Money Matters | iberwang

6Jan/100

Planipedia Wiki of Financial Planning

Google a phrase and you will probably sees reference to Wikipedia on the first page of results. Now, there is a Wikipedia of financial planning, called Panipedia.

Planipedia (www.planipedia.org) is a community-based global financial planning encylopedia and knowledge base that uses the Wikipedia model - information maintained by volunteers - to reach out financial planning communities worldwide.

It was launched by PlanPlus, which provides advice-centric wealth management and financial planning software solutions by over a dozen founding supporters that include authors, memberships associations and profesional planners from over 14 countries. There are currently over 2,000 pages of articles in English, French, Spanish and Chinesse.

Users are free to view, edit and translate content. The aim is to bring together the world's best minds in financial planning, provide an open venue for communication and provide users with up-to-date information focusing on clients' best interests.

Planipedia is non-for-profit and relies on the contributions of professional financial planners, academics and others who are willing to share knowledge that will help planners or consumers who are interested in financial planning. The long-term success of Planipedia depends on new contributors.

You also can access the PlanPlus Planit Community Edition, a free level of the PlanPlus financial planning software by PlanPlus. The Community Edition aims to give planners some basic planning capabilities and includes exercises and case studies.

Registration is simpleas only basic information is needed. There are many calculators like retirement goal, critical illness, rate of return but do note they are quite technical and aren't for the layperson. They aren't intuitive, so you will probably need to head over to the help section until you familiarise yourself with them.

Tagged as: financial planning, knowledge base, wikipedia No Comments

22Dec/090

Recipe for Debt Free Living

Debt free living is a feeling that's hard to explain. It's a feeling that's alien to most consumers today. But once you've had a taste of living without debt, and without the stress that often comes with it, you'll be cookin' it up all the time.

This is a recipe you'll surely want to pass down from generation to generation. Your children and grandchildren will love the flavor of debt freedom.

Serve it to them from birth to marriage and you'll be giving them a taste of success. Give yourself and your heirs a slice of financial security and independence to savor!

What's in the recipe for debt free living?

Debt Free Living Ingredients:

* 2 cups self evaluation
* 1 cup self discipline
* 3 or more cups self control
* 1 cup self monitoring
* ingenuity by the handfuls
* determination as needed

Directions:

1. Use 1 cup self evaluation to track spending habits and the other cup to determine what type of budget suits your personality and level of budgeting tolerance. Use a good honest grade of self evaluation. Take a good look at your past budgeting habits (failures and successes). Choose an easy budgeting method that suits you. You don't want your debt free recipe to fall.

2. Add self discipline to stick to your debt free living goals and your personal budget plan. Depending on what grade of self evaluation you've used, this should mix in with minimal effort.

3. You'll surely need all 3 cups of self control to stop overspending, wasting money, making impulsive spending decisions, and creating more debt. Don't be stingy here, use as much as you need. The more self control you use the tastier the result!

4. Throw in a cup of self monitoring to track and maintain your budget plan and, monitor spending and goals. Mix well. You want your mix of budgeting, spending management, and goals (debt elimination, savings, investment, and wealth building) to be a complete and smooth mix.

5. Ingenuity is the secret ingredient that will help your recipe rise to success. Use your resources to the fullest to trim your budget expenses and save money everyday. Recycle, reuse, reconcider, resell, and use a variety of money saving strategies. Never pay more than you have to for any ingredient in life.

6. Add determination as needed to keep your recipe for debt free living cooking. Cook until done. Debt balance when viewed says zero!

You've reached your goal to eliminate debt. Enjoy the taste of true freedom and rejoice with a huge slice of stress relief.

Tagged as: debts free, freedom, self evaluation No Comments

21Dec/090

More Professionals Being Cheated by Schemes

An increasing number of professionals and highly-educated people are falling prey to get-rich-quick schemes. Deputy Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism Minister Datuk Tan Lian Hoe said the culprits managed to trick professionals and the highly-educated by convincing them that they could get rich quick by recruiting new members.

“These syndicates are targeting the human weakness for materialism. Many people are willing to invest their money to get rich quick,” she said when closing a consumer empowerment seminar at a hotel in Georgetown yesterday.

She said the perception that only the uneducated were being cheated through this scam was not true at all. Tan said 529 cheating cases involving direct-selling were reported from Jan 1 to Dec 13 this year, with Kuala Lumpur having the highest number with 236 cases followed by Selangor (91) and Johor (39).

“However, we believe the number is much higher as there are people who have become victims but are too ashamed to file complaints,” she added.

She said the ministry had identified a few companies involved in such scams and they were currently being investigated.

Direct selling tops the list of complaints lodged with the National Consumer Complaints Centre. There were 2,339 complaints in 2008, a substantial increase of 21% compared with the 1,933 complaints in 2007.

Consumers complained about scratch-and-win scams, credit card payments, cooling-off period (time given to consumers to reconsider the purchase), lack of information and defective products offered.

Next on the list was housing developers with 2,316 complaints – an increase of 11.6% from 2,076 complaints in 2007. Consumers often complained about abandoned housing projects, shoddy workmanship, late delivery penalty, non-refundable booking fee and Mortgage Reducing Term Assu-rance.

This was followed by telecommunications at 2,136 complaints, an increase of 24.1% from 1,721 in 2007. Consumers said service providers did not take their complaints about the frequency of the Internet service breakdown seriously.

These figures were revealed at the launch of the National Consumer Complaints Centre 2008 annual report.

Source: TheStar, 21 December 2009

Tagged as: beware scams, direct selling, get rich quick schemes No Comments

6Nov/090

12 Month Internet Millionaire

Click Here To Find Out How

Tagged as: millionares, myth No Comments

24Oct/090

#3 MLM is a SCAM?

Bernie Madoff

3. INVESTMENT SCHEME (PONZI SCHEME)

The next characteristics would be an Investment Scheme (or a Ponzi Scheme) rather than a working program.

This is usually an investment scheme where one is promised a high interest payout, for example, 10% (or more) per month of the invested sum. However, the payment actually comes from the member’s own invested money or from the other members (or victims) whom had invested after him. This scheme looks promising in the initial stage but will soon collapse when there is no more investment coming in to manage the high interest payout.

The investment scheme is not a question of how much a member can work (sell, recruit or train) but rather more a question of how much money a member can “invest” or put into this program.

This scheme is such that you can easily identify from their presentation that they always use these words “You don’t need to sell” or “Just put in money and you can make money”. The presentation is always in relation to the amount of money that members put in. The more money that is put in, the bigger the returns are. Many of these companies don't even have products but a program or a project that invite you to invest and share returns to you beyond normal market range.

Normally, their presentation on their plans is that a member’s returns are 3 times or more of the initial investment within a year or two, using the investment capital as a measure instead of using the sales volume that a member can bring in.

Both the inventory and investment based program will have the characteristic which will be presented now, that is:

”You Buy Now or Invest Now, But Take The Products Later!”

This is one very clear sign of characteristic of a company that uses both the inventory loading and investment scheme where they ask you to put in a huge sum of money that the volume of purchase is so high that you may not have enough room in your house to stock your products, so the company stock your products for you.

Or worse still, the company may not even have enough stock at all to give you the products.

Some companies just give you a piece of paper of value yet to be seen.

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