Edward Tse at Strategy+Business (http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00011?pg=all#authors) writes an extensive article on how and why ”[...] Executives should track Internet commentary in China to protect their company’s reputation — and market position” (full article at http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00011?rssid=all_updates&gko=9f718&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StrategyBusiness-AllUpdates+%28strategy%2Bbusiness+-+All+Updates%29).

I think on line reputation is becoming more a threat than an opportunity, not only in China, but throughout the world.

I think everyone agrees that company reputation is one of the biggest assets a company owns: being innovator or having a bunch of assets in the barn is nothing valuable (or at least seems so) if company has a bad reputation.

The only difference is that with globalization and the internet, what in the past was limited to a city, state, continent (depending on company size and spreading) now has a worldwide dimension.

But who decides that a company reputation is good or bad? People.

But what makes the difference between people with solid facts for or against a company and those saying false things? In our world only the number of people involved. Sometimes is percieved as more credible a Social networked group (just because has a lot of people), rather than an informed opinion of some “gurus”.

I think most of us remember some urban legends saying (without scientific basis) that some ingredients used in bath foams were cancer developers. And what happened? People stopped buying products and companies lost reputation. Just because of a wrong spread of mouth.

What I’m saying is that online reputation should always be evaluated together with solid facts for a company and never shoul prevail on real facts, because is too easy to be manipulated

I have been talking about the market being a big smoke and mirrors show for some time. I believe that the market is not in a V or a U, but a W curve and the worst is yet to come.

I do not know if the next crash will be as bad as the first, but I do know that it won’t be pretty. We all seem to be in some sort of denial about how bad the economy actually is.

Dubai was just in the news, but it is not really news. The media may have just discoved Dubai issues, but if you look at the reports you will find that the Dubai debt problems have been known for awhile. You can find stories of Dubai debt issues in Febuary. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/13/dubai-boom-halt

The debt Dubai has built and you are now reading about are based on issues for 2008 and we are now at the end of 2009. I believe the next reports will be even worse.

The U.S. has pumped billions into the economy. Billions we don’t really have, which should point to rising inflation in the comming years.

The un-employment numbers are at extremely high levels and growing. The retail numbers are not completely in, but if they are over expectation, I would attribute this to denial about the economy, not a stablizing of the economy.

Many banks and the federal government are holding distressed and unstable assets just waiting for future appreciation to help make these properties sell at higher rates in the future. If you believe in the law of supply and demand you can figure out that even if assets begin to appreciate to the point the banks and the fed can sell some of the assets; you can see that they can only sell small amounts at a time. The problem is that if you release to much inventory in the market at one time; the whole market will loose value.

John Hussman believes the market has an 80% chance of crash next year. http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/382709/80-Percent-Chance-of-Market-Crash-Next-Year-Says-John-Hussman?tickers=%5Edji,%5Egspc,%5Eixic,dia,spy,xlf

Some say the bigger the slump the bigger the recovery. I believe we will have many ups and downs over the next few years, but recovery is not around the corner, it looks to me like we will look more like Japan in the 90’s going forward.

JW Najarian
www.jwnajarian.com
CREPIG
CREDAA

What to do about your House when you Divorce Part 1 of 2

 By Michael Hughes   December 1^st, 2009

Usually when divorcing, the home is the single largest asset you own.  One or both of you will be moving out.  These are not merely financial decisions but often intertwined with very real feelings and emotional issues around the marriage, the kids (if there are any), possessions and money. I always suggest if couples have made the final decision to get divorced, get the house ironed out as quickly as possible.

If You’re Staying in the house

You have to ask yourself a lot of questions.  Can I afford the mortgage? It costs a lot, do not underestimate this.What is my budget? Do I really want the house or is this another “I win” because I now own the house?  Will there be any capital gains on this acquisition or sale? Do I know how capital gains tax works? Will I feel comfortable here or does this house harbor so many bad memories that it will interfere with my peaceful living here?  Is the market heading up or down and what does that mean to me, and this asset, in the future when I wish to sell the house?

If You’re Leaving the house

How will this affect my credit score if the former spouse doesn’t pay the mortgage?  Should I set up a divorce lien and quit claim the property?  If your former spouse doesn’t pay, the lender couldn’t care less about your divorce, they just want their money.  If you are still on the mortgage it could impair your ability to receive financing to buy another house. 

What’s it worth?

There are many ways to ascertain what the value is without a huge fight.  Call me if you need help with this in a non combative manner.

If you are selling the house

You absolutely want to get top dollar.  The other side to this is, you want to sell it quickly and minimize the pain and suffering and get disentangled as quickly as possible.  The longer the sale takes the more stress experienced on both sides and the lower the price will be when you do finally sell it. 

Present a United Front to Potential Buyers

When people see a divorcing couple they usually see the word “bargain” flash across their mind.   This can be totally alleviated.  Discretion is the word.  Present a united front for possible buyers and you will usually alleviate the possibility of a lower offer.

I have helped many people in divorce settle their home out quickly and to every ones satisfaction. Call me today, I can help you.

