How to Save Money

PAY YOURSELF FIRST (P.Y.F.) -

This is a very simple and effective idea.
You don’t have a choice about paying your taxes.  You are in control of the amount to some degree, but the government still gets its taxes.  P.Y.F. is the secret to getting what you want and becoming a disciplined saver.

Saving is simply setting aside money to spend later.

It’s the same technique the government uses to collect taxes on a regular basis, although most people never think of it that way. It’s a simple trick almost every self made wealthy person uses, and may also be one your parents used to save.

P.Y.F. follows the same principle:

• Don’t give yourself a choice.
• Make it a regular part of your budget.
• Think of it as a bill you MUST pay to yourself.

Why? Because it’s the P.Y.F. money in your budget that helps you reach your goals. Why not begin today to save 10%, or just 10 cents, from every $1 you get.

Have you heard of the 10/10/10/70 philosophy, remember?

• GIVE 10%,
• SAVE 10%,
• INVEST 10% and
• SPEND the other 70% WISELY.

With a limited income, and in tough economic times, you have to make tough choices about how you spend your hard-earned money.
Having P.Y.F. money in your budget makes it possible to reach your long-term goals. Without it, you’ll probably never get past your short-term goals, and you may not even reach those.
P.Y.F. is another one of those lifetime money-management principle. You’ll be dealing with money the rest of your life, so consider P.Y.F. as the gift of a lifetime. The earlier you develop this habit of saving, the better off you’ll be.

“Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.”-Samuel Johnson

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How To Tell If A Guy’s Into You

Would you like to know if a guy likes you or is interested? Perhaps you noticed him when you were crossing at the lights, standing in a check-out queue or talking with a friend. Did he notice you? You think so, but maybe it was your imagination or just wishful thinking. Your eyes met for just a few seconds, and then you both looked away. When you looked back up, he was talking with someone. Was he watching you as you socialised? Or were you making that up? How can you tell if a guy likes you? Why is it so hard to read a guy?

We’ve put together five signs that he is interested in you too. If any of the following happen, he is on the verge of asking you out:

1. He tells someone he’s interested
Is he interested? He likes you if he tells a mutual friend that he wants to know more about you, or he asks other people who you are and where you’re from. He is trying to act like he’s “just asking” but his questions indicate more than a casual interest. And when he tells someone that he finds you attractive, he probably knows that it will get back to you. He’s hoping it does.

2. The gives you the look
Was that him giving you THE look? He gives you a look that betrays his calm exterior. Even from across the room, “that look” says it all. It sweeps from your head to your toes, and then his eyes linger on yours and then lock in. Was that the beginning of a tentative smile? You think so!

3. The conversation
Does he like you? When he manages to get close enough to ask you questions, he is interested. He appears to be listening and responds to what you say. He’s moving in to the ultimate question, which is: “Are you seeing anyone?” and he hopes the answer is “No.”  He would only ask this question if he wanted to go out with you. If he doesn’t ask you the question of whether or not you are attached, he may ask someone whom you both know.

4. He turns up unexpectedly
He likes you a lot if he shows up out of nowhere. He can only do that if he has been asking people about your schedule, or he has been paying attention to where you said you’d be  going and at what time. He may be embarrassed when he sees you. A sudden, “Oh, hi,” is his way of saying, “I don’t want to seem obvious, but I am very interested in you.” If you feel the same way, do not act shy. Stop and talk to him.

5. EVERYONE likes you. . . so why wouldn’t he?
Is he interested? Will he like you too? When you are well liked and a happy and positive person, why wouldn’t he like you? Of course he does. He wants to get to know everything about you. If you don’t have a great life, however, now is your time to start working on one. Take a look at your career possibilities, body image, future plans, areas of your life that are not working and resources. You may be naturally talented at something, but it won’t matter unless you work on your strengths. Misused or unused talents fade away. Training and coaching do not.

So what do you have to gain? Make it easy for him and be friendly. This is how relationships begin.

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How to Spend Less Money?

Is it really about “How to spend less money” or could it be:

“How to spend your money wisely”

“How to have something of value to show for the money”

“How to feel you are progressing towards what you want”

“How to create financial freedom”?

In my opinion “You can only truthfully know what you test and measure.”

You know when you go to the gym to lose weight? You only know it’s working because you know what you were at the beginning and you measure as you go.

You know how you tell when your boiled egg is ready? Because you have timed how long it has taken before and you repeat what worked?

Who knows where all their money goes? Who runs out of money before they run out of week? Tracking what you spend will help in setting a budget and give you the ability to create your financial freedom.

Keep a note book, or our fold away tracking card, on you and record every time you spend money. Tally expenses each week and assess your financial position. This helps curb unnecessary spending and makes you aware of where every cent of your hard earned money goes. Do this for thirty days.

