Ways to Earn Extra Money at the Office

A lot of us wanted to have additional income or extra money while in the office. Besides from monitoring and cutting expenses, the best way to increase extra cash is to have sideline jobs. If you are born as business minded person you can surely find ways to to improve your cash flow and always in your mind that business opportunities are everywhere. Use your creativity, resources and talents. 

In this post, I rounded up the ways to earn extra money at the office.

Here are the Ways to Earn Extra Money at the Office

1. Food Orders - Are you good in cooking or baking? You can use your cooking or baking skills to earn extra cash by simply accepting orders from your office-mates. Try to offer your products to your friends and co-workers. if you are working in a big company there's a chance that you will earn big as well.

2. Direct Selling Business - I know you already heard about the direct selling opportunities. Direct selling business is a good way to earn additional money and there's a big chance of expanding your business which will result to bigger income. 

You can choose from wide array of products to sell like clothes, supplements, cooking products, insurance , health products, life plans and beauty products. If you have huge network of friends there's you can succeed in this type of business.

3. Buy and Sell Products - Buy and sell products is another popular gig to earn extra money at the office. Know the good places to purchase wholesales and get connected to the direct suppliers to get the best deals, discounts and products. 

If your co-workers are mostly ladies then choose products like clothes and accessories and offer it to them. Just think of the things or products your office-mates need and for sure you will earn decent amount of money from this gig.

4. Lending Money - In every office lending money is very typical specially the days before the salary. You can take profits from simply lending your excess money and ask for interest. Just make sure that someone who lend your money will pay it.

Effective Ways to Save Money As a Student

One of the primary problems every student encounters is having insufficient money that results to typical scenario of begging money from their beloved parents. If you find yourself in the same situation then you should read this post and try all the effective ways on how to save money as a student. This can be apply to primary, high school and specially for the college students. 

Effective Ways On How to Save Money As a Student

1. Bring Your Own Food - If you have the time to cook or your parents then why not just bring your own food rather than buying at school canteen which is more expensive. I observed that foods from canteens are a bit expensive compared to other stores specially in the grade school or high school whereas some school prohibit their students of going out.

2. Water Instead of Soft-drinks and Juice Drinks - If you're a juice drink or soft-drink lover then try to discipline yourself and buy drinking water instead. Aside from water is cheaper it is also healthier compared to soft-drinks and juice drinks. 

3. Cut Out Vices - One way to effectively save money as a student is to cut out vices. If you like going to malls or pubs during weekends better cut it out and save your money. There are a lot now of vices every students are into like online games wherein some are even paid for subscriptions just to upgrade and play their favorite games.

4. Don't Be Impulsive - One situation that best demonstrate of being impulsive is when purchasing or buying things that you don't really need. Focus on the things that matters most, just visit the malls or shopping center when you really need to purchase an item.

5. Buy Second Hand Books - This one is familiar to everyone. In the millennial age everything is almost so buying second hand books is now way easier. There are now available sites where you can check to find the books you needed like eBay, Craigslist and even social media specially in Instagram.

6. Buy in Bulk - For most of the college students who are living in a flat or apartment it will save you money if you purchase in bulk. For example, buy toiletry in large volume like the toilet papers it will save you money if you buy in dozen or two than per roll. You can also apply it when buying school supplies.

7. Don't Get A Pet - If you're in college it is a wise decision to not get a pet until after college. Having a pet is a stress reliever but think of the expenses associated with it like the foods, grooming and sometimes medical expenses when they're sick. Having a pet is like having your own baby wherein you need to provide their needs.

8. Live Below Your Means - One of the golden rule to save money is living below your means meaning don't force yourself to buy something you can't afford. This is highly observe in college or universities where some want to have the latest version of gadgets like laptops and cellphones which is not necessary to upgrade every now and then if yours are still working well and doing its job.

Startup tips - Motivate Your Team on a Budget

Ever since people started thinking of the business world as an isolated entity that plays by its own rules, the question was what is the key to success in this hostile environment .Although you can find tons of different answers, everyone who has been in the game long enough will say one word – motivation. Yes, motivated team is capable of moving the mountains. Without proper motivation, even the most talented individuals will stumble, and eventually fall off a cliff. But how to motivate your team to move those mountains? Well, that is the real billion dollar question here. Let us try to find the answer.

Be a Good Leader

Let us get one thing clear first – the fish rots from the head down and nearly everything that is wrong with your team can be, should be, and will be traced back to you. For this reason, do your best to become a great leader and make the necessary foundations for your team to flourish. Support new ideas, empower each individual in the team, get your hands dirty from time to time, be reachable and become the person your team-members can not only stand behind, but follow as well.

