Monthly Archives: January 2010

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A Different Kind of Investment

January 25 10:56 pm ,

Continuation

Today, I learned about a different kind of investment and a different kind of bank.

What did the endorsers have to say?

Giselle Sanchez: “It is an investment just like bonds, stocks and savings.”

Anna-Lynn Salindong: “It is just like an insurance policy – a biological insurance policy.”

But I was not really thinking about investing and investments that day.  I was going about my own way, staring at the wall of a clinic, when the wall stared back.  On it was a message board and on the board was a poster of a cute baby.

It was a poster for cord blood banking.

Cord blood what???

And I was reminded that I kind of knew about it, a colleague in work having “banked” his baby’s cord blood in Singapore two years ago.  All I know was that the expense was prohibitive.  But I remembered too that my colleague, although sighing and murmuring about all that money he spent for it, thinks that he did good.

Could I? (should I)

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Posted in: Insurance, Life Stories , Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Guest Post: Mortgage Loan Calculators to Assess Your Financial Obligations

January 22 1:08 pm ,

Semblance of Order

Live within your means, an old saying, is what one is religiously expected to follow.

In reality, this is not implemented all the time and it is evident from the statistics which tell us about innumerable mortgage delinquencies. How then will you avoid deviating from the “old saying”?

Effective money management skills are called for.

Mortgage loan calculators can be of good help along with judicious spending habits. (please take note of the combination)

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Posted in: Financial Education , Tagged: , , ,

Solving a Finance Problem

January 16 11:35 pm ,

 

Dissect, Analyze, Solve

Something bothered me.

I was looking at my financial duties for 2010, staring as far out as December, when the imminence of what I have to pay struck me: huge life insurance premiums.

Do you have the thought that sometimes you may have bitten more than you can chew?

Years ago, when I bought those policies, business was good and was not yet bogged down by recession woes.  I felt I could do anything – be anything, buy anything.  My financial planner convinced me of the wisdom of obtaining life insurance (my second attempt at it).  For peace of mind, she said.  And I did have it.  I remember thinking while driving one day that my family will be okay if…  But now, that same thing that gave me peace of mind is shattering it.

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Posted in: Financial Education, Financial Planning, Insurance , Tagged: , , , , , ,

Credit Card Musings (er, Woes)

January 12 1:57 pm ,

Magnify

If there is anything that I have learned during all my years of existence, it is that you do not get answers if you do not ask any questions.

So I ask my questions, no matter how silly or how dumb it sounds.  Doubt is also an element that I constantly entertain in my mind, so I confirm and re-confirm until the thing has no choice but to sound true.

So on the day that I got my credit card statement and alarm bells were sounding in my head, I picked up the phone and called Citibank direct.

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Posted in: Consumer Protection, Financial Education, The Basics of Finance , Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Mutual Funds: Magic of Larger Numbers

January 9 12:02 pm ,

 

Hop In

I think I first heard about Mutual Funds from Bo Sanchez.  He likens it to a vehicle that almost anyone, with some funds to invest, can jump into, and that it should be a staple in the portfolio of any smart investor.

I was not entirely convinced (I did not really understand).

To further dispel the mystery of this so-called staple – Mutual Funds – I did some further reading and some interviews.  It is simpler than I thought.

Mutual Funds, turns out, is an investment vehicle where people can pool their resources to take advantage of the magic of larger numbers, that is, because a lot of people invest into “the fund”, they have a large number, and thus, the mutual fund manager – a professional who will manage the investment – can get better rates of return for them.  The mutual fund manager trades the “pooled” money on a regular basis and the net proceeds or losses are then typically distributed to the investors annually.  As my friend Salve Duplito said in one of her articles in MoneySmarts, with as little as USD$100, the regular John or Juans can get their feet wet in an instantly diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, or both.

A sort of safe haven for the cautious investor.

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Posted in: Financial Education, The Basics of Finance , Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feng Shui and the Year of the Tiger

January 6 6:50 pm ,

Influencing Your Destiny

I had my first brush with Feng Shui during my first trip to Hongkong.

We were taking the cursory city tour and the tour guide very carefully pointed out the building in the distance with a hole through it. She said that a Feng Shui expert was consulted when it was built and she said that there was a dragon that lives in the mountain behind the building.  To keep him happy, there should be a hole in the center of the building so that he can easily go in and out whenever he wanted.  It became the site of the former Repulse Bay Hotel and known as Repulse Bay’s famed “building with a hole”.

I was fascinated.  A dragon!

On her website, Lillian Too explains that the Feng Shui practice is described in colorful dragon metaphors and that that Master Yang Yun Sang’s (Founder of Feng Shui) emphasis was “…on the shape of the mountains, the direction of water courses, and above all, on locating and understanding the influence of the Dragon, Cha’s most revered celestial creature.”

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Posted in: Financial Education, Wealth Attraction , Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,