Pujah

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Posts posted by Pujah

  4. Posted

    Pujah, sweetie, First take the halal out of the equation.

    Whether it's halal or not is the first thing I look at when it comes to money making schemes. And like I said before you have a lot more option to build wealth than investing in CD or ING savings earning minimal amount while they get much bigger return using your money.

  6. Posted

    Originally posted by -Serenity-:

    Do you guys get the feeling the more you earn, the more you HAVE TO spend?

     

    I remember a time when I used to save £500 a month of a £1,200pm. And live contentedly.

     

    But now...
    :(

    Of course, your taste always matches your income.

  7. Posted

    ^ First build your emergency fund then start aggressively paying all your debts starting with the highest APR. I would start thinking about investments and such once you have no credit card debt. Mortgage and student loans are ok as they don't cost you as much.

  8. Posted

    LG 3-5% APR on few dollars is not going to make you rich it will only take the baraka out of your money since that will be mixed up with your hard halal earned money. The way to financial freedom is investments in the stock market, having your own business or real state. Obviously you have to do your research to make sure who ever you invest in is not involved in unholy activities.

  9. Posted

    This type of budgeting can help the undisciplined as it requires no real budgeting just a need to stop when the specified amount runs out.

    Understand your committed expenses

    As I looked back over the past 20 years of budgeting, I saw that there were a few years when my wife and I believed we were fairly on top of things, even with a much lower income than we have today. How did we manage?

     

    The key was a drop in our fixed monthly expenses. It was a period when declining interest rates had lowered our adjustable-rate mortgage payment to about 15% of our household income. That left us with some extra money each month to set aside in a savings account for those irregular expenses.

     

    We later moved to a bigger house with a much bigger mortgage payment, higher maintenance costs and utility bills, and obscene property taxes. The monthly mortgage payment was only 20% of our gross income, far lower than the 33% that most lenders will allow, but, suddenly, we were struggling again.

     

    Even after refinancing our mortgage at a lower rate, we were still often running out of cash before the end of the month. I realized that other fixed expenses had crept upward over the years. As my children, Natalie, now 17, and Jackson, 14, have gotten older, they need things like music lessons and sports equipment that can add several hundred dollars a month to our basic expenses. They're also outgrowing clothes faster than we can buy them.

     

    The slow but steady growth in our monthly spending commitments was putting a squeeze on our budget. I call these "committed" expenses rather than "fixed" or "non-discretionary" expenses, because things like music lessons are neither fixed in amount nor absolute necessities, but rather are commitments my wife and I have made to provide for our children.

     

    The 60% Solution emerges

    After analyzing our spending patterns over the past couple of years using our Microsoft Money data file, I determined that we needed to keep our committed expenses at or below 60% of our gross income to come out ahead at the end of the month.

     

    Committed expenses:

     

    Basic food and clothing needs.

     

    Essential household expenses.

     

    Insurance premiums.

     

    Charitable contributions.

     

    All of our bills -- even such non-essentials as our satellite TV service.

     

    ALL of our taxes.

     

    I'm not saying that 60% is a magic number. It's a workable goal for my family, and it's a nice round number. But your number might well be a bit higher or lower. At any rate, it's a good place to start.

     

    Then I divided up the remaining 40% into four chunks of 10% each, listed here in order of priority:

     

    Retirement savings:
    consisting entirely of my 401(k) contribution, which is subtracted automatically from my paycheck.

     

    Long-term savings:
    also automatically deducted from my pay to buy Microsoft stock at a discount as part of an unusual stock-purchase program. The relative lack of liquidity (i.e. the difficulty of turning these shares into cash) makes it harder to spend this money without some planning and a series of deliberate steps. In a real emergency, though, I could sell and have the cash wired into my bank account within three days, so this is also our emergency fund.

     

    Short-term savings for irregular expenses:
    which are direct-deposited from my paycheck into a credit union savings account. Money in this account can be easily transferred into our checking account, as needed, via the Web. Over the course of a year, I expect to use all of this money to pay for vacations, repairs, new appliances, holiday gifts and other irregular but more or less predictable expenses.

