Month: September 2022

Budgeting

Smart Financial Tips for College Students

Author ByCFI.co Blogger

The class “Personal Finance for Young Adults” usually isn’t part of a high school curriculum – an unfortunate oversight that leaves many young people clueless about how to manage their money, apply for credit, and stay out of debt. Now that you’re in college, it’s likely that you’re in charge of your financial affairs more so than when you lived at home and mainly functioned in the realm of your parents’ economic universe. Indeed, you have more freedom to decide where and how to spend money.

College Students

But with that freedom comes the responsibility to spend money wisely. That’s what it’s like when you’re on your own – you get to decide. And you also get to experience the consequences of your choices, both good and bad. Soaring tuition costs coupled with financial unpreparedness spell a recipe for financial setbacks. Accordingly, it is crucial to understand basic financial tips for students and other core lessons about money.

9 Practical Financial Literacy Tips for College Students

While you may be forgiven for being nose-deep in your books, it’s time to reflect on how you manage your money. Do you have a budget? Or are you spending it on the go? Remember that the younger you are, the more time your savings and investments will grow – the sooner you start, the better. Here are some practical, real-world financial tips for college students you can take advantage of to reinforce your saving and spending habits.

Create A Budget

Carefree high school students frequently spend whatever is in their bank account, living off their parents’ generosity or the spoils of a part-time job. Once that student moves to college, a budget becomes indispensable. Making a monthly or semester budget is the first step toward staying on top of your finances. Budgeting gives you a big-picture view of your money, so you can make informed spending and saving decisions. Start by identifying your income for the semester or year, including paychecks if you have a job, loans, grants, and family contributions. Accounting for your inflows gives you an idea of how much to spend each month. Thereafter, plan for essential needs like transport and food. In whatever is left, you can save a fixed percentage and spend on other expenses like trips or simple pleasures. Remember to stick to your budget because straying from your financial blueprint defeats its purpose and risks pushing you into debt.

Practice Self-control

One simple but effective financial tip for college students is always paying with cash, not credit. You’re lucky if your parents taught you self-control. If not, understand that the sooner you learn the essential life skill of delaying gratification, the sooner you’ll keep your personal finances in order and as a habit. Put your money for everyday purchases on a debit card instead of a credit card. A debit card attracts no additional fees when making transactions, unlike a credit card with a high-interest charge. Use credit cards only for emergencies.

Track Your Spending

Write down every purchase you make or use a budget app. Create a routine that includes a regular accounting of your finances. Simply tracking what you spend can help you notice patterns and understand where your money is going. It also enables you to identify if you need to make a change. This financial self-knowledge will make your life calmer and allow you to focus on more important matters like your grades.

Exploit Student Discounts

College students should become masters in exploring ways their educational status can save them money. Restaurants, local venues, vendors, and services near college campuses often offer student discounts that can save you big money. What’s more, you should learn the value of hunting down great deals by looking for bargains. Being discount-obsessed is also an excellent financial tip for high school students since many companies offer discounts in the form of student memberships.

Use Cheap Essay Writing Services

It’s essential to make time for fun and relaxation even as you juggle academic work, family obligations, and social life. Sometimes students feel zapped from energy because they have too much on their plate and end up buying expensive college essays online. Luckily, you can use cheap but reliable and trustable professional essay writing help without breaking the bank. Custom Writings is a college paper writing service that offers affordable academic writing help from scratch for students in the USA and worldwide. Their writers deliver subject-savvy, content-rich custom college essays and research papers that help students fulfill their educational goals without blowing holes in their budgets. More free time, better grades, and financial wellness are three key benefits you get from using their services.

Set Financial Limits

Imposing financial limits for necessary items is another way to curb impulse buying. Setting a spending limit doesn’t necessarily prevent you from making impulse purchases but helps you pause and assess whether the new iPhone is necessary. By setting a relatively low limit, say $100 per month, you get a wiggle room without having carte blanche when it comes to spending power. Add the non-essential money into your student’s proposed budget, separate from basic expenditures on food and gas.

Avoid Full-price Textbooks

Ah, the textbook – the budget breaker for college students everywhere. While it’s true that some professors change and update texts practically every year, the vast majority use the same textbooks each academic year. Students shouldn’t have to shell out hundreds to shop for books before class. As a student, you can exploit many ways to save money on college textbooks, such as shopping for second-hand books from Amazon. You can also rent a book online or borrow local libraries. This financial wellness tip helps you recoup some of the cash spent on buying books.

