Journal of Finance and Accounting – TanasiJournal

Archive for the ‘Invesment’ Category

Even though planning your estate isn’t an enjoyable job it’s necessary so that you can efficiently and successfully transfer all of your assets to those you leave behind. With a bit of careful planning, your heirs can avoid having to pay estate taxes and federal taxes on your assets. As well, a well planned estate avoids confusion for your loved ones.

Still, with all the advantages of estate planning, many people make a great many mistakes in the process. The most common mistake when it comes to estate planning is not getting around to doing it at all. Make sure that you take the time to plan at least the financial portion of your estate so that you leave your loved ones behind with some amount of security. The following seven mistakes often put families into great difficulty after a loved one’s passing.

1. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that estate planning is just for the rich. This is completely false as planning your estate is essential for anyone who has any amount of assets to leave behind. Many people don’t realize that their estate is as large as it really is, especially when they fail to take into account the assets from their home.

2. Remember to update your will and to review it at least once every two years. Factors that can change information about your beneficiaries include deaths, divorce, birth, and adoption. As your family structure changes so does the change in your assets and who you want to leave them to.

3. Don’t assume that taxes paid on your assets are set in stone. Talk to your financial planner about ways that your beneficiaries can avoid paying taxes on your assets. There are several strategies for tax planning so that you can minimize taxes or avoid them altogether.

4. All of your financial papers should be in order so that it’s easy for someone to find them. Make sure that one of your loved ones has information on where to find the papers necessary for planning after your death.

5. Don’t leave everything to your partner. When you leave all of your assets to your spouse you are in reality sacrificing their portion of the benefit. You’ll get an estate tax credit but will forfeit part of this if your spouse is your only beneficiary.

6. Ensure that your children are well planned for. Many people take a lot of time deciding what to do with their assets and forget that they need to appoint guardianship for their children. There are many details to take into consideration when it comes to guardianship.

7. If you don’t have a financial advisor, get one. Financial Planners and Advisors are trained intimately in these matters and can provide asset protection well above whatever fees they may charge. If you need help selecting the right financial advisor, get the Financial Advisor Report.

The above mistakes are common when people are planning their estate. Take the time to plan for your death even though you think that you have years before it becomes an issue. The key to successful estate planning is being prepared.

Imagine what you could learn from over 500 articles based around internet marketing, business and finance, home business, legal matter, blogging, copywriting, email marketing, PPC, RSS, search engines, website promotion and more and what could this do for your business?

1. How to Turn an Idea into $100,000

Do you ever wonder why some people seem to get all the lucky breaks in business while others struggle to barely get by? They seem to be in the right place at the right time.

Fact is, maybe they’re not at the right place at the right time; maybe they just know how to make things “happen.”

As a business advisor I often see people begin and end a business before they have given it a chance to grow. For some reason, they seem to think that all they have to do is have a product or service to sell and the rest magically takes care of itself.

Nothing could be further from the truth. For any business to succeed there are steps that must be taken.

2. The Steps from Product Idea to Product Success

Michelangelo once said that his statue of David was embedded in the block of marble and he merely chipped away the edges to reveal it. Is your product idea inside your mind just waiting to come alive? Or, is your product already formed and you need only to smooth out the edges?

Using my Market-Step process your idea will come to life as we progress in the following steps from idea to launch:
1. Self-Evaluation
2. Concept Evaluation
3. Prototype Evaluation
4. Product and Market Planning
5. Product Development and Marketing Tactics
6. Product Launch, Marketing and Selling
Please use this roadmap as a navigational tool to guide and monitor your progress.

3. Is This the PR You Thought You Were Getting?

You know, where you do something positive about the behaviors of those outside audiences that MOST affect your organization? And where you do so by persuading those important external folks to your way of thinking, then move them to take actions that help your department, division or subsidiary succeed?

Yes, that’s right, it’s where you use the fundamental premise of public relations to produce external stakeholder behavior change – the kind that leads directly to achieving your managerial objectives.

What it boils down to is
(1) your public relations effort must involve more than special events, brochures and news releases if you really want to get your money’s worth, and
(2), the right PR really CAN alter individual perception and lead to changed behaviors that help you succeed!

4. How to Easily Increase Your Profits

Do you remember the last time you went into a shop and the person ‘serving’ raced over to you, greeted you with a lovely smile, heaps of enthusiasm and said, “Welcome to our store, what can I help you with today?” And then listened attentively to what you had to say?

Doesn’t happen very often does it? In fact, while I was writing this, I couldn’t recall when I had experienced it. I’m sure I must have yet it would have been so long ago, I can’t remember.

Let me tell you what happened this week…
I belong to a well-known trade exchange which I have found very useful for my business. I wanted to purchase a suitcase from a particular store which usually takes trade dollars.

