Category: Personal Finance

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

Should you get VUL Insurance?

Variable Universal Life (VUL) insurance is one of the most popular types of life insurance sold today. One of its main selling points against traditional life insurance is that it has an investment component, meaning that in addition to the guaranteed death benefit you receive, it also accumulates a cash value that is invested as part of your premiums.

This option makes sense for people who do not have the time or the interest in investing their own money. They just want to let others handle their own money and at least have more returns compared to letting their cash sit in their house or in the bank. However, as conscious investors we need to be aware that VUL insurance may at times not be the best option for us in terms of value for money. This article will explore the different aspects of VUL insurance and how we can analyze if a particular product best suits us. Continue Reading