Finance Book

Millions of people are over-extended financially. They max out their credit cards and dig a financial hole that seems impossible to escape from. If you find yourself in that situation, there are some strategies you can use to reduce your debt and free some money each month.

If you are having financial problems due to excessive debt levels there are only two alternatives. You must bring additional money into the household to pay down some of the debt or you have to reduce your expenses. This article will deal with reducing expenses. The first thing you need to do is change your spending habits, create a spending plan for yourself. Here are 5 strategies to get you started:

1. Stop spending money on items you don’t need. Before buying those new shoes at the mall, ask yourself, ‘Do I really NEED them?” The key word here is ‘need.’ Most people spend much more money on things they want, as opposed to things they need. Only buy things you need until your debt problems are under control.

2. Take inventory of your monthly spending habits. Most people have no idea how much money they spend each month. They forget the little things like that coffee in the morning, the soda or drink in the afternoons. These little meaningless expenses can really add up at the end of the month. Keep a small pocket journal and write down everything you buy during the course of a month. You’ll be surprised at how much spend on frivolous things hat you don’t really need (and can do without).

3. Reduce your expenses by using public transportation if possible. Talk to colleagues about starting a carpool. At the grocery store, buy generic and store brand products. Use coupons whenever possible. Drink tap water instead of expensive bottled water and soda. There are thousands of other ways to reduce your expenses, use some of them.

4. Sell some of the items you no longer use or need. Have a yard sale or open a sellers account on Ebay. Millions of dollars worth of used items are bought and sold on Ebay every day.

5. Stop using your credit cards! Use your credit cards for emergencies only. Get into the habit of paying cash.

Check out my newest ebook for the details on how to slash expenses and put money in your pocket to reduce debt!

By: Jo Mark

The other day I decided it was finally time to clean – really clean – my desk. As I worked through years of accumulation, I noticed an actual pencil lying forgotten on an old pad of paper. The pencil was all dusty and unused, and the pad had yellowed and curled edges. That got me thinking about how long it’s been since pen and paper were used for daily communication and record keeping. Now, some of you may brand me an old codger for being able to remember that at all, but, bear in mind that the first usable version of Microsoft Windows, version 3.0, shipped just 18 years ago. At that time, many pencil pushers resisted transferring everything to the “computer,” but even the most active holdouts gave way in a year or two.

Oh, some of us might have used an email system back then.  At Hewlett Packard, I remember sending emails using their proprietary HP Desk mail system back in the mid 1980s.  However, at the time, the majority of office workers were… actual pencil pushers.

Can you find anyone today who doesn’t compulsively check their email or scroll through file listings to find what they need? OK, John McCain doesn’t, but he has “people.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t have “people.” However, I do have my fully networked system with Internet access, Instant Messaging, stunning graphics, oodles of productivity, and regular backups. And I love it!

In that eighteen years we experienced the world changing faster, and more completely than it ever had. The Internet (once the exclusive domain of the nerdy-ist of nerds – cosmological physicists) became everyone’s instant window to the world. Easy-to-use authoring tools allowed everyone to be productive. It’s as if the sorcerer’s apprentice were replicating legions of pencils instead of brooms to generate a catastrophic data deluge. Today, corporations are literally drowning in it.

Back in 2006, IDC conducted an exhaustive study (Source: The Expanding Digital Universe, IDC, March 2007) and forecasted, between 2006 through 2010, a 57% growth rate year over year in the amount of information created, captured and replicated.

So, where is all this information coming from and why aren’t companies able to deal with it? Well, it comes from everyone, and it’s a problem because most of it is unstructured. Most people aren’t aware of this, but The Enterprise Strategy Group estimates that between 80-85% of all business data is unstructured (Source: Extending Discovery to All Corporate Information, Enterprise Strategy Group, December 2007).

What is unstructured data? It consists of emails, reports, all user files (documents, spreadsheets, PPTs, PDFs), images, video, HTML/XML, MP3, etc. It varies in importance, too. The average user will save pictures of their children, emails about what a good job they are doing, CYA “email trails,” work-related spreadsheets, thick Word documents, etc.