Get A Job

Of course, college should be fun. The freedom of being on your own is something to be savored, and the social aspects of college are nearly as vital as classes. But if you can, adding a part-time job to the equation can significantly boost your income. Many college jobs have flexible schedules built to accommodate students. So, find a job that fits your workload without spreading yourself too thin. That extra cash can make a huge difference in managing a budget.

Collaborate with Roommates

Having roommates in college is pretty much a necessity. So, if you’re doing college solo, you have set yourself up for a much more expensive ride. Undoubtedly, living with roommates can be a challenge, but saving on housing can make it worthwhile. It’s crucial to go beyond having roommates to cut down on housing costs.

The Bottom Line

Your financial decisions during college have a lifelong impact, which is why it’s important to have financial literacy. You don’t need an MBA in Finance or even specialized training to become an expert at managing your personal finances. Following these basic financial tips for students can lead you to financial security, which forms the cradle for building the rest of your dreams. Remember, these ideas are not just for college students but also practical financial tips for high school students.

Budgeting

Six Essential Habits to adopt for a Brighter Financial Future

Author ByCFI.co Blogger

Your financial future depends entirely on several habits that may not seem to have anything to do with money or finances. Getting the right information from online tools like Velocity trader reviews is one way but are there other ways? The answer is yes. The journey to financial freedom can be shorter and less arduous if you adapt these six habits.

finance-budgeting

  1. Remain Poised

Like many aspects of life, it is important to remain agile and poised through all aspects of financial situations, good or bad. Losing composure often leads people down a financial rabbit hole chasing high-profit, low-risk investment ghosts that leave them financially drained. Practice keeping a level head through tough times by learning and experimenting with low-cost situations.

  1. Consistency

No habit will significantly impact your life unless you consciously and consistently implement it. It takes about a month to get acclimated to a new habit and start enjoying yourself. The first few days are always the hardest. Encourage yourself to stick to new habits, make bad habits hard to physically achieve, and implement visual reminders to keep yourself on track. In time, your efforts will pay off by being reflected in your bank account.

  1. Use the Best Trading Tools

Trading tools are especially useful if you are looking to invest, which is a crucial habit to initiate in search of a brighter financial future. Tools like Velocity trader reviews give you an upper hand in making crucial financial decisions. Numerous financial tracking tools on the internet help you make the right financial decision for future gain. Make use of these free tools and any other that may require regular subscription fees but add actual value to your life.

  1. Knowledge is Power

If you are determined to make a true difference in your financial journey, you will take measures to increase your knowledge base about money. It is common knowledge that schools do not teach us about money management, so it is important to enlighten yourself using free data littered across the internet. So instead of spending your lunch break scrolling through a social media app, grab a pen and paper and get learning.

  1. Plan for Everything

Monthly or annual budgets and goals will save you a lot of financial chaos and turmoil. Making shopping lists is also a great way to plan for each aspect of your spending. The key to planning is using measurable and timed goals to create plans, so everything falls perfectly in place when the time comes. Planning may also involve identifying areas where the opportunity to save arises.

  1. Discipline

Setting financial goals and making budgets are useless if you have difficulty sticking to the plan. Discipline is a habit that will put you in the top 5% of any crowd. Most people find it difficult to stay disciplined because of external forces, so it is important to forge your focus skills. Always keep your focus fixed on what needs to get done at the moment. One small at a time is the way to go.

The Takeaway

Your financial freedom is entirely in your hands, affecting you and your future generations. Don’t get left behind; take matters into your hands, start practicing these habits, and give yourself a financial leg up.

Technology

Online searches for ‘work from home jobs near me’ have grown by 300% since March 2020

Author ByCFI.co Blogger

“Quit rates have been steadily increasing over the past 10 years,” US-based professor of management Kristie McAlpine recently told the BBC, underlining why the much-publicised ‘Great Resignation’ evidently did not start with the COVID-19 pandemic.

WFH

Indeed, resignation letters have continued piling up in historically high numbers even as the pandemic threat has receded. Overall, since March 2020, online searches for ‘work from home jobs near me’ have grown by 300%, as London Loves Business reports.

The pandemic’s role in the Great Resignation  

There are suggestions that the trauma of the COVID crisis led many people to look again at what they wanted to get from their work.

