Updates from Brian Hill RSS
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09:32:51 pm on August 7, 2009 |
The main purpose of auto insurance is to protect you and your assets from the financial consequences of being in an auto accident. You may resent having to make that insurance payment every month but in the long run you’ll be happy you did. And “assets” means everything you own, not just the value of your automobile. Lawsuits stemming from auto accidents can be extremely costly, and can devastate an individual’s financial situation for years to come. In the case of a lawsuit, everything you own is at risk?your home, your wages, your investments. It is extremely important to have sufficient liability coverage to protect you and your family from potential financial harm.
Auto insurance companies offer a wide variety of coverage options so you can tailor your policy to your specific needs and your budget. Auto insurance is a versatile tool to use in your financial planning. Among the benefits are:
Besides safeguarding the assets you’ve worked so hard to accumulate, having adequate coverage allows you to you feel more secure when you are driving, knowing you have the protection in place to deal with any of the perils you may face on the road. Insurance can cover your medical bills in the event of an accident. Insurance can pay the full cost of repairs or replacement of your vehicle after an accident, as well as pay for damages to another person’s car or property due to an accident you are involved in. Some insurance policies will even pay for a rental vehicle while your own car is being repaired.
Auto insurance can pay for damages or repairs to your vehicle that result from such varied perils as theft, vandalism, or natural disasters. And importantly, it can protect you and your vehicle from harm caused by uninsured or underinsured motorists. Even with state laws in place that require motorists to have insurance, many people do not, or they choose to only carry the absolute minimum, which may not be adequate to compensate you in the event of an accident in which they are at fault.
Some people skimp on their auto coverage because they have a safe driving record with no prior collisions. The problem with that philosophy is, you also have to worry about the other drivers on the road. You have no way of knowing whether they are safe drivers or not. And many people don’t realize that you can be sued even if you are not at fault in an accident.
When you consider the consequences of being sued, versus the relatively modest cost of the coverage, having adequate liability coverage is important to sound financial planning. Individuals with substantial assets often purchase additional coverage in the form of an umbrella liability policy, which protects you from all sorts of lawsuits, including those arising from auto accidents. The cost of this insurance is also relatively modest.
Auto insurance is part of a comprehensive financial plan to protect your assets.
Brian Hill is the author of several commercially published nonfiction books, the novel Overtime, and is an award winning screenwriter. Get Free online auto insurance quotes and compare rates to get the best deal on insurance. Your credit score affects your insurance rates, Free credit report and scores.
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02:04:29 am on July 11, 2009 |
The road to financial health is a journey that can begin with simple, relatively painless steps. One way to get started is to apply a systematic approach to making your credit card payments. Improve your credit score by rebuilding your discipline.
If you find your credit card balances are growing uncomfortably large, the first step to reducing them is to make sure they stop building. First, hold the balances constant, and then when you are able to accomplish that, you can begin to work on getting out of debt altogether. One of the evils of credit card debt, besides the high interest rate, is that the lender charges interest on interest. They apply a finance charge to this months balance, then next month if you haven’t paid the balance off, last month’s interest becomes part of this month’s principal balance, which in turn they apply the finance charge to.
You can stop this problem in its tracks by doing the following: To calculate the payment you want to make, add up the current month’s expenditures on the card, this month’s finance charges, and whatever contribution you want to make to reduce the principal balance. The contribution could be minor, $20 at first. The point is, you are not allowing the principal balance to build up any longer. And you are beginning to learn the discipline of paying for what you purchase each month. In the end that’s your goal: to have no finance charges at all to pay, because you do not carry over and debt from month to month.
Another way to stop credit card build up is to review what you usually spend on lunches, coffee, groceries, etc using your credit card. Put the monthly amount in cash in marked envelopes. Each week take out one fourth of the amount for that week’s expenses. If you run out of money before the week’s end you’ll just have to make do by bringing your lunch rather than buying it, or stretching out the groceries you already have in the house.
