5 Best Ways to Pay Off Your Credit Card Debts

Credit card – being one of the main contributors to increase household debt among Malaysians have become an obvious debt trap. Many are struggling to escape their credit card debt and have mostly failed to come out of it being debt-free soonest possible.

As we seek for the best advice to help us reducing our debts, we tend to get overwhelmed by the amount of information accessible to us. There are many tips and advice on ways to clear off debts from personal finance blogs you’re reading to those given by your friends or family members. This load of information might lead to confusion and you’ll end up not getting the much needed advise you’ve been searching for.

However, we believe that if you’re following the right advice and are willing to make major changes to your financial situation, being debt-free is a possibility worth striving for. Check out our five best ways to paying off your credit card debts and learn how you could apply them on to your monthly financial arrangements.

Cut down your multiple credit cards to one – If you have more than one credit card, it’s time to thrash away the rest and stick to only one. Knowing that you don’t have as many credit card as you initially do will decrease your dependence on the other cards hence stopping you from spending more than you should each month.

Pay more than the minimum – If you have the habit of paying only the minimum required each month, you’re not going to make any progress at clearing off your credit card debt anytime soon. With the usual minimum rate being around 2% to 3% of the outstanding balance, minimum payment commitment will only prolongs your struggle. Always remember, this is the thing the banks want you to do – taking longer time to repay the charges hence allowing them to make more money on higher interest. You’re basically at the losing end if you keep on paying the minimum. There’s definitely no better time than now to start strategising, even that requires some major sacrifices on your monthly financial plan to meet this needs.

Do a balance transfer – If you begin to rack up debt on a high-interest credit card, transferring the outstanding balance to another card with a lower interest rate through the process called balance transfer could be one of the wisest things to do. Balance transfers could help you pay less as many banks or credit card issuers offer a 0% period on balance transfer that could save you a lot of money on interest alone. It’s one way to clear existing debts and allow you to organise your finances by combining all of your outstanding balances into one.

Use the Snowball Method – The debt-snowball method popularised by financial advisor Dave Ramsey suggests paying off credit cards in order of lowest balance to highest balance, regardless of interest rate. This method allows you to pay off small credit cards quickly, giving you that much-needed motivational boost that will fuel the rest of your debt payoff plan.

Use your savings – Say your debt is already overwhelming and it seems impossible to fork out your monthly earning to clear the debt off, you might want to look at the option of using your savings for debt reduction. We are not suggesting for you to make use of your entire savings and leave it completely dry but instead we highly recommend having at least RM 1,000 of emergency fund out of the savings that you could utilise.

CompareHero is the leading Malaysian financial comparison platform, aimed at helping Malaysians save time and money. Visit CompareHero here.

9 Tips For Growing A Successful Business

By Chris Seabury

To succeed in business today, you need to be flexible and have good planning and organizational skills. Many people start a business thinking that they'll turn on their computers or open their doors and start making money - only to find that making money in a business is much more difficult than they thought. You can avoid this in your business ventures by taking your time and planning out all the necessary steps you need to reach to achieve success. Read on to find out how.

1. Get OrganizedTo be successful in business you need to be organized. Organization will help you complete tasks and stay on top of things to be done. A good way to do this is to create a to-do list each day - as you complete each item, check it off your list. This will ensure that you're not forgetting anything and you're completing all the tasks that are essential to the survival of your business.

2. Keep Detailed RecordsAll successful businesses keep detailed records. By keeping detailed records, you'll know where the business stands financially and what potential challenges you could be facing. Just knowing this gives you time to create strategies to overcome the obstacles that can prevent you from being successful and growing your business.

3. Analyze Your CompetitionCompetition breeds the best results. To be successful, you can't be afraid to study and learn from your competitors. After all, they may be doing something right that you can implement in your business to make more money.