“We were going through a time where we lost millions of people,” McAlpine, of Rutgers University School of Business — Camden, recalled to the BBC. “It’s hard to imagine how that can all occur and not kind of force us to think about what’s important to us.”

In this light, the 300% figure — as revealed in research by the HR firm Cydney’s Creative Solutions — should not overly surprise.

However, many people have remained active in hunting for jobs, with the Cydney’s findings also including a particularly recent 40% increase in online searches for ‘jobs’ over just a six-month period.

Why have resignations continued at a staggering rate in 2022?

In January 2022, 29% of UK workers reported that a job change was something they were considering for that year. For many US workers, however, this prospect became more than just a consideration — as, in March 2022, 4.5 million of them actually did quit.

One big reason why could have been a widespread yearning for more flexibility in working practices. Cydney’s has found many of its clients claiming that hybrid work models have brought them numerous benefits — including reduced commuting time and higher productivity.

However, another factor could be an emerging focus on wellness — for both employers and employees. Many Cydney’s clients have started offering their staff heightened support packages ranging from team wellness activities to counselling sessions.

What could employers do to combat the Great Resignation?

Cydney’s Creative Solutions founder and CEO Camile Duria has urged business leaders to “reassess their existing HR resources and set out to bring them in line with the new expectations from workers.”

If you run a business, its office might not be particularly suited to workers’ post-pandemic priorities — especially if your company originally moved into this office before the pandemic.

So, you might want to consider booking a new flexible workspace ideal for hybrid working. Workspaces like this are available to rent in various major UK locations — including London, Birmingham, Bristol and Milton Keynes.

Finding a cost-effective workplace like this could also free up money for your business to potentially spend on supporting its employees through the current economic turmoil.

New figures indicate that, worldwide, the increased cost of living is now a major concern for 29% of Generation Z workers as well as 36% of millennial workers. Therefore, the financial perks you offer to employees could hugely assist you in keeping them.

Technology

5 ways you can save money with unified communications

Author ByCFI.co Blogger

Unified communications is the new ‘big thing’ in business and IT, and for good reason. Moving all communications to the cloud is a brilliant way for companies to reduce costs and increase productivity within the workplace. If you want to know exactly how unified communications could help you to save money, keep reading.

Unified Communications

  1. No hardware is required

On-premises systems generally require a range of hardware like clunky phones on each desk to operate effectively, not to mention the storage space. As well as this, trained IT staff need to be hired which is very costly, and that’s without even going into the costs of maintenance and repairs. Unified communications eliminate all of these costs.

  1. Increased productivity

When there are sufficient or adequate communication tools for employees to use, productivity wanes. Employee productivity is one of the most expensive resources and not one that companies can afford to waste.

With unified communication tools like Voice, Data and Mobile Services by Gamma, employees are able to work in a range of different locations. This will increase productivity because employees aren’t limited in their movements and can get more done outside of the office.

  1. A reduction in downtime

One of the major benefits of cloud based unified communication systems is that it eliminates employees relying on their hardware as much. Instead of having to work at the mercy of your communication systems, the cloud provides a higher level of reliability and effectively fool proofs your systems.

There will be no more wasted time when disaster strikes, and hardware issues take you offline.

  1. Increased employee retention

With the increase of remote and hybrid workers after the coronavirus pandemic, the satisfaction of employees has never been so significant. Companies now have more choice in who they hire, and remote employees have more freedom. Employees need the right tools to be able to do their work and unified communications delivers exactly what out of office employees need most – effective communication and mobility.

This all amounts to cost savings because the happier the employees are, the more likely they are to stay, resulting in less turnover and lowered costs associated with replacing and retraining employees.

  1. Unified communications is a lot more scalable

With on premises hardware, companies don’t have the flexibility they have with unified communications. The capacity is fixed so they will have to pay for the full use of systems, even when a lot of users aren’t actively using the system. In contrast, unified communications isn’t fixed so companies only have to pay for what they need at a given time.

Instead of paying for 100 possible seasonal workers, unified communications allows companies to scale up or down as needed so they don’t need to stick with anything that’s too expensive or struggle with not having enough capacity.

Final thoughts

As you can see, there are numerous ways that unified communication systems can save you and your company money. After all, more time working and less time messing with technology is the key to happier, healthier workforces. All that is left to do is try out, and see whether it works well for you.