If you apply this method, over a few months it will become automatic. And having to pay the current charges each month will have the subtle effect of getting you to reduce the number of purchases you make, because you want to have a monthly payment as low as possible.
This goes back to the original concept of credit cards: a means to facilitate purchases where it was inconvenient to use cash. Credit cards, by virtue of their high interest rates, have never been ideal sources of long-term credit. They are best thought of as something to use in emergencies, for expenditures that are unforeseen.
The best approach to your regular monthly expenditures such as going out to lunch, or putting gas your vehicles, is to regard these purchases in the same way as cash expenditures, except you pay for them in a group several weeks after the expenditure was incurred.
Improve your credit score by paying for all your purchases every month.
Get your credit scores and free credit report at credit card debt. Brian Hill is the author of several nonfiction books. Find ways to get out of debt and more about debt consolidation.
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01:58:07 am on July 11, 2009 |
Problems with credit card usage aren’t usually something that happens overnight. They are the result of bad habits accumulated over the years. And just as it can be extremely difficult for long time smokers to quit, even if they know their health is at stake, so too good credit card management doesn’t happen without a change in behavior. After all, people don’t really abuse credit, the credit card charges end up abusing them. Here are some techniques to use to pay down debt and improve your financial health:
Don’t let small purchases pile up into your credit card balance. The convenience of credit cards is one of the reasons they are so dangerous. We end up using them for the myriad of purchase we make, particularly those smaller ones, such the trip to the gas station, the video store, the restaurant. It can be quite a shock to get your monthly statement and find all those little nickel and dime expenditures added up to an $800 balance?that the credit card company is now cheerfully applying finance charges to. In our hectic lives it is easy to forget how many expenditures we make each month.
Two easy ways to address this problem are:
1) Get in the habit of using your debit card instead. This card takes the cost of the purchase right out of your bank account, so there is no credit balance incurred at all, and no finance charges. You are forced to only purchase what you can pay for. If you use this card frequently, however, be sure to deduct all the transactions from your checkbook right away, while the expenditure is still fresh in your mind. You don’t want to end up overdrawing your bank account and perhaps bouncing checks you have written.
2) Get in the habit of using boring old?CASH. If you’re the type of person who never carries cash, think about reacquainting yourself with it. You don’t need the old fashioned gold money clip with a thousand bucks in it. You could just make sure you always have $50 or $100 with you to use for all those minor expenditures, those $20-$50 items that add up to the sizeable credit card balance at the end of the month. These days, there are ATMs where you can make cash withdrawals nearly every place you spend money. And again, you can only spend the cash you have in your bank account. You are therefore implementing better financial discipline.
What these techniques allow you to do is start to retool your credit card to be something used for emergencies or big ticket items. You may lose track of 10 minor $40 purchases you make during the month. But it’s doubtful you’ll forget the big screen TV you bought, or the trip to the emergency room.
The nice thing is, you will no longer have a nasty shock when you open your credit card statement. Pay down debt and remember: Credit, used wisely, can be an indispensable tool for managing your finances with greater ease.
Get your credit scores and free credit report at credit card debt. Brian Hill is the author of several nonfiction books. Find ways to get out of debt and more about debt consolidation.
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01:53:30 am on July 11, 2009 |
The road to financial health is a journey that can begin with simple, relatively painless steps. One way to get started is to apply a system to how you approach your household budget. Of course, the step before that step is to actually create a household budget, which unfortunately many individuals do not. How to improve your credit score by budgeting is relatively painless and the payoff can be a healthier financial lifestyle.
Americans are inherently optimistic people; we expect tomorrow to be better than today, including the amount of money we earn. This positive expectation has been one of the reasons for our decades of prosperity and economic growth. But when applied to our financial management, this expectation can cause trouble, particularly for individuals whose income is variable. And for most of us, our income does vary from year to year, up and down, even if we don’t remember it that way. Suppose you made $88,000 last year. You could reasonably expect to earn $95,000 this year, perhaps because the company you work for has cost of living increases, and you might get a merit pay raise. So what happens? You begin to spend as though you’re already earning that $95,000, ignoring the possibility that your income could actually drop next year.
