Financial Planning and Budgeting

Financial Planning and Budgeting

One should always plan for future uncertainties and creating a budget, financial goals and an emergency fund will go a long way in meeting your financial obligation and handling any emergencies that may arise.
Budget is a very important aspect of financial planning and one which will enable you to achieve your financial and long term goals. People normally do not give much emphasis to a budget and they just have a rough idea of what is coming in and how much they are spending. Having a budget and sticking to it will enable you to have a micro image of the finances and you can cut down on unnecessary expenditure. You should see the budget as a route to delayed consumption. Start with a weekly or monthly budget depending on how you are paid and this switch to an annual budget or even a longer horizon if you can. Once the budget is set, you can channel the inwards into expenses and investments.
The next step is creating an emergency fund. Once you have created a balanced budget and eliminated debt, then you should start putting an emergency fund in place for all those unforeseen and unplanned financial situations that may arise like a medical emergency, car breakdown. You should normally have 2 months earning buffer for these emergencies and a 4 to 6 month buffer for critical situations like Job loss. Also have specific insurances and make the premium payment on time. You can use a credit card for these emergencies but you should normally avoid it and use the fund as credit card debt can be back breaker. You need to build the fund at regular intervals and put money into the basket so that it keeps growing. Any spare money above the budgetary amount goes into this. This fund should not be used for regular expenses like shopping or the new car that you want to buy.
The next important point is to create an increasing gap between your expenses and your income with your income rising and expenses falling. You may need to find substitutes instead of just cutting down. You would also need to reward yourself at regular intervals which will serve as an incentive to save and invest. Have a goal in mind for the reward and work towards it. The achievement of these goals will serve as a motivating factor for future goals. If you reduce your expenses, you have sparer money to pay off high cost debt and invest.

Once you have your budget planned out, then you need to find ways to increase your income. Proper investments with the savings made will give returns which will increase the income.

Always keep in mind that financial planning and sticking to it requires discipline and is a long term thing. Work to make it a habit.

About Guest Author: Kelly Jones writes for www.ocnissanirvine.com. She writes for blogs as a hobby and enjoys exploring new avenues in the social sphere.Submit Your Post: http://www.lolstudent.com/p/submit-guest-post.html

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How to Concentrate?

The Flow Model Balancing Challenge and Skills

How to Concentrate   Have you ever been so involved in doing something that     you lost track of time?   Everything around you - from the ringing of phones to     the people passing in the hallways -      seemed to fade away. Your attention was focused   entirely on what you were doing, and you     were so engaged that you might have missed lunch.   You felt energized, even joyful, about    what you were doing.    Most of us have had this experience at one time or another, and psychologists call it "flow."       When it happens, we lose our sense of self, and we move forward almost on instinct,      completely devoted to the task before us.

