Finance

Some people assume that selling a home is as easy as putting it on the market. However, it’s not as simple as you might like to think. There are all sorts of factors that can lead to your home staying on the market. The longer it stays on the market, the harder it will get to sell it. So, how do you get your home sold to a buyer as fast as possible?

Take a look at some of the most practical tips for selling your home as fast as you can.

Take Care Of Problem Areas

Before you put your home on the market, it’s important that you address any issues that could push potential buyers away. Whether there is a pest infestation, or a leak in the roof, the sooner that you get rid of problems, the sooner the buyers will be interested.

Rarely do buyers want to buy a home that will require a considerable amount of work. Make things as easy as possible for someone purchasing your home, and they’ll be much more likely to buy from you.

Get an Agent

Many people trying to sell a home may avoid getting a real estate agent because they don’t want to pay a commission. However, a real estate agent is one of the best tools you can have for increasing your chances of a faster sale.

A real estate agent will know exactly what it is that you need to do to make your home sell quickly. From helping you get your home appraised to helping you choose the best selling price. Choosing a real estate agent who knows what they’re doing is probably the best favor that you can do for yourself in terms of selling quickly.

Pull Out The Paint

It’s a good idea to slap a new coat of paint on your house to give it a fresh breath of air. If you’re not sure what color to paint your house, consider consulting with your real estate agent. They might know what a great color is that tends to sell faster. In general, darker colors aren’t as appealing. Go for a light and airy, and you’ll immediately make your home feel newer.

Boost Curb Appeal

Curb appeal is what makes your home appealing to someone walking down the street. It should be the first thing that catches a buyer’s eye when they see your home from the outside. The better curb appeal that your home has, the more likely that you are to appeal to buyers. You can try anything from painting your front door to adding fresh flowers. It’s all about giving your home a little extra pizzazz.

You may have heard the expression “save for a rainy day,” and you certainly should. But how much should you be saving, and how much of that money should you be keeping in your checking account?

Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to keep your savings and your checking separate. After all, you don’t want to be tempted to spend the money that you’ve worked so hard saving on a frivolous impulse buy. But at the same time, you should keep a little extra on hand in your checking account. This will help you avoid overdraft fees, for instance, if you make a mistake and draw too much from your account.

So what’s the right amount? Well, that depends on a few things. Here are our five tips for knowing how much money you should keep in your checking account.

1. Maintain the Required Minimum Balance

Some checking accounts have minimum balance requirements. Before signing up for an account, check with your financial advisor to see what, if any, requirements are associated with the account. The minimum amount required often varies based on the financial institution and the particular type of account you have.

For instance, Rivermark Community Credit Union offers a Free Checking Plus account with a minimum opening balance of $25. Once your account is funded with the opening deposit, however, there are no further minimum balance requirements. If you do have a checking account with a minimum balance requirement, you should make sure you always have at least that amount in your checking account to avoid any penalties or fees.

2. Calculate Your Monthly Bills

Once you’ve made sure that you have enough money to cover any minimum balance requirements, make sure you have enough in your account to cover your monthly bill payments. Many people use the auto-deduct option for payments such as rent, utilities, and debt obligations, such as credit cards or student loans. Using auto deduct not only ensures your bills get paid on time, but you may also get an interest rate deduction by using this option.

This can save you quite a bit of money over time. But only if you have enough money in your account to cover these bills. If you forget you’re signed up for auto deduct and you don’t have enough money in your account to cover the payments, then you’ll likely incur late or overdraft fees. That’s why you should add up your monthly bills and always keep enough money in your checking account to cover the total.

3. Account for Monthly Expenses

Once you know how much you’re spending on your monthly bills, you’ll also want to add up how much money you need for other monthly expenses. For instance, you probably use your checking account to pay for things like gas, groceries, and other basic living expenses.

If you have a monthly budget, great. You can use that to know how much you spend in an average month. If you don’t have a monthly budget, now is a good time to sit down and create one. This free budget worksheet from Consumer.gov is a good place to start.

