, the media company should be able to tell you what their average impressions per day are. Chances are you’ll also be able to deal with the same sales person for online ads as for the other ads you purchase with them.

The downside to this is you aren’t paying based on the effectiveness of the ad. Like running a radio spot or a print ad, you expect the ad to ultimately generate sales for you, and with online ads you have a better ability to track that your website visitors clicked through a particular ad, but if your ad doesn’t get enough people to your site to buy your product, you may pay for a lot of eyeballs that don’t do anything for you.

Online Ads in the Performance Marketing Space

Before traditional media companies even had their own websites, Internet publishers were hosting advertising banners placed through affiliate networks. The publishers (anyone with a website that wants to advertise someone’s product on their site would be considered a publisher), to a certain extent, were happy to take whatever money the advertisers were willing to push their way. And the advertisers, thanks to the electronic nature of the Web’s marketplace, wanted to pay for actions, not just eyeballs.

Today there are hundreds of these affiliate networks that help pair online advertisers with online publishers. To advertise on these networks, you need to simply join the network. Most networks are free to join and you’ll have a network manager assigned to you. Others are more like exchanges where you pay to join, then post your campaigns on the exchange hoping to get picked up by the many online publishers in that network. You will have direct access to the publishers in an exchange, but probably not have any access to publishers in a managed network.

Affiliate networks are using the term “performance marketing” to highlight the fact that you’ll pay for actions, not just eyeballs. What you pay depends on what you are selling and the type of campaign you run.

If you are a bricks-and-mortar retailer, you will probably run a cost-per-sale (CPS) campaign. This simply means you pay a publisher only if a visitor on the publisher’s site clicks through your ad, lands on your site, and buys your product. When you start the campaign, you’ll tell the publisher what the percentage of each sale you will pay. So if you figure you can afford to pay 10-percent commission on all sales coming from a publisher’s site and still be profitable, your campaign will have a 10-percent payout. Publishers decide whether to run your ads based on 1) the payout and 2) how well the advertised product fits with the publisher’s site content.

If you aren’t selling a physical product, you may want to do a cost-per-lead (CPL) campaign. For example, if you are just trying to build up your email list, you might want to put an ad on a publisher’s site that entices a user to fill out a form with their email address. Once the form gets submitted, that lead gets tracked in a tracking system, you get the email address you’re looking for, and you then pay the publisher whatever amount you previously decided for that lead.

If you run performance campaigns through networks, you actually won’t pay the publishers directly. You will actually pay the network, which will then pay the publishers. The network will also have the tracking software that tracks your sales and leads. The network will provide you with a login to their tracking software so you can monitor your campaign’s activity and results.

As you can see, there is a lot to learn for advertisers in the traditional and online arenas. I hope this information has given you a good starting point for learning more.

When installing any outdoor digital signage project there are some things that cannot be ignored or overlooked, if they are you are just wasting your effort and money.

We will look at them in order of importance:

1. Plan the project – without sufficient planning the solution could be installed in an area with low foot traffic, or even worse vandals. Correct planning will certainly influence how fast you see a return on your investment, otherwise you may as well go out of your office and give the first person you see the money you would have spent on the project to them.

2. Installing the solution – this can be either an all in one solution using a digital poster or a solution that uses an LCD display and a media player, we will look at the later as this is were it gets costly (well sort of). If you are installing a group of displays in a network you have 2 options firstly to data cable the units or connect the units up to a secured WIFI network, depending upon the size of files and locations will depend upon the infrastructure used.

3. Selecting the correct screen – this can be a nightmare as many people try and use standard displays when starting out in digital signage that are designed for indoor home use only, the perfect solution is a commercial grade panel designed and manufactured to run 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. They may look the same but they are massively different.

4. LCD Enclosure – this is a special box that offers both International water ingress protection to IP65 and NEMA 4X. Some of these LCD enclosures on the market are equipped with internal heating and cooling solutions as a high flow air current is essential in the enclosure to remove any warm air that the TVs generates inside the case.

5. Media player – this will depend if you are going down the WIFI route or wired, if wireless ensure that the network is secured and all the default settings are changed, otherwise some people will be advertising on your network free of charge, worse still they could hijack the network and hold it to randsom, use the inbuilt firewall to guard against from Trojans and viruses.

6. Software – many media players come as standard with complex software built in, check it out when you are looking through specifications. If it is included in the media player you don’t want to be buying any more.

Now these 6 basic rules will help you produce a project that will work efficiently from the first day, taking a short cut in any one of these rules will put a project in serious jeopardy.

Beginning of 2008, Hui Bing was selected to participate in the first wave of Lean Six Sigma training and project work. After being nominated she did some readings on the web to figure out what Lean Six Sigma is about. The result was sobering: Lean Six Sigma is a tedious, time-consuming exercise that is based on lots of data and has been applied in preferably manufacturing environments. Equipped with a “Can Do” mindset, she attended the training and started working on a project together with her team members to increase efficiency in the outbound operations.

“Nothing is too small to know, and nothing is too big to attempt. Sometimes we give up at the exact moment when changes are about to occur for the better. If you know you are doing the right thing, keep going and you will get the results you are looking for.” Xie Hui Bing, Operations Manager at Schenker Singapore (Pte) Ltd.

