Financial lessons learned

Here are lessons learned from my gained financial discipline all over the previous couple of months.
- Reducing the cash withdrawing and keeping the bulk of money as long as possible in the bank. This by itself is helpful in knowing the financial situation and reduce the risk of possessing cash and utilizing the banking fees in a more efficient ways.
- Increasing the dependency on the debit and credit card and particularly the debit card to capture expenses data and to reduce the budgeting time.
- Ceiling my monthly expenses by firstly determining expenses threshold and the target savings within the whole capital investment plan.
- Analyze the monthly budget by charting the expenses vs savings vs investments.
- Adding the total asset in monthly bases in the budget to check how the budget is affecting the total wealth.
- Adjusting the starting balance in the beginning of the year in the budget.
- Linking directly the budget to the bank statement spreadsheet and the asset spreadsheet.
- Leverage the spendings in more valuable and profitable stuff which justifies the value for money.
- Setting objectives for the expenses vs savings vs investments.
- Increase the intellectual and productive content in the expenses items against the consumables like outings, and phone bills.
- Improve the intelligent and wise spendings on more profitable items and personal development items and products rather than the consumables like buying books instead of going to restaurant or cinema or buying useful gadget instead of some shopping items.
- Expenses optimization and smart spendings objectives.
- apply Lean 6 Sigma in achieving some tasks by the better resources planning as cost reduction method.



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A financial resolution: improving the data capture of my spendings

I need to put more effort and discipline in capturing the all budgetary data to know exactly my cash flow.
I strongly believe that knowing my my spendings cash flow and getting detailed as possible monthly budget data will bring valuable information about my spendings habits and the saving opportunity and the projection of the savings.
It is essential information about the one's life and it should be known.
Any life planning also has to considered this essential spendings data.
I will continue urge my wife to use the credit and debit cards to have the shopping record from the online banking.
I will continue collecting the receipts to track the spendings and record them in the budget spreadsheet.
My objective to reduce the gap in the monthly balance to be a very narrow margin.
I will add another column for the gap between the income and the expenses to measure the performance of my spendings data capture and recording.
So If I will earn 100 and I found that I spent 50 and 30 left in the bank that means I have 20 as an unrecorded in the budget which should be reduce gradually by improving the data capturing and recording.
Definitely the credit and debit payment and the online banking will totally ease and facilitate this task.
As usual my wife will need a little push to follow this requirement and to reduce the cash withdraw against the plastic money spendings.
Any investment planning should be based on this valuable expenses data. That's why the first step in the financial planning and in any proper investment planning or personal finances discipline is to have well documented budget records.
I know that iPhone apps has one of the application to track the expenses. I will think about utilizing more the cell phone to capture the spendings data.
The next stage will be the full analysis of these captured data and to convert it to meaningful information about our spendings habits and our life style and to take the appropriate actions and decisions to improve that.

The journey from the imperfect to the perfect

I developed since a considerable time a sort of procedure in achieving things.
It is depends mainly on the gradual improvement and development of the product or the process.
Whenever I want to initiate a new task or produce something or initiate a new process, I start it in the very rudimentary form.
This rudimentary form is usually very immature and is considered as a very early form of the desired product.
I use this early form as the alpha experimenting stage and the practice area.
It is very useful and important stage because this real life experiment will give me the lessons learned to improve the product or the process.
This version 1.0 is my learning and practice area and is heavily subjected to my observation and my experimenting.
I applied this evolutionary approach and continuous improvement process in my personal and professional life and it was very effective in encouraging me to initiate a lot of tasks and processes and produce a lot of products which I was totally ignorant about.
This has represented a drastic change in my perspective toward achieving the tasks where my previous perspective was either the perfect achievement or nothing.
Missing some elements required for the perfect achievement was hindering me from doing it. Eventually I was ending up was doing nothing.
I gradually changed my mind by the partial achievement of the task as long as it is divisible or can be partially done.
This approach was matured over time and I gained valuable experience in developing these prototypes to mature products.
The imperfect product or the process was continuously improved by the time and going through very productive and effective maturation process and my learning curve was gradually in the increasing trend.
The imperfect was in exciting transition stage to the perfect or near perfect product.

empowering my blogging and improving its quality

I want to improve the quality of my blogging and enrich it is expressive power by increasing the image content and drawings.
I was painting since a long time ago but when I was so busy with the life stream I didn't draw since then.
I want to recover back this hobby and associate it with the blogging where both will increase my power to expression.
I want to increase the value of my blogging by exploring the world using more active and thinking mind.

Life planning

On conjunction with the previous post about the planning, I started since one month ago to plan through this Excel spreadsheet for my life key milestones and objectives.
I categorized the objectives to the following groups:
-Career
-Academic
-Family
-Financial
-Health
-Intellectual Objectives.
Each set has a section in this spreadsheet.
For the time being, the key milestones are stated. I'm planning to extend them to include the rest of my expected life till the retirement and post the retirement.
This has helped me significantly to think about the mid-run and long-run objectives and planning for my life.
I will consolidate more defined plan for the coming three to five years followed by life time plan.
As any task or plan I'm doing, this plan and objectives will be matured and developed by time.
the planned period will be 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years till it include the whole life span.
Panning for the life is the most important task one can do it has the power to change the one's perspective to the whole life and the point of being in life and what the one wants to do in this given time span.
The long run vision is one of the key signal about the visionary persons and it will be great source of wisdom.
I was totally short sighted and stricken randomly and without any self determination by the fate events from event to another in an objective-less and plan-less life.
I was totally passive and reacting only to the urgent needs without long sighted vision.
This life planning has triggered and urged me to raise the big question in life about the mission and vision of being in life and what and where I want to be in the coming years to go.
Planning as a skill and its profound impact on the life is continually developed by going through all these real life exercises.
Now I've objectives and better understanding about these objectives. Previously, I didn't have objectives at all.
Now I'm developing continuously these objectives and categorizing them in relevant sets.
These objectives will include the desired career achievements, and academic degrees, financial objectives, investments, knowledge and intellectual objectives, and even innovations and patents as ultimate objectives.

Planning

There are different scales and levels of planning. I'm working in developing the planning in my personal life at different levels to be well disciplined and well planned person. Starting from the day to day planning by following task planner and calendar. I need to work more on this daily planning and to do task list to be smartly organized. It is a potential room of development. Notes are working as reminder and I want to associate them in my daily plan where this will micro-manage my daily plan and will fit the to do tasks and notes in time context within my daily responsibilities.
The another level of planning is addressing the key milestones on the mid-run and within the coming 3 to 5 years. For example I want to achieve the financial security in the coming 3 years and I want to initiate and finish my Master within the coming two years in addition to exploring the chance of initiating my own business in the upcoming year. All these objectives are planned in my life milestone spreadsheet where it arranges the mid run objectives and the planning for them.
It will be extended also to include the long run objectives like the near retirement stage and the career life and the educational plan for the kids and the above 50 stage and beyond.
Life insurance can provide useful lessons regarding this long run planning and life planning.

Resources management

I've a lot of concerns about how my company is managing the human resources. Sometimes their main objective is retaining the resources and taking decisions which are not healthy for the business needs to meet their resources retention objectives. Retention should be justified by optimizing and maximizing the return on head and the proportionality between the head count and the revenue and reducing the head count by leveraging the technology and the business intelligence.
Increasing the revenue per head should be one of the essential objective for any organization by following smarter business practices and de-bottlenecking the business processes.
Investing in the training and development and the professional task delegations should contribute directly also in the increase of the individual and team productivity and revenue per head.