Long long time ago, there was a rich businessman living in an old town. He exchanged all his assets and money for golds the time he retired. He buried all the golds under a tree. Everyday, this rich man dig out from the soil, count the gold and buries them again under the tree. He is happy to find that all his golds are there every day.

But his habit was discovered by a thief. One night, this thief dug out all the golds and ran away with them. This rich man was sad and cried in front of the tree when all his golds had gone. At this time, a monk passed by. After understand the whole story, this monk took up a few stones and gave to the rich man. The rich man was shocked.

The monk explained and said:” Your money is like a stone because you buried them and never fully utilized its value”.

That is the end of the story. Do you learn something from it?

We all know that money is a figure in our account or just a piece of paper in our wallet. Before this I read a book saying that money just a piece of paper that doesn’t have any big value on it. However, it has the power to exchange goods. This is the real “value” of money. Therefore money is just piece of paper before you really use it to exchange for something.

I have a few friends who are good in money management. They spend money wisely and they have their own budget. What they are focusing is saving more money. They don’t active in any other charity activities or help people. They just ignore them by saying that they don’t have enough money to do so. They said so because they want to save more money!

But I have a question for them: how much they want to save? Hundred thousands? 1 million? or 1 billion? They never have the answer for me! In fact, they will never have the answer. The time you save one hundred thousands, you will think that you can save 1 million. The time you hit it, you will say there are people who has hundreds of million inside their bank accounts. So you decide to follow and keep saving. This is a small little rat race. Can you see this?

Saving is a good habit that we must learn. But if saving too much without a purpose or goal, then you are just saving a pile of papers in bank. Money will always be a paper unless you spend it on something that has value.

I’m on my way to achieve financial freedom. Saving is very important for me but it never becomes a lifetime goal for me. For me, there are a few purposes saving money for:

1. Save for the emergency
2. Save for the investment
3. Save for children college or education fund

So all I have to do is set a goal for each purpose. For example, I have a goal to save $50,000 for my investment plan. So once I save this amount of money, I will release the power of my money and will never save again except I lost all my $50K. I will spend my money in something that is more meaningful than putting it in a bank. For example, donating to charity, helping other people, travel around with family and etc. I believe that our life is not all about money and saving money. We should unlock and break this barrier to enjoy the life that we want to. But please remember, the foundation is you must be financial secure or free. You must solve all your money problems before you can do this.

Please remember, saving is good for you and your family. You must do this first in your financial planning especially you have the common financial problems that most people have. At least you must save up the money for emergency purpose or I usually call financial security. In this article, I just want to show you that over-saving is not good. Anyway anything that is good will become bad if it is over the limit.

So start saving today but never bury the power of your money. There are a lot of people needs your money to survive. Use your money to help them and not put them as a paper in bank and calculate the figure every day just like the rich man in my story above.

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If you do then you must pay attention. You might fall into a trap. I agree that goal setting is an important process for us. It is a guide for us to plan our year accordingly so that we can achieve what we want to. If you want to make more money, you must set a clear and achievable money goal.

The Problem of Money Goal

I always set money goal. I’m making money from the Internet and this is a business that needs to be driven by goals and motivation. This is because it is a part time business where I take action in my spare time. So I need motivation to take action and sacrifice my spare time to exchange for a business income source. Otherwise I cannot take action because of laziness.

However, I always fail to achieve my goal. I always fail to achieve goals that I have set for my online business. If I want to give a mark to this “test”, I can tell you that I FAIL. I believe something must be wrong with me.

So I look back at my works and I found something common. That is I always stop taking action in the earliest stage. I never take action persistently until I achieve my goal.

The biggest problem that I have is I’m too focusing on the money goal. For example, I want to make $1000 in 1 month. So I usually divide the $1000 by 30 so that I know on average I have to make at least $33 per day. I wrote this down on a piece of paper and put it every where that I can see it. Then only I go out and take action.

But I’m not the lucky guy that always succeed in first few days. In day 1, I fail and I told myself that I’m just starting up. In day 2, I fail again and I told myself that it takes time. After 1 week, if I haven’t hit my goal to make $33 daily, I gave up because I worry, lost my focus and stopped taking actions.

I must do something on this or else I will never succeed in online business or any money goal that I set in my journey to financial freedom.

