Win the Lotto

Winning the lotto is not the easiest thing on this planet and, even with a lot of math, you might have to face a small odd of winning it, but with some analytic help you might have the chance to improve your odds.

I have always used the Florida’s Fox 29 page to read about some news and today I have noticed the lotto results on the page and right bellow them, an icon saying “charts”.

It’s a beauty to have all those numbers, counters and information in hand and the best of all is that they have that for all U.S.

Check it out: WFLX29

International Calls virtually free from your mobile

Finally VOIP has reached the mobile services in U.S. A long ago I have heard that Skype was providing a mobile add-on that would allow you to use the Skype services to make international calls at Skype rates. If you compare their rates with any other provider, you would not have a doubt that their rates were way to lower.

Today I was reading a article from Business Week which shows more VOIP providers that allow you to do international phone calls with your cell using VOIP.

I have accessed Gorilla Mobile and I must say: It’s catchy. You got a free trial, low rates, annual subscription almost free.

Take a look, you would probably like it - http://www.gorillaMobile.com. Hopefully all phone providers will take a better look at this and make they calls with rates even lower.

Creating a scenario

Alright now that you know how to indentify an income and what are your expenses is time to create action scenarios.

I’m going to use a real world situation example where you can see more easilly what’s going on.

Consider that you need to cut some expenses and right now you have about $ 2000.00 of income and you have about $ 1,500.00 of exepenses. Your expenses include:

- Car payment: $ 200.00
- Car insurance: $ 100.00
- Rent: $ 900.00
- Credit Card $ 50.00
- Groceries: $ 100.00
- Gas: $ 50.00

First thing you should do is to identify your money drains. In that list you will have the Rent, Car payment and Credit card as your money drains. You already have identified your incomes source.

So how should be your scenario? Do the following question: If I wan’t to cut some expenses, what expenses can I cut or make it lower? Usually all of the money drains. All of these drains should be vanished from the face of the earth, but if you can’t just clear them, then you should reduce them as much as you can.

Considering the expenses above there’s one money drain that you can cut 100%: The credit card payment. Looks just a few in numbers but if you consider the % over your income, the credit card payment is taking from you 2.5% of all your income. Another drain that you can take a look at is the car insurance. With the high competition between all insurance companies, you might find one that is reliable and have a low cost.

There are some other things that can affect an scenario and one that you might want to take a look at is the lack of income source. If you have only your salary as income, you should consider creating new forms of income sources such as savings account, CDC’s and stocks.

On the above scneario the user is renting a house, but what would happen if he just bought a house and paid mortgage over? The expenses could raise, could go lower and this is the whole goal of the scenario building.

Start making questions about your finance. Question as simple as “How much I need to save to buy a 42” LCD TV?” or “What expenses should I cut to make top dollar of my money?”.

Whatever is your question, building a scenario can predict in advance how your finances will flow and this is a big plus when you are thinking in making more than enough money.

I’m going to finish this giving a example of how this can be good. I was paying about 29% interest rate on my car finance. High hugh!? I did some scenarios and looked for a refinance on my car. With the refinance I could manage to get a interest rate of 7% and saved about $ 3,000 in the long run only in interest.

Build a scenario today and see how much can you make more of your income and what new toys you can have.

Have fun.

Identifying Incomes

First I want to apologize to all of my readers for posting this so late.

Identifying Incomes is an essential part of the whole financial management process. At the moment that you know how much income you have and you much of the icome is being expent, you can easily manage how do you want the money to be expent or invested.

As from income everybody only consider the salary earned, but if you take a better look you might find more income sources that you think.

Do you have a savings account? If you do, then you have another income source. If you have a CDC or any investment portfolio, you do have more income source. Not all income sources came from the bank, you will find some others like, rent, if you have anything being rented to someone and you receive any money from it in a regular basis.

So, how to identify the income sources? Simple! Just use the following question: Do you have anything that give you money in a regular basis? If you do then you have a income source.

I’m going to put down a list here of possible income sources and I want you to do a list of your own and keep it. On the next article I’m going to teach you how to build financial decision scenarios which are going to help you to visualize how your financial life is going and help you to improve it even more.

These are some possible income sources:

• Salary (break it in a bi-weakly basis - it will help)
• Savings account
• Checking account with interest rate
• CDC
• Stocks
• Investments
• Something that you rent or lease
• That free money that your grandma sends you every month (just kidding, but yeah, can be considered one income source)
• Something that you do at your home or out of work and get some money out of it (cakes, fix cars, computers, etc).

See you next week and remember, identify your incomes, expenses and money drains, we are going to start to build scenarios for your finacial sucess.

Financial Management - Money drains

For the next weeks I’m going to talk about financial management. This is a topic that you should rule so you don’t get cough into the vicious cycle of earning income and expending all you got (and more). At the moment you got inside this cycle, is very hard to get out of it and, it may not looks like it, but at this point all your money is going into the drain.

I could start about how to identify your incomes and going from there, but with todays “recession” let’s start identifiying what you are expending.

Right now you will have fixed and variable expenses. Fixed expenses are mostly car payments, insurance, rent or mortgage, credit card payments and all bill that you have to pay in a periodic way with the same value or with small variation from it. The variable expenses are mostly groceries, pharmacy, lunch, utilities and all this small expenses that you need to survive.

What are money drains? Money drains are all expenses that take’s money out of your pocket and you can’t see return from it. You will see variations about this subject, but you will probably have these bills are your money drains:

• Credit Cards
• Rent
• Mortgage (ok, your house is your investment, but until you sell it or fully pay it, your mortgage is a big money drain).
• Car payments
• Loans

Do a test. Sum all bills that you have that belongs to those categories above and see how much they are taking from you. Impressive right?

