Improve Your Focus

The most important asset of any investor or entrepreneur is time. Given enough time, even a small investment in an ordinary time-deposit account can become a huge windfall. 

And because we can't buy or create more time, we have to make sure that we maximize our opportunities today. But despite appearances, people aren't multi-taskers; we just switch from one task to another. So if you want to make less mistakes, get work done faster, and generally be more productive it's best to focus on one thing at a time.

So in this article, I'd like to suggest some things that can help people focus more and get more out on their time.

How To Reduce Your Investment Risk: Hedging, Diversification & Insurance

When it comes to investing, we're generally giving up a sure thing to earn more. But we don't always have to concede and just accept the risk. There are steps we can do to minimize them. And in this article we'll quickly go through some of the ways we can help protect ourselves.

One Morning In The Philippines

So this morning's commute was interesting. I was riding a cholorum shuttle (right spelling?; and no other legit transpo was available, btw), which was being driven by a police officer. No idea if the police driver owned the car being used as a shuttle - which was a Toyota Fortuner.

And the passenger in front had a son who was a policeman as well - so they naturally started talking. And so, over the morning commute, I got to know a lot about the police driver.

One Step At A Time

When I first started investing, one of my "plans" was to buy a lot of stocks and live off the dividends. But I did some  math after seeing that 5-10% is right near the top of how much dividends can be paid.  I realized that my plan would work only if I was already rich enough to invest millions.

Filing for Philhealth Benefits and Reimbursement

A few months ago, for the first time, I experienced being the one arranging the paperwork and payments in a hospital.

Plus, while going through the process I overheard one person who was not able to take advantage of his PhilHealth benefits. He was employed, and was getting the premiums deducted from his salary.

But apparently, their Human Resource department did not really enroll him and gave him the application number instead of a real PhilHealth number. I usually hear something like this from those working in agencies or doing manual labor. But this guy was from a BPO. He got asked by the guy manning the PhilHealth booth if he was working for a BPO, so I'm thinking this might happen more often than I think.

So I thought it might be interesting to share my experience and the info I picked up along the way and save people some headache (and money) in the process.

Can how we speak affect how much we save?

If you've been looking around a few personal finance sites, a while back you might have noticed a lot of posts about money beliefs: old sayings, myths, truths, misconceptions, and the like.

They're fun to read, especially the authors' takes. But when one of the blogs I read posted the different Chinese proverbs about money, my first reaction was I didn't realize there were that many. And I thought about looking for all the salawikains we Filipinos have regarding money.

But in the course of doing so, I came across this very intriguing video from TED. And it raises a very intriguing question: Could our language affect our ability to save money?

Pay for Value

Value is one of the more complicated concepts we have. I've wanted to write about it for some time, but it's been very challenging so say the least. I mean, it can mean a lot of different things so I'm not sure where to start.

The Real Price Of The Last Minute

We've all heard the saying "time is money." It means that we can use the time we have to make money. Or we can lose money by wasting time. But does it apply literally? Is there, in effect an actual tag price for being late?

Well, let's see...