Treat your personal finances as you would those of a public company; everything on paper and visible. Even if you’ve previously managed to account for within 10-15% of your monthly expenditure, without tracking it, do it anyway for the experience and distinctions the exercise will provide you.

The 5 step automatic wealth system:-

• Automatic Investment Plan (AIP) Set 10% of your gross income aside each week for investment. This will systematically increase your wealth every week.
• Debt termination plan A contribution of at least 10% of your gross income that systematically reduces your debt every month. This one step will have you completely debt free in 3-7 years (including house and car!)
• Charitable giving plan A contribution of at least 10% of your gross income as part of the responsibility and reciprocity associated with creating and being a good steward of wealth.
• Debt avoidance lifestyle strategies Living by such strategies as only paying cash and maintaining tough restrictions on the use of credit cards. Be sure to totally clear your credit card debt every month. Use the interest free period carefully and wisely. Now you are beating the banks!
• Spend the rest wisely! That’s right! PARTY!! The flexibility to spend all the rest of your money WISELY.

“The use we make of our fortune determines as to its sufficiency. A little is enough if used wisely, and too much if expended foolishly.”-Christian Bovee

By measuring exactly where you spend your money you will have brought to your awareness where you are bleeding money and where you are cutting your self short.  In doing this you will give yourself the choice to carry on the way you always have or look to stop the bleeding and spend more in areas that are  important to you.  Give it a go as I think you could surprise yourself and it could take you closer to what you really want.

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Dealing With Time Wasters

There are two main categories that time wasters or time bandits can fall under.

The first category is self generated internal time wasters. These are the things that you do yourself to waste time and are the easiest to control.

The second category is the external time wasters. These are the things other people do to waste your time. This can be more difficult to control, though it can be controlled with a little bit of effort and ingenuity.

Let’s look at the self generated internal time wasters and some possible solutions:

1) The lack of planning and priorities. Many people never get anything accomplished because they don’t know where to begin or how to proceed once started. It is important that you keep a weekly schedule. List your priorities in order of importance. If needed, discuss the priorities with your boss or co-workers. Make a schedule that starts at the beginning of each week and incorporates all of your priorities into the schedule with goals for completion dates. List every hour and what you should be working on for that hour. Make a tight schedule so there is not a lot of time in between projects. Too much time between projects is wasted time.

2) Disorganisation. Disorganised people spend way too much time looking for lost items. Keep your office neatly organized and free of clutter. If you can’t do this yourself, recruit a friend or hire someone to help you.

3) Procrastination. This is a big time waster. Set a deadline for those projects that you don’t want to do. Plan a reward for yourself when finished. Work on the project in small chunks until completed. Sometimes it helps to work on it first thing in the morning to get it out of the way.

The second category of time wasters is the external time wasters. These are not as easy to control since they involve external factors. Here are some solutions to help control or at the very least, keep them to a minimum:

1) Visitors. If you get a lot of visitors dropping to your work area this could be a huge time waster for you. The solution is to move your desk so that your back is to the door. This will make you seem less approachable. When someone stops in to talk, stand up. This will send the message that you don’t have time to chat. If all else fails be honest. Tell them thanks for dropping by, but tactfully let them know that you need to get back to work.

2) Telephone calls. Screen your calls. Let the voice mail take your calls during the day when you are busy. Schedule time during each day when you will return the calls and let your clients know when that time will be. Keep your answers short and to the point and end the conversation politely when it has achieved it’s purpose. With a little practice you can be personable and still keep the conversation short.

3) Mail. It can flood your desk and take it over before you get to it. Schedule a time each day to go through your mail. Make it a rule to handle each piece of mail only once. Throw out the junk mail immediately, file” information only” mail in a file box to be read later and respond to the others by telephone or fax. Faxing a response is a great idea because the response is immediate and takes very little time.

4) Email. Clean out your email box daily and don’t use your business email address for personal use. Make an auto responder to send people letting them know when you will be checking your e-mails and stick to it (batching your work). Try to deal with each email now if it will take less than 2 minutes otherwise you could be wasting time rereading and reappraising what you might do with it. If you cannot deal with it now ask yourself can I delegate the job?  If not ask yourself is it important, is it urgent and make a time when you will deal with it?

Using these solutions, your productivity will increase and your stress level on the job will decrease. The best part is, you can say goodbye to the time bandits forever!

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Can Money Buy You Happiness?

“I know that they say money can’t buy happiness but I’d like to find out for myself.”

This is one of those quotes that got me thinking;

It was my partners sons birthday yesterday. He seemed pretty happy with all the presents he got. It was money that allowed those thing’s to be produced and for us to purchase them.

Whenever you see an ad for World Vision, Save the Children and the like, the kids that now have a full belly or fresh water or a chance at education always have smiles on their faces. It is money that allows those things to happen.