Imagine what could you do if you had all that money at your pocket in a monthly basis? I bet that big screen flat tv, boat or bike could be bought with that.

Before telling you how to get rid of these drains, we will have to go to one more step, identifying your incomes.

After that we will be able to create scenarios that will help you getting rid off those money drains.

So be back next Monday for the next post on financial management.

How being green can save you big time on your eletric bill

Just today I was watching a Braziliam tv channel (Globo.com) which made a interesting report about how the young people, that says that have green conscience, really does apply what they speak out.

In that report they have made a series of questions, with the help of WWF, to see how green is your conscience and have created a question queue on their website.

I have translated some of those questions, and changed the pointing system to pertecentage that, those actions apply in decreases your eletric bill on the end of the month.

Answer the following questions and see how much can you save on the end of the month.

How long do you take in a bath?

1. 20 min
2. Between 10 and 20 min
3. Between 5 and 10 min
4. Less than 5

When you brush your teeth:

1. You leave the water running all the time
2. You do close the water and only let it run when you actually need

When do you buy a new utility or eletronics for your home:

1. Buy the product that you want the most even knwoing that it does not have energy efficiency
2. Buy the product that is energy efficient

If you have answered 1 for any question, add 0% savings on your eletric bill.
If you have answered 2 at the first question, add, 0.5% savings on your electric bill.
If you have answered 3 at the frist question, add, 1% savings on your electric bill.
And, at last, if you have answered 4 at the first question, or 2 in the last 2 questions, then add 2% savings at your electric bill.

I understand that taking a 5 minute bath is almost impossible, but you still can save about 5% on your eletric bill. In a $150.00 eletric bill you can save about $7.50.

The 30% savings rule

Lately I have got lot’s of questions about how to start saving some money and my answer to all is the same: use the 30% rule.

Consider this scenario:

• You have no savings
• have accumulated debts on credit cards and car payments
• and you are expending as much as you earn

This is definitely a bad scenario, but you can still find people on this situation: the total lack of financial management. Imagine what could happen if you, in this situation, lost your job. A cycle of accumulating bills would start and things would only get worse.

That’s why there’s a 30% savings rule. No matter what you earn, what’s your income and if you have a temporary disability protection (Aflac), you should save 30% from whatever you earn.

After some time you will have enough money for any occasion where you cannot make enough income for a small period of time and all the other savings you are doing can be applied to credit card bills or even to new pieces of furniture or whatever you need.

See you next week.

Image source: AOL

Buying gas tomorrow with prices of today

This is the main adverstisement from the webiste MyGallons.com. The concept sounds  nice and it might work well if you have a V6 or V8 car / truck, otherwise, you will have to drive a lot to actually have a real savings.

The way it works it’s simple. You create an account that is attached to your credit card and you will pay a membership fee of $29.90 if you use auto-refill or $39.90 if you decide to refil your card. After you sign up you can fill your card with the MyGallons.com site actual price, so when you go to the gas pump, instead of paying the current price, you will pay the price that you have seen on the site at the time of purchase.

A week ago the gas station across my condo was charging $4.09 for the basic unleaded gas. Today the same gas has it’s price flagged to $4.14. Not a huge difference, but when you are filling up  a 20 gallons tank, 4 times in a month you can save about $ 5.00. If you consider that the gas might reach the $5.00 dollar mark in the end of this summer, the savings can reach about $72.00.

So all of this sounds good, but what’s the catch? There’s no catch. Everything is very clear on the website, but you should be aware that there are charges $1.90 for every card refill and charges a $15.00 fee if you overdraft your account (similar to a bank).

Do a small math of how much gas your household expend in a monthly basis and consider that the gas might get to the $5.00 (already true in San Francisco). With all this on your mind you can decide if this is going to be a real deal.

Getting the most mileage per gallon with your car

I have just read an article about hipermiler driving on USA Today and some of the techniques are pretty good, but not all of them are safe.

Considering what was told on the article and what every good driver knows, here are some filtered techniques for getting the most mileage per gallon with your car.

• Pump up tires, but do not pump it over than what’s recommended otherwise you will be affected by road hazards more easily. A flat tire can increase the resistance of your car on the road.
• Drive on the speed limit or less (but please don’t go too slow). This minimize the wind resistance.
• According to UPS try to make your course only turning right. You will take less time and spend less fuel.
• Time stop lights. This is awesome and getting a open road will make your car consume less because it will not need to make a huge effort to start speeding again.
• Take it easy when leaving from a traffic light or stop. Take your time, but not so much time. If you don’t step up, it will not need to use more gas to get to speed that you want it to be.
• If you can, don’t use AC / Heater when driving. Most of AC’s use part of the torque to pump the air on the car.
• Don’t wide open your windows. This will make a parachute effect on your rear window.

That’s pretty much it but no matter what you will do, drive safe.

Waiting for the best deal

Does waiting for the best deal worth the price that you will pay? In most cases, yes.

Off course is not everytime, but if you can wait for a good oportunity then you should wait. Two of my best friends when they see a “good deal” they don’t think twice, both of them pull out the wallet and pay in the act for the good and in always in the next week there’s a sale going on for the same thing.

In the last 3 weeks I have been searching for a chair and table set for the patio outside. Every place that I have gone or looked at, the prices were high and when I found a reasonable price, it was out of stock.

Yesterday my wife send me an email with a set that was on sale, so I have decided to take a look at it.

Searching a little bit more the site I have found out a 25% coupon that I could use with the same item.

That was awesome, the item was already on sale and I could use a coupon of 25% less on the same item. On the end a $ 199.00 item ended up with a price of $ 60.00.

Does waiting for the best deal pays? In my case it did.