Finally I found the solution for the Money Goal Problem

I found a secret to overcome this problem. I wish I would have found this earlier so that I won’t waste so much of time.

Yes we must set a money goal especially about how much money we should make in a certain time frame. But we should not focus on the figure and use it as the measurement of our progress. In most cases, we are not always lucky enough to see the results in the early stage. Therefore, if we keep focusing on the figure and we can’t see any sight that we are making any money, then we will in trouble as we loss our confidence and motivation along the time.

So the solution is we must focus on the actions and the results. Here is what we must do:

After we set a goal, we must decide how we are going to do to achieve it. Here we decide the strategies, plans and tools that we can use to achieve our goal. After that based on the plans, we must list down the actions that we must take. Then we must imagine what kind of results we will get after the actions. Please never include money in these results. When every thing is done, then all you have to do is wake up every day and take the actions. Focus on the actions and never check how much money you have make. As long as you take enough actions and the money will come on itself which you don’t really have to care about.

I found that this method is working fine with me. I can focus on my actions and it will take care the rest for me and attract the money that I deserve. Besides that my motivation keeps increasing because I accomplished a lot of tasks(actions). If you always fail to achieve any goal, then my method may work for you too.

Steps to Hit Your Money Goal

Here is a short list about things you must do in order to succeed:

1. You must set a goal about how much money you must make. Yes you must do this!
2. Then spend sometime and think about how you are going to achieve it.
3. List down the actions or to do list that you must accomplish to hit your goal.
4. List down the results that you will get after you finish each actions you have listed above.
5. Revise and change your actions plan accordingly based on your experience, if needed.

Never think about your goal about money. If possible, never check your balance or calculate how much money you have make. This will help you to maintain your motivation and let you focus more on what you should do right now instead of what you have achieved.

Give this a try and let me know the results. Good luck!

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1. Our greed caused today’s global economic crisis. I totally agree with his words on this. We are living in the world where most people are so greedy and materialistic. We have too much things to buy and enjoy until we put a great honor on our money. The demands on money are increasing until everybody is so keen about it. This make a lot of people use improper ways to make more money until the collapse of the economy system.

2. The importance of transparent. People are worry about our economy because most of us didn’t prepare well for this. In fact, I believe there are many so called economy experts should know about this global economic crisis earlier than everyone of us. They should give some warning to the public and let people prepare for this crisis. However, the transparency on this method is not really clear and most people never know about this until the last minute. This is why so many people are suffering from this economic crisis.

3. The obsession with money. Sometime it is really funny how we should deal with our “money”. Money is important because we need it to survive. But if we become too obsession with money, we will suffer. So we must find a balance point where we will not too obsessive with money until we lost the direction to have a happy life.

4. The Buddhist approach to deal with economic crisis. Things happen because of some reasons. This is something that we called karma. We have been destroying all the economy system in the last decade, now it is time for us to deal with the crisis(results). Nothing we can do right now except learning how to accept the fact and the lesson so that we will not repeat the same mistake in future.

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Most of the time management books recommend us to set a schedule or time table for our daily life. This can ensure we can do whatever we need to do and yet never disturb our current lifestyle. For most people, they don’t have any timetable or limitation on their time. They do whatever they want to according to their idea at that moment. Their time can be disturbed very easy by their families and friends. This is why they achieve nothing at the end of the day.

So please set a special time for your money and personal finance. Once you set this, you will feel that things and people around you will be more tolerant with your timetable. For example, if your girl friend wants to chat with you over the phone. You can tell her that everyday 8pm to 9pm  is your time to manage and plan your finance. You can chat with her after that. In this way, she can chat with you and at the same time you have your personal time to manage your money. This is a win win situation where everybody is happy.

So please don’t give yourself too much of reasons not to do this. Busy is not a good reason because you can plan your time. Set a time to manage your money and you will fell the difference after doing this for some time. Besides that this is a good starting for you to approach the retirement and future that you want to. Remember, allocating time to manage your money.