You can look at your checking account for the past few months and total up how much you’re spending on food, gas, entertainment, and any other regular expenses. Then create a budget with categories for these things, as well as for your monthly bills. Assign a maximum spending amount for each category in your budget and then add up all these amounts. This is how much money you’ll need each month to cover all your expenses.

If you see that you’re spending more than you’re making, you may need to cut back in certain areas. Your financial advisor can help you do that. Once you know how much money you need to cover all your average monthly expenses, you should aim to keep that total amount in your checking account.

4. Add a Little Extra

Remember that your budget is based on an average month. There will always be some months when you spend a little extra. You could have a water leak, for instance, that may cause your water bill to be higher one month. Or you may have certain expenses that only come around once or twice a year, like property taxes or membership fees. You’ll want to account for these extra expenses as well and add them to your overall monthly budget amount. If you have an annual expense, divide that amount by 12 and add that amount into your monthly budget.

Once you have a new monthly budget that accounts for all your annual expenses, add at least 10% to the total monthly budget amount so that you can cover unexpected expenses without having to dip into your savings.

5. Put Your Savings Elsewhere

In general, you should plan to keep a full month’s worth of expenses plus 10% extra in your checking account at all times. It may be tempting to keep more money in your checking account. However, you should set any extra aside in a separate savings account. As we mentioned before, this will help you avoid the temptation to spend the extra cash and will help you save for bigger-budget items, such as a vacation, car, or new home.

Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Wouldn’t it be nice to instead have enough cash in your checking account to use the money from this month’s paychecks for next month’s expenses? Doing that will keep you one step ahead of the game. It may take some time and work to get to that place, but we can help. Our financial advisors can come up with a plan to help you find extra savings, cut back on your spending, and plan for the future. So give us a call and we can put you on the path toward future financial success right now.

Investments is a very broad term. The world of investments includes a variety of options: fixed deposits and recurring deposits, mutual funds, stocks, commodities like gold, currency trading, derivatives trading and so on and so forth. With the multiple options available with us, paying heed to investment tips in India is very important for you to know how you can pick investments and to know which investments suit you because not every investment is everyone’s cup of tea. The thing with investments is, it is unique for every investor.

Here are a few investment tips for beginners that can help you to pick from the various options:

Understand your investor profile:

This is extremely important to understand and is the first step to investment. Even the best investment tips will not help you if you cannot define yourself as an investor.There are few steps to it:

• What are My Financial Goals?
• For How Long Can I Stay Invested?
• How much money do I have?
• What is My Risk Tolerance?

Financial Goals: Before you decide how much to invest, you should know why you are investing and this is you will get to know if you know what your goals are. Higher education, marriage, starting a family, buying a house or car, retirement or simply to build a corpus. After you know why you do have to invest, you will know when you will need the money and how long

How to decide how much to invest?

Before you know how to invest money you need to know how much you can invest. Investments are volatile. Unless you go for FDs and RDs, in the short term, your value of investment might go down. Three things that determine your risk appetite is: how much money you have, how much money can you part with and may be your age. Your investable corpus is the fund that should be invested. Do not invest all you have so it all depends on what you can siphon off from your total funds and how much can you set aside.If you use all you and do not keep aside anything as buffer funds, you are playing with our risk appetite. What you invest should always be your surplus funds.

Risk appetite

How much risk can you take? Risk in the investment world means can you emotionally and financially withstand seeing your money go down in a short period of time and not have the tendency to redeem your investment? Knowing your risk appetite is one of the top tips for choosing investments. Once you decide if you can take more risk, medium or you want to avoid risk completely, it will be easy for you to pick investments.

Risk-wise categorisation:

Risky investments: Equity as a category is a risky category. Stocks are volatile and their prices move alot during a short term. However, if you stay patient and stay invested for a long term, which would mean at least 5-7 years, you will see results and better than the other traditional products in the market. So equities are riskier. Simiary equity mutual fund investments, which invest in stocks, are riskier.

