Some points to consider:

• Don’t overpay.
• Don’t buy low quality.
• Don’t buy more quality than you need.
• Decide what are your most essential functions before you shop.
• Check to see if you can get those functions for free.
• Check to see if your buying stuff is just a form of self medication.
• If it costs more than $50, wait 1 to 3 days after you have decided to buy it, before you actually do buy it. In other words, shop twice and buy once.
• Keep the receipt and the packaging for at least 3 weeks. Buyers remorse can be cured instantly by simply returning it.

It’s a sin to waste money. Remember the 7 deadly sins? If you do the above you’ll avoid a lot of them. You’re not lazy if you buy on your second visit to the store and give yourself time to decide if you really need this thing. Envy, Gluttony, Sloth (lazy), Greed, etc.

Compare prices online before you go out to the store. If you buy online, look for stores that do not charge you sales tax and offer free shipping. I love B & H Photo for printer supplies and electronics.

Check them out here:  http://www.bhphotovideo.com

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Deflation is when nobody is buying anything and producers lower the prices to get people to buy. Then people see the prices dropping and refuse to buy because the prices will only get lower later. Then the cycle repeats until producers lay off everybody because nobody is buying anything. So we get lower prices but everyone is out of work. This is now.

Inflation is when the money in circulation is getting watered down by more newly printed up money. If we double the amount of money in circulation, prices will double. Things don’t get more valuable, it’s just that the money is less valuable. This is later.

The Booby-Trap, the Banks, and the Boobs
The newly printed up money will only hurt the economy (your money in your account) if it’s in circulation. So the government didn’t put in circulation. They gave it to the banks and said “add this money to your bottom line, but don’t lend it out under any circumstances”. Then they told us the money was for us, for re-financing, for loans. But if the banks actually did lend it out, the money would then be in circulation and destroy the economy with soaring prices and making your savings worthless.

Money is Powerful Only When It Moves
The banks will eventually start moving the newly printed up money. They buy each other, they will buy more re-packaged toxic mortgages. Nothing has changed. These purchases will put the money into circulation, so they will be the source of inflation. The banks will decide when to start the inflation for us by going on a massive spending spree buying up cheap property (see Deflation above) using the free money we gave them, which was supposed to be for our refinancing.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Don’t Play With Them
During Deflation, buy items that will hold their value so you don’t have to buy them again when prices rise. Put your savings in hard assets. That’s why gold and silver are the big thing. Australian investments should be on your list, too. They can’t make your dollars worthless if you have already converted them into chunks of gold sitting in an Australian bank’s safety deposit box. Check out Peter Schiff at Europacific Capital for lots of choices.

Hard Assets get hurt in Deflation; Cash gets hurt in Inflation

You only get hurt when your old assets wake up one day in a different environment, either the environment of deflation or the environment of inflation. Your house says “We’re in deflation now, I used to be worth so much more.” Your bank account says “We’re in inflation now, I used to be able to buy so much more stuff.”

During deflation, you should be accumulating hard assets. Things you’ll need for years to come. (computers, courses/training, tuna, clothes, furniture).  Then you need to refinance any loans for the longest possible time at the lowest possible rate. Don’t take the sucker bet of really low for a few years then who knows what because you’ll sell it anyway. You don’t want to be forced to sell just because the bank says your affordable payments have gone up to not-affordable. If deflation continues for many, many years at least you have loan you can afford even though it’s not the lowest in the world, but if inflation hits, you’ll be able to afford it much easier than everyone else.

During inflation, you need to be able to buy and sell. You will have nullified the effects of inflation. If you can make some profit buying and then selling, you not only have made that profit, but you have converted some assets from one environment into the other environment, from “widget equals few dollars” into “widget equals several dollars”. Ever wonder why the stock market goes up during inflation? It’s not because companies are “doing better”, they are just trading old few-dollar-shares into new more-dollar-shares.

You need to know what environment you’re in and where you’re headed.
There are only four possible economic environments:
(1) Inflation
(2) Deflation
(3) Monetary Collapse
(4) Political Upheaval – Revolution

Martin O’Hara writes on business and personal finance related issues. You can learn more by visiting his blogs, Success With Personal Finance and Money Hidden at:

http://successwithpersonalfinance.blogspot.com/
and
http://moneyhidden.com/

• Add Google Mortgage Calculator on Your Google Homepage

• Bank Rate.com

What’s Wrong With a 401k

* You can’t buy individual stocks
* You can’t sell individual stocks
* You can’t short the market
* You can’t control your investment at all

What’s Good About a 401k

* Employer Matching (Free Money)
* Delayed Taxation
* What else? Um, uh . . .

Are We in an Up Market or a Down Market?

