Making Money

Step #1: Maximising Your Interest Income

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Step One:

I was going through my box of accounts for the home, and I was surprised just how many useless bank accounts my wife and I had. Here, every employer seems to require a different bank account to pay salaries. This is fine, if you are still working there, but it’s lousy if:

  • 1. the bank is bad
  • 2. you no longer work there
  • 3. you no longer live nearby
  • 4. the interest rate is crap

The last few months I have worked hard to close many of the extra accounts. We’ve closed three in the last few months, but I think there are at least another three that need either to be closed or at least to have the money withdrawn.

I’m planning to bring the money into only one of several accounts, and open a CD at a more attractive interest rate. The money was earning something like 0.4% per year in the old account. I’m hoping I can boost that to over 2.0% in the longer term. It won’t make a great difference in the short term, but it will help to control the expenses of accounts that don’t meet the minimum requirements (e.g. my hsbc account, which I let slip and ended up forking out nearly $100US penalties over the last six months!) and generate a little extra.

Kenneth

Running Our Business

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1

We’ve been running a business (a language school) for over 6 years, and it’s grown from a very small base into a much larger concern than originally it was. Naturally, in business life, there are the ups and downs of the operation and the cycle of business. We’ve become aware of this.

Yesterday, though we noticed that the number of our enrolments had dropped in September, so we are still trying to analyze the situation. But anyway our moods at school have been dropping this past few weeks because of the antics of one of our staff members. So this just added icing to that cake. We are currently not profitable as the business goes right now, which feels like a real slap in our face.

I recently took back more or less complete financial control, but the hard part of our business is predicting future income (as I guess any) so to discover enrolments are down was quite a shock to me. This will naturally make the next few months more difficult than they would otherwise be.

We were planning to do so many things, but now we need to focus on our core essentials, and we need to develop our marketing skills. So I have decided to dedicate this website to my search for business and financial success. I’m hoping that its successes and failures will encourage other readers to try.
Kenneth

Independently wealthy or just a great salary?

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Ask Steve – Money and Financial Issues

What do I do with the excess cash that the business is throwing off?

An answer for you, Steve!

I understand your situation, but I am concerned that your perception may not be quite right. Yes you do have a LARGE salary, well-done. You manage your debt wisely, too. YOu have enough savings for “Quite a while”.

I however.. Continue reading →