From time-time the store will limit the use of trade dollars if they have reached their maximum for the month. Anyhow I quickly discovered this wasn’t going to be my lucky day.

5. A Simple Formula for Success

Leaders in the business world need public relations big time, and they show it every day.

How? By staying in touch with their most important external audiences and by carefully monitoring their perceptions about the company, audience member feelings about hot topics at issue, and the behaviors that inevitably follow.

Could there be an angle here for your business?

What I mean is, once you interact with, then learn what that key target audience of yours believes about you and your organization, a corrective public relations goal – a specific behavior change — can be established.

Which then requires that you identify a strategy. There are just three choices here, create opinion where none exists, change existing opinion, or reinforce it.

6. Attracting Clients With Ease

Whether you are already running your own business, or still thinking about starting your own business, I suspect that deep down you know you have gifts and talents that can really make a difference to others.

In an ideal world, you’d spend the majority of time doing the work you love to do, with a steady stream of clients knocking at your door as and when you want them. The reality, however, can be somewhat different, and the whole process of finding new business can be a time consuming challenge full of uncertainty.

Some would be entrepreneurs are so intimidated by the idea of finding clients that they never put their dreams into action. Others start promising businesses, yet give up disillusioned by the frustrating lack of clients. Some die-hards persist, but at great emotional and financial cost as the uncertainty about attracting and maintaining clients takes its toll.

Just imagine! You can use these articles to build, promote, advertise, write articles, newsletters, build autoresponder messages and much, much more for your business. These articles are loaded with good keywords for search engine rankings and they are yours for the taking as long as you leave the resource boxes in tact. If you want to read the rest of the articles above and to read more about internet marketing, than this is the place to do it!

Steve Pike, is a internet infopreneur and author who is interested in the internet marketing world. At the age of 49, he has become interested in writing, selling online, and managing online businesses:

Finding a bargain investment property on paper is only half of the process of property investment. The other half of real estate investing is going down to the property to examine the real estate investment property physically for defects either in terms of the construction and legal title and other liens that can be on the property. You do not want to spend lots of legal costs later to undo the bad lemon you bought into. This article will highlight five possible things to consider when searching for your next investment property.

Firstly, unless you find a property that is really run down and you want to tear it down to its foundations, you want to look out for properties that might have potential electrical and water piping problems. The reason why this is critical is that, wiring and water piping is usually hidden behind walls and other furniture fixtures and repairing them can be a very costly affair since you have to hack into the walls and run the piping and wiring if the problem is very serious. If you are new to property investing try to bring a electrical engineer along with you when you are doing some property inspection.

Secondly, foundation problems are usually harder to spot. When walking around the property, look for cracks appearing at the side of the house and the foundation that goes into the ground. Look for large unusual holes found at the side of the property and cracks on the exterior paint of the building. You might want to bring a civil engineer and a contractor along to figure out how much it would cost to fix the property if you suspect the repairs involved will be substantial. You can also bring them along to give a “grim estimate” to the house owner and bring down the cost of the property.

Thirdly, roofing problems can be a persistent nightmare to you and your potential tenant if you are purchasing the real estate for tenancy purposes. When inspecting the house, look around the ceiling near the windows and around the edges of the walls to look for new paint or yellow spots or cracks with water in them. Most sellers would be smart enough to eliminate the water bubbles after a heavy rain when trying to sell the property, but it is always important to figure out if there is a major leaking roof which might cost you are lot into repairing it. Use this defect to negotiate the price of the property further if you are interested in the property.

Fourthly, another reason why the investment property in question might be a bargain might be because there are legal problems associated with it. Common ones include, multiple owners that cannot agree whether to sell or not. Litigation here would be futile and you should avoid such property once you learn about it.

Another problem might be a lack of clean title. Did you know that the seller can be selling you only the building without the land or maybe there are existing tax liens on your property or some other liens that can prevent you from getting good title to the property? Spending some time chatting with a reliable real estate attorney to learn about common real estate problems in your area can save you lots of legal problems later.

Fifthly, bankruptcy of your seller or one of the part owners of your real estate may depending on the legal proceedings of your state affect your ability to transfer title quickly. Most states make it a requirement that the receiver of the bankrupt has to agree so pay careful attention to the bankruptcy legislation of your state. That being said, sometimes the banks are willing to sell you at a bargain so as to recover the bad debts quickly so do your homework before purchasing such an investment property.

In conclusion, these five pointers can be used as a starting point for you to evaluate your property investment. Spend some time to think rationally about the properties that you have seen and see if they have any of the above flaws and consider if you want to continue purchasing them and whether the costs that you may incur in fixing them will justify the discount of the property to the market value. Above all, take massive action today and pursue your property investment dreams.