Zalacsany

If you want to buy a more costly property, such a move is known in the real estate business as trading up. Doing an honest assessment of whether you can really afford to trade up is imperative. Based upon your income and down payment, the lender and agent can tell you the most that you can spend. They can’t tell you what you can afford to spend and still accomplish your other financial and personal goals.

One of the biggest mistakes that trade-up home buyers make is overextending themselves with debt to get into a more expensive property. The resulting impact on their budgets can be severe — no money may be left over for retirement savings, for educational expenses, or simply for having fun. In the worst cases, people have ended up losing their homes to foreclosure and bankruptcy when they were hit with unexpected events, such as job losses or the deaths of spouses who had inadequate insurance.

Before you buy your next home, get a handle on what you can really afford to spend on a home. Unless your income or assets have increased significantly since the time that you purchased your last home, you probably can’t afford a significantly more expensive property. The most important issue for people to consider is how spending more money each month on a home will affect their ability to save for retirement.

If a broker calls you with a hot stock, you should hang up. No matter how exciting the deal sounds, no matter how glib the presentation, never invest solely on the sales pitch of a broker—particularly one you hardly know and have never dealt with.

Here are some of the pointers from an article I have read that you could follow – a penny-stock checklist:

1. Always scrutinize the annual report and any other literature you can obtain about a small firm, including brokerage company reports. Brokers are sometimes prone to, shall we say, exaggeration. Written information is more accountable to regulation and may put the investment in a more realistic light. Pay close attention to the footnotes and fine print.

2. Stay away from companies with excessive debt or companies that are in bankruptcy.

3. Stay away from companies whose annual reports reveal too much of their assets under goodwill or that have negative working capital, poor earnings or significant legal problems.

4. Stay away from penny stocks with high market capitalization. (The market capitalization is the market value of a public company, determined by multiplying the number of issued shares by the trading price.)

5. Look for liquidity. A stock should trade at least 50,000 shares a week.

6. Diversify your penny-stock portfolio. You should be invested in at least six companies.

7. Ask brokers if they personally have a position in the stock they’re recommending. (It’s best if they don’t.) If so, ask if they h-ave sold or are planning to sell any, or whether they purchased the stock at a price below the current offer.

8. Always take possession of penny-stock certificates.

9. In mining stocks, stick with firms that are in production or near it. Do not buy mining stocks in the earlier phases of growth— exploration, developmental exploration or development. It’s difficult even for professional geologists and mining-stock experts to assess the future prospects of these.

10. Don’t bet more than you can afford to lose. Penny stocks are speculative. Even if you’ve done your homework, you’ll still probably lose your money. Take a flyer on them only if that doesn’t bother you.

Real estate is a good long-term investment – it has produced returns similar to those diversified stock portfolios over the years. In practice, investment in real estate is different from investment in stocks. You can also leverage your real estate investment-that is, you can make a profit on your investment as well as on borrowed money. Investing in real estate is time intensive (although investing in stocks can be, too, if you don’t use a professional money manager).

You also need to adept at managing people and money if you are to bear fruit with real investments. One drawback of investment property profits in a retirement account the way you can shelter profits earned through stock investments.

I once wrote to a friend in a sanatorium, advising her bow to recover from her nervous illness. Some months later, a stranger telephoned to thank me for the letter, which my friend had shown her. This woman said she knew she was cured before she finished reading it, and had been able to leave the hospital within a few days. She said that now, four months later, she was still cured and was confident she would never relapse. Complete understanding was her shield.

Such quick recovery is possible, and when I say you may continue to feel fear and the persistence of symptoms for some time and must be prepared to let more time pass, do not misunderstand and think that I mean that all recovery from illness is a long-drawn-out process. Recovery can be, as just illustrated, dramatically quick. I have merely warned you that your recovery may not be as rapid as you expect, so that you will not be unnecessarily disappointed, “Letting more time pass” means no more than being patient a little longer, but I purposely have not asked directly for patience, because the thought of being patient may seem an impossibility to a sufferer from highly tensed nerves. For this reason I chose the phrase, “let more time pass.” The difference is subtle but important. Where the sufferer is prepared to let more time pass, he may think he could not take advice to be patient. The very sound of the word is exasperating.

Big businesses have a lot of employees. Most decisions require the blessing, or at least some input from several people. If one employee brings up a product or service that he or she thinks will benefit the organization, and no one else has heard of this great thing, then that individual is faced with having to remarket the solution internally to get everyone else on board. Of course, product recognition isn’t a problem for American Express or Staples. They’ve got the money to make everyone aware of what they do. But when marketing to larger corporations, you have to make sure you’re hitting ALL the people internally who would need to be aware of your offerings. With turnover, relocation, promotions, and reorganizations this is a pretty tough task. When marketing to small companies, on the other hand, you’re only concerned with getting the attention of one person:
that crazy little fox who owns the business. Small business owners don’t get promoted, relocated, or downsized. A fox like Julie is the queen bee and the primary buyer of everything. She may be running from here to there, but she’s still the main target. So even though the total market of small businesses is much larger than the corporate behemoths, you only have to worry about a single person at each company. This will change your marketing approach significantly.