Bonds and debt funds: Bonds, though sort of market linked but do give guaranteed returns to some extent. The returns will be moderate but guaranteed. Bonds are less risky as compared to stocks and debt mutual funds are less as compared to equity mutual funds.

Gold: Gold is considered as a safe haven against equities because mostly they move in opposite directions. However, for releasing optimum returns on gold too, you should invest for a long period of time. The risk in gold investments is lesser than equities.

Currency and derivatives trading: Such options have extremely high risk because the number of factors that impact these are more.Make sure you have spent enough time in the market and have enough knowledge before you go for such investments.

Diversify

At least within the regular options when you are picking a broader category between stocks and bonds, do not avoid a category completely. This is again one of the best investment tips. You may follow all the aforementioned tips but all of them will fail if you do not diversify and keep your money invested in only one asset. Say you have a very high risk appetite but you invest everything in equities during dire circumstances you will lose all that you had invested. Diversification is the key to success in investments. If you have a high risk appetite, keep more money in equities and less in bonds. This analysis goes for equity funds and debt funds as well.

Knowledge and research

There is no free lunch in the world and so is the case with returns. You cannot watch your money grow without zero efforts from your end. A bit of research and markets study from your end is required because it is extremely important to be an informed investor. This is one of the important investment tips for beginners who may not have in-depth knowledge. New age investment platforms like Groww provide investors with a transparent platform, with all the information that you need to know about a particular stock or fund and a lot of learning material for you to make an informed decision.

Do not invest on hearsay

Never invest in the basis of random advice you receive from friends, family or TV analysis. Your investment should be done after a careful study of your investment profile. An investment profile that works for your peers may not work for you. That is why we only have one Buffet or one Munger in the world. Copying someone else’s investment basket will never serve money its real purpose.

Final Words…

For you to truly learn how to invest money, it is important you go through these tips and implement them in reality. Making informed and learned investment decisions is key to watching your money grow. Know your investment profile, risk level, goals without copying anyone else’s investment basket and then invest your hard earned money.

You need to be extra cautious when handling your tax documents. There are times when you rush to submit the paper to the government agency because you have to meet the deadline. As a result of rushing the process, you end up with documents full of mistakes. It’s not going to benefit your business, and it could even lead to possible losses.

Penalties and fines

Since you decided to rush the documents and there are tons of mistakes, the government could fine you for doing it. At first, you will have a chance to correct these errors. However, if they keep happening, you won’t receive another opportunity for an error connection anymore. Worse, the government will think of it as an intentional falsification of documents. Your business might end up receiving an order for foreclosure as a result. Anything can happen because you mishandled the tax document. Therefore, you have to do everything possible to avoid it from happening.

Keep the records up to date

You have to ensure that all financial documents are up to date. Any financial transaction also needs to be on the file. It doesn’t matter how significant the amount is. As long as the money comes in and out of business, it needs to be on the record. It’s easier to keep track of what’s going on if someone is making sure that no money gets disbursed without proper records. Every amount coming in also needs adequate documentation.

Apart from ensuring that you’re paying the right amount for taxes, it’s also important to document to avoid financial losses. You will know how much money you’re spending on certain expenses. You will also know if it’s time to cut down. There’s also no chance to corrupt the company’s money since everything is on record.

Partner with an accounting firm

If you’re running a small business, you might find it challenging to hire a lot of full-time employees. You need to prioritise jobs that are necessary to keep your business running. If you can’t afford to have a full-time accountant, you don’t need to worry. You can always partner with third-party firms. You can send your documents to the firm, and they will have someone looking into every item. If you need to have the tax document ready on a specific date, you can count on these firms to do the job. Check out www.gsmaccountants.co.uk for more information about accounting firms and the services they offer.

Make sure that you choose a reputable partner. You also have to check the terms to find out if they will be responsible for rechecking the documents for mistakes. Some firms would even go as far as taking the penalties given by the government if they made the errors. You will feel more confident about the document you’re handing over to the tax agency when you partnered with these accounting firms. You can continue the partnership in the future if you think it’s for the company’s best interest.