In this recession, we’ve seen millions of people fall into this trap. As the economy contracts, so do the earnings for many of us. It doesn’t have to be as drastic as getting laid off. It might be something as minor as our company not being able to afford paying us a bonus. Or we have to offer our customers discounts to keep them buying from us, in the case of a retail store, or even a service provider.
People whose income is variable, such as commission salespeople, or people who work on a contract or project basis, are particularly vulnerable to falling into this trap. The extreme case would be people who, temporarily, earn the most money they possibly can over the course of their lives, such as pro athletes. They might earn $5 million a year for a few years, and unfortunately spend at that rate as well. It can be disastrous for them when their career ends, their income drops, but their spending habits stay the same.
One way to avoid this financial pitfall it to think of your income as a moving average of several years’ earnings; three years might be a good place to start. Maybe our person who made $88,000 last year, for example, earned $58,000 the year before, and $70,000 the year before that. Averaging these three years, we see that number comes out to $72,000. If this person made out his budget with this number being his assumed income level, he would be building up cash surpluses during good years that could carry him through lean years. Perhaps this recession would have been hardly painful at all, in terms of changes he would have to make to his lifestyle.
Improve your credit score by budgeting your expenses.
Get your credit scores and free credit report at credit card debt. Brian Hill is the author of several nonfiction books. Find ways to get out of debt and more about debt consolidation.
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12:35:56 am on April 16, 2009 |
Millions of Americans have found themselves trapped in the financial crisis of the last two years. The toll it has taken is enormous, whether from people losing their homes, finding themselves out of a job and mired in debt, having their retirement savings cut in half, or facing a substantially lower standard of living. Besides the financial impact, it has also robbed people of their feeling of self-esteem and their hope for the future. Many families have made “Get out of debt” one of their primary goals.
Depending on how serious their financial difficulties are, it may take years for many of these individuals to fully recover, but there are ways to accelerate the healing process. And it’s not simply a matter of healing families’ balance sheets, but also healing their hearts and psyches as well. This has implications for the U.S. economy as a whole, because faith in our nation’s future has been a perennial driving force in creating and sustaining economic growth and prosperity.
A good first step to take in the healing process is:
Don’t get caught up in the endless cycle of media gloom and doom.
The press has clearly contributed to the national financial crisis by constantly emphasizing the worst possible statistics. This is particularly dangerous when it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Individuals and businesses become frightened about their future and decide not to make purchases or investments, with the result that the economy contracts even further.
The housing market is a perfect example of this. Think about the headlines in recent months that screamed, “Home values fall by record levels!!!” Four or five years ago, do you remember any headlines that said, “Home values rise by record levels!!!” or “A trillion dollars of wealth created for American homeowners!!!” Of course you don’t. Because at that time all they had to say was that home affordability was dropping by record levels, and they lamented that if the uptrend in home values continued, soon the middle class would not be able to buy a home anymore. A rising housing market was great news for the majority of Americans. Somehow the media didn’t see it that way.
One strategy for healing is to cut down on the consumption of excessively gloomy, toxic news. This doesn’t mean it is advisable to adopt the posture of an ostrich and disengage from the world around us; it just means don’t let yourself be inundated with this relentlessly bad media spin at all hours of day at work and at home. Concentrate on your own efforts at financial recovery, and don’t let the negativity in the news media bring you down. According to the media the old saying no news is good news should be good news is no news. Keep track of what’s going on the financial world but don’t become mired in it.
Focus on the upside of how you’ll feel when you finally get out of debt. The freedom from worry, sleepless nights, and creditors calling are well worth the belt tightening you may have to do.
More tips and hope to get out of debt Brian Hill is the author of several nonfiction books, the founder of Profit Dynamics Inc., a management consulting company focusing on business planning and venture capital. He also is a screenwriter. Brian is a contributor to Credit Card and Debt Management