Focus on Happiness, not Motivation

Being inspirational person can get you very far, but only so far, and after some time the power of good old pep-talk starts to fade. Compensate for the lack of motivating skills with various workplace perks and other measures aimed towards improving employee happiness. According to recent study by economists at the University of Warwick, improved happiness can lead to a 12% spike in productivity. There is no reason why these numbers cannot be emulated in your startup, too.

Celebrate the Small Milestones

Huge projects tend to have very demoralizing effect on workforce. That is why it is very important to break up them up into smaller tasks and reward the team members when they are accomplished. Whether you are going to use an affordable gift cards, or you will resort to more conventional incentives like paid vacations, it is up to you – just do your best to present a long journey as a series of small, rewarding steps.

Encourage Friendly Competition

It is not that big of a secret that competitive environment is a productive environment. That is why you should encourage friendly competition whenever possible. Just remember– we said friendly competition. Open rivalry can easily slip into chaos, so be very careful while handling your employees. One of the easiest ways you can make this problem disappear is create smaller competing teams by yourself and shake them up whenever you feel that the positions are becoming too entrenched.

Encourage Individuality

Being a small cog in a larger machine can be a truly a terrifying thought. Never allow your employees to feel that way and encourage their unique personalities to shine through the uniformity of the team. If you allow the individual team members to choose their own office equipment or dress how they like, they will not feel as mindless drones, but as accomplished and independent individuals. Consequently, you will notice a significant difference in their performance.

Create a Career Path for Each Tem Member

Last but not the least, every one of your team members should know what lies ahead of him. If they are aware how, when and what they need to do in order to progress, they will not only be better motivated to accomplish those tasks, they will also feel more as a part of your organization and look at the success of your startup as their personal accomplishment.

Are these few tips everything you need to know about motivation? No. Are they a really good beginning? Yes. Use them as a starting point, learn what motivates the individual team members, and one day your team too will be able to move the business mountains.

Image source: stocksnap.io

Author: Lilly J Adams has worked for seven years in different marketing agencies across Australia. She specializes in digital marketing, marketing for small businesses and consumers behavior. She also writes about marketing, tech & business for the Bizzmarkblog.com 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lilly_j_adams 
Website: bizzmarkblog.com 

Bank 4 you – prepaid card from UK in 10 days

 Bank 4 you – prepaid card from UK in 10 days

The student flow from the Philippines to Europe and the United Kingdom is constantly growing, and this attracts attention of many European companies. Recently the UK-based company Bank4You entered the Philippines market. This company was established in London in 2014 as a fintech company.  B4U has already taken part in different fintech conferences and events in Europe, and only now, in 2016, it reached Asia. 

B4U is now known only for one product – B4U Student card. This product is a special VISA card, issued by the “Royal Bank of Scotland”. The key benefits of this card are the low rates, simplicity of loading the card and easy to complete order procedure. This card can be ordered online at bank-4-you.com, and it will be delivered from the UK within 10 days.  

CEO of the B4U Card Solution (start-up), Adam Lane remarked: “Youth at the Philippines is notable for its ambitions and sense of purpose, and the Bank4You solutions are developed for exactly such people. ”

Pocket Money or a Long Term Investment?

Wise approach to personal finances can drastically increase your savings. Since we are living in the age of fast internet and mobile apps, we can upgrade our finance tracking with some of the most advanced financial software, and figure out great ways to earn and save more funds. In this article we will give you a few great tips on how to bring your personal finances in order. 

1. Use personal finance tools

Running personal finances became much less complicated, since the introduction of personal finance tools, like Mint or GnuCash. With these mobile apps people can easily track all of their spendings and earnings.  They connect to bank, credit card, retirement and investment accounts and record all transactions. In addition to that, most of these tools come with bar code readers that can be used for recording cash purchases.

Users have the ability to create monthly, daily and weekly spending plans, and apps give them warnings if they overspend. With all these advanced goal-setting features, users are able to determine exactly where their money goes and to improve their spending, so they can put more money on their savings, 401(k) or investment accounts.

2. Become a freelancer

Digital age allows us to monetize all skills that we have. Anybody can be a freelancer, and more than one third of American workforce is already doing freelance gigs. You can find work on websites like Upwork.com and Fiverr.com, which cover wide selection of niches from graphic design and content creation to different fields of engineering and marketing. Of course not all freelancers use this concept for getting an additional income, there are plenty of people who do this as a main job. This type of engagement can also be very rewarding, but it requires much more effort and expertise.