When you buy a new car a new TV, a new house etc that seems to put a smile on your dial. All made possible by money too.

I have attended many personal development seminars that all take a sizable monetary investment. Most of the people I have met at such events are extremely happy at seeing new possibilities. Again it is money that makes these events possible.

I am a Foundation member of XL Results foundation. This is a networking group for entrepreneurs with the aim of ending world poverty through helping it’s members to excel in business so that they have the ability to help the world’s problems by having more income than they need and therefore the ability to give. Within this group there are people putting meals in children’s stomachs, others making cost effective solar lamps to allow children to study at night, others planting trees to clean up our air or saving endangered species. One lady who started a charity to help her people in Zimbabwe was given $1,000,000 by another member because he had more than he needed and she had the cause. More things made possible due to money.

The people doing these things are getting a huge amount of satisfaction at being able to contribute to the things that they are passionate about.

As a Success Coach I see my clients and hear of colleagues clients making amazing changes in their lives. These people make a sizable monetary investment in themselves to improve the quality of their lives and a lot of them significantly improve their income as a result of being coached, and in the process create many different options for them and their families.

What have these people done differently?

• Such people invest in themselves,
• take responsibility for their actions and lives
• take the steps to modify their behavior.

And as a result of this reap the rewards.

An interesting point is that the most dedicated and successful clients are usually the ones that are stretched the most by the coaching fee. This is because of what they have at stake. No matter what you are doing:

“If the money you pay out hurts you in the pocket you are a lot more likely to make changes that you may find difficult in order to get your monies worth from the investment you are making.”

As part of my coach training I was required to coach people for free for a 3 month period. Out of 10 such clients only 5 got any results. The reason is that they didn’t value it and so didn’t put the effort in and hence got no results.

So money can fix a lot of the world’s problems and that will make a lot of people very happy on both sides of the equation. I personally think that we owe it to ourselves and this wonderful planet that allows us our amazing and precious lives, to do what it takes to be the best that we can be.

So can money buy you happiness? I’d like to suggest it depends on:

How you define happiness?

What steps you are taking to be the best you possible?

Who or what are you investing in?

Confident Future Newsletter

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Finding Happiness - it isn’t just in the fairytales

It’s my experience when working with people that being happy is high on their list of wants.So in this sometimes chaotic, competitive, demanding and unsympathetic world, how can we find contentment? We can choose to be happy, now, we can choose to think pleasant thoughts, now.

Here are my thoughts and some tips on how to be happy.

You can be happier than you are right now, not matter how your life is going.
Happiness is a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant.
It’s not just something that happens to us but is something we have direct control over.
Most people postpone happiness telling ourselves we’ll be happy when-we get married/divorced, we are successful, get a better job/retire, win lotto, have a baby/when the kids leave home, lose weight, have plastic surgery, find true love, find ourselves, find the meaning of life, or some other distant event or circumstance. So we wait for something that might never happen, or if it does, prove not to be the solution we thought it would. We think being happy depends on something happening to us or on us deserving it. We need a reason to be happy.
And most of us sabotage our own happiness by:

• Expecting perfection - one of the all time biggest myths!
• Concentrating on externals to bring us happiness-other people, acquiring things, achieving things.
• Fretting and being irritated over trivial irritations such as traffic jams, having to wait, being passed over for promotion, other peoples’ rudeness, a waiter getting our order wrong, or any of the countless other small ways in which the Universe lets us know it does not care about our convenience.

We can choose to be happy by:

• Having happiness as a mental attitude, making it a habit.
• Being happy for no reason at all, simply because we want to be, because it feels good and we want to feel good.
• Breaking the habit of feeling annoyed every time anything goes wrong.
• Not seeing setbacks as blows to our self-esteem (don’t take the traffic jam or the insults personally).
• Not letting events and other people dictate what we think and do.
• Even if things are really bad and we cannot be happy, at least we don’t need to make things worse by thinking dramatically negative thoughts such as ‘this is a disaster, a catastrophe, I’m devastated, I’ll never get over this.’ Such thoughts are not facts, only opinions and therefore alterable.
• Human beings are goal oriented so it is much easier to be happy if we are striving for something. Working towards something focuses the mind on a positive, takes it off problems, and gives us the pleasant expectation of something to look forward to.
• When faced with a problem, don’t bemoan the misfortune but face it and act positively to solve it (a goal to work toward).
• Accepting that happiness is not something that happens to us, it is something we can make happen.
• In times of distress and crisis using memories of happy times and successes to help get us through and to inspire us.
• Closing our minds to negative thoughts and redirect our thinking toward positive and pleasant things.
• Focusing on what is good and pleasing and ignore the rest.
• Choosing to think about only happy past memories and never dwell on unhappy ones.
• Choosing to think kindly and tolerantly about others and avoid criticizing and judging them.
• Choosing not to see other peoples’ rudeness or thoughtless as a personal attack.
• Getting rid of the unrealistic expectation that everything will always go our way.
• Believing life is still good even if we can’t have everything we want.
• Deciding to focus on what we have rather than what we lack.
• Deciding to give at least as much as we expect to receive.

