Category: Personal Finance

Investing is like Planting a Tree

Investing is like Planting a Tree

Investing can be daunting especially for people beginning to learn how to manage their money. One way to make it easier to understand the concepts and avoid doing things that can hurt financially is to think that investing is like planting a tree.

You don’t eat it while it is a sapling

All plants and trees start out as a seed and then a sapling. Even the largest trees in existence today started out as small saplings many years ago. This is also true with wealth: all of the wealth today started out as a small investment decades or centuries ago. Continue Reading

Protect Your Online Accounts

Protect Your Online Accounts

Data breaches are a common occurrence nowadays, with larger and larger personal data being exposed to the public and the hands of malicious organizations. Big companies such as Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Equifax are not immune to these data breaches and resulted in exposing millions of customer accounts. In the Philippines we also experience these data breaches, recently in COL Financial (online stock brokerage) and in Jobstreet (job board). Therefore it is important for you to protect your online accounts to minimize the damage caused by these data breaches.

I personally have accounts in COL Financial and Jobstreet, and so the reported data breaches served as a wake up call for me to take steps into securing my own account. In this article I will share some ways on how to protect online accounts in a practical way. Continue Reading

Consistency Beats Intensity: Finance, Part II

In the first part of this article, we have said that success is not a result of sudden events or “accidents” but the accumulation of small and seemingly unimportant actions performed over a period of time. These small positive actions when applied to our financial situation can reap great benefits in the future as evidenced by the compounding effect.

However, compounding also has a dark side to it, which can result in great losses instead of great benefits if it is allowed to accumulate over time. Continue Reading

Consistency Beats Intensity: Finance, Part I

If you are like most people, myself included, you have set goals and things that you want to achieve. However like most of us these goals are sometimes not realized and we wonder why. We find it hard to push through our goals and thus give up eventually.

My take on why this happens is: we do not achieve our goals because we are not consistent. Even if we work towards something, we lack the follow-through actions and eventually lose our target and motivation. After studying resources about this behavior, I came into this realization: Continue Reading

Reignite Your Finance

When was the last time you have looked at your expenses this month? How much are you saving per year? Do you pay all your bills and debts on time? Do you have investments years ago that you have forgotten about? The new year can be a good time to reflect on how you are doing with your finances and to see if it has turned cold in some way. If it has, then maybe it is time to reignite your passion about handling your finances well. This is my story on how I regained my passion on personal finance after almost a decade.

After I graduated from university in 2005 I immediately found a job at a software company for printer hardware. I chose this job because it paid well relative to the other job opportunities I had. When I received my first paycheck, it felt very weird as it was my first time handling a “huge” amount of money. As with most people during college, I constantly lack money and sometimes had to borrow from friends to get by, so a month’s paycheck looked a lot of money for me then. Not knowing better I then proceeded to find a way to lose all that money again by spending and giving it away, probably because I was not used to having money before. This continued on for months. Continue Reading