3. Start saving money for your kid’s school 

One of the biggest problems for young college graduates today is the huge amount of student debt. Student loans are often as high as $100,000; they come with huge interest and can’t be pardoned or written off after declaring personal bankruptcy. Many students are forced to take these loans, because their parents weren’t investing money in their college funds, and due to very high tuition fees and cost of living in student dorms, especially when it comes to private colleges.

High school education is not much different. Parents also spend huge funds for paying children’s high school tuition fees if they decide to send them to private schools. In some cases they even need to take loans, which is fine considering good-quality education children are getting in these private establishments. For all of these reasons parents need to start saving money for their kid’s college and high school, as early as they can. They should use benefits of various 529 plans, when it comes to college education, and when it comes to high school, there are many solutions like school easy pay, that allow parents to pay children’s high school tuition fees and other expenses in up to 12 monthly installments. 

4. Start saving for retirement as earliest as possible

401(k) and other retirement plans offer great benefits. They come with compound interest and tax deduction and most people who start saving early retire with solid six figure amounts, while the few lucky (smart is probably the more suitable word here) ones, retire as millionaires. If you are working for an honest and caring employer, they will definitely offer you up to 6% of match to your 401(k) investments, which is like getting free money.

Unfortunately, not a lot of people recognize all the benefits retirement plans bring. They start saving money when they are well off in their fifties or even sixties. Most of these people wait for retirement with ten or twenty thousand dollars on their account and dependence on welfare checks. With thinking about retirement money, as early as in your twenties or thirties, will leave you enough funds to spend your old age under the sun.

Handling your personal finances in a good way can drastically improve your standard of living and direct more money into your saving and investment accounts. Today many individuals and households use advance ways of financial tracking, which enables them to save more and live their life to the fullest. 

Author: Sonya is a passionate business consultant from Melbourne, Australia. She has a wide range of interests, including online writing, technology trends and marketing in general. However, she likes to share her own experiences in the fields of money saving, considering it's her main focus.

Sonya Watts Business consultant, Blogger at Bizzmark Blog sonya.watts@bizzmarkblog.com || bizzmarkblog.com || Melbourne, Australia https://twitter.com/wattsmsonya https://www.facebook.com/sonya.watts.9406

Preparing for the Unexpected – Start and Build an Emergency Fund NOW!

At the onslaught of something unexpected, who do you turn to? Your parents, your best friend, your relatives or your emergency fund?  The majority of us will choose any of the first three. Here are the ways to start and build your own emergency fund. 

The rule of thumb

Financial experts say that an emergency fund should be enough to cover up to 6 months of expenses for a single person with fixed monthly income. It will take more months for a married man or woman; let's say, 6 to 12 months of coverage. So, calculate your monthly expenses first. If you are spending $1,000 per month, for example, your emergency fund should be $6,000. This amount is enough to cover for all the months' expenses so that you won't have to borrow money from other people.

1) Save at least 5% of your income

Start with saving 5% of your bi-weekly salary (or $100 per salary if you prefer). Just make sure that the amount is reasonable for you and won't jeopardize the necessities. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that you have to stop building your emergency fund once you reached the $6,000 threshold based on the example above. Building the fund is an ongoing process. After all, the situations are called 'unexpected' for a reason.  

2) Open a separate account

Put the emergency fund in the bank. Choose a bank that is accessible anytime, anywhere, so you have something to reach out to if, in case, the financial emergency strikes during nighttime. Consider the ADA (automatic deposit arrangement) of the banks wherein you simply need to link another account to the primary account. Just let the fund sit there and don't touch it unless there is grave reason to do so. 

If you are tempted to withdraw any amount from the fund, ask yourself first – is this an emergency or not? If not, better stay away from the fund. 

3) Channel extra money to the fund

A friend came to you to pay the $100 he borrowed from you from way back when. Put it in your emergency fund. Your team closed a deal and received an incentive from it. Put your share on the fund. One of your time deposits matures. Put the interest on your emergency fund account. Do you have a jar of coins that sits comfortably in the corner of your room? Take it to the bank. 

It is really challenging to build up the fund because of various factors at play such as your current salary, your liabilities and your obligations (also called debts). That's why you need to seize every opportunity to build the fund.

Having an emergency fund is no longer a question of when and why; instead, you should be asking how you can start and build your emergency fund. The steps are easy; the challenge lies in your commitment to building up your emergency fund over time. That takes discipline. You can put it this way, if you don't have an emergency fund, and something happened to you or one of your loved ones, you'd end up financially miserable. You don't want that to happen, right?

Author: Raphael Zamora is a blogger and a freelance writer that blogs for Paramount Direct, one of the best insurance company in the Philippines. He mostly writes about life and accident insurance on his blog.