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1. Save More Money. The key to retire early and wealthy is investment. It is about how we invest and grow our money so that we can retire early. This is why the first step we must take is save more money and let us have more money to invest.
2. Delay your gratification. In order to save more money, you have to delay your gratification and stop buying things that not really necessary or something that is expensive. I know this is the hardest part for us to do as we are facing so much of temptation today. But if you have a goal to retire early, this is a must. We only delay and buy later after we are wealthy and rich.
3. Build more income sources. One of the greatest way to save more money is have multiple sources of income. The more income you have, the more money you can save each month. This will greatly help you to boost the growing speed of your early retirement fund.
4. Reduce Debt and Accumulate wealth. Debt is dangerous if we don’t know how to handle it. So my advice is we must try our best to be debt free and let our finance back to the starting point of 0. After that we can fully concentrate on wealth accumulation by investing money and buying assets.
5. Take more risks in investment. Depends on your current age and income, if you are young and have multiple sources of income, then you should try to invest in those high return investments. Of course the risks are higher. My advice is you only can do this after you are debt free and have plenty of extra money on hands. Please make sure your life will not be ruined just in case your investment fails.
6. Buy VS Rent Your House? If you come to the age to buy your first house, you must think properly whether you should buy it or rent it. There are many factors involves in this decision. In most cases, house is the greatest asset because we will spend most our money in this asset. But it is also something that may affect our plan to retire early. So think properly before making decision.

Yes, it is not that easy to retire early as you have to sacrifice so much of things and have a life that is so different from others. Just like me, I always have different mindset in money when I talk to my friends. This is because I have different financial goal. No matter what you goal is, as long as you know what you are doing and what you want, then you are on the right track to achieve what you want.

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Today, we need money to settle a lot of things and problems. Basic needs such as food, clothes, houses, medicines are consuming money. We need money to survive. Therefore in order to feel the sense of real security in life, we must have some money left behind which give the sense of security to us

We all love to live in a life that full of security. No body like to have the challenges in their finance all the time. We need security to feel the peace. So achieving financial security is the basic goal that everyone of us should have. Besides that, before you start any investment, you are advised to cover all your basic needs and achieve financial security. This will not put you or your family in hot water just in case you lost money in investments.

What Is Financial Security?

My Personal definition for financial security is a level of personal finance where you don’t have to worry that you are not enough money just in case anything happen in your life. You have the true security for your life because you have all the necessary money ready to cover whatever unpredictable circumstances happen in your life. Besides that there are also no loopholes in your finance that might let you down such as debt or persona loan.

Therefore based on this definition, I have listed some of the requirements that we must have in order to achieve financial security.

1. Emergency Funds. Ok, it is very important to have an emergency funds ready for you and your family. Just in case anything happen, you have money to settle your problems. For example, if you lose your job, this money can let you to cover all your basic expenses while you can continue to look for a new job. Build up this emergency funds even you are in debt. If you are in debt, you can build up 1-2 months of emergency funds. After that you can continue to pay your debt. 1-2 months of emergency funds are better than none.
2. Become debt Free. Debt is dangerous and risky if we don’t know how to manage it properly. Therefore, I always encourage people to be debt free. There are good debt and bad debt tough. But if you don’t know how to handle your debts, you are advised to pay down the debt first. Debt is just like termites which can eat up the support of your finance. It can ruin and make your life fall down if you don’t handle it properly. So become debt free first and clear all the bad debts.
3. Saving Account. It can really give you the sense of peace and security to see that there are money left in your saving account. It is really nice to see this amount of money keep increasing. Saving account is a must because it is a fund for us to move our personal finance to the next stage. Maybe you want to start your business, maybe you want to invest or even save it for your children education. Well, this is very important for you to get into the next level of personal finance, Financial Comfortable.
4. Insurance. Life is hard to be predicted. There are things that might happen and affect our normal life. So we must buy the insurance to cover all this unpredictable things. Personally, I think an insurance that can cover death, medicines and illnesses is important for us. A life insurance is a must for everyone of us.
5. Maximize Your IRA Potential. Even though we have different financial goal to hit but we cannot forget our retirement. We should build the nest of our retirement from time to time. So spend sometime to manage your IRA and maximize its potential so that your retirement is under a protection.

It is really hard to live in a life that full of stress and worries about not enough money. Financial security is a stage that we must achieve for the peace of life and happiness. So please set a goal to achieve financial security as fast as possible. Good luck.

