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Focusing on Large Expenses to Save a Ton of Money

12 Things You Should Know Before Buying A House

The following is a guest post by Jon who blogs at Money Smart Guides, a personal finance blog whose goal is to help you get out of debt and start investing for your future. If you’d like to guest post on Money Q&A, be sure to check out the site’s Guest Posting Guidelines.

We all know that small expenses add up over time. This concept has been popularized and tagged as “the latte factor” by various experts and authors. The idea goes, if you cut the spending on smaller items, not only will it be easy, but you can reap a large amount of savings over time.

While the potential for saving money is not in doubt, many people solely focus on the small expenses and forget about the big ones, when in fact, the big ones can help you learn how to save a ton of money. Here is why you should focus first on the big expenses first, and then concentrate on the small ones.

How to Save a Ton Of Money on Large Purchases

Bigger Potential Savings Mean Bigger Impact

While cutting out a $3 coffee two days a week will add up to a nice $312 extra over the course of a year, if you focus on the big expenses in your life, you can easily save much more than this.

For example, I shop my insurance needs every year or two. At first, I was skeptical that I could save money doing this. After all, I thought the company I was with for over 10 years valued me and offered me their best rates.

Boy was I mistaken. It turns out many insurance companies use the practice of price optimization. What this means is that those who don’t shop around for insurance coverage pay for those that do. How does this work?

At its most basic, let’s say you are with ABC Insurance Company. I shop around and get a quote from ABC Insurance. They offer me an incredible deal to come on board. This deal might even cost them a few dollars. How do they overcome this? They raise the rates on their long-term (loyal) customers, who happen to be you.

If you don’t shop around for insurance coverage, most likely you are costing yourself money. When I switched companies the other year, I ended up saving $200 a year

6 Reasons Why Your Business Need Enterprise Content Services

by Guest Contributor

Do not forget to follow up from a business conference. This ‘structuring’ of processes has driven incredible productivity benefits for companies throughout the world, but as it turns out, not all businesses make use of content management system (CMS) to avoid data processing/storage issues and maximize productivity.

Why Your Business Need Enterprise Content Services

So, why should you have one set up for your business? Here are the reasons.

1. Less risk and more control over company information.

This is the main reasons why enterprise content services are being used by both small and big companies. With the right CMS technology, companies control the access to their data, maintain audit trails, histories, and automate the distribution of content based on a set of policies. All of these help businesses decrease risk and increase control around the natural life cycle of their data.

2. Direct and efficient access to content for efficiency.

There are countless amounts of time wasted on researching for information. Traditional techniques for finding and supplying information result in significant efficiency and even profitability losses, hindering the company’s ability to remain effective and ahead of their competition.

Companies should always have quick access to the data they need at the right time and the right context. CMS solves this issue instantly through better information management.

Is There a Best Way to Tackle Your Debts?

by Guest Contributor

Moves to Make With Your Finances When Consolidating Debts

The best way to tackle debts might initially seem obvious – pay off as much as you can, as early as you can – but it’s often not as easy as it seems. If every person in debt did that then no-one would ever have any problems, but our financial, occupational and family situations often make it a struggle.

Is there a ‘best’ way to tackle your debts?

However, there are various strategies to tackle your debts. Some of which are better than others. Here is a run down of tactics that you might consider, alone or together, in order:

Know your debt

If you don’t understand the problem, then how can you tackle it? The first stage of taking back control is to find out more about your debts. Ask your creditor for the latest statement showing how much you owe and your current agreement. Then look at your bank statements and work out what you are paying and when. It’s sometimes easier when in debt to shy away from statements but to address the problem, you need to know the extent of it.

Prioritize payments

If you’re struggling with debts and you can’t make your money stretch as far as it needs to, you need to order your debts and look at priorities. For example, not paying your rent could leave you homeless but paying your phone bill late may leave to your service being cut off.

It is not recommended you miss any payments but some payments have more drastic consequences if not kept up to date. You should look through your statements and work out what’s the most important and how you can make sure those bills are paid. A debt snowball can help you prioritize your debt repayments.