     

    Fun money:
    which we can spend on anything we like during the month, so long as the total doesn't exceed 10% of my income.

     

    You may have noticed that only 70% of my paycheck is used for everyday expenses. Since we never see the other 30%, my wife and I generally don't miss it.

     

    We don't really need to track our expenses, because our checking account balance is generally equal to the amount of money we can spend. That's the way a lot of people do it, but they don't first make provision for savings.

     

    The key is keeping a lid on those committed expenses. You can categorize them if you want, but it isn't really necessary. In fact, you could make a budget with just three categories: committed expenses, fun money and irregular expenses, and that's just what I've done with the budget in Money 2005. (I can't really give up my anal-compulsive ways completely, so I've also created a set of subcategories to track the committed expenses, partly because that also allows me to export parts of my spending data to a tax program at the end of the year.)

     

    Now, at this point you may be saying, "Well, la-dee-dah for you, but there's no way I can get my committed expenses down to 60% of my income."

     

    How to get your spending down

    For a lot of people, part of the difficulty in reducing committed expenses comes from the need to make big monthly credit card payments. If you're carrying a substantial amount of non-mortgage debt, I'd suggest using the 20% that would otherwise go to retirement and long-term saving to aggressively pay down your debt -- but only after you cut up those cards.

     

    Every dollar in interest that you don't pay is just like getting a guaranteed, risk- and tax-free return on your money equal to the interest rate on the debt. When your debts are paid off -- and it won't take long using 20% of your gross income -- immediately redirect that money into savings.

     

    Now, let's take the really hard case: Even excluding debt payments, reducing your committed expenses to 60% still seems like an impossible goal. If that describes your situation, the odds are good that you're facing one of the following problems:

     

    You have a more expensive home than you can afford.

     

    You've committed to car or boat payments that are larger than you can afford.

     

    Your children are in a private school that you can't really afford.

     

    There's just a big, ugly gap between your income and your lifestyle.

     

    If it's one of the first three, you can undo the damage by slowly unwinding the commitments you've made and choosing something less appealing but ultimately more appropriate

     

    If the problem is having champagne tastes on a beer budget, you'll need to take a long, hard look at where the money is going and why. Take the "Savvy Spending Quiz" on MSN Money to see if perhaps you're using money and things to fill a void in your life. Often, the steps needed to fill that void have little to do with money.

     

    The real secret to building a budget that really works isn't tracking what you spend, any more than counting calories is the secret to losing weight. The key is creating a sustainable structure for your finances, one that balances spending and income and that leaves enough room to handle the unexpected.

  11. Posted

    Originally posted by Baashi:

     

    Back to kashafa's point. Here is a question for you all. What do you make of folks who spend money they don't have on things they don't need?

    I call them clueless as they don’t know or care the real cost of what they’re buying. Anytime you put something on a credit card you can’t pay off at the end of the month you’re just setting yourself up.

  17. Posted

    Car Bombs in Algeria Kill at Least 22

    ALGIERS, Algeria - Car bombs exploded minutes apart Tuesday in central Algiers, heavily damaging U.N. offices and partly ripping the facade off a new government building. The interior minister said 22 were killed but hospital and rescue officials gave figures at least twice that toll.

    The minister, Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni, said another 177 people were injured in the attacks. A national official at the civil protection agency who spoke on condition of anonymity said 45 people were killed. A doctor at one Algiers hospital who said he was in contact with staff at other area hospitals put the death toll at least 60.

     

    Suspicions quickly focused on the North African wing of al-Qaida. The date - the 11th - could point to an Islamic terror link. Al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa claimed responsibility for attacks on April 11 that hit the prime minister's office and a police station, killing 33 people.

     

    "We are looking through the rubble for people," said Jean Fabre of the U.N. Development program in Geneva, after speaking with Marc Destanne De Bernis, the agency's top official in the Algerian capital.

