Stock Taking

Have you ever worked in manufacturing, distribution or warehousing environment? If you had, then, you know what I mean by taking stock.

I mentioned before that you need to THINK before you lauch your next career hunt. There is no better time than now to reflect upon yourself WHO you really are, WHAT you really want to do. Once you identify your areas of interest, next thing to do is to do a stock taking for yourself. Here I mean you need to do an internal check of WHAT you really have in terms of SKILLS.

If you don't know what you have, how are you going to sell them? That could be the reason for not getting that Interview you wanted. Try to check on the market, how much your skills are WORTH. That will be your Market Price. That determines how much you should be asking for! Not your previous salary.

Once you know what you want to do, how much you want to get, you are very much in control of the situations. You know your own cards well, you can talk with a lot more confident and sure.

You are ready to take on any challenges and move on...

Survival Skill #7: Know Your Own Worth

Good, Truth & Success

When you are downsized, redundant, or whichever word your previous company uses on you. What is you first reaction? What is your state of emotion during then? Dejection, Shock, Disbelief, Worried, Angry, Dumbfolded... All these are just normal human reactions to somethign negative. No big deal. I said, NO BIG DEAL!

You disagree. Because you have mortgage to pay. You have car loan to service. You have to pay for your children's school fees, childcare fees. You have to pay for your meals, transportations. You little savings.

I KNOW! Just Listen! Didn't I told you that you need to relook at your expenses? But, let me tell you this: This is NOT THE TIME TO PANIC.This is the worst time to panic. This is not the end of the world. When you sit back and take a closer look, you will find a way out. Follow the method I told you earlier.

Now after you have settled your expenses, you started to look for jobs. You send in applications after applicaitons. Guess what? 3 months has gone past. You have not gotten any interviews! Now you are down. You mood is down,down, down... You don't think there is hope...

Let me let you this: Whether you think your life is full of hope or there is no hope, either way, you are right! What? I must be nuts to tell you that! NO! I am not. You must keep up your Hope, your spirit. Your thoughts will be reflected into everything you do. Including your application letters and your resume. More importantly, your family and friends.

In my 9 months of searching for something to do, I had kept constantly reminding myself to stay POSITIVE. My children, my friends never felt the pressure when they are with me. I want them to be hapy and I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY!

You must only think of GOOS, TRUTH and SUCCESS at this point of time. Believe me. Nothing Else Counts.

Let me tell you the Ultimate Survival Skill #6: POSITIVE THINKING

The Power of Concentration or Focus

The Power of Concentration or Focus

To achieve you goals, you need to first identify the goal. This goal needs to
be specific and with timeline. You need to quantity the goal. For example, to
make 20 business friends within next 6 months. Another one, to be able to swim
10 x 50m laps within 12 minutes in next 3 months.

Once you have identify that, you need to have a plan. Details of the actions to
be taken to take your there.

These are easy part. Now comes the difficult part. That is to focus on the
plan. What determines success and failure is not so much of whether you have a
goal or plan. It is the determination and concentration to carry on the plan
nor matter what happens.

You must put your focus and concentrate on getting it. Keep hitting until your
get it.

If you waste your time reading sensational stories or worthless newspaper
items, you exite the impulsive and the emotional faculties, and this means you
are weakening your power of concentation. You will not be free to success.

Concentration of your mind can onle by developed by watching yourself closely.
All kind of development commence with intense concentration. If you stay on
course and keep sticking to it, you will get it.

CONCENTRATION - Survival Skill # 5
Survival Skill for everything you do... Job seeking, self employment, starting
business, selling, learning, teaching and so on.

Plan B - What is that?

You Can Make (or Lose) Some Money On Internet

When you are retrenched, the first thing in your mind is to find the next available job as soon as possible. But, my advise to you is not to get overly concerned. In order to get new employment, you may want to reflect upon yourself to see what are the skills you have and the experience that can sell yourself. If you had been in the sales, you should not have any problem. However, if you are technical person like Engineer, Programmer, Project Manager, Software Developer, Production Management, and other more technical or technology oriented persons, then, you really have to take a good look at yourself and assess your skill sets. While you may take your time to reflect up on yourself of what you really want to do and what you can do, you can start something simple to make some money.

The fastet way to start online business is to become an Affiliate Marketer. That means you become a sales agent and earn some commission. Just go to Clickbank.com and open an account there. Then from there market place, you can search for a product that you want to sell and get your hop link URL from there.

Then you can open an Adwords account and you can start to place your add there. Each time someone clicks on your ad, the person will be sent to the URL for the product that you are selling. If he buys, you earn. But if you pay too much for advertising, you will lose money. As simple as that. Doing business means you must take some risks. Internet Business is like normal business. There is risk of losing money.

Cheers!
http://www.bizgenerator.com

While You Are Employed

Try to Keep Your Current Job

What is the most important thing to do when you are still employed? The key thing to do is to protect your current position. Every dummy knows that.

Protecting your current position calls for some of the following common sense.

1. Constantly Upgrade your skills.

2. Keeping your eyes and ears open

3. Looking out for signposts

You need to constantly upgrade your skills for your current job but more importantly, your future job. Be aware of potential changes that may happen to your organisation that may affect your current position. Be aware of what possible future positions you may be heading towards to. If you are like what I was, without any career path for future in your organisation, you should be focusing on skills that will make you employable outside of your organisation.

Don't keep your heads down working hard. Companies don't rewards hard workers these days. Hard work may not pay. Works smart. Be conformed. In order to do well, you must conform. You must speak the same jargon as your boss. If you can't do it, you can hire contract staff to do it. Come on, there is no secret these days that only contract staff are doing the actual work. The so called “permanent” staff are just playing the politics. That is their main role. You can't blame yourself for doing that. In any case, you are rewarded more playing politics that doing actual works. Actual works are for contract staff. Don't you get it? Keep your eyes and ears open and learn quickly these skills.

