Defeat Your Financial Enemies (eBook)

Carlos Villeda (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-5439-4911-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Defeat your financial enemies is a book that contains practical tips to properly manage money. The first 7 chapters are somehow sequential. Chapter 2 contains a list of over 40 common enemies of money, some which are very common and lethal such as debt and unemployment when they work together, others might seem not to be harmful but when working with other enemies they can cause great damage when people are negligent in handling money.

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Your financial enemiesMoney is not a complicated topic, if we keep in mind that it is a means and not an end; however, to be able to understand this we must first learn the basic financial principles and be wise to obtain it, to spend it, to multiply it, and to keep it. Money is not a problem in itself, the problem are the bad habits regarding its usage which we learn at home and outside of it. It is not hard to change those bad habits if we are willing to unlearn those inadequate practices we have regarding the usage of money. Family beliefs inherited from generation to generation mark significantly our perspective on money. Thank God the myths and habits that harm our economy are easy to defeat if we learn and understand the damage they produce in our lives. Once you have read this book you will be able to identify the enemies that are affecting your personal finances and you will be able to defeat them. As soon as you start to apply the principles and advice shared in this book you will see great changes in your personal finances. Defeat your financial enemies is not just a book, but it is a manual that will reveal to you which are the bad habits are affecting your personal finances and will help you become a better financial manager through simple and practical advice. It will also reveal to you secrets that, regardless of how simple they might seem, are very effective in showing us new ways to obtain additional income through very profitable business.

Textauszug

CHAPTER II

ENEMIES

In war, an enemy is someone who we are facing in the battle field. Our purpose is to defeat him or he will defeat us, for there are no second places when it comes to war; it is either you get the gold medal or the grave, which even if it has flowers, it will remain a grave.

In the financial scope there are enemies that will declare war on our budget, like debt and unemployment, but there are other enemies that will attack like the guerrilla, for they only ambush us from time to time. Regardless of whom our enemy is, the best way to defeat him is by getting to know him and his strategies.

Even though I know there are innumerable financial enemies and I will only mention some of them; some will be described briefly, since they don’t require much explanation and others will take us longer because of their relevance and because they are the ones that deal the most damage.

I would like to warn you that this is not a document of religious matter, but it includes many biblical references as backup and the reader can decide whether to consider them or not, but as for me I cannot disregard them, because the Bible has been, and will remain, the best source of wisdom for mankind.

1. Laziness

Laziness leads to poverty. Proverbs 24:30-34 declares that scarcity will come like an armed man to the sluggard. Proverbs 13:4 adds: “Lazy people want much but get little, but those who work hard will prosper.” The apostle Paul said in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 “..The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” In other words, a lazy person, sooner or later will face times of need and won’t have the financial status to deal with it nor will have anyone to help him, as most of us don’t like lazy people. There are of course lazy people with luck, who will find someone to drag them around in life, but they are the exceptions.

When we talk about lazy people, one immediately brings to mind those who get out of bed late, that spend the entire day doing nothing or the spend hours watching television or social networking, but in this category we could also mention those who, even though they have a job, they do whatever they can to avoid the responsibilities of their jobs, they play sick so that the office doctor can dismiss them, they take advantage of any recess they can take from the office even if they don’t deserve such break, or have accomplished the minimum amount of tasks to earn a break and make up excuses for them. The employers sooner or later identify these people and label them, and won’t let them move up in the corporate ladder, and when they get fired they have a hard time looking for a job because of the bad reference and this will lead to financial crisis.

2. Negligence at work

This is laziness close relative, but they are not the same, for laziness entails not working or disregarding a job, while negligence entails not caring or even forgetting about your job. A doctor who leaves medical pincers inside the patient after a surgery, the carpenter who leaves a door maladjusted, the tailor who leaves a sleeve longer than the other, the blacksmith who leaves a crooked balcony, the plumber who leaves the water dripping from the faucet, etc. A negligent person won’t carry an agenda, won’t prioritize, does what is trivial and not what is important, watches a lot of television, chats or spends a lot of time on the social networks, talks a lot over the telephone, wastes a lot of time in the computer sending non-productive emails, reads the newspaper page by page and is not eager to do his or her job with excellence and complains that he or she has no time to read, get trained or study, yet dedicates many hours to non-productive activities.

