Save Money on your Superannuation Investments

There is an interesting new service available from a recently launched company All My Funds which has potential to save considerable amounts of money. There are many hidden costs that can be associated with superannuation investments and insurance. For a set fee of $275 you can get a SOA (statement of advice) that compares your particular superannuation fund with other similar superannuation funds. Although the comparison funds are not specific recommendations, the information would indicate if your fund is costing you too much in fees and charges. A sample of how this report would look is provided on the AllMyFunds.com website.

The other way that All My Funds could save you money is via their subscription service of $385 pa. For this annual fee you will get a rebate of contribution fees (up to 5%), annual trailing commisions (up to 1% per annum) and life insurance commissions (30+% of premiums). Often a superannuation fund will either pay fees and annual trails to a 'financial advisor' that was nominated when you joined the fund (even if you get no follow-up advice), or whill keep this fee themselves if you invested directly with a superannuation fund and don't have an advisor. By using the rebate service you could get rebates worth more than the annual fee paid to All My Funds.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

NuWire Investor Site

NuWire Investor has a website www.nuwireinvestor.com that offers free investment information. The website is attractive and easy to navigate, but the content scope is fairly restricted - concentrating on US and International real estate and some franchising.

The most interesting article I saw there was "Volatility Kills Compound Interest" which showed an example of six cases where the investment returns had an arithmetic average return of 6.00% over three years, but the more volatile the returns the lower the Averaged compounded return became.

Another interesting article on the site is "Investor Risk vs. Reward" which covers the relationship between risk (volality) and expected return, and why some risk must be accepted in an investment portfolio in order to achieve reasonable returns.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Movie Preview: The Bug

It's a bit hard to do a review of a movie you haven't seen yet, but the new bug movie from Lionsgate Films looks interesting. The two posters I've seen (shown below) are attractive, with the black and white one having a vaguely Hitchcock feel about, with a reasonably subtly visual reference to a bug in the portrait of Ashley Judd, who stars in the bug movie. I'm less enticed by the second poster image, as the double exposure human face looks more evocative of a ghost movie than a sci-fi/horror flick.

The movie trailer on YouTube suggests that this movie will be an eerie combination of the alien invasion, psychotic killer and plague movie genres. As a great fan of movies such as Alien, The Blob, and similar sci-fi horror movies I'm sure I'll enjoy watching this movie. However, I'll most likely take my usual option of waiting until the movie gets released onto DVD rental, and then buying an ex-rental DVD to watch at home and add to my collection. I'm not sure that DW will like the movie - although she quite enjoyed the remake of War of The Worlds, she only watches horror movies when I'm sitting close by (to be grabbed during the scary bits). It also doesn't look like the sort of movie that I'll let DS1 watch. He got through War of The Worlds without any problems (it seems that the vapourising of people was too detached from the everyday to be frightening for a six year old), but he gets scared and refuses to watch parts of Harry Potter movies. I definitely think this sort of atmospheric horror movie would be unsuitable for young kids (hence the R-rating), but I'm sure most teenagers would think its a hoot.







Enough Wealth

Pay Per Post is buying Company "X"

In yet another mysterious (ie. publicity seeking) pre-event announcement, Pay Per Post - the most admired provider of online ads in the known universe - has announced that next week they will announce that they've bought another company. Hopefully it is a sensible match for their current online advertising business - perhaps Blogsvertise, ReviewMe or a similar company (then again, I'm not sure which companies may already own each other). In terms of impact on bloggers I can only hope that this will mean additional avenues for monetizing blogs. It would also be nice if the opportunities this acquisition opens up are suitable for the smaller blogs - these are the ones with small, niche readerships, or perhaps are just starting out. At the moment the best advertising opportunities are, of course, only available to the more popular blogs with large numbers of readers. But it is the smaller blogs that would benefit most from the advertising revenue. I don't mind payment being proportional to readership, but at the moment smaller blogs are completely excluded from many advertising offers. Rather than paying flat rates (which makes small blogs unattractive to advertisers), perhaps they could introduce a pay-per-view system for smaller blogs to be able to take up offers that would normally not be available to them at all.

Pay Per Post Mystery News

There's something mysterious in the works at PayPerPost (you know, the universe's most popular online advertising business) - a big announcement is due out in the next few weeks and I think I know what it is. Free shares in PPP at their IPO. Yes, you heard it here first - bloggers who "work" for PPP will get a stake in the company for all their hard work getting it off to such a great start... Well, I'd like to think thats going to be the "big announcement" - the last one of introducing opportunity requirements (so that the more lucrative posts were only available to blogs with loads of traffic) simply meant that there's almost nothing listed on PPP that I can post about these days ;) So, maybe the big news is that only blogs with a pagerank of 4+ can join, or perhaps you'll need an Alexa score of less than 1,000 to qualify for any opportunities.

