Personal Money Tips

I came to this conclusion. Cash is no longer an asset! Yeah, you read correctly. With inflation rearing its head rather alarmingly, prices of almost everything has gone up. I’ve noticed something happening over the past few months and wonder whether cash can still be considered an asset.

When I say cash, I mean anything that’s liquid that gives you very low return.

If you define an asset as something that will either :

• grow in value over time, or
• produce an income or throw off interest,

then, I have to say that cash is no longer an asset. It depreciates like heck, interest from FD or savings account (where I live anyway, is peanuts). Yeah, some of you lucky souls out there have online banks available, I don’t.

There is not much motivation to hang on to cash. Looking at the way things are heading, there’s limited option to grow your money. Without getting into sophisticated investments like collectible, it leaves me with properly selected real estate, value stocks and some mutual funds.

In continuation of what I wrote several days ago about hanging out with the right group of people. What happened just proves the point even more.

I went to a sales convention today. Well, it wasn’t exactly a convention since there were briefings and updates and they only brought in a speaker who has done well from within the company. The thing about sales meeting is I often wondered about the effectiveness of such meetings. Sure the updates and company strategy is good. Knowing that your principal company has a direction to deal with current issues and challenges that’s coming allows us to prepare.

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Next in line in “a so called series” to manage my own finances better this year, I figured a good way is to simplify them. As I keyed in my own data into Money Manager Ex, I realized I had too many accounts all over the place. I mean literally. Some of my accounts I opened when I was in university, some 30 km from where I currently stay.

I have a bank account I opened when I started my first job, then my second, and third. Plus I had CD at a branch when I lived with my parents. By the way, they are across town from where I lived. I’m sure you get the picture and very likely, you’ll probably are in the similar situation. Oh, when I got married, my wife bugged me to open a joint account near where we live, and that is another account, I almost forgot to mention. Then there are the credit cards and stock broking account, which I have two.

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