Sadly, many workers in Latin America fall in this category, which is why they are living in financial crisis. Proverbs 10:4 says: “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.” Also in Proverbs 18:9 it says: “One who is slack in his work is brother to one who destroys.”

Proverbs 21:5 adds: “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty”

3. Consumerism

We live in a society that is characterized by consumerism and we are bombarded with publicity that will induce us to consume. It is said that a person could be persuaded by over 2,000 television ads in a single day. Business are not dedicated to develop and discover but to create necessity in people to buy and consume. And what is the consequence of consumerism? People spend what they have, and even what they don’t have (getting in debt), getting what they don’t need, because of psychological pressure, generated, mostly, by publicity.

What would you do in a very warm day and while watching television, if an ad came up with a very cold drink? The odds say you would, most likely, go to the store or send someone to get one of those drinks, when you could easily just drink a glass of cold water or even a refreshing homemade drink.

The ads on television convince young people of smoking a particular brand of cigarettes to date beautiful girls, or that if they drink a particular brand of liquor they will also date beautiful girls but by the dozen. This is just a trap, because I can assure you that what they will get is cancer or cirrhosis.

This enemy is loose in the streets attacking many families, particularly on special holidays that we like: Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Mother’s day, The Super Bowl, World Cup, etc, and those without clear priorities will be financial victims of this enemy, as it will make them spend even what they don’t have. During these special dates there are two kinds of people, those who sell and those who buy. I advise you to be very careful if you are among those who buy and stay within your budget. Now if you make it to the seller's side the better, because from the product of your sales you could get more money, even to buy.

4. Inflation

SInflation is defined as a sustained growth in the general level of prices. Its financial impact is that it reduces the purchasing power of money. This means, in average, what you can buy with a dollar, euro, pound, etc (your local currency), is less than what you could buy last year in the same proportion indicated by the inflation. Inflation affects much more in personal finances than in corporate finances and the reason is that a business can deal with the increase in costs due to inflation and other variables, like the currency exchange rate or the rise in the price of their raw materials, by transferring it to the price of their products, while people don’t have a way to transfer this inflation.

In a newspaper in Guatemala, they published an evaluation on the purchasing power of the Quetzal (Guatemala’s currency) comparing years 2000 and 2010, and it reflected to be of Q0.53, which means that in 10 years, the Quetzal lost a 47% of its purchasing power. In other words, if the average inflation was of 10% yearly, in 10 years you need 10 times more money to buy the same merchandise you used to buy 10 years ago with 10% of that money, and the same example applies to any currency you want to use.

Inflation becomes a very dangerous enemy when one saves money in local currencies at a lower interest rate than inflation, which is what usually happens and it’s even worse when this variable slips out of control from the monetary authorities. In Guatemala, inflation rates above the 30% were registered during the 90’s, but some countries in South America have had inflation rates of three digits and changing by the minute. The phenomenon is known in the economic jargon as “hyperinflation”. God save us from these financial maladjustments. So let me clear it up for you, all what you have been saving at a lower interest rate than the inflation rate annually, is actually going to waste or loose its purchasing power.

Among those greatly affected by inflation are the retired people that receive their pensions, more often than not, in fixed amounts or with low variability. In Guatemala for instance, we still see pensions paid by the social security order of Q500.00 a month (about US$64.00) and anyone would say that is too low, and it actually is, but this amount was fixed 10 or 15 years ago when this amount represented an income that would be enough to purchase the basic basket of back then, but now it’s not enough to subsist.

5. Deflation

If inflation is the sustained increase on the general level of prices, deflation is the economic phenomenon when the general level of the prices drop, but no only because everything is cheaper but also because the economic activity is depressed. When deflation occurs it is because the economy is entering a state or recession which means that for more than three months the economy is rising but at a lower rate than the rate it was rising at earlier, and when the economy, instead of rising, it decreases, the phenomenon goes from recession to depression.

In 1929, the greatest worldwide depression took place; and in 2008 many countries went through this process again while others only experienced recession during that time. The...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.9.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft ► Geld / Bank / Börse
• ISBN-10: 1-5439-4911-8 / 1543949118
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5439-4911-7 / 9781543949117