All About Financial Matters

Archive for September, 2009

You have just finished a financial training course. You’ve learned to distinguish business finances from your personal expenses. From the training, you have acquired the skills to record, organize and monitor your daily spending. For all intents and purposes, you are now as ready as you’ll ever be to control and manage your finances quite successfully. Never forget though, that learning about it is different from practicing it. Everything you have learned will not matter one whit if you don’t put it into practice.

Follow-Up is Crucial

Once you know where you have to be (a success, financially) and you know how to get there (the methods leading to financial success) you have to set things in motion. You should not gaze at your big plans on paper and do nothing else. A vision without the accompanying steps to reach that vision is reduced to a mere dream. Again, you should start doing the things that you know you should be doing to attain your financial success. Once you learn how, don’t stop there. Begin doing it one step at a time.

There’s No Excuse that’s Good Enough

Now that you have the grand blueprint for your financial success and endeavors, you need to start putting your time and effort to it. No excuse is and should be good enough to put your plans aside. Nothing will ever justify putting off your plans for another day, another week, another month, or another year.

You cannot merely say you’re busy and leave it there. Being busy is a favorite excuse of procrastinators and it’s never going to be a good enough excuse. If you’re serious about attaining financial success, you can never be too busy. You will always have time to put all your plans to action.

When you’re confronted with making heads or tails of our finances, you cannot merely say “I’ll sleep on it tonight because I’m too tired right now.” Doing so would only postpone your success and make it even harder to start.

Prioritizing Finances

When you’re too busy and you really have no time, make the time. Achieving financial control and success should be a top priority. It must be something you don’t just want to do; it must be something you’re compelled to do or something that you really ought to do.

Wanting to do something connotes a lack of urgency. Needing to do something, however, means you have to or you shall suffer undesirable consequences. This difference between a want and a need is something that you must learn to understand. In particular, you must keep in mind that financial success is something that you need and executing plans to realize this is something that you need to do.

Allocate Time According to Your Priorities

Once you determine what you want and what you truly need, you will know which to prioritize. Prioritize your need over your wants. If you have already accepted financial success as a need, then there’s really no question as to how you will spend your time. Given a choice between a baseball game special on TV and doing your financial accounting for the day, which do you think should be done first? If your financial success is that important to you, I think the answer is obvious, don’t you?

Allen Bohart is a life-long reader and writer with an interest in many subjects. With a background in business (including an MBA from California State University) personal-finances-blog.com” target=”_new personal finances are a subject near and dear to his heart. Other favorite subjects include allen-bohart.com” target=”_new Internet Marketing and allen-bohart.com/adwords-miracle-ez.html” target=”_new Google Adwords.

If you were perhaps of a more cynical nature, and were looking for an ideal target market for your payday loans business, how would this scenario sound to you?

How about people working in a business where the paychecks are absolutely guaranteed to come in on time each and every month, no matter what?

A business with a large, relatively immobile workforce, who tend to stay in one place for predetermined periods of time, and who will, moreover, have plenty of notice that will move, should that happen.

A business whose workforce is overwhelmingly comprised of young, who are perhaps not too worldly wise, and who are used to doing what they are told to do, when they are old to do it.

I guess that, were you that somewhat cynical payday loan company owner, this would sound pretty good to you, right?
Perhaps that is why most military bases in the USA are now almost surrounded by payday loan outlets.

At a time when ever increasing military demands are being made of young army and navy personnel by the continuing Iraq conflict, Senior Military Officers are increasingly concerned about the additional stresses on the servicemen and women caused by the prevalence of outstanding payday loans.

Whilst the payday loan companies themselves deny that they specifically target military personnel, it is hard to actually believe that to be the case, simply from looking at the concentration of payday loan outlets near most military bases.

Stories of both Army and Navy officers falling prey to such lenders are fairly easy to come by, and of course, the last thing that such soldiers, sailors and officers need at a time of war are the additional stresses placed on them by increasing debts.

In fact, the problem has now got so bad that many military bases are running training courses in responsible personal financial management, a key module of which is teaching the younger servicemen and women about payday loans.

In particular, these courses are designed to teach the students how it is probably best to avoid payday loans completely if at all possible, or, if not, how to deal with them responsibly.

Of course, this cannot get away from the fact that military personnel are no different to anyone else, and they will have times of cash flow problems, just the same as their none military counterparts.

And this is equally not saying that payday loans are of themselves a bad thing. Anyone who has used such a loan to dig themselves out of a hole will probably have no problems with payday loans, on one proviso. That is, that they paid it back in time!

Unfortunately, whether the payday loans companies concur or not, there does seem reasonable empirical evidence to suggest that perhaps they are unusually willing to extend such loans to military personnel.

Personnel whose very existence depends on them being able to concentrate 100% on the task in hand, who, perhaps morally, should not be placed under any additional external pressures.

The fact is that payday loans for military personnel are big business, and they do serve a real purpose for the beneficiaries of such loans.

However, there can be no denying that military personnel are not like other people who take payday loans, and it is good to see that the powers that be have taken this on board, and are attempting to deal with it through additional training and education.

Stephen is an international business consultant, specializing in debt management and control working with major businesses in Asia. You can download his stunning free report Death By Credit Card at webbiz99.com/paydayloans webbiz99.com/paydayloans