Contact me today if you or anyone you know needs real estate help
e-Mail michael.hughes@sothebysrealty.com  Direct 303-359-6627 Website:www.bolderrealestate.com

Forget Foreclosure Make Mortgage Affordable

By Michael Hughes November 29, 2009

There’s a new sheriff in town and their going to help you out. Government’s new Home Affordable Modification Program, known as HAMP.

The U.S. Treasury created the program as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. It is intended to help struggling home owners work with their lenders to get those payments down to what is more reasonable.

“The U.S. Treasury has introduced a streamlined process to expedite more affordable monthly mortgages addressing current financial hardships,” said Meg Reilly, a spokeswoman from the Treasury Department. “We surpassed our goal sooner than anticipated with over one-half-million borrowers who already have trial modifications underway.”

While some lenders have been slow to start HAMP is proving to be quite a life saver to those in need who have now gone through the process.

“ More than 25,000 applicants are being processed each week through HAMP”, Reilly said. To qualify for HAMP, a home owner’s monthly mortgage, including principal, interest, taxes and insurance, must be greater than 31 percent of total gross monthly income.

“Once a mortgage modification is approved, it will reduce a monthly mortgage to 31 percent of monthly income for at least five years,” Reilly said.

There is no cost to have a mortgage modified in HAMP.

HAMP can reduce a homeowner’s payment by lowering the interest rate to as little as 2 percent, extending the repayment term to as long as 40 years.

The reduced interest rate will remain in place for five years. After that period, the interest rate can only go up to a capped current market rate based upon the day the modification is effective per Freddie Mac’s weekly market rate survey. Currently the maximum the rate could reach is approximately 5 percent.

“Our goal is to have delinquent customers or those who are current but know they are going to have trouble making their mortgage payments to receive timely financial assistance to lower their payments through a modification or some other means,” Goyda said. “We’ve hired and trained more than 5,800 additional employees this last year in our home-retention department to address the increased demand.”

Wells Fargo was among the lenders criticized early in the process for not modifying enough eligible mortgages.

The HAMP process generally consists of a homeowner contacting his or her mortgage provider. Home-retention specialists ask questions and request documentation to determine qualification.

Upon preliminary approval, a homeowner will be placed on a three-month trial with a lowered monthly mortgage payment while the documentation is processed and reviewed.  The deadline to participate in HAMP is Dec. 31, 2012.

“We are making many of the HAMP forms available online and many can be signed and forwarded with an electronic signature to expedite the process,” Reilly said.

Once final approval is received after the trial period, the HAMP applicant will receive documentation in the mail outlining all details. Since this program is still in its infancy, a two-month trial period extension is possible if needed to provide all documentation. To avoid scams and people asking for a fee go to www.makinghomeaffordable.gov

Contact me today if you or anyone you know needs real estate help.  e-Mail michael.hughes@sothebysrealty.com Direct 303-359-6627 Website:www.bolderrealestate.com

Well, it’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been very busy lately producing some art assets which, unfortunately, I cannot post here. I found time however to produce this, which is currently a WIP. It’s a Blood-Elf and a Rogue, from the Warcraft series:

Italpetroli smentisce di aver dato mandato a Mediobanca per la cessione di tutti gli asset del Gruppo. Lo comunica in una nota di precisazione, anche su richiesta della Consob, in cui definisce le notizie in proposito del tutto prive di fondamento. In particolare, Italpetroli non ha conferito a Mediobanca alcun mandato a vendere il pacchetto azionario di controllo dell’ A.s. Roma.

“Come già reso noto, e ribadito in un incontro tenutosi in data odierna presso la Consob – si legge nella nota – Compagnia Italpetroli ha conferito a Mediobanca un mandato avente ad oggetto esclusivamente il ruolo di advisor finanziario nell’ambito della ristrutturazione del proprio debito bancario. A questo fine e in questo contesto, ovviamente se opportuno – aggiunge il comunicato – può rientrare la consulenza anche su possibili operazioni di dismissione”.

Italpetroli fa inoltre presente che “nell’ambito di tale attivita’ di consulenza, la merchant bank in questione sta valutando possibili strutture e operazioni che valorizzino alcuni asset di Italpetroli. Tali strutture e operazioni non solo e non necessariamente sono rappresentate da un processo di vendita: in questo contesto devono essere inquadrati i contatti che Mediobanca intrattiene con le diverse tipologie di operatori potenzialmente interessati ad investire sugli asset del gruppo Compagnia Italpetroli”.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Peter_Macfarlane

Apparently I have enough time to update my post tag list, nothing new in the land of N yet, trying to figure out how I’m going to interlink all of my story’s into movuies and stuff.

Molto spesso si sente parlare di “asset” di un’azienda.
Dal punto di vista dell’economia aziendale e della contabilità, un “asset” è un cespite.

Più semplicemente è uno degli attivi che costituiscono il patrimonio di un’azienda.
L’assieme degli asset di un’azienda costruisce un patrimonio che si chiama equity, quindi la cosiddetta “brand equity” è il valore, la ricchezza di una marca e la marca è qualcosa di più dell’azienda e dei prodotti.