Look out for signs of problems. If you have access to companies financial well being, you should have an idea when the business may become unsustainable. Make contacts to head hunters (employment agents) and explore possibilities.

Market yourself in your own company if you think it is worthwhile to stay. Whatever good things you have done must be noticed. Appear positive always, especially when you are in front of your bosses. Nobody likes negative people. Only you know what you are talking about.

Develop your plan B

If you find yourself having problem developing skills that is needed to take you into the next phase within your organistion, start to explore opportunities outside. Look out for other opportunities in other organisations. Contact friends, customers, suppliers who may be able to provide you with that opportunity.

Again and again, I want to stress, Manage Your Finance.

Start to scrutinise your expenses and calculate your real wealth. That is how many moons you can survive with your cash when you are booted. Many financial consultants would advise that you have at least 6 months of buffer. My suggestion is to have at least 12 months. If you can maintain current life style for 6 months, that is all right. If you can change your life style and stretch it to 12 months, that is even better. I have seen people (typically mid managers) taking 6-12 months before getting the next income. I am not talking about job here. If you start something of your own, your income may flow in 12-18 months later and may be in such a small quantity that is not even sufficient to support your reduced life style.

Oh, yeah, I have updated some ads in this blog. These are called Google Adsense. That is one way of making money on the Internet. If you click on these ads, I will make some money. So, you can help me to make some small changes by clicking on these ads whenever you visit my blog. :)

If you are looking for home business opportunities, you can visit this website called Biz Generator at bizgenerator.com.

Maintaining Your Life Style

You don't have to sacrifice you life style when you lose your job!

That is a BIG LIE!

You HAVE TO sacrifice your life style unless you have sufficient money to maintain your current life style for another 35 years (assuming you will die at 80).

The True Title of this Post is "Managing Your Expenses - part 2: How to go about it".

Life is a business. You need to manage your CASH FLOW. If you do not know what Cash Flow is, never mind. Simply explained, it is basically how much money comes in and how much money goes out from your pocket and bank accounts. Money comes in is income, money goes out is expense. More money coming in than going out means you have a positive Cash Flow (very good!) If you have less money coming in than going out, it means you have negative Cash Flow (problem!)

If you do not have an income, your pocket and bank account will deplete. You have negative Cash Flow (CF). You must try to reduce the rate of depleting. Since there is no income, the only way to slow down depletion is to reduce expenses.

Here are steps to reduce expenses:

1. List down in detail all the expenses and classify them into things you pay daily, monthly and yearly. You must include all expenses like food (break down into breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, snacks), transportation (husband, wife, children, public & car loan, gasoline/petrol, taxes, services), phone bill, Internet bill, Credit Card Bills, power, water, gas, home mortgage or rental, TV, subscriptions, childcare, school fees (itemised), money to parent (in detail), donations etc.

2. Sum up all the expenses that you paid daily into monthly figures by estimating how much you would be paying every month.

3. Divide the yearly expenses by 12.

4. Now you have your itemised monthly expenses. You sort them in descending order. That is, the highest goes to the top.

With that you will be able to see clearly what to cut. The rule of thumb is to cut the nice to have items like Cable TV subscription, movie, ice cream, restaraunts, beer (alcohol), holidays, etc. Depending on which country you live in you may sell your car. In some countries, having an old car is better than public transport. If that is a big expense, you get rid of it. You can always buy back a better car when you have better income. Here is what I did. I sold off my condominium that I was paying mortgage (over $2,000 per month). The rental income is less $1,000. So, my CF improved by $1,000. The interest amount was around $1,300 per month. So, this is money losing business, no point keeping anyway. Certainly, I held back buying my digital camera (I drop the old one on the floor and not working anymore.) I may buy back the digital camera if I really need it for my Internet Business.

After going through this exercise, you may be able to cut your expenses by 20-30%. Now, if that is not enough, you may squeeze more out of it. For example, talk to your bank to re-structure your mortgage. Talk to your insurer to change the payment scheme. Cut down the nice-to-have courses for your children or hold back for awhile. Teach your children instead of sending them to tuitors.

Remember: Accept the Reality. But keep your spirit up by having FAITH! (survival skill #1)

Survival Skill Number 4: Managing Your Expenses.

Your Finances

The first thing to take control is the Financials. When you are faced with challenges in your income side of the equation, you certainly need to look at the expense side to balance if off.

The last few topics I talked about were FAITH, THINK & QUICK INCOME. Yes, you must have faith. Once you lose faith, you lose everyting. You need to really think of your next step of action. One urgent step is to control your finances. Next step is to decide to be an employee or to seek out to be self employed or start a new business.

Let focus on the finances now. While most people may not practise it. It is important that you have a Income Statement or Profit & Loss statement. In this case, if you are out of job, you Income Statement is one sided. Only expenses.

So, now you need to look into your expenses. You need to list down in detail what are you monthly expenses. All the daily and yearly payments will be summarised or pro-rated into monthly expenses for easy management. Daily expenses are summed up and average value is use. These includes housing payments, transportation, food, school fees, insurance, utilities, taxes, and all other expenses.

After summing up the monthly expenses, using the amount of cash you have, you will able to work out your wealth indicator. That is how many months you can survive with your current cash you have. With that, you will be able to know your own position.

After doing this exercise, you will be able to know what to cut when you need to.

So, the Urgent thing to do is to develop survival skill number four: MANAGING YOUR EXPENSES!

Who says being retrenched is not stressful. It certainly is stressful. But with faith and doing appropriate actions, you will get to where you are.

Survival Skill Number Four: Managing Your Expenses.