In the book, “Tapping into unstructured data: Integrating unstructured data and structural analytics into business intelligence” (Bill Inmon and Anthony Nesavich, Prentice Hall, 2008), the authors describe the various types of unstructured data created by the typical departments in a corporation. These include: Accounting, Call Centers, Engineering, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing, Sales, Shipping and Operations. That means everyone is contributing to the challenge while they look to the data center to control it.

The Challenges of Unbridled Information Growth

Let’s take a look at some of the major challenges in dealing with this unbridled growth of information.

Factor #1: Information must be stored

The more data we generate, the more storage is required. This storage need opened up tremendous opportunities for storage vendors as customers sought to purchase more and more equipment. The storage industry introduced the moniker Information Lifecycle Management to provide more cost effective ways to deal with this growth. They also introduced the concept of tiered storage to allow companies to better manage it along various dimensions: price, performance, capacity and function. Initially, the storage cost factor was the biggest impact on corporations of this growth. However, as storage cost quickly declined, its importance became dwarfed by other factors.

Factor #2: Information can be sensitive and needs to be protected

As companies created more and more information, the importance of protecting that information and ensuring the proper access level became more apparent. While it sounds easy (i.e. making sure the right people have access to the right information), it’s not so easy to actually do, and the costs of not securing data can be astounding. Examples are:

Hefty fines under PCI, SOX and HIPAA for breaches and noncompliance Bad PR and damage to the corporate brand due to the need to publicly disclose privacy breaches Outright IP theft where trade secrets and proprietary information could fall into the hands of a competitor and materially damage the company’s business prospects
Factor #3: Information must be preserved for regulatory reasons

Every company is governed by a set of regulations that that determine the length of time that information must be stored. There are a slew of regulations that govern information retention. The more familiar of these include:

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 SEC Rule 17a-3, a-4
There are countless more. Some industries (e.g. Pharmaceutical, Finance, etc.) are more regulated than others. And, of course, with the recent Credit Crisis, we expect the number of regulations to skyrocket in the coming years.

In the good old days, retaining this information was simple. We simply put everything in a box and placed that box in a warehouse for however long. Given the explosive growth of easily replicable electronic information, it’s much more challenging.

Factor #4: Information is subject to electronic discovery

A critical event occurred in December 2006 with the passing of The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). The FRCP governs procedures for civil suits in United States district (federal) courts. It was amended to outline how electronic documents can be used to support litigation proceedings. The amendment also defined how electronic documents should be handled to support litigation search and discovery.

Essentially, this means that all information is discoverable, which presents a problem. Companies are not only required to keep information for a particular period of time (for regulatory purposes), but also are incentivized to get rid of it as soon as possible. It simply isn’t practical for a company to pay an attorney $400/hour to perform discovery across all of their information.

The Challenges of Managing Unbridled Information Growth (the Buckets Multiply Geometrically)

So – where does this leave us? We have too much information today. Some of this data needs to be protected because it contains sensitive information. Some of it needs to be retained for certain periods of time due to regulatory constraints, and it’s all discoverable. We are creating new information at an alarming pace, and like with the sorcerer’s apprentice bucket brigade, it’s frighteningly out of control.

I attended last month’s ARMA (Association of Records Managers and Administrators) conference in Las Vegas to get more perspective on the information conundrum. After all, records managers have had to deal with the management of information for many years, initially in physical form and more recently in electronic form. Their mantra is simple. They need to know what they have and where they have it. They need to make certain only the right people have access to the information. They need to know what to keep, and they need to keep it as long as they have to. They need to get rid of everything else. It’s a simple matter of setting up policies across the enterprise and enforcing them.

It sounds so simple. But is it? Do we know what we have? Do we know where we have it?

Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. The information we create is vast. It is stored in heterogeneous formats throughout the world.