Che cosa è una marca?
Il discorso è molto complesso e lungo, ma in sintesi si può dire che la marca è un’entità che crea continuamente buone esperienze, è una promessa (di performance, si esperienze, di soddisfazione, di garanzia, ecc) fatta al mercato. Non è associata solo all’impresa, ma si adatta a tutte le entità che riconosciamo come differenze.

Nel sistema delle marche e delle merci, la marca ha un volto, una identità visiva (di cui parleremo un’altra volta) che la rende unica, distintiva e riconoscibile.
In generale possiamo dire che la marca è un insieme di elementi visivi, tattili, acustici, eventualmente gustativi ed olfattivi ben riconoscibili che rimandano ad un mondo altro dotato di una propria coerenza interna e di una serie di elementi caratteristici. Il mondo della marca in questione, appunto. Quando c’è tutto ciò ed è ben gestito, si crea valore.

L’obiettivi prioritario di un’azienda è creare valore nel lungo periodo, il che vuol dire essere competitiva sul mercato ed avere una redditività superiore alla concorrenza.
Per essere competitiva ha la necessità di offrire un prodotto che incontri le esigenze e le preferenze dei consumatori. Come si fa?
Si fa puntando sulla diversità. Darwin stesso lo rilevava durante i suoi studi alla Galapagos: sopravvive il più resistente, sì, ma il più resistente è anche chi è più capace di adattarsi al contesto, chi è diverso dagli altri in modo rilevante, cioè chi ha delle caratteristiche proprie più utili di quelle proprie degli altri.

Allora, tornando a noi, come puntare sulla diversità?
La parola chiave è innovazione.
La vera innovazione consente di migliorare le situazioni: può farlo rendendo migliore la qualità o più conveniente il rapporto qualità-prezzo, oppure rendendo più semplice o funzionale l’utilizzo di qualcosa. Viene da sé che il passo fondamentale da compiere è quello di far sapere che è avvenuta l’innovazione, trasmettendone la vera essenza.
Torna in mente la battuta di Ford che disse che l’oca tace quando fa le uova, la gallina starnazza; è per questo che tutto il mondo mangia uova di gallina.

E’ qui che entra in gioco la comunicazione.

Dell’altro più avanti.

When you get a business need to expose a piece of data, build the necessary asset that will assist in data integration and consumption. Data integration can be accomplished in many ways – by exposing a web service interface, via an object library, message publications, ETL, or by sending file extracts. What would be an option that will be a prudent investment for your firm? Do you envision multiple applications and/or processes to consume this piece of data in real-time?

Data management interfaces typically consist of create/read/update/delete operations and additional functionality (e.g. transformation, search, enrichment, encryption, etc.). If you get a requirement to expose customer data for a project, you can provide a Customer interface that supports a getCustomer() function. If applications/processes need to get access to this data from varying platforms, you can expose this as a web service. If it is required within a single platform, you can expose it as a library (JAR or DLL for instance). The important thing is to resist placing data management logic alongside consuming application code. Every consumer would have to implement the similar code and you will add operational complexity every time you need to modify data structures or upgrade versions.  The library or web service can encapsulate most of the data logic and leave the consumer with what they really want – an easy way to get and update business data.

The data management interface could also support additional operations but you don’t have to build them immediately. Over time, you can enhance this interface to offer additional functionality.

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Here are some common Spanish question words – you need to learn these off by heart.

Use the sheet below to answer questions about your holidays.  Try to practise so that you don’t need to use the answer prompts.

By JEFF SOMMER - NYTimes.com

WHEN the Dow Jones industrial average climbed back to 10,000 this month, the achievement was widely noted but barely celebrated, and for good reason.

“Haven’t we done this several times before?” asked Edward Yardeni, the economist and investment strategist.

In fact, we had. The Dow had crossed 10,000 on more than 20 occasions, starting in late March 1999, when the market was so hot that stock-picking seemed to have become the national pastime. In that year, the book “Dow 36,000” confidently declared that stocks were “actually less risky than bonds” and that the Dow would more than triple in value within a few short years.

As investors know all too well, the financial history of the last decade turned out a bit differently. Stocks proved to be extremely risky. Despite the recent rally, in the 10 years through September, most stock investors lost money.

What may be less widely understood is that over that same 10 years, while the stock market’s overall returns were disappointing, the bond market produced handsome gains. Bond rallies have not generated the hoopla that the stock market customarily receives, but over the last 10 years, investors have had more reason to celebrate if they held bonds, not stocks, in their portfolios.

Calculations performed for Sunday Business by Morningstar, using data from its Ibbotson Associates subsidiary, show that the stock market underperformed important bond categories over the 10 years through September — with an annualized loss of 0.2 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, versus annualized gains of 8.1 percent for long-term government bonds and of 7.8 percent for long-term corporate bonds.

What’s more, the S.& P. 500 underperformed long-term government and long-term corporate bonds over the last 20 years as well. Over longer periods — 30 years, 40 years, and in an 83-year stretch from 1926 to 2009 — the Ibbotson numbers indicate that stocks did outperform bonds, sometimes by more than three percentage points, annualized. But bonds were far less volatile throughout. And the further back in history you go, the less directly comparable is the data.