Geopolitical Risk In Your Investment Portfolio – Investing in a President Trump World

by Guest Contributor

The following is a guest post by Lars Kroijer, who used to run a hedge fund in London and wrote the book, “Investing Demystified: How to Invest Without Speculation and Sleepless Nights“. If you’d like to guest post on Money Q&A, check out the site’s guest posting guidelines.

With President Donald Trump making headlines on an hourly basis and our social media accounts going crazy with comments on his presidency, we are left asking ourselves: Should we perhaps change our investment strategy as a result?

In short, the answer is yes but perhaps not how you think.

In earlier blogs, I have outlined how I consider it highly unlikely for the vast majority of investors that they can beat the markets themselves through active stock selection, market timing, or via picking the one out of ten actively investment funds that may do so over a ten-year period.

And, for your equity exposure, you should pick as broad and cheap an index tracking exposure as you can get your hands on, namely a world equity index tracker. Just because Donald Trump is now President of the United States, that is no less true. You most likely couldn’t beat the markets before November and still can’t.

Editor’s Note – You may also like to see five things you can learn about personal finance from President Trump!

What you perhaps can expect is to make 4-5% above inflation. This is based on over 200 years of history of equity returns in many states of the world. And, you can expect that return to range from lottery type winnings to desperate failures – can also reasonably expect to be compensated in higher risk periods with commensurate higher expected returns, but there are no guarantees obviously.

Editor’s Note – I think you can squeeze out a 10% return on your investments. Be sure to check out how.

So, even in a President Trump world, we haven’t found a crystal ball. So, what can we do?

In my view, there are two main things we main things we should focus on.

Evaluate if the risk of the markets has changed enough that we should re-evaluate the risk levels of our portfolio.
We should consider if the sudden change in the political landscape has changed our overall economic life enough that our risk profile should change as a result.

Market Risk

Below is a graph of the expected future risk of the US stock market. Without being too technical, it measures the expected standard deviation six months into the future. Since the index value is based on the implied volatility of equity options, it is a market price.

If you think you know the future volatility of the market better than this chart, you can get rich trading it (many try!). There are many issues with this kind of chart, including that the value itself is very volatile. So, the risk changes a lot.

The volatility doesn’t capture “fat tails”, the fact that unlikely events happen far more than predicted by the normal distribution assumption of the standard deviation. And, that it is only six months into the future. That all said, the chart gives a good idea of future expected risk. You can also find it on cboe.com.

Can Your Business Easily Save More Money?

by Guest Contributor

When you run a business, at least half of your attention is always on the bottom line. You know how much everything costs, why you need it and how much profit it could help you make. Sometimes you just can’t avoid spending money to make money, but here are four simple ways for you and your business to save money.

4 Ways Your Business Can Easily Save More Money

1. Creative Marketing

No matter how big or small a business is, marketing is always going to be a huge budget consideration. There’s a simple way of getting your marketing out to more people without costing you any extra. When you send out an invoice or a product, put your latest flyers and leaflets in with them. When a customer buys something from your shop, slip a few coupons into the shopping bag at the counter. It has not cost you

When a customer buys something from your shop, slip a few coupons into the shopping bag at the counter. It has not cost you any more and you have increased the reach of your marketing campaign.

2. Streamline Your Online Shop

It used to be expensive to set up an online shop. Having systems to manage your stock, private information and payment security were never cheap, but now you have two options. You can either use one of the many free online shop websites to create your own shop or you can use Amazon and Ebay to be your shop. Neither of these has any up-front costs and would greatly reduce your need for an expensive website.

Increasing Home Value with Your Children – Projects and Funding Options

by Guest Contributor

DIY Ideas for Home Improvements - Building with Your Children

The following is a guest post by Hank McKinsey, a stay-at-home-dad and home blogger at homebyhank.com. If you’d like to find out more about guest posting on Money Q&A, please read our Guest Posting Guidelines. Your home is more than a just a place to live. It is a financial investment. It’s easy to forget that any home project, from changing the wall color to installing new cabinets, can alter your home’s value. Ideally, each upgrade should increase the value and make your home more marketable. Three fun and ‘kid friendly’ projects that can add to your home’s value and help you save money are: starting a garden, updating your doors and windows, and adding a reading or office nook to a … Read more