The market looks like it will be down for 9 to 16 months. If you leave your money invested in 401k mutual funds, you will continue to lose before things turn around. If you move your money to your 401k cash equivalent, you might have stopped the bleeding but you won’t gain a dime until things turn around.

That’s the two huge problems with a 401k. You only make money in good market times. And secondly, you can’t buy individual stocks, only sectors (good stocks mixed with garbage).

Solution:

Borrow as Much as You Can Against Your 401k and Open a Roth IRA and One for Your Spouse Too and a Regular Brokerage Account for Any Left Over

* You get charged interest
* You are paying that interest with after tax money
* You will pay tax on that interest again at the time you withdraw it.

But So What. Here’s the Arithmetic:
You pay 5% interest but it goes back into your own account so that part is your own money. You took money out of your pants pocket and moved it into your 401k, so that’s just your money shifting around. No cost.

You paid that 5% with “after tax” money. If you’re in the 30% tax bracket, then 30% of 5% is only 1.5%.

When you retire and withdraw your money, you’re going to pay tax again on it. If you’re still in a 30% tax bracket, that’s another 30% of 5%, which is still only 1.5%. The two 1.5 percents add up to an out of pocket cost of only 3%. Pretty cheap loan. Better than losing 50% due to no fault of your own.

Of course you need to check with your 401k Administrator or HR Department for your plan’s specifics. Make sure of the interest rate. Make sure you can pay it back early in a lump sum, if you want to, etc.

Roth IRA as Opposed to a Regular IRA

A Roth IRA allows for you to withdraw your “deposited” money without interest or penalties. This is because you deposited “after tax” money into it, so you can get it back with no tax ramifications. Not so with a regular IRA. Nice to know you can use that, if your 401k loan payment makes things too tight.

Conservative Strategy: Buy Low, Sell High

With IRA’s you can buy individual stocks. So build a nice collection of great companies that are having half off sales right now. You know they will be around for a long time. You know who they are and you know who they aren’t. The ones showing up in Washington saying “I don’t know what I’m doing. Give me money to make up for it.” are not the great companies. The companies you buy from everyday are probably the great companies.

Buy real gold. I don’t mean gold coins and I definitely don’t mean gold stock. Just little pieces of actual gold metal you can save in your safety deposit box. If the economy gets really bad, you clip off a piece and take it to a dealer and say, “I’d like a month’s worth of groceries, please.” So your 401k turns into a stash of real, tangible gold.

For the More Adventurous:

Short the market. You know the whole market is going down. You know there’s a lot of companies suffering. You know there are a lot of lousy companies out there barely hanging on. The tidal wave is still crashing in. Bet that their stock will go down and make some cash on it. This you can do in an IRA.

You can trade options in an IRA. Learn about options. Work your way up to knowing what you’re doing with a few thousand. Then generate cash that you will use to either short stock or buy stock you want to hold onto. My website has a link to the best options trainer I have ever seen. For about $29 a month, he will take you safely, step by step showing you everything you need to know about safely trading options. His name is Dr. Stephen Cooper. But no matter what, you should be in control of your own investments.

Martin O’Hara writes on business and personal finance related issues. You can learn more by visiting his blogs, Success With Personal Finance and Money Hidden at:

http://successwithpersonalfinance.blogspot.com/

and

http://moneyhidden.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Martin_O’Hara

When a Midget Fortune Teller Escaped Prison, the Newspaper Headline was: Small Medium at Large

People’s problems are either small, medium, or large. The cure is always the same for all sizes. That’s because the size of the problem is an illusion. When it’s your problem and in your face, it’s always large. When it’s someone else’s problem it doesn’t seem so big. It’s like the definition of a recession is when people are out of work but it’s a depression when it’s you that’s out of work.

I’m trying to set some perspective here because the mechanics are all the same. Cut expenses, make more money, get out of debt, build savings. But it’s the emotional side that is really the problem. Why are you not 10 million dollars in debt? No really. Whatever debt you have, you did yourself. But really why not millions? Because you cut yourself off at some point, didn’t you? Somewhere you said, “yikes, that’s enough”. So you do have self control. You are in charge of how much you spend. Circumstances didn’t run away with you. You did what you did and still you used self discipline and self control and basic money management skill. Congratulations.

You just ignored the arithmetic. If you make one pile of money and you spend 2 piles of money, you’ve got to pay back that extra pile, but you can’t because the next one pile has to cover a new 2 piles.

Money is energy. It follows mechanical principles. Do this and that will happen. It’s people that change everything. People are not machines, they are the variables when it comes to money. It’s the people part that you need to know about, more than the money part when you’re dealing with the subject of money. That’s why things don’t work out the way they’re planned. Things aren’t always what they seem.

2 plus 2 equals 2
Two cats plus two birds equals two cats.

