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Simple and Personal Finance: Budgeting Basics

9/1/2013

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by Joanne Danganan, Jeepney Hub Content Development Director

One of the keys to future success is making sound financial decisions early on. Recent research findings published in the journal Science indicate that poverty and dealing with financial issues saps our mental abilities. "The limited bandwidth created by poverty directly impacts the cognitive control and fluid intelligence that we need for all kinds of everyday tasks." (Emily Badger, The Atlantic Cities). We want you to start building good financial habits while you're young so that you have the cognitive function to focus on other important things in life. Thus, let's get started with the basics and read about how to make a budget and sticking to it.

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For some, handling personal finance is a natural skill. For many others, it is a long and labored learning process. Personally for me, it’s the latter, and a process that I hope doesn’t end.

It’s hard to admit this, but my parents and many of my relatives don’t have great relationships with money. Some gamble it away, some spend it on way more wants than needs, and some borrow more than they can handle. I observed all these growing up (and still see it today), and I unfortunately developed the “earn then spend” mentality, rather than the “earn, save, give, then spend” mentality. When I graduated college and thankfully landed a full-time job, I knew that I had to buck up and face the reality that “earning then spending” would leave me at the intersection of Broke and Financially Stunted. 

Knowing my many shortcomings in the financial area of my life, I started reading books and a ton of blogs about personal finance. They have all taught me how personal finance should look like and how I can use it to plan my wealth and pay down my debt, while still enjoy being a 20-something living in a big city. And each book and blog has taught me one simple thing: personal finance is personal. Not every rule or suggestion will work the same for each person, but rather, it should be used as a map with many routes to the same destination. 

For me, personal finance isn’t just using math as a means to acquiring more monetary assets. It’s a tool that I use to advance my dreams and aspirations, like being debt-free, living under my means, buying my first home, or finding resources to help fund a potential startup. Effective personal finance is a behavior, and I hope to impart useful advice that I have used in the past that might be helpful to you in developing a good set of habits when it comes to your wallet.

The first principle you must know in personal finance dictates anything concerning your hard-earned cash: how to budget. Budgeting is one of the simplest tasks in personal finance, yet not everyone of us knows how to effectively use one. Not only can budgeting help you plan your month’s expenses (or whichever time interval you prefer to use), but it can help you finance on a micro-level like financing a vacation trip that you’d like to pay with cash (rather than credit or personal loan), taking a class outside of school that you’re interested in (like a sewing class at the local community center), or even investing in your side hustle (like paying for the launch of a new website). 

At its most basic level, a budget simply compares your income against your expenses and helps prevent you from overspending. First, list all your sources of income. Then, list all your expenses. You can make both as specific or as general as you want it to be – whatever works for you. In my sample budget, which looks pretty similar to mine as a working college student some years ago, I made mine pretty general.

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Employing the zero-out method (notice my end balance is $0), if I underspend in one category like misc. spending, I can allocate the leftover money to my groceries fund or send it over to my savings account. By the same token, if I overspend in misc. spending, I must transfer enough money from, say, my groceries fund to ensure that my balance stays at zero, helping me avoid overspending. This is just like using an actual budget envelope, except you can keep it virtual with smartphone apps like EEBA. If you prefer to have a physical budget envelope, you can do that too (though I do caution carrying too much cash around with you).

The point of planning a budget is to avoid the bad habit of overspending. There are so many tools out there that help you do that, but budgeting is the most basic way. So, if there’s nothing else you learn from budgeting, it has to be this:
  • End balance > Expenses = Amazing!
  • End balance < Expenses = Bad! If you find yourself in this situation, consider spending less or earning more (preferably the latter!).
Common sense, right? For many of us, though, it is easier said than done, but that’s what I’m here for. If you currently live in the second bullet, like I had been for quite some years, I hope to help you break the cycle. Keep checking back here at Jeepney Hub for more tips on personal finance, or make it simple for yourself and subscribe to our email newsletter!

If you have any feedback or questions about this post, I’d love to hear about it!

Helpful resources:
  • The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, proving that the millionaire next door is least likely to buy a brand new Benz or have a Rolex watch. He also might not have the biggest house on the block.
  • Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, transforming the way we think about our time and our money – a personal finance must-read.
  • Money Under 30 - a blog catered to 20-somethings, started by David Weiner when he was 25, covering all sorts of topics from financing your college education to planning a family.
  • Money Girl - a blog on Quick and Dirty Tips by Laura Adams, a writer and host of one of the most popular personal finance podcasts around, covering topics from credit scores to investing in a Roth IRA.

Copyright © 2015 Jeepney Hub.  All Rights Reserved.
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Your Online Footprint: Controlling Your Brand

9/1/2013

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by Kate Nicole G. Blanco, Jeepney Hub Founder and Executive Director

As my good friend Titilayo Tinubu would say, “You, my friend, are a brand.”   I've learned most of what I know about creating and cleaning up my "brand" from her.  Along with her valuable advice, this is what I've gathered about online footprints and controlling your brand.