Some big companies work hard at marketing goods and services to small businesses. American Express targets small companies with special credit cards, programs, and financing services. Banks, in general, like to market their loans and checking accounts to small companies. They understand that these companies are the backbone of their lending practices. Staples, PedEx, Verizon, and Dell Computer all market directly to small companies. These companies understand that marketing to the small business market is not the same as marketing to larger companies. Here are a few significant reasons why.

It may take up to five years to make a sale. Have a lot of patience and make sure your drip marketing program is for the long term. How did we get noticed by this crazy fox? Checking her history, I saw that our telemarketer had initially called her four times but was never able to track her down. Following those initial calls, our follow-ups were consistently routine. Because she had shown an interest in one of our contact management and CRM applications, we automatically added her name to our monthly e-mail newsletter list. For the next sixty months, Julie received newsletters, invitations to free training on the Internet, and occasional announcements of new product releases and information. Even though we never made contact, she did receive two personal e-mails a year from our company, offering any assistance whenever she needed. She was also included in our twice-yearly postcard mailing too. Poor Julie! All she did was innocently ask for a little information about a software product and for the next five years she was sentenced to a stream of communications from a company she hardly knew.
Occasionally she replied (often in the middle of the night) with a brief “thanks for the info” but for the most part we never heard from her. Not once, however, did she ask to be removed from our list, even though she was given ample opportunity to do so.

Our “drip” marketing program (which I’ll describe in more detail shortly) lured in a wacky ol’ fox. Julie called us out of the blue because she was interested in a contact management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software application that we sold. She was a fast talker with a hyperactive personality, and she juggled two other phone calls while on the phone with me. She wanted to know every little detail about our product, but she would cut me off in mid-sentence when the information became too much. After I heard a crying baby in the background, she told me that her husband traveled a lot and that her kids often came to the office with her. She said that she didn’t like surprises, but she admitted she never fully knew what was going on in her business from one moment to the next. She had so many things on her mind that she would ask a question only to later forget it. Now this was a crazy fox!
Julie had contacted us five years earlier when she was starting up a small business that specialized in floral arrangements for special events like weddings. She was curious about contact management, but that was all. Five years later, she employed twenty-five people and was doing business in six states! Her workdays were now twelve hours long, and her desk was complete chaos. She had been surviving on a little custom-created database, but now she needed to get a true customer relationship and contact management application for her entire company. Oh, and she also mentioned that her custom database had become corrupted and she had a major mailing to do the following week. She was completely manic on the phone, and she needed help.
When Julie had finally made the decision that it was time to buy, our name came first into her mind. She called us as a customer eager to purchase—mostly because she had a problem. “I kept getting your c-mails and your postcards and your mailings and I saved many of them,” she later told me. “I knew at some point I would need a system like this and you stayed on my radar.”

One more very important thing to note: It’s really not uncommon for a fox to fall into more than one category. In fact, it happens quite a lot. Peter may be a micromanager, but he also highly values his family life and works very hard to balance this with his profession. Charlie suffers from being part of two categories. He’s not only a lone fox, but he’s also a micromanager! Not only does he not have anyone to delegate work to, or a partner to rely on, but he’s also extremely detail-oriented. Because of this, he often ends up working eighteen-hour days, trying to make sure everything is just right.
The good news is that you’ll rarely encounter small business owners who fall into more than two categories. This makes it easier to position yourself and your product. It’s important to identify which is the dominant characteristic. Charlie is definitely a lone fox, with a side order of micromanagement. Peter is a micromanager with a little bit of the family fox thrown in.
So don’t feel like you have to squeeze every small business prospect into some type of narrowly defined category. Quite often you may find yourself using up a couple of categories to accurately describe the wily and wacky fox. There’s only so much generalization you can do. Now that we’ve discussed our seven types of crazy foxes, let’s talk about how to get them to notice you.

When we have company meetings, a great topic of conversation is about the clever, crazy, and wily foxes we work with. We love them. And they’re certainly entertaining. As I’ve gotten to know my employees better, I’ve learned the importance of matching the right employee with the right fox. In the past, I would assign an employee to a customer based on his or her availability or technical skills. Now I’ve now added another significant factor:
his or her ability to deal with the specific type of small business owner as we’ve identified them.
For example, it would be good to match the family person with an employee who shares the same interests. The micromanager will best work w.ith someone who is very detail-oriented but who can also step back and consider the big picture. The fox with the half-empty glass may be most satisfied (at least, as much as he can be) by working with someone who also views the world in the same manner. Basically, people who have a common background and culture usually work better together than those who don’t. So if you have an employee with some rough edges who might be able to connect with that unfinished fox, use the resources that you have. Identifying these foxes early on can help you match your best people to do the job for you.