Writing in the May-June issue of the “Journal of Indexes,” Robert Arnott, chief executive of the investment firm Research Affiliates in Newport Beach, Calif., declared that bonds had been neglected by the financial press and by many investors. He reviewed market returns going back 207 years, and found that stocks outperformed bonds by only 2.5 percentage points, annualized. This “2.5 percentage point advantage over two centuries compounds mightily over time,” he said. But for very long stretches, bonds have done better than stocks.

The wild ride of the last decade or so does not mean that stocks will underperform bonds in the months or years ahead. If only it were that simple.

For one thing, past returns never provide a clear guide for the future — especially when technology, innovation and government policies are changing the structure of financial markets and transforming the global economy as rapidly as they are right now.

For another, it can be argued that the recent stretch of relative stock market weakness and bond market strength is precisely why stocks are likely to do better than bonds. Jeremy J. Siegel, a finance professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Stocks for the Long Run,” advocates stock holdings for people with long horizons but acknowledges that some periods have been painful for equities.

He says that the environment is auspicious again. “Historically, whenever you’ve had long periods when bonds outperform stocks, that sets up an excellent time to invest in stocks,” he said. “So looking forward, things look very favorable for stocks and not favorable for bonds, certainly not Treasury bonds.”

In part because of market intervention by the Federal Reserve, yields on long-term Treasury bonds remain extremely low, and prices, which move in the opposite direction, are high. When and if the economy recovers, bond yields are likely to rise and prices are likely to fall. Low yields, meanwhile, make it cheaper for many companies to finance their operations, which could help generate outsize profits.

Laszlo Birinyi, president of Birinyi Associates, a stock market research firm in Westport, Conn., who says he believes that we are in the middle of a vigorous bull market for stocks, has studied the long-term returns of many asset classes. He has found that from 1970 to 2008, emerging-market stocks outperformed the S.& P. 500, the bond market and alternative assets like oil, gold, real estate and diamonds.

But Mr. Birinyi recommends sticking mainly with domestic stocks and bonds, perhaps adding a sprinkling of foreign stocks that “don’t replicate your domestic stock holdings.”

“My issue with diversification beyond that,” Mr. Birinyi said, “is that an incremental or arithmetic increase in the number of decisions you make leads to a geometric increase in the degree of difficulty.”

The logic for treating domestic stocks and bonds as the two central asset classes was outlined in the 1930s by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, the fathers of value investing. In their classic work, “Security Analysis,” they emphasized safety — favoring bonds, and only those of the highest quality, as far more suitable for small investors than stocks, which attracted “speculators.”

Because shares of common stock are much riskier than bonds, they need to have the potential for a much higher return to induce investors to hold them, Mr. Graham and Mr. Dodd said. But they wouldn’t have been surprised by long stretches of bond market outperformance.

LD Lowe Sr. Financial Advisory

Through a proper balance of investment options, we seek to produce outstanding results for our clients. From stocks and bonds to alternative investments that often increase return and lower risk, our recommendations come conflict-free. We build your financial future with professionals who are independent and unbiased. We welcome you to sign up for your complimentary consultation with us. You can easily and quickly request a no-fee consultation by using our convenient online form HERE or by calling
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(What to change)

Money is an interesting concept. Mostly because it isn’t what we think it is. Which means that the thing that needs to change is how we think.

Money isn’t actually any one thing at all, it has aspects and uses and effects that are separate and distinct depending on circumstances and situations. For instance, the types of money that I know of, comes in at least nine forms. There is the spending cash you have in your pocket for a cup of coffee, a donut, or a lotto ticket, etc. There is the money set aside for major or regular expenses. There is taxes, savings, credit, interest and dividends. There is Capital and there is currency. It is all the same stuff in some ways and yet it is not either. There are important distinctions and we need to appreciate what those are and what they mean.

Unfortunately most people haven’t got a clue. I worked in a bank for several years in my twenties. In retrospect I can look back now and appreciate that I am pretty fiscally ignorant in many ways. But even then I was much more conversant with how money worked than many of the people I dealt with across the counter. And that was just talking about the very basics of money management like interest rates. As a friend of mine recently said to me, he always thought he was pretty good with money, he was conservative and careful, he didn’t get into debt and didn’t habitually waste money on trivia. And yet he was not well off or even looking like being so. So if he was brutally honest with himself, he would have to admit he wasn’t actually any good with money. If he genuinely was good with money then he would have known how to manage and leverage what he did have into a significant fortune. It has been done by others, so the failing must logically therefore lie in his appreciation and abilities with money. In general, that’s probably true, and the same logic would apply to me as well and indeed most of the people I know. I do have several friends who have managed to do very well for themselves and patently they do have a more insightful grasp of what they are doing with money and I applaud them for that.