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But when I grow up and start to manage my own money, I found that sometime it is not easy for us to make the donation, especially in the form of money. There are many facotrs you might have to consider before you can put the money into the donation box. So here are some of the question that you might consider:

1. How much you can donate? Maybe you have started your own budget and living under its control. So you must consider how much you should donate so that it won’t affect your budget.
2. Should I donate now or later? Maybe you are lack of money and you are waiting for the next paycheck. So it can be hard for you to decide whether you should donate your money now o … later?
3. Which organization you should donate? Nowadays there are many charity organizations appear in the market. Do you have any favorite organization that you like to donate? What you should do when other charity organizations approach you?
4. What you can get in returns? Well, we have to accept the fact that there are some people are looking for returns after making the donation. Maybe the good name or the returns in Karma. But I think this is not really a donation anymore for this group of people. It sound like some kind of advertising and investing. To be honest, I hate this kind of people.
5. Can your love one accept that you make the donation? To be honest, not everyone is acknowledge the fact of donation. I saw this case before where a couple argue because of donation. So you might consider whether you should donate even though your love one objects on this case.
6. Can you sacrifice? Again, you know you want to use the money to buy something you want to. All in sudden, someone approach you and ask for the donation. But if you donate the money, you will be not enough money to buy what you want. Will you continue the donation?

God always tell us to love and help each other. It is very easy for God to do this but it can be hard for us on the hands. There are so much of things we have to consider before we can lend out our hands to help others. Anyway, it all about your heart to make your own decision whether you should donate. There are no “right” or “wrong” for this question.

So when someone hold a box and asking you to donate some money, will you do it?

With all the questions have to be considered, sometime I can feel that it is not easy to make a donation.

Photo Taken By Daquella manera

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Just like investing and retirement planning, we must diversify our income source so that our income will not 100% collapse just in case anything happens.

The Benefits to Have Multiple Income Sources

Having more income is really a big advantage for us. With more money,

1. We can pay down our debt faster. We can use the money to pay down the credit card debt, mortgage, personal loan etc. This will let us to be debt free faster and easier.
2. We can have more money to invest. With more money, you can have more choices for your investment plan. You can invest in those high yield investment or even invest more money to build up for your wealth. With this extra money, you can take more risks to have more returns too.
3. Save more money faster. You can put all the money into your saving account to save money. You can save for your children college fund or even your retirement fund. You can also build up your emergency fund too.

In good time, extra income sources simply let us have more money to invest and build our wealth, in bad time, we have multiple income sources to support our life. This is why I always say that multiple income sources are essential for everyone of us.

What Are The Important Requirements To Have Multiple Income Sources

Currently, we are making money because we are providing some kind of value to others. People are paying money to exchange for our values. It can be services, products, knowledge or time.

So if you want to have multiple income sources, you can:

• Provide Multiple Values. Maybe you are knowledgeable in different area. Then you can provide different values to different kind of people. For example, you can repair computers as your job, get a freelance programming jobs at night time and provide computer tutorials to children at weekend. This can let you have multiple income sources.
• Provide The Same Value in multiple ways. This is slightly different from above. You know nothing but only your expertise. So you can concentrate on your expertise and provide your value in multiple ways. For example, you are good in cooking. So you can work as a chef in local restaurant, then you can write and sell some cooking recipes, you can also build a site that about cooking and earn money from the internet. All the ways are build around the same expertise but in different ways to provide the value.

Personally I prefer the way #2 to make more money. By focusing on 1 expertise, you can really improve and become an expert on a particular field. So you can provide even more value to people and make more money because you are an expert. Besides that it is also easier to control 1 knowledge rather than different knowledge. Just like what people said, 1 knife that can cut is better than 100 knife that is blunt.

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Well, one of the common thinking of people about retirement is they only can retire after the age of 55 or any other number that match their condition. People usually work and wait until the age of retirement then only can start to “enjoy” and “taste” the life after retired.

In this blog, I always emphasize that we should retire as early as we can. If possible, we must retire wealthy, younger and financial free. Retire Early is my dream and also something that I want to propose to others like you. This is because our life is not just about jobs and income. I said this because many people spend most of their life in jobs just to get the income. There are many things in this world are waiting for us to enjoy!

For some of them, they have delay their retirement and continue to work because they need to the income so much. I feel sad while I saw people around me spend all their time in the jobs that giving them stress and tiredness. But don’t worry, if you start earlier with a proper plan and take action, you can retire early and enjoy your life too.