Banking

Pay Off My Mortgage or Invest? Consider These Things Before You Decide

Author ByCFI.co

More and more mortgage loans are getting approved by the Bank of England every year. In April 2021, 86,921 of them got approved which was an 81% increase year-over-year. 

Do you have a mortgage as well? Are you almost finished paying it off or did you remortgage it and are now deeper in debt than ever? 

A mortgage is good debt, but does that mean that you should hold off on paying off your mortgage and invest instead? This is an age-old debate in financial circles and among homeowners – ‘pay off my mortgage or invest?’  

Each individual will be different in which course they should choose. Keep reading for some factors that can help you decide. 

Pay Off Your Mortgage Quicker

If you are the kind of person who stays up at night worrying about your mortgage and the debt that you are under, then your best course of action is to pay off your mortgage quicker. There’s no need to become an anxious wreck or deteriorate your mental and physical health because you are constantly worrying about your mortgage.

Also, consider that inflation is causing interest rates to rise rapidly. If that’s a concern of yours, then paying off your mortgage early is a good way to boost your finances. 

Pros

There are many pros to paying off your mortgage quicker:

  • You become debt-free and that frees you up in a way
  • You don’t have to pay exorbitant amounts for interest payments
  • Once you pay down your mortgage you are free to use that additional income as you wish

Don’t make the mistake though of paying down your mortgage, only to use that leverage to buy some other big-ticket items, like a car or a world cruise. 

Cons

Some cons to consider when paying off your mortgage sooner:

  • There are prepayment penalties to paying off your mortgage sooner
  • You are going to miss out on all tax deductions and advantages of having a mortgage

If your mortgage is your only investment, then you are in big trouble. That’s because you are missing out on all the other potential investments you could undertake. 

Putting Your Money Into Investments

Some folks are firmly entrenched in the ‘save for retirement first‘ camp. The main reason for this? The power and magic of compound interest over time.

Pros

If you start investing when you are in your 20s, you have to invest less money over your lifetime, than someone who pays off their mortgage first and then starts investing in their 40s or 50s. 

Let’s look at the numbers. If you start saving in your 20s and invest $100 every month for 40 years, you would end up with a neat $1.17 million after.

A friend of yours who waits until their 50s to start investing, even if they invest $1000 a month for 10 years, would only have $230,000. This assumes a 12% compound rate on your investments.

But, the conclusion is quite clear. Waiting to invest can rob you of all that precious compound interest and growth time. You would have to invest more money each month if you start later and you won’t even end up with that much more despite the additional investment. 

Another big pro to investing your money starting now, rather than waiting until you pay off your mortgage is that you can take advantage of any employee matching programs that your job might offer. This is essentially free money that you can pour into your investments at no disadvantage to you. 

Cons

Not to say that there are no cons to this way of doing things. No matter if you are putting money into investments each month, your debt is still looming large over your head. 

Your mortgage is there in the background, constantly reminding you that you are in debt and your assets aren’t liquid. You can’t stop making mortgage payments, and that can put a dire strain on your finances as you try to juggle both investments and mortgage payments while trying to live a reasonable quality of life.

Some folks live an extremely frugal life because they don’t have enough income to balance both mortgage and investments at the same time. But if that’s not something that appeals to you, then this option might not be up your alley. 

Doing Both in Moderation

When you can’t figure out if one way or another works for you, then the middle way seems like the best option. Instead of pouring all your disposable income into paying off your mortgage or investing, how about you put a moderate amount into both?

This way you don’t have to sacrifice your current lifestyle for your future self. You can still enjoy an occasional meal out and a bit of travel each year. And you can splurge on big-ticket items when the need arises. 

You can make decent progress towards both goals by tamping down on your impatience and taking it slow and steady. You might not pay down your mortgage in 15 years or you might not make millions from your investment, but at least you will be able to live a balanced lifestyle while taking care of your financial future. 

Everyone reading this article is working with a different life situation. We can’t tell you which option is best for you. You would have to decide that for yourself, but the information above should make your decision easier. 

Question: Pay Off My Mortgage or Invest?

This question might seem simple, ‘pay off my mortgage or invest,’ but the answer is quite complicated indeed. Take your time and use all the information presented above to make the best judgment for yourself. 

There isn’t a ‘wrong’ answer to this question. It’s just what you are comfortable with and what risk and debt level you can handle. If you would like to read more articles on retirement to build up your knowledge base, keep browsing through our blog.