I spoke with one Records Manager of a mid-sized company who told me, “Yes, I know what we have. I have two file shares in Des Moines with my finance, marketing and sales files. I have a user share in our corporate office with personal files. At corporate, I also have my web farm. I have an Exchange Server, one Personnel Database, one Accounting Database,  and one Documentum System. Oh, and twelve SharePoint sites.”

Her problem is typical. With information stored everywhere, how can she manage it across heterogeneous systems? How can she set up consistent policies for ensuring the right access? How can she ensure that the right data is retained? How can she ensure that she gets rid of what she does not need?

Basically, she not able to address these problems, which could place her company out of compliance. This brings a risk of being heavily fined. The problem, of course, is even worse for larger companies who literally have Petabytes of information stored everywhere.

One Certified Records Manager I spoke with likes to categorize information as follows:

Type of Information and Where it Exists

Unstructured – Data File Shares, Desktops, Laptops Enterprise Content Management System – SharePoint, FileNet, Documentum Messaging – Email, Voice Mail, IM, etc. Databases – Human Resources, Order Processing, etc.

He explained, “The problem is that a single, universal system for managing information does not exist.” I visited vendors, both big and small, and confirmed what every Records Manager has known for quite some time. That being able to effectively manage information according to the Records Management mantra is truly a Herculean task.

Managing Information in a Cloud (the Sorcerer Returns from Lunch)

There is a sorcerer who can clean up, organize, and control the deluge of information, and its name is Classification Management. Only when information is classified, can it be effectively managed to address the concerns of sensitivity, retention and destruction.

The magic wand of this Classification and Management sorcerer is a sophisticated Policy Engine. It’s sophisticated because it can support different Policies for different information sources (databases, email systems, etc.). It can support different Policies for different regional regulations, and it’s flexible enough to deal not only with today’s regulations, but also with future ones.

Scalability is the other side of this magic wand because, classification alone is not sufficient to deal with the scale of the information in the average enterprise. It is geographically distributed across heterogeneous systems, and a centralized information management scheme will not and cannot scale.

Because of this, we see Enterprise Information Management as being the first enterprise application that requires a form of cloud computing. This allows all information everywhere to be managed.

What’s Next

As we proceed into 2009, only a couple things are certain: companies will create more information; government will create more regulation, and the sorcerer will have more and more data to manage.

By: Will Matlack

Life is tough. It’s not tough for some of us; it’s tough for all of us. So, for those of you who spend a lot time boo-hooing about your financial status, you no longer have a reason. Join the crowd of well-wishers, and do something about your situation.

There are those of you who are low income and have a difficult time buying food and getting to work with our over-priced gas. There are folks who call themselves middle income, but are actually poor, because their income is clouded with heavy debt; yes I said they are poor, because they disguise credit for money, and live way above their means. Then there are the high-income individuals; some are fake, some are real, and some are struggling just to keep their head above water with debt. The fake ones partake in all sorts of unsavory activities to appear middle or upper middle class, the real ones work hard, make good money, pay their bills, save for a rainy day, and invest for retirement. Those struggling to keep their head above water are similar to the so-called middle income who are deep in debt, the upper income fakes are much deeper in depth, and in a matter of time, all their finances will sink with them.

There are many reasons why some of us are financially poor; some of us live deep in debt, and some just waste a lot of money, but are not deep in debt. The real middle income and upper middle income people with low debt do well understanding how to budget money and stay out of debt. Some of us have terrible challenges such as; jobs going to China and the prison system (yes, companies are moving into the prisons for .25 cents an hour labor), loosing homes to the mortgage crises, and loosing jobs to collapsed mortgage companies. I really don’t need to talk
about the gas crises, but I will say it continues to get worse. The price of gas has crept up faster than any time in our recorded history, and the trend doesn’t seem to be reversing soon.

None of us deserves the current state of finances our government and corporate policies has place upon us. How do we find answers to our toughest financial problems to circumvent the current state of U.S. financial affairs?

The answer is simple; it is in the financial advice of many of the webs personal finance sites.

By: Lois Center-Shabazz