In this article, we'll examine flow in detail by looking into the Flow Model. We'll explore how the model can help us understand why we find some tasks much easier than others. We'll also look at how you can use the ideas behind the Flow Model to experience flow more often, so that you can be more productive. The Flow Model The Flow Model (see figure 1, below) was first introduced by positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He wrote about flow in his book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience." Note: Csikszentmihalyi published his book in 1990, but didn't publish this version of the model until 1997. The model shows the emotional states that we're likely to experience when trying to complete a task, depending on the perceived difficulty of the challenge and our perceptions of our skill levels. For example, if the task isn't challenging and doesn't require a lot of skill, we're likely to feel apathy towards it. But facing a challenging task without the required skills could easily result in worry and anxiety. To find a balance, and to perform at our best, we need a challenge that is significant and interesting, and we need well-developed skills, so that we're confident that we can meet the challenge. This moves us to a position where we can experience "flow" (being totally involved and engaged in the activity). This state of flow is often observed in people who have mastered their business, art, sport, or hobby. They make whatever they're doing look easy, and they're totally engaged with it. 10 Components of Flow How do you know when you're experiencing flow? Csikszentmihalyi identified 10 experiences that go with this state: Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve. Being able to concentrate for a sustained period of time. Losing the feeling of consciousness of one's self. Finding that time passes quickly. Getting direct and immediate feedback. Experiencing a balance between your ability levels, and the challenge. Having a sense of personal control over the situation. Feeling that the activity is intrinsically rewarding. Lacking awareness of bodily needs. Being completely absorbed in the activity itself. Remember that all of these factors and experiences don't necessarily have to be in place for flow to happen. But you're likely to experience many of them when flow occurs. Three Conditions Csikszentmihalyi also identified three things that must be present if you want to enter a state of flow: Goals - Goals add motivation and structure to what you're doing. Whether you're learning a new piece of music or creating a presentation, you must be working towards a goal to experience flow. Balance - There must be a good balance between your perceived skill and the perceived challenge of the task. If one of these weighs more heavily than the other, flow probably won't occur. Feedback - You must have clear, immediate feedback, so that you can make changes and improve your performance. This can be feedback from other people, or the awareness that you're making progress with the task. Using the Flow Model To improve your chances of experiencing flow, do the following: Set goals - Goal setting is important in experiencing flow. Learning to set effective goals can help you develop the focus you need. Improve your concentration - Many things may distract you from your work, and achieving flow is more difficult when your focus is interrupted. Use strategies to improve your concentration, so that you're more productive and focused during the day. Build self-confidence - If you don't have confidence in your skills, tasks may seem much harder than they actually are. Our article on building self-confidence will show you how to develop yourself for success. Get feedback - Remember, feedback is an important requirement for flow. Make sure that appropriate feedback systems are in place, and learn how to give and receive feedback, so that you can help yourself - and others - improve. Make your work more challenging - Consider strategies such as job crafting to do this, and explore ways of creating more job satisfaction. Tip: Remember that simply increasing the amount of challenge doesn't guarantee flow. Csikszentmihalyi stressed that you experience flow only when you perceive the right opportunities. It happens because you're in the right mindset, not because you have "perfect conditions." Improve your skills - Doing a Personal SWOT Analysis, can help you identify the skills that you need to work on to be successful. You can then develop a plan for improving your skills to help you complete more challenging tasks. Coach yourself - If you don't have a mentor or coach to help you through challenging tasks, learn how to coach yourself. Note: No matter how much you love your job, it's almost impossible to experience flow in every task that you do! Our articles Overcoming Procrastination, Motivating Yourself, and Is This a "Morning Task"? explore strategies that help you complete less desirable, yet essential, tasks. The Inverted-U Model There's an overlap of ideas between the Flow Model and the Inverted-U Model - a popular and widely respected model that helps explain the relationship between performance and pressure. In the inverted-U graph, the vertical axis represents someone's level of performance, while the horizontal axis represents the pressure that he or she is under. According to the model, there's a "perfect medium" of pressure where people perform at their best. The Flow Model doesn't explain the loss of performance that occurs when pressure is too high - for example, when we're scared, or when we're overwhelmed by work. At these times, your productivity can drop and negative emotions like anxiety will increase dramatically. By using both of these models together, you're most likely to be able to enter and enjoy the state of flow. Key Points Flow is a state we enter when our perceived skills match the perceived challenge of the task that we're doing. When we're in a state of flow, we seem to forget time. The work we do may fill us with joy, and we lose our sense of self as we concentrate fully on the task. This is the state that we're in when we're doing our best work, and when we're at our most productive. The Flow Model shows the relationship between task complexity and your perceived skill level. You can use the model to find out why you're not achieving flow. It can also help you discover whether you need to improve your skills, or reduce the challenge of certain tasks, to help achieve flow. Origin: Mindtools.com Submit Your Post: http://www.lolstudent.com/p/submit-guest-post.html

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Human Resource And The Recruitment Process

Recruitment/selection is one of the major functions of human resource management. It is also one of the major concerns of an organization, while trying to hire the best possible candidates. Usually when one wants to find a job, they look for their area of expertise related jobs and put in their CV’s. The CV’s go up to the employers and are short-listed through either manual processing and check or the recruitment software. One may or may not get an interview call from an employer due to the eligibility criteria for the job applied.

How does the criterion match with the CV’s? The recruitment software is as such the basic for deciding which candidate to short list and which not to short list. This is because the software is fed with the general requirements of the job vacancies published online and in different newspapers’ classifieds. It helps filtering out of the relevant resumes put in by different candidates. It also helps in different HRM recruitment functions as many as one can pay the software developers for developing and tailoring into the application systems.

My company has good recruitment software that successfully establishes the functions of:

• Applicant tracking system
• CV database
• Staffing requirements
• Filters
• Connects with different social networks
• Connects with different hired jib hunting websites
• Incorporates connection with the headhunters.
• Generates emails and telephonic calls to the short listed candidates.

The software can also be optimized to fit the needs and requirements of the company who wants to install it into their systems. The data base can be of oracle or any other good database management system application. Fields and tabs can be customized to help the ease of recruiters. It also generates an automatically matched list with the CV database and files in official template based emails to the candidates.