My wife had a friend that went to co-dependent group therapy meetings because her boyfriends always walked all over her. My wife told her, “Stop that. Just don’t do that anymore. I don’t get it. Just kick the bum out and stand up for yourself.” Her friend said she can’t. She doesn’t know how. Well eventually, she started to stand up for herself. With practice and new habits, she made a lot of progress. But it’s not easy, because you’re making personality changes when you’re dealing with emotions. People that give financial advice generally miss this point.

So the starting point is to take a good look at how you got yourself where you are. Remember you’re not millions in debt so you do have control. Bad control maybe, but at least you’re in control. So like my wife said, “Stop that”. Don’t do what you did to get yourself in trouble anymore. You can. You might need to learn some new habits but the mechanics of money will take care of itself. Just don’t let the people part run crazy. Just stop it.

The people part of money: I want things. I want it. I want it now. I want lots of it. I want lots of it now. It will make feel good. I want to feel good. I deserve it.

The money part of money: It grows when it’s left alone. It grows more when you add just a little to it. It makes you feel fantastic just to have it. It’s the real security feeling that makes you feel better than having things. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

The Plot Against You

The Phone call: “No my wife’s not home. She’s out stimulating the economy”. The economy is built around people getting in debt. When people borrow money from a bank (buying on credit), the bank counts that debt as an asset. They in fact have just printed up their own pile of money because of your signature. Banks make money but not the old fashioned way from the interest they charge, they make money from your signature. That’s why they want you to borrow like crazy because you are manufacturing money for them when you do. They don’t care if it takes a lifetime to pay it back. They made their pile of instant cash when you signed, right out of thin air.

Don’t fall for it. Don’t buy anymore stuff you can’t pay for. Stop it.

Do the mechanical parts of money. Do them in this order: Spend less, make more, build a reserve, pay off your debts, build a savings account, save for retirement. But you have a lot to face before you start that stuff. You have to “Stop it”.

Martin O’Hara writes on business and personal finance related issues. You can learn more by visiting his blogs, Success With Personal Finance and Money Hidden at:

http://successwithpersonalfinance.blogspot.com

and

http://moneyhidden.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Martin_O’Hara

Investment #1: Make 20% or More

Pay off your debts. If you have invested $10,000 at 20% interest you have gained $2,000. If you don’t have to pay 20% interest on $10,000, you have gained $2,000. If you are in debt and take the critical step to bite the bullet and pay off your debt, you will be making one of the best investments of your life. And it’s totally 100% risk free. It’s a guaranteed rate of return.Where else in this wild and scary economy can you get a super high return and have it 100% guaranteed. Now if you’re already out of debt, go to investment #2, and if you are in debt, go to investment #2 anyway to help you get out of debt.

Investment #2: Make 30% or More

Sell something. This is the only real protection against both deflation and inflation. You have to buy something and then sell it for a profit. The quicker the better. Here’s why: If we are having deflation, your money might have better buying power, things are cheaper, but you might find yourself with salary cutbacks, work hours reduced, or layoffs. But there will always be someone buying something.

The Magic of Combining
or “You Want Fries With That?

If you can buy some things for $10 total and sell it for $15, you’ll be doing fantastic. That’s a 50% profit on your investment. Where can you get that interest rate?

The easiest way to start, is not to Make “the thing”, but to Combine “the thing”. Look around craft stores, hardware stores, drug stores. Have the “Gift Basket” mentality. What if I packaged travel hand lotion with a nail file with stick-on nails with clear nail polish? What if I packaged a bicycle inner tube with a tire repair kit with a can of air? What if I packaged a mechanical pencil with a crossword puzzle book with a clip-on book light? What if . . .

Now sell “the thing”

If there’s deflation, you are selling it at a low price but you bought the raw materials at a low price. You are still making your profit, return on investment, your mark-up, your “interest”.

If there’s inflation, you are protected. You have bought your current raw materials in the same environment you are selling them. By selling and making raw material purchases and then selling again, you will be protected from any change of value of the dollar. Your money is protected because it is riding the wave of inflation.

Going Up the Down Escalator
If you stand still on the escalator of “downward dollar value” it will take you to the bottom. But if you can walk up the down escalator by buying and selling, you will be completely unaffected by the movement of the dollar (escalator). Transactions will be the only true defense against both deflation and inflation.

How Do I Sell “the thing”

Get yourself a $10 domain name. Get yourself a $10 a month hosting. Use a free website template. Use the free PayPal service to take credit cards. You can sell stuff. It’s not hard. Combine, combine, combine. Make things easy and convenient for people and they will buy.

Martin O’Hara writes on business and personal finance related issues. You can learn more by visiting his blogs, Success With Personal Finance and Money Hidden at:

http://successwithpersonalfinance.blogspot.com

and

http://moneyhidden.com