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With the advent of so many online websites and apps where we can share our daily lives, every single thing we post online leaves a footprint.  Many of those can come back to haunt us many years from now when we start applying for jobs and start becoming more well known in our chosen careers.  In the process of building a career and doing job interviews, you will most likely do an online search of your potential employer to find out more about them.  Thus, you can bet they will do the same for you and it doesn’t do you any good to just hope they don’t find that skeleton in your online closet. 

Anyone who’s anyone in sports, politics, hollywood, and virtually all other career fields hire Public Relations Specialists, Brand Managers, Media Relations Experts, etc. to ensure that their brand and reputation are protected.  Like you, I can’t afford to hire any of those folks, but there are many ways we can build our brands and reputations that are virtually cost-free.  Now, I know not all of you are trying to become the next President Barack Obama (and why not?), but as we are all still young and just starting out, we are in the best position to start creating our brands and an online footprint that is in our complete control.

Here are quick and [virtually] free ways you can control your online footprint and start building your brand:

1) Google yourself. Did you find something you don’t like? See if you can take that information down yourself or email the owner of the site and ask them to take down the content.

2) Clean up your online profiles. Yes, especially Facebook. Despite the privacy settings provided by the website, you still cannot afford to have trails of pictures and posts that you know you’ll regret having in a public space later. If you can handle it, take down some of your online profiles that are now redundant (I mean, is anyone really on MySpace or Friendster anymore?). Trust me, as interesting as your lunch may have seemed yesterday, it doesn’t need to be posted on three different online profiles. Delete pictures and posts from your profile that are potentially damaging. Have a profile that will make you proud! Feel a little hesitant about losing some of your photos? Don't panic: there’s a way for you to get a copy of EVERYTHING you’ve ever posted and all the photos you were tagged in on Facebook before you go on a deleting spree (and just as an aside, the fact that Facebook has an archive of all these information you have on your profile should serve as an impetus to clean up your online footprint now): 

Step 1: Click on the little thingamajig at the top right corner of your Facebook page and click "Account Settings".

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Step 2:  Click on "Download a copy" of your Facebook data.
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Step 3: Click on "Start My Archive" and you're good to go.
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3) Create a professional profile by taking either or both of these steps:
  • Create a LinkedIn Profile. This will serve two purposes: to have your name out there for employers who may be searching for someone in the industry you’re interested in, and to list all of the experiences you have that you may not be able to fit in your resume. (More information on building a resume that works later. But in short, you shouldn’t have everything you’ve ever done in your resume, only experiences relevant for the specific employer you’re applying to).
  • Create a Personal Website. I found this to be fairly easy to do and it's free unless you buy the domain name instead of having a host website (buying the domain name costs only a little over $10 per year).  Websites like about.me and flavors.me make it easy to create an online website and unify your online presence.  I personally use weebly.com as it allows me more freedom to design my page, add HTML codes, and use a domain name I had paid for at GoDaddy. When I was doing my job search, my good friend Titilayo Tinubu, JD Job Coach extraordinaire suggested that I create a personal website to make it easier for my networks to pass on my information - instead of sending them an attachment of my resume, I can just send them to my personal website where I have my resume posted. Here's what Titilayo has to say about creating a personal website:
  • Even if you have your resume posted on LinkedIn, a personal page is a way to take even more control over your Google reputation.
  • To understand why, let me give you a little insight into how Google works. Google will rank a site high up in its search results if that site is a reputable or popular site or if the site is not popular but other popular sites link to it. I know, it’s like high school all over again.
  • If you create a personal site, and you place links to that site on your Twitter page, Facebook page, and LinkedIn page, over time your personal site will start to rank high in Google search results because Google gives preference to sites that are connected to popular sites.
  • You can create a personal page using several different platforms. One of my favorites is Weebly because it’s free and easy to set up if you’re not familiar with coding. So hop on over and create a personal page.
    As I would not give you advice that I wouldn’t take myself, feel free to Google my name: Kate Nicole Blanco. You’ll find that the first search result is my personal website.  The second result is my LinkedIn profile and just a couple of results later are my profile as a Dispatcher for Jeepney Hub, and my Twitter account. If a potential employer were to do a search of me, I can be certain that most, if not all, of the information they’ll find about me are within my control. It’s a way for me to track my own online footprint. Can you follow the trail of your own online footprint?

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Give us your feedback to this coaching piece here or post a comment below. Let us know whether you followed the steps, if there's something we forgot to mention, or if you disagree. We welcome all input to provide better coaching for the Filipino-American youth and young professionals.

Copyright © 2015 Jeepney Hub.  All Rights Reserved.
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