This all process is only possible when the job analysis has been properly done at an organization and effective job vacancies have been analyzed. If however, there are no jobs worth filling, there is no need to hire extra gentry into the offices to maximize cost of employment. Even sometimes, the job analysis software works in coherence with the recruitment software.

It is easier to install the software but the fixed cost of it is quite huge. In addition, sometimes the software may malfunction as the technology is good but never wise

Resource Box:

Hi! My name is M. Azam and I am an avid blogger and a professional writer. I have experience in writing articles for PR media and reviews on recruitment software.
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The Safety of Journalists in Wars

According to the international humanitarian law, journalists who are accredited by and accompanying armies will be regarded as part of the military entourage. Although it is dangerous for journalists to involve in the war, they continue to get into the war. They usually face physically or psychologically or both challenges, some of them need to face death because they are usually shot as spies or some other reasons.

     The Geneva Convention which was ratified in 1949 set out standards to the journalists in wars that if captured by opposing forces, journalists can expect to be treated as prisoners of war. Great number of journalists dies in the combats of wars. "Recent conflicts bear this out. During four weeks of fighting in Iraq, 15 journalists and media workers died and two are still missing. Accidents killed some, but most died in combat."(International Labor Organization) Another anecdote shows 94 media workers and journalists died in Yogoslav wars of the1990s which also points out the unsafe conditions of journalists.

     In 1977, the Geneva Convention added new standards to the reality that "journalists engaged in a professional mission in the areas of armed conflict shall be considered civilians" contrast to some other journalists who wear the military uniform. As people known, civilians cannot be deliberately targeted by military forces during the war. So, if journalists are harmed, killed will be regarded as crimes. However, there are still more and more "embedding" journalists in military units in order to win the "hearts and minds" of the public. The "embedding" journalists who are attached to a military unit in the war can get more access to the battle fields, but more exposure to risks too.

      More and more organizations come out to try to get more protection for journalists such as European Broadcasting Union (EBU) who protested against the differences between the treatments of "embedding" journalists and the journalists who are not attached to the armies. In March of 2003, the International Federation of Journalists, with the supports from the European Union, published an impressive and thorough "survival guide" for journalists' safeties which can be downloaded at www.ifj.org. In this "survival guide", journalists can find various helpful tips, information such as equipment, training, precautions, preparations, insurance, first aid, and post-traumatic stress disorders.

     It is good to see more and more people and organizations begin to focus on the safety of the journalists and try to make some differences. However, no one is able to guarantee those changes and the "survival guide" will make journalists' safer and build better conditions for them according to the brutal battle fields.

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What Can Public Consultancies Do for You?

Public relations are very important in every field of a business. It helps identify unique customers of the business and starts to develop honest relations with them. So many businesses are there that have a marketing department working on identifying the unique needs of individuals. It has all the information on the market segmentation and the types of customers to be turned to target audiences.  They find out what type of product one has and the type of PR involved. They define tactics and strategies to cater to the problem of finding and retaining the public. Nowadays the criterion has changed from mass target to unique target. One-to-one relationship building is common among all the business competitors in the field of any industry.

Nowadays, the trend of doing work by one self is also not in fashion. The outsourcing of work is a necessary thing to do. It helps savor the costs and the tension of working on a new thing from scratch. However, hiring the companies that help in your outsourcing the business saves the additional costs of work.

PR consultancy in the field of marketing and HR has evolved in such a way that different side business companies offer these services to all companies for their internal and external customer management. Public relations are now so important in these fields that both the parties described feel important and valued. The value is what the business wants out of them. Many different outsourcing companies provide the service of PR consultancy in the fields such as:

• Product development
• Integrity development
• Value generation
• Relationship building
• Value proposition
• Event management
• Public policy and management
• Targeting the right people etc

The PR consultancies are made up of unique and highly skilled marketing and HR based individuals who provide the facility of research on the marketing tactics and then provide a report on the flaws and goodwill according to the company and its customers. There are strategies mapped out in those reports and the formulae to involve the public however they can. They have rich electronic networks in different areas such as:

• Academics
• Politics
• Print media
• Government based departments at any level.
• Trade association and the trade bodies etc

They provide one stop solution to all the PR problems in the businesses. They have their own ethical and privacy policies so that all the businesses feel safe while working with them and letting them know their information.

Keyword: PR consultancy, Student Club

URL: http://www.pr4.com/

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My name is Muhammad Azam and I am an avid blogger and PR consultancy expert. I have written several articles and helping blogs for the individuals and companies on Public relation topics.

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