4. Understand the Risks and RewardsThe key to being successful is taking calculated risks to help your business grow. A good question to ask is "What's the downside?" If you can answer this question, then you know what the worst-case scenario is. This knowledge will allow you to take the kinds of calculated risks that can generate tremendous rewards for your business.

5. Be Creative

Always be looking for ways to improve your business and to make it stand out from the competition. Recognize that you don't know everything and be open to new ideas and new approaches to your business.

6. Stay FocusedThe old saying that "Rome was not built in a day" applies here. Just because you open a business doesn't mean that you're going to immediately start making money. It takes time to let people know who you are, so stay focused on achieving your short-term goals and give the rest time to come together on its own.

7. Prepare to Make SacrificesThe lead-up to starting a business is hard work, but after you open your doors, your work has just begun. In many cases, you have to put in more time than you would if you were working for someone else. In turn, you have to make sacrifices, such as spending less time with family and friends in order to be successful.

8. Provide Great ServiceThere are many successful businesses that forget that providing great customer service is important. If you provide better service for your customers, they'll be more inclined to come to you the next time they need something instead of going to your competition.

9. Be ConsistentConsistency is key component to making money in business. You have to consistently keep doing the things necessary to be successful day in and day out. This will create long-term positive habits that will help you make money over the long term.

ConclusionStarting and running and running a successful business can be rewarding and challenging. Success requires focus, discipline and perseverance. However, success will not come over night - it requires a long-term focus and that you remain consistent in challenging environments.

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Warren Buffett Tells You How to Turn $40 Into $10 Million

By Patrick Morris 

Warren Buffett is perhaps the greatest investor of all time, and he has a simple solution that could help an individual turn $40 into $10 million.

A few years ago, Berkshire Hathaway CEO and Chairman Warren Buffett spoke about one of his favorite companies, Coca-Cola, and how after dividends, stock splits, and patient reinvestment, someone who bought just $40 worth of the company's stock when it went public in 1919 would now have more than $5 million.  

Source: Coca-Cola.

Yet in April 2012, when the board of directors proposed a stock split of the beloved soft-drink manufacturer, that figure was updated and the company noted that original $40 would now be worth $9.8 million. A little back-of-the-envelope math of the total return of Coke since May 2012 would mean that $9.8 million is now worth about $10.8 million.

The power of patienceI know that $40 in 1919 is very different from $40 today. However, even after factoring for inflation, it turns out to be $540 in today's money. Put differently, would you rather have an Xbox One, or almost $11 million?

But the thing is, it isn't even as though an investment in Coca-Cola was a no-brainer at that point, or in the near century since then. Sugar prices were rising. World War I had just ended a year prior. The Great Depression happened a few years later. World War II resulted in sugar rationing. And there have been countless other things over the past 100 years that would cause someone to question whether their money should be in stocks, much less one of a consumer-goods company like Coca-Cola.

The dangers of timing
Yet as Buffett has noted continually, it's terribly dangerous to attempt to time the market:

"With a wonderful business, you can figure out what will happen; you can't figure out when it will happen. You don't want to focus on when, you want to focus on what. If you're right about what, you don't have to worry about when" 

So often investors are told they must attempt to time the market, and begin investing when the market is on the rise, and sell when the market is falling.

This type of technical analysis of watching stock movements and buying based on how the prices fluctuate over 200-day moving averages or other seemingly arbitrary fluctuations often receives a lot of media attention, but it has been proved to simply be no better than random chance. 

Investing for the long termIndividuals need to see that investing is not like placing a wager on the 49ers to cover the spread against the Cowboys, but instead it's buying a tangible piece of a business.

It is absolutely important to understand the relative price you are paying for that business, but what isn't important is attempting to understand whether you're buying in at the "right time," as that is so often just an arbitrary imagination.

In Buffett's own words, "if you're right about the business, you'll make a lot of money," so don't bother about attempting to buy stocks based on how their stock charts have looked over the past 200 days. Instead always remember that "it's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price."

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