The process became thornier when she tried to involve her warehouse staff in the project work. On one hand, they were interested in improving their own work environment. On the other hand however, every warehouse staff were scared of losing their income due to the project’s benefits in overtime reduction. It took her a lot of courage and leadership skills to navigate through the early phase of the project work.

Over time, Hui Bing and her team members as well as her warehouse staff got captivated by a methodology that made sense, even in constantly varying logistics processes. Understanding the value stream and optimising the flow of the outbound operations – from receiving the order through picking and packing until ready-to-ship, revealed plenty of room for improvements. At the end, her team developed more than twenty improvement ideas of which seven were selected for implementation in phase one, leading to significant increase in efficiency, i.e. higher throughput in lesser resources.

Her project was successfully completed in 2008 and she was tasked to present it at an all-staff communication session together with the other pilot Green Belt, Rhoger Tan, Operations Manager at Schenker Singapore. Since then, Hui Bing has been mentoring another Green Belt on his project to successful completion.

In January 2009, Katherine and Serene were listening to Hui Bing’s and Rhoger’s presentations. The first impression was very encouraging; Both pilot teams were able to pull it off, i.e. on top of their daily workload, they learnt and applied some powerful new tools to their respective work processes, developed solutions and delivered remarkable results in processes and cost savings.

Not much later, the two together with a group of other Green Belts were commissioned to take on a Lean Six Sigma project for their respective operations. Whilst both were still under the very positive impression of the pilot runs, Katherine had only one fear: “I cannot do it because I don’t know how to deliver savings in my process!” Serene had another concern: “I do not like statistics. I will not be able to use these tools!”

Master Black Belt, KH Tan, Lean Six Sigma Specialist at Schenker Singapore, responsible for Lean Six Sigma deployment could calm them down. He assured all second wave Green Belt candidates that the focus of Lean Six Sigma is not all about statistics. It is much more about analysing and improving business processes, with some proven tools to deliver results for businesses, stakeholders and customers. Whilst statistics can be helpful, it does not mean that Lean Six Sigma Green Belts become statisticians. Often enough, one of a team member will be able to help out. Using the power of the team of different people with complementary strengths helps through personal despairs.

“A major success factor in Lean Six Sigma is your ability to involve your staff. They know best how to improve their process. You just need to motivate them to tell you.” Katherine Yap, Operations Manager at Schenker Singapore (Pte) Ltd

KH also made clear that the amount of savings a project delivers depends on the scale of the operations. In some projects, the benefits are not solely in terms of cost savings but also in achieving higher customer satisfaction and retention.

A general pitfall of Lean Six Sigma work lies usually in the scoping of project. Katherine started off with the target of improving both the inbound and outbound processes at the same time. After the first training session and discussions with her coach, she was convinced to begin smaller and to tackle the outbound processes first.

Although she had to do much of the project work after office hours, she could overcome fears and obstacles, was able to involve her initially reluctant warehouse staff and eventually delivered results. Now the warehouse is well organised with a reduced order picking time and even on financial savings. The best reward however lies in the compliment she received from her customer, “Katherine, you seem to have a brand new warehouse!” Throughout the entire assignment, Katherine has involved her team member Teh Ngee Hooi, Customer Service Executive at Schenker Singapore (Pte) Ltd such that now Ngee Hooi is able to roll out her own project for improving of the inbound processes.

“Use the power of data to convince others of changes necessary to deliver better re-sults in your operations.” Serene Kwan, Senior Operations Executive at Schenker Singapore (Pte) Ltd

Serene’s statement after she got “volunteered” to participate in the second wave of Lean Six Sigma was somehow like “No choice”. However, some interest was stirred up by the impressive job, Hui Bing and Rhoger could proudly present. Contrary to her apprehension at the beginning, she was able to master the tools. More importantly, she pulled her team together to deliver a successful project with dramatically reduced defects through standardisation of workflows. Her work was crowned by a striking presentation to the Management.

Now that the foundation is laid, the initial concerns and fears gave way for organisational courage to embrace the new methodology in additional waves of improvement projects. Reduced turn-around time for inventory, eliminated defects and significant increase in service level are the most noticeable results for DB Schenker’s customers.

This success is made up of some simple rules for change management: Start small. Trust people with the right mindset. Be persistent. Generate credible success stories. Publish accomplishments. Celebrate success!

IRS can be really nice or can be really bad with you. If you are paying your taxes on time then you can expect IRS to be nice but if you owe huge sum of money to it then get ready to face the bad consequences. The only solution to get rid of IRS problems is to return the money you owe them. This article will highlight some of the ways which you can use for tax debt relief.

1- The Direct Contact
Contacting IRS directly can be really helpful in some cases if your case is really genuine. You can sign a custom agreement with IRS for the extension of the payment deadline or cut off your debt by 20% or 30%. You will only get allowance on your IRS debt if you are really in financial crisis otherwise you will have to pay the whole tax. Usually IRS always accepts he application from people for the extension of the time. Other applications relating to allowance at full debt settlement vary case to case.

2- Going through a Professional
Attorneys and other tax debt relief companies usually never contact IRS but they contact the people you owe money. In most of the cases your tax debt will reduce by 20-30% as some creditors will consider you as bad debt and let you go.

The second method is most commonly used because you do not have to do anything. All you have to do is pay a small fee for the attorneys or debt relief companies and that’s it. Sit back enjoy the relief of your tax debt.