I might make a couple of nitpicking comments. One is that mathematically you can’t have everyone being above average, therefore not everyone can be wealthy. Wealth being a relative thing after all. By whatever mechanism, it can only be a slim minority who can fight their way through to the apex, and in consequence the rest of us must end up being also-rans. My second comment is a quote attributed to Honoré de Balzac: ~ behind every great fortune there is a great crime. Which isn’t to say that my friends who have done well are criminals , we will leave that aspersion to lie upon the truly wealthy.

(NB – try Googling the phrase “behind every great fortune there is a great crime”. There are some very interesting and disturbing stories)

Link – Billionaires

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At this point I will cut and paste a couple of items that I have recently read that are relevant to our subject.

.

(from: Oftwominds ~ by C H Smith)

Pareto’s curiosity was sparked by the fact that the greatest amount of wealth was in the smallest number of hands. His observation boiled down to: If you gave everyone in a society one dollar, eventually 80% of those dollars would wind up in the hands of 20%. And of course out of that 20%, 4% would hold 64% of the dollars. In this sense Nature’s capitalism is always at work. Money moves from poor managers to strong managers. Strong managers put that money to use by investing in plant and capacity which puts people to work. Albeit imperfect and prone to greed, when left alone it works better than socialism.

It has been my experience that nearly all of the people I know and have met have no idea what to do with their money. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, government officials and even money managers, all have no clue what to do with their money. Multi-million dollar lottery winners are broke in short order. People in entertainment routinely die broke. Bubbles come and go as they all chase the dream of something for almost nothing.

It is not under-education or an inability to think critically which part people from their money, it is their uncontrolled emotions. Faced with purchasing a house which they know is unaffordable or choosing to rent they will not bother to run the comparison as long as it is their dream and “someone” told them they could. Had grumpy old Mr. Critical Thought been allowed to show up and run a spread sheet or put the numbers into Quicken they (the cold, emotionless reality of the numbers) would have irrefutably deprived them of their “dream”.

This drama plays out everyday at different levels across the spectrum of human psychology, the food you should not eat because you are morbidly obese, the years-old but never used exercise equipment in the garage, the spouse or partner who is abusive but you can’t leave, the dress, shoes, house, boat, car you have to buy but cannot afford, the candidates we vote for because we like the way they part their hair. The inconsistencies, contradictions and convolutions are endless and mind-boggling to the point of madness to the observer.

I close with a comment by Harun I. on the intrinsic difficulties of managing capital assets to retain purchasing power. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Hedge Funds and The Pareto Principle (February 19, 2007)

******************

And from: Market Ticker ~ by Karl Denninger

There have also been those who disagree with my definition of “money.”  I will therefore remove that term entirely, since “money” connotes different things to different people and we’ll go through the definitions again:

Asset: An item that has value of some varying amount of stability.  Examples are a stand of trees, a stack of sawn and finished lumber, a bushel of corn, a house, a car, a CNC machine and a computer.


Currency: An abstraction of a collection of assets, also of varying value against those assets.  Often used as a medium of exchange between parties who wish to exchange one asset for another, and sometimes used as an abstracted store of value.  Examples include federal reserve notes and quarter coins.  Some forms of currency are officially backed or mandated for certain uses, but not all.


Credit: A further abstraction of currency, but generally fungible with currency in commerce.  When brought into existence backed by an asset, credit is “hard” or “secured”; when not, credit is “speculative” or “unsecured.”  Credit always, in some form, requires payment of interest.


Interest: The amount one pays for the use of credit, usually (but not always) denominated as a percentage.  The elements of interest are the risk of failure to pay, the risk of debasement of the unit credit is denominated in, the scarcity of credit and the demand for profit on the lending transaction.


Liquidity: The amount of currency and credit in an economic system that is available for deployment (that is, is not committed to some other purpose) at any given point in time.

—————————————–

It was very good of Karl to do half my work for me there, and cover a few I didn’t mention, now for me to expand on the rest.

…I know of money that comes in at least nine forms: There is spending cash,  money set aside for major or regular expenses, taxes, savings, credit, interest, dividends, Capital and currency.

Karl covered Currency, Credit and Interest: so that leaves me Cash, Expenses, Tax, Savings, Dividends and Capital.

Cash – folding, walking around money, readies. Cash is what you have for incidental expenses, it is disposable income and needs to budgeted as such. After everything else is accounted for, then cash is what you have left over to be used or wasted however you like. The comment about gambling where you only bet what you can afford to lose applies to this. It is a medium of exchange and of value to pay for the things you like and enjoy. It can be used to buy something solid and long lasting, but typically it is for consumables and the ephemeral, such as your lunch or a bunch of flowers. For most people this would also only amount to at most a couple of hundred dollars a week, although there are the wealthier amoungst us who can burn through many thousands of dollars disposable income. Our little luxury purchases might be some nice sun glasses, theirs might be a Loius Vutton handbag at $3000. So there is a pretty wide spectrum of what constitutes disposable income/cash, but it all comes under the category of things that you can do without and would survive losing.