In the words of Allen Chalmers:
The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Put the above changes into practice for a month and see how much better you feel.

Confident Future Newsletter

Would you like to receive a short and sweet weekly success strategy sent to your inbox? These were made available due to popular demand, they are short and sweet, sent direct to your inbox, thought provoking and implementable in your life now. To receive your weekly dose of inspiration from us and begin benefiting from our information now, fill in the box below.

Confident Future Presents at BizSmart 2009

BizSmart is a once-a-year opportunity for Small Businesses to discover ways of working smarter, not harder in their business. It includes an expo of the newest products and services for small business, great networking opportunities and the chance to win up to $2000 cash and a Business Improvement Package worth $5000!

Confident Future is really excited to be presenting at this years BizSmart event on the subject of Selling With Emotional Intelligence. Lloyd Johnson, a Confident Future coach, will be running this presentation. His 90-minute presentation has been designed to leave you with practical, take-home skills that you can use to immediately improve your sales. Unlike your IQ, with training you can increase your Emotional Intelligence (EQ). Emotional Intelligence is a complex area that can be broken down into four main areas. Lloyd explains these areas and shows you, with real examples, how you can maximise your sales by developing your EQ. During the session you will spend time in small groups practising the techniques taught and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. The skills covered in this session will go beyond improving your sales results; they are applicable in any area of your life that involves people.

If you are interested in finding out more information or registering to attend this event please visit the BizSmart website.

Steps To A Healthy Self-Image

Why do angels fly?
Because they take themselves lightly.

“It’s time to take an inventory of who you are, making sure you don’t sell yourself short. No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Did you take that point in? I’ll say it again because I want you to understand and remember it.

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.

There are many reasons why you should like yourself just the way you are. Common sense demands it! Try this scenario. Would you swap your eyesight for $100,000? Or your legs for $1,000,000?  Would you swap your good health with a person with poor health for $100,000? Take a moment now.  Look down at your legs; feel the strength of your back; how great is your vision and what sounds do you hear all around with those great ears of yours? What are these things worth? One billion dollars? More/less?  Fortunately you don’t have to swap one asset (health) for another (money). There is another, far less costly road to complete wealth. If you allow yourself to learn and build on
the foundations of character, faith, integrity, love, loyalty and honesty, you can have them all! Health, wealth, happiness, peace, friends, security and the rest.
Remember, you are one in a billion! UNIQUE ! Just like a painting by Picasso or Rembrandt, you are a rare, exclusive and different individual. Your qualities give you enormous value.

Think about the following story. If you had the only car in town you’d have a very valuable possession - unless you leave it parked in the garage! Now, you are the only one of your type in town, the only one in existence. So, take you and your talent and use it!
If you are struggling to feel good about yourself, feeling a little jaded, then try a quick and easy make-over, a bit of spit and polish. When you make up and dress up, you look up.  Research has clearly shown that how we look has a definite bearing on the way we feel.  The first step to a new, improved you could be as simple as a haircut, a new shirt or a facial.

Build a healthy self-image with a series of short steps.

One reason many people never attempt new things is FEAR OF FAILURE.

Start in a small way, build confidence and transfer one area of success to another. Athletes see themselves clearing the bar, breaking a time barrier. This visualisation is used by top performers the world over, but it is something we can all do. See yourself winning!  Self-image improves performance, which improves self-image, which improves performance, which . . . . . which leads to success.
Do you get the picture?

Learn from the ’successful failures’ of others.
Thomas Edison’s teacher called him a dunce. He failed over 14,000 times to perfect the incandescent light. However, he didn’t see himself as a failure. According to Edison, he found 14,000 ways that did not work!

Albert Einstein failed courses in maths.

Henry Ford was broke at 40.

Walt Disney went broke seven times and had a nervous breakdown before success came.

These people succeeded because they persevered.

So to improve our lives we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. People have been feeling good about themselves and leading very successful lives for thousands of years. We may all be unique, but there are certain philosophies and tried and true methods that work for us all.”

Find what works for you and make a time in your diary to do it, not later, not when you see if you can fit it in but right NOW!

Give it a go and be all you truly are.

Extract taken from “Your Guide to a Healthy Self-Esteem”

Confident Future Newsletter

Would you like to receive a short and sweet weekly success strategy sent to your inbox? These were made available due to popular demand, they are short and sweet, sent direct to your inbox, thought provoking and implementable in your life now. To receive your weekly dose of inspiration from us and begin benefiting from our information now, fill in the box below.