Seriously though, I'd like the big news to be an upgrade of their server hardware - at the moment it can take ages to log in to my PPP account. I really can't understand why this would be so as they're aren't really all that many members as far as I can tell.

On the other hand, I can't complain too much about PPP - I've earned over USD$200 from them, safely paid in to my PayPal account and transferred out into my online savings account, so if nothing else they've help pay for my domain name registration and pfblogs "friend" fee for the next several years!



Enough Wealth

Blog Monetization: Review My Post

Well, I got very confused. According to the "opportunity" on PayPerPost, there is a new PPP Affiliate program the builds traffic and links called "Review My Post". Unfortunately when I followed the instructions provided (ie. clicking on the relevant link in the blogger interface and then finding and selecting "review my post" to get details of the opportunity.) I couldn't for the life of me find anything in the blogger dashboard that looked like "Affiliate Tools". I even checked the help page in blogger and did a search on the terms "Affiliate Tools" and "Review My Posts". So, for an exciting new program that is supposed to build traffic it had gotten off to a rocky start.

It was only after wasting time searching my blogger account screens for a while that I went back to the PPP screen and noticed that there is a "Affiliate Tools" link sitting right there! D'Oh!

PPP call their interface the "Blogger Dashboard" - it goes to show how confusing it is having a google blogging service being called "blogger" at the same time other people use the term "blogger" in it's more generic sense.

Anyhow.... I eventually found the "Affiliate Tools" and followed the link to the "Review My Post" section. Apparently the way this will work is that by including a special link at the end of a post (the blurb says *EVERY* posts - but I assume putting this link at the end of each and every post is not actually a condition of this new process working) - if someone clicks on this link and joins PPP I'll get a referral fee. The new twist is that the new member will then also get a "personalised" opportunity to make a paid post ($7.50) about one of my posts - which should give me the added bonus of getting an extra link, and the new member an easy $7.50.

I'll start adding the new html link to my posts (see below) and see if it does anything spectacular... I'll let you know how it works out.

ps. I'm reasonably happy with PPP so far - I've been only doing around 1 PPP post per week as I only select opportunities that are relevant to this blog's theme. Plus there are getting to be more restrictions by advertisers around page rank of blogs that can do paid posts. Yet I've still managed to get paid nearly $200 so far, which covers off my hosting and pfblogs gold membership fee. It is also a lot more than I've generated via Amazon affiliate links or Blog Ads.

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My use of home equity for investing

As previously discussed, we bought an investment property in 1999, just when the "boom" in Sydney real estate took off. The property cost just over $400K, and we took out a standard 25-year variable rate mortgage. The property appreciated significantly until 2003, and is now valued over $700K, so we have significant equity in that property. As loan interest on your own home loan isn't tax deductible in Australia (but you don't pay any CGT when you sell it either), but loan interest on investment loans is, we recently converted the loan to a fixed rate 5-year mortgage, so we could maximise payments off our home loan instead. At the same time I also arranged to make use of the available equity via a Home Equity Loan and I'm investing the funds over a period of 18 months a portfolio of US stocks, selected from candidate companies listed on the magic formula investing website. This strategy allows you to put your home equity to work as an investment, but, of course, is fairly high risk so is not suitable for all investors. It will pay off handsomely though if my US stock portfolio performs as well as the long-term average for the S&P-500 and interest rates on my home equity loan average out less than this rate of return. As a bonus, the dividends from the US stocks are fairly low compared to the interest on the home equity loan, and the difference can be claimed as a deduction on my personal tax return. As long-term capital gains in Australia are taxed at half your normal marginal tax rate, this means that I am basically able to reduce the tax paid at marginal rates (up to 48%) on my wage income, and will instead pay CGT at half the marginal rates (ie. up to 24%), assuming I eventually sell the stocks at a profit.

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Budgeting for Small Business

Just as it is important for your personal finances, when your running a small business it's vital to establish and monitor your business budget. As the old saying goes, "people don't plan to fail - they just fail to plan". IncParadise.com lists the four most important actions when monitoring your budget:
1. Set targets
2. Keep accurate books
3. Check how your tracking each month
4. Monitor your cash flow

The IncParadise.com Small business blog has lots of other interesting articles and news relevant to small business. Recent post topics include:

    * Growing Popularity of Internet Fax
    * Extended Deployments Hurting Small Businesses
    * Common Branding Mistakes
    * Testimonial for Robert Arnal from Citibank
    * New Small Business Information Website
    * Failure is NOT an Option
    * Small Business Tax Help
    * The Best Bank For Small Businesses
    * Monitoring Your Budget
    * Small business managers and owners working 24/7
    * Small Business Hiring Up
    * Keeping it Legal
    * Using Your Workforce Effectively
    * Tax Law Changes for Business in 2007
    * It’s the little things tucked away

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