Below are some of the benefits that retire early can give you:

1. Start enjoying your dreams. It has been so many times I heard that how people have to sacrifice their hobbies and dreams because they need to work for income. I have to admit that not every body can live and make money from their hobbies or passions. Sometime we have to be realistic and tell ourselves that we can only enjoy our what we likes after we retired. Therefore, the early retirement will let you enjoy what you have dropped earlier in life in the younger age.
2. Skipping all the causes that make you sick. Don’t you agree that nowadays people are stressful and have a lot of emotion problems? Don’t you agree that those are the causes that affect their health and let them fall in sick? Reports show that many people are feeling stress because of their jobs and these emotion problems have affected their health. Besides that, people have less rest and change their living routines because of their jobs until they are greatly affecting their health and body. So if you can retire early, you can adjust your time and hence control your life. This will let you have less stress in your life and hence have a healthy body for the rest of your life.
3. Doing what you want while you are young. Before this, I heard an advice from my elder customer who like traveling so much. He is considered as retire wealthy and have the ability to spend most of his time in traveling. But he can’t do that because he is too “tired” to do so. He retired at the age of 55 and he told me that it is very tired and exhausted for him to travel in long period. As he get older, his stamina is not as good as those youngsters. Although he exercises from time to time but his body is not as good as before. So he gives me an advice that we must retire early and do what we want to while we are still young. This advice really punch my head and make me realize that how important it is to retire early.

We are usually tied up because of money or so called income. We have to do something that we don’t want(job) and spend most of our life in things that meaningless to us. So as long as you can build up the income sources that cover all your expenses now and future, then you can retire early and enjoy your life.

If you are still young(<50), you have the higher chances to retire early. Of course, the younger you are, the easier you can plan to retire early. In fact, in financial world, the earlier you start to plan, the better future you will have. This is a fact. So start saving, investing, planning early if you want to retire early.

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For me, it takes more than just a healthy body to have a healthy life. There are many things that we must take care in order to have a healthy life. For example, our personal finance. We can’t deny the impact of money on to our life and we must take care about it.

For our good health, we are advised to take more rest, eat more healthy food, do more exercise etc. We must take some healthy steps each day to ensure that we can have a healthy body. It is all about what we do every day that determine our future.

For the issue of money is same. There are a few things we must do from time to time to ensure we have a healthy finance. Without further ado, here are the 5 things that I recommend to you:

1. Take more notes. I have been listening so many time that my friends complain how they are struggling financially. They make so much of money but they still have financial headache. When I ask them in details, most of them will answer me they don’t even know how and where their money gone. This is a big problem for them. Since they don’t know how they spend their money, then how they can manage their money? So take more notes about how you spend your money every day. This will let you have a great overview on your cash flow.
2. Spend more wisely. Think before you spend so that you won’t worry after you spend. Before you buy anything, think properly. People usually buy things emotionally and they might spend too much money on something that is not really important for them. Ask yourself question like do I really need this thing? Is there any alternative for it? Should I buy at this price? Besides that you can also do some calculation so that you can find out how this spending can affect your future and life.
3. Read your statement. Each month we receive a lot of bills and statements in mail or email. I also know that not much of people will go through the bill. This is a bad habit. Even you are in great debt, you must read through the statements. This will let you understand how you spend your money and what kind of charges are taking money from you. So far I found that banks tend to charge some kind of “service” fee in our statement that we might not know. So if you don’t look at your statement, then how you are going to get rid of it?
4. Change the habits that consume our money. There are many things that we can skip and save money. For example, I never drink any coffee but plain water. In fact, drinking too much of coffee is not good for health. So why we must spend money for this habit? Drinking water is better and it is cheaper than a cup of coffee.
5. Read about Money. We must always read and touch things that we want to master in life. In fact, the issues of money is a huge knowledge and we can easily spend the rest of our time to study and master it. If you want to have a healthy body, you can read about books and taking care of your body. If you want a good financial future, then you must read about money. Personally I will encourage you to learn how to invest your money. No one can really help you when comes to investment even experts. Experts are only assisting you to plan and make decision and not really can help you to make money. So learn this skill yourself and it will pay off in future.

Above are the 5 tips that I think people should take to master their finance. Hope you enjoy it.

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