Expenses – Bills, rent, mortgage payments, weekly groceries, car running costs….  These all cost money to service, but it is a different order of money use than Cash. This is money that has to be spent, that has to be budgeted for and is a constant call on our income. Some expenses we can not avoid and these need to be ranked, prioritized, then paid. This is money that we only nominally have in our possession and is traded away for the essentials we need. In fact our expenses are our current and future income committed to being paid to another party. All that we can do is analysis very carefully what we are spending this money on and why, then determine just how essential it is. Typically we will stack all sorts of expenses up against our income, right up to the limits of what we can afford, but truth to tell there is often much we can do to rationalize what our outgoings are as well. It is incumbent upon us to clarify and define exactly what is essential and why, much of our expenses may be rather more optional than we imagine. At that point our expenses have become large-scale cash transactions that we have chosen to commit to long term. That’s fine if you can and want to do so, but recognize the difference between what is essential and what is optional and discretionary.

Tax – this is not optional and if it is structured properly it is seamless and invisible in deducted money from you. It is necessary in our modern social systems to pay taxes to finance the administration and support of our society. The more efficiently that can be done the better. If it is your money, then it is in name only, and should ideally be collected without you doing anything or being materially involved. GST for instance is built into the cost of anything you buy and takes away a percentage of your money as you use it. In contrast, a user pays scheme like road registration requires you to specifically go and buy a coupon or license for the right to drive and use the roads. (actually that is a poor scheme and should be replaced with a fuel tax – but that’s an argument for another time). So if tax systems are designed properly they should be unavoidable, everyone gets to pay their fair share, and the money involved is really only a book entry. It will show on a bank statement but that’s all, in a way it is the ultimate expense, money that is yours but not yours and is not seen or missed.

Saving – There is a very wise observation that noticed the only way to get rich is to spend less than you earn. It really is that simple, less money going out than coming in means you accumulate an increasing positive balance. Most of us struggle with that, either we don’t have good enough control of our expenses and other outgoings, or we are restricted by a low income, it is not easy but knowledge helps. If we can find a surplus of money over essential expenses then it becomes a choice about how we handle it from there, it is a bit like coloured sand. As a kid it was possible to buy test tubes with multiple layers of coloured sand in them. It is all sand but it was organized into bands of different colours, money is the same. We need to be able to divide our money up into various roles, categories and functions. And we all need to be able to save. That can be helped a lot by good public policy, but it also requires good habits and knowledge by everyone too. The positive results of turning money into savings is increased control of our lives. It is then available for emergencies or it can become another different form of money if enough of it is accumulated, it can become Capital.

Capital – This is just a particular form of savings. Some savings is just an accumulation of enough money in order to finance a large purchase, expenses money on a larger than normal scale. Savings that are retained and structured as capital is not spent per-se, it is invested. It has been said that an asset is something that will not just retain its value, it will earn and return you additional value, as opposed to something you own that does not return you any additional value but instead continues to cost you. By that definition, a car, a house or a boat are not assets as they typically will cost you money to maintain and might not even be sold for as much as you paid for them. Houses can attract a capital gain, but that is certainly not guaranteed whatever anyone may tell you. Therefore savings in order for it to be capital has to be utilized in a way that does not involve spending it in the normal sense. Savings that is capital is money in a financial instrument which is an asset you own that can be assured of a reasonable expectation of retaining its value, as well as earning a return. The basic and standard mechanisms for achieving that are: retaining your money as a cash deposit in the bank and allowing them to hire out your money to third parties, or buying shares in a company and getting a dividend return from them for your money. Thereby, your accumulation of money has been put to work in a productive and useful enterprise that creates additional wealth. This is a completely different use and understanding of money from all the rest.

Dividend/interest – (this is the other half/side of Karl’ s definition of interest)  So there are a few basic and a number of more complicated mechanisms for getting a return on capital. The more complicated schemes will often try to nett a capital gain in addition to a dividend or interest, but that often starts to slide over a very blurry line into gambling, which is something that needs very rigorous regulation. In any event, the ideal is that we would all have enough accumulated money/capital that there can be a sufficient return gained on it that could cover our requirements for savings, taxes, expenses or cash. What sort of percentage return you get on your capital is a bit of an open question. As in all the rest of life there are no guarantees on anything and inherently with money there is also the likelihood that someone somewhere is going to be trying to steal or scam your money. So both your capital and your dividends are always at risk. On the positive side, money is working for you rather than you working for money and you will be cash-flow positive from good money management.

(NB ~ just a note on taxes, capital and dividends/interest. There is no justification for taxes on capital or capital gains taxes. Certainly no government is going to cover anyone’s capital loses, so they have no rights to any capital gains either. But taxing dividends and interest is entirely justified and should be pitched at the same rate as GST. This is proper place for an income tax, and has the big advantage that it can be done easily, seamlessly and universally)

Coloured sand – so to return to analogies and coloured sand, money is money and it is all the same stuff basically, but it can be divided up into many different flavours, colours and functions and it is up to us to determine how we allocate it and use it. Some uses are just wasteful, some are dangerous and many are useful. It is better we don’t misuse and misapply it through ignorance. Used properly it can be very useful stuff indeed. It is both a store of value and a medium of exchange, hmmm did I cover those two functions…??? At any rate, moneys is a tool to be used and like any tool can be used or abused, the problems tend to come from it being a lot like a swiss army knife, it has so many functions it can dazzle and confuse. Hands up who has managed to cut themselves opening and closing blades on a pocketknife, haha. The same rule applies, the more careful you are and the better you know how to use the tool the better it will work for you.

