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Posts Tagged ‘Financial’

When you sign up for a bank account, take note of what kind of compounding the bank uses in calculating interest. The more frequent the compounding, the more you will earn. The fastest compounding is called continuous compounding. Other banks compound on a daily or monthly basis. While signing up with a bank that compounds interest more frequently is desirable, you will not earn so much more interest that it makes it worth sacrificing convenience or other useful bank services.

Remember that all interest you earn from a bank or savings and loan account is totally taxable at the federal, state, and local levels. Deduct what you will be paying in taxes when you calculate what your return will be from a bank account of any type.

In choosing a bank, look closely at the minimum deposit levels required to avoid monthly service charges and other fees. Banks today say they are not in the banking business, but the “financial relationship” business. The more of your money you bring to a bank, the more you will be rewarded with higher yields and lower fees on your accounts, as well as lower interest rates on loans. If you keep small balances of less than $1,000, you may want to opt for a no-frills checking account, on which you pay a flat fee no matter how low your balance falls.

Cash flow is the transfer of money into and out of a company. As indicated previously, the developer needs to know what financial demands are going to be made during all stages of the development. Equally, contractors need to know about their predicted cash flow to be able to cover any deficit in funding. Remember the contractor aims to cut this to a minimum as the margins on a contract are small and any interest paid on money borrowed  will eat into this.

In practice, on a traditional contract using the bills of quantities the timescale is as follows. To save time the contractor’s quantity surveyor will produce an interim valuation of the work that has been carried out by the contractor during the month. A meeting then takes place with the client’s quantity surveyor (PQS) on site at the start of the following month and this valuation will be agreed. It normally takes one week for the PQS to submit this valuation to the architect.

Usually the architect takes two weeks before issuing a certificate, and depending on the clause in the contract the employer is obliged to pay the contractor the agreed amount within 14 days. This can sometimes be 28 days. Generally, from completing the month’s work the contractor is paid within four to five weeks.

Now that you know where you stand financially, you must figure out where you want to go. Setting specific financial objectives and putting them in writing—listing dollar amounts and noting exactly when you will need the money—will motivate you to achieve your goals. So many people never take the time to figure out what they want because they have convinced themselves that they will never reach their targets. However, if you don’t define your goals, you won’t accomplish them.This section will give you several easy-to-fill-out worksheets so you will be able to determine your highest financial priorities and how you can achieve them.

You can’t reach all of your goals overnight, but knowing what they are, and which ones take precedence, will help you fulfill your goals faster than if you never took the time to do this exercise. Because setting goals is really another way of defining priorities, the process helps you make sure that your limited resources and income are used most effectively to attain your highest priorities. By crystalizing your aspirations, you take charge of your life so that you control your money for the purposes you find most important.

Don’t think that goal setting is too hard  you’ve been doing it for most of your life. When you last started a diet, you set a specific goal for how many pounds you would trim. When you were on the track team in high school, you set a goal to
achieve a particular time for your event—a four-minute mile, for instance. As you went through college, you set a goal of a certain grade-point average or maybe a goal of doing well enough to enter a certain graduate school. All you are doing now is applying the same discipline to your personal finances.