     

    One employee of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was killed and 12 employees from various U.N. agencies were missing, said Marie Heuze, spokeswoman for the world body in Geneva.

     

    If all the missing are found to be dead, it would be the deadliest assault on the U.N. since the Aug. 19, 2003, truck bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed 22 people, including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

     

    U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned Tuesday's bombings.

     

    "This is just unacceptable," said a somber Ban, who was on Indonesia's resort island of Bali for a U.N. climate conference. "I would like to condemn it in the strongest terms. It cannot be justified in any circumstances."

     

    The Bush administration added its denunciation.

     

    "We condemn this attack on the United Nations office by these enemies of humanity who attack the innocent. The United States stands with the people of Algeria, as well as the United Nations as they deal with this senseless violence," said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

     

    Ban said the blasts destroyed the offices of the U.N. Development Program and severely damaged the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

     

    The bombs exploded around 9:30 a.m. (3:30 a.m. EST) and blew off the front off the U.N. refugee agency building and also damaged the main U.N. building housing the U.N. Development Program and other agencies across the street.

     

    "We can't even say for certain that the U.N. was being targeted but one can certainly start to draw that conclusion since this explosion took place in a very narrow street right between two UN buildings," Redmond told CNN.

     

    He added that one UNHCR staff member was killed.

     

    The U.N. offices are in the upscale Hydra neighborhood of Algiers, which houses many foreign embassies and has a substantial foreign population.

     

    At least 15 people were killed in the Hydra attack, said a national official at the civil protection agency who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. The other attack, which killed at least 30 people, was in the Ben Aknoun neighborhood of Algiers, where the Constitutional Council is located, the official said.

     

    The official APS news agency, citing the Interior Ministry, reported 17 people were killed and 67 injured. It said rescuers were still pulling people from the rubble.

     

    Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni said the Constitutional Council, which oversees elections, was the other target, adding that the attacks appeared to have been caused by car bombs.

     

    "An attack like this is among the easiest actions to carry out. I have always said that we are not safe from these sorts of attacks," he told reporters in remarks carried by APS.

     

    "Everything depends on the degree of our vigilance and our degree of mobilization against this. You will have noticed that there are fewer and fewer attacks of this nature. That means that the groups carrying out these sorts of attacks are facing more and more problems."

     

    Public radio, Algiers Network 3, said the bombs went off about 10 minutes apart.

     

    Some victims of one of the attacks had been riding a school bus, APS said.

     

    "I was in my office and heard an explosion in the distance. When I went downstairs, I was hit by another explosion, just in front of our building," said an unidentified man swathed in bloody dressings who spoke from his hospital bed in footage shown on France-2.

     

    TV video showed a badly damaged building with windows blown out, burned out cars in a street and a charred bus.

     

    Algeria has been battling Islamic insurgents since the early 1990s, when the army canceled the second round of the country's first multiparty elections, stepping in to prevent likely victory by an Islamic fundamentalist party.

     

    Islamist armed groups then turned to force to overthrow the government, with up to 200,000 people killed in the ensuing violence.

     

    The last year has seen a series of bombings against state targets, many of them suicide attacks.

     

    Recent bombings have been claimed by al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa. That was the name adopted in January after the remnants of the insurgency, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, or GSPC, formally linked with al-Qaida.

     

    Once focused on toppling the Algerian government, the group has now turned its sights on international holy war and the fight against Western interests. French counterterrorism officials say it is drawing members from across North Africa.

     

    A Sept. 6 attack during President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's visit to the eastern city of Batna killed 22 people, and a suicide bombing two days later on a coast guard barracks in the town of Dellys left at least 28 dead.

  21. Posted

    Originally posted by Red Sea:

    reer U.S:

     

    Faarax Brawn,

    Xiinfaniin,

    Baashi,

    Khalaf,

    Libaax sankataabte,

    Chevuara,

    Hodman,

    Clever Trevor,

    Maakhirian,

    Caamir,

    General Duke,

    Red Sea.

     

     

    ^ that list should say SOLers from MN not from the U.S because there are so many more of us around here