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Turning your readers into customers should be the goal of any affiliate marketer, blogger, or online entrepreneur. With the benefits of free content being obvious and easy to spot for experienced marketers, taking the final step and moving your audience from passive readers to active and happy buyers is a process involving trust, security and hope. You need to gain the trust of your readers, which is most effectively achieved by offering innovative and important free content. Then, introduce security for your product, including guarantees and important achievements that it can help readers with. In addition, you need to highlight exactly how the product can help readers get what they want from life.

First, you’ve got to build trust. Once you’re in a position where you have a large, trusting audience behind you, you can market your products. While you can bypass trust and go straight to selling, it’s never going to be as effective as building trust beforehand, and playing into straightforward sales is a sure fire method to miss long term opportunities. With affiliate marketing all about building passive income streams, selling out for the short term is the last strategy that you want to invest your time in.

Introduce your products like you would introduce a pitch to investors. Being blatant and blunt achieves nothing but scorn from your audience, and turns what could have been a successful free to paid conversion into a disappointed and annoyed reader. Whenever you’re introducing an affiliate product, weigh up the pros and cons of each different type of introduction. For most bloggers and affiliate marketers, it’s best to go with an introduction that highlights the virtues of your product for your audience only. If your message could be copied and pasted for any other audience, it’s likely too generic and artificial to truly connect with your own.

One way to introduce readers to products without having to worry about the risk of putting their money on the line is to highlight the guarantees for your affiliate product. Instead of simply putting the product on prospective customers’ plates, you should gently place it there along with the security that a guarantee and testimonials can offer. Remember, when you personally sell something you’re putting your reputation on the line, and don’t ever devalue yourself to sell more affiliate products. Craft a sales pitch and trust building system that not only sells products, but builds your audience at the same time.

These three steps are fundamental for your success as an affiliate marketer. While it’s possible to bypass building your trusting audience, doing so distances yourself from a hugely powerful permission asset, and blocks your abilities to build long term marketing audiences. Passive income and lifestyle income are highly valuable to internet marketers, and without that permission asset it’s very difficult to achieve that level of success. By taking these steps and applying these strategies, you can make sure that your affiliate marketing success weathers any storm and continues to bring in income, year after year.

To learn more about affiliate marketing, check out the free Affiliate Marketing 101 report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

UPCOMING SEMINAR INFORMATION

“STOP GIVING YOUR RETIREMENT MONEY AWAY!”

HOSTED BY LLOYD LOWE SR.

DECEMBER 18TH, 12:00PM TO 1:00PM

at the DALLAS FISH MARKET (1501 MAIN ST. DALLAS, TX 75201)

JOIN US AS WE DISCUSS: Trade up to a better pension. Stop giving your retirement money away! Understand your 401k and make it work better.

We keep these lunches small to communicate one on one and answer any questions you might have. If you would like to join us for a Lunch and Learn please RSVP as soon as possible – 972-335-2523 or use the form below. Seats fill up quickly.

Come have a great lunch and learn how we can help you reach Financial wHealth.

If you are a current client, please plan to bring a friend or co-worker. 

www.ldloweplan.com/seminars.htm

The following information is required, at a minimum, to understand the profit economics of a business:

1. How many dollars of assets are committed in each stage of each product/market business (e.g., R&D, materials, plant and equipment, finished stock, post-sale support)?
2. What is the fixed/variable cost relationship for each product/market business, that is, for each dollar of sales, how many cents are attributable to bedrock fixed costs, how many to structured or discretionary costs, and how many to out-of-pocket costs?
3. How do costs and profit change with swings in volume?
4. What is the break-even point at current volume and what actions could be taken to bring that break-even point down should volume potential decline?
5. What is the rate of incremental profit on each added increment of volume? What are the volume points where new increments of structured cost must be added?

A net profit and loss statement (after all allocations) and a balance sheet for each product line are essential for generating answers to these questions. Despite their claim that “we know all that,” very few managers actually have this information readily available.

Actually, most accounting systems are not designed to provide these kinds of statements and the accountants will argue that you can’t get them because many products run over the same machines, a lot of indirect costs can’t be allocated, and so on. To which we say, baloney! Shared fixed and indirect charges often represent the most serious cost problems in business situations where a cost disadvantage exists. And they are impossible to attack in the aggregate. They must be broken down and assigned to a discrete business unit even if done arbitrarily. Then a manager with hands-on responsibility can argue about fairness and whether there is value received for the costs involved. Although this is obviously not a precise exercise, it is effective and essential. Without full cost profit and loss and balance sheet statements managers cannot really understand the profit economics of their business. Further, they can’t make the types of intelligent business decisions and plans so important in today’s environment.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight

By Sam Mircovich and Edwin Chan

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. authorities seized nine failed banks on Friday, the most in a single day since the financial crisis began and the latest stark sign that substantial parts of the nation’s banking industry are being crippled by bad loans.

