Excuses for Financial Fuzziness? Not acceptable here.

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This afternoon, in my fuzziness, I was listening to a woman talking about her financial situation. It was on the old Fool Radio Show! (I can’t find the archive now)! I was very surprised by her attitude to her finances.

In summary, she didn’t like thinking about her finances, didn’t want to invest time thinking about them, and didn’t necessarily see the importance of doing so. As I reflected on this, I realized there must be many people like this.

But to me, this digging your head in the sand now seems odd. So many products out in the market place, from credit cards to insurance policies, rely on the fact that we as consumers never want to read the fine print. We’d rather get on with our lives.

And yet, within that, we find that we become victims to all kinds of ‘scams’, including perfectly legal ones at that. Why is this? What is it about our nature that prevents us from really examining our financial lives? Or is it just laziness? I wish I knew.

And it’s true, I used to be like that, too. It was only when I got married that I realized that I had to be the one responsible for the finances in our house. And yet, it doesn’t matter what excuses we make, because it is still our money flying out of our pockets and into someone else’s, and good/bad excuses won’t change that!
So as investors, we must resolve to:

  1. not be afraid of the details;
  2. spend a reasonable amount of time on our financial affairs;
  3. at least obtain some kind of rudimentary level of competence over our financial affairs.

Once this is done, we can begin to chart out our goals, our dreams and our future much more clearly and with much more confidence.

So what excuses have you heard? Have you ever heard yourself making excuses? How did you try to overcome this? Please comment your answers! Looking forward to reading them.

Kenneth

Ways to cut your expenses: Refinance your Car Loan!

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Well, recently, I’ve been in a belt-tightening mode, with the cutting of my salary and my business not doing as well as it was six months ago. Naturally, ALL expenses are under the microscope. Since I have a car, I’d like to reexamine the car refinancing.

There were some very attractive loans, such as this:

Loan Amount – $30,000
Original Loan New Loan
Term 60 Months 60 Months
Interest 12.5% 7.5%
Payment $674.95 $601.14

That would be a net savings of $4,428.60 or nearly $74.00 per month. Of course, you could shorten the term as another way to save some money. But do be aware of your interest rate, you don’t want to end up paying more!
Now for an Investorblogger that would represent an extra $5450 if it were invested at a return of 7.5%. A nice little sum!

This is a sponsored post.

Google Ads: Should blogs have them or not?

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Lorelle VanFossen posts an interesting question, If I Had Ads Here, Would You Click Them?, this is very much an issue that IB has been struggling with as well.

Hosting Google Ads: Would you?
The more observant of you will have noticed that I did run Google Ads on this blog for quite a while, but in the end I have removed them. I actually liked them quite a lot because I felt that they added a certain legitimacy to my blog for a while, but then I read over the TOS from Google, and felt that they were too limiting for me:

* revenue is uncertain;
* ad quality isn’t always suitable;
* too many limits on what can be done;
* a click through rate on my blog that just was awful;
* I’d prefer not to have fraudulent click issues;
* I couldn’t use Blogmad or BlogExplosion to promote my blog (though many others do so, in contravention of Google’s TOS).
So, for the meantime, I have decided to remove ALL Google Ads from this blog. You may still see them by accident! Do let me know. Perhaps for other kinds of websites, I would still use them; in fact, on some of my other non-blog sites, I have actually retained the Google Ads. It’s just that I don’t find them effective on blogs. Any ideas why?…

Clicking on Google Ads: Would you?
I don’t have a problem clicking on Google Ads when I see them. I usually do that because I see something that catches my attention. I have an instant preference for ads that are relevant to the content I have been just reading. But I can’t stand some of the particular ads that occur from time to time. The big bugbear I have is ads like those here where the ads are wedged right up against the text. The other kind of ad that I hate is the Flash ads where the ads flash all the way; in fact they are so distracting that I have to navigate away from the page. In fact, I recently installed an ad blocking tool for FF2.0 only to get around those awful ads.

Hope this answers Lorelle’s question! Any comments?

Further Reading:

A Review of My First Year of Blogging provides some good follow up reading on Adsense on your blog. And a further article here quotes:

The more realistic conclusions here is that AdSense for bloggers sucks, the click-through rates are too low, the advertising is not relevant enough and readers of blogs are more accustomed to blocking-out the ads – all this results in a very low CPM rate.