The move brought the total number of failed banks in 2009 to 115 — their highest annual level since 1992 — with analysts expecting more to come. Among the lenders seized Friday was Los Angeles-based California National Bank, in what was the fourth-largest U.S. bank failure this year.

The largest institution to fail in the current financial crisis was Washington Mutual, which boasted $307 billion in assets when it was shuttered in September 2008.

U.S. Bancorp on Friday acquired the nine banks that had been held by FBOP Corp, picking up $18.4 billion in assets and $15.4 billion of deposits.

Visibly worried employees lined up to file into Cal National’s head offices in the heart of a deserted downtown Los Angeles on a chilly Friday evening, where they had their employers’ fate explained to them, regulators said.

“We’re getting ready to turn everything over to U.S. Bank,” said Roberta Valdez, a spokeswoman for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, which helped supervise the transfer of FBOP’s assets. “They will continue to operate as normal in the interim,” she added, referring to lenders acquired from FBOP.

U.S. Bancorp — which has been buying up distressed assets this year — is picking up the lenders once owned by FBOP, a private Illinois group with over $18 billion in assets that owned banks in Texas, Illinois, Arizona and California.

Cal National is FBOP’s largest bank by branches. Others that will now go under the U.S. Bancorp umbrella included BankUSA, Citizens National Bank, Madisonville State Bank, North Houston Bank, Pacific National Bank, Park National Bank, San Diego National Bank, and the Community Bank of Lemont.

“This transaction is consistent with the growth strategy that we have outlined many times in the past, which includes enhancing our existing franchise through low-risk, in-market acquisitions,” said Rick Hartnack, vice chairman of consumer banking for U.S. Bancorp.

“This transaction adds scale to our current California, Illinois and Arizona footprints.”

NEXT BIG HEADACHE

In the “near future”, all nine lenders’ branches will be re-branded U.S. Bank, which is the California-focused unit of U.S. Bancorp’s that operates a network of more than 770 branches across Illinois, Arizona and California.

U.S. Bancorp did not specify what would happen to the new employees it inherits.

Cal National operates 68 branches across Southern California with more than $7 billion in assets. As of June 30, the lender maintained five times as much foreclosed property on its books and twice as many non-current loans as it had a year earlier, according to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported news of its evening takeover on Friday.

Cal National lost about $500 million on heavy investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred shares, the newspaper added, referring to securities rendered nearly worthless by the government takeover of the mortgage firms last year.

According to FDIC data, Cal National was the fourth biggest bank failure this year in terms of assets, just edging out Corus Bank, seized Sept 11 with a flat $7 billion of assets.

A bank official who answered the main number at Cal National’s headquarters said they could not talk at the time.

Banks are still cleaning up their balance sheets from the recent credit boom that fueled banks’ appetite to extend loans, many with poor underwriting and triggers that caused borrowers’ payments to spike to unaffordable levels.

More lenders are expected to go under this year as the industry tries to get a handle on commercial real estate loans that will continue to worsen, as more strip malls go vacant and residential developments stall.

Banks held about $1.7 trillion in commercial real estate loans at the end of September, according to Federal Reserve data, or about 15 percent of their total assets. But to the extent these loans weaken, small banks are likely to be hit the hardest because larger banks were better diversified.

Banks that analysts say could risk big losses include Salt Lake City’s Zions Bancorp, Columbus, Georgia’s Synovus Financial Corp and Dallas-based Comerica Inc.

Before FBOP, U.S. Bancorp bought Downey Savings of Newport Beach and PFF Bank & Trust of Pomona when those thrifts failed last November, the newspaper said. Just this month, U.S. Bancorp bought 20 Nevada branches from BB&T Corp, which had acquired them as part of its deal to buy Colonial BancGroup Inc, it added.

(Additional reporting by Mary Milliken; Editing by Bernard Orr and Dean Yates)

There was little surprise among Afghanistan experts and longtime CIA watchers at the New York Times report that claimed Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan President and alleged drug kingpin, has been paid by the CIA for eight years.

The agency has declined comment on the Times story, but Karzai’s CIA connection “has been an open secret in Afghanistan for many years,” says Gretchen Peters, author of Seeds of Terror, an authoritative account of Afghanistan’s opium-terrorism nexus. In Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold where Karzai is alleged to have helped the agency stand up a local paramilitary, Kandahar Strike Force, that group has long been half-jokingly known by locals as “the CIA’s bastards.”

Karzai. governor of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, has not been formally charged with any involvement in drugs, but allegations about his connections to the opium trade — which also helps finance the Taliban and al-Qaeda — are legion.

Even if true, they would hardly disqualify him from being a CIA asset. “If you want inside information on shady dealings, you have to deal with shady people,” says Amy Zegart, a UCLA professor and national-security expert. “Nobody should expect to find Boy Scouts on the agency’s payroll.”

[TIME]