Get Financially Fit!

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According to government statistics, the Core Price Index (a measure of broad inflation) is up only 4.0% over the last year (see March 2008 report from the Bureau of labor statistics).   In my life I am finding a disconnect between this low reported rate of inflation and a wide variety of good and services such as gas, groceries, and restaurants.      

I have written several articles with ideas on how to Live within your means, How to Balance your Checkbook, and how to Eliminate Debt.  In this article I would like to share some ideas on how I am working to reduce expenses.

1.  Eliminate left hand turns on busy roads.  Both UPS and FedEx announced early this year that they remapped their routes to minimize left turns.  I have been trying this strategy.  I’m not sure if I’m saving money, but I can say that I have reduced the stress associated with crossing difficult roads.  The next time you are completing your errands, see if you can eliminate those difficult left turns that keep you stranded in the middle of the road.

2.  Split a meal when eating out.  American portion sizes are much to big.  My wife and I typically share meals at our favorite Mexican, Thai, and Chinese restaurants.  For example, at the Mexican restaurant we share Fajitas and order extra tortillas. 

3.  On date night, eat at home but then go out for dessert  Another trick that my wife and I do sometimes is to eat a simple meal at home (such as leftovers) and then go out for either a fun appetizer and drinks or dessert.  This is a fun way to get out and enjoy the experience of a restaurant at one-third the price.  I’ll never forget one time when we met a large group of friends at a high end bistro.  My wife and I split an appetizer and each enjoyed a glass a wine for $25 for both of us, while our friends bloated on multi course meals at over $100 per couple.  When the bill arrived, the credit cards began flying into the center of the table like playing cards in Vegas.  The looks were priceless when we simply paid with cash, bid everyone good night, and escaped into the clear night air. 

As you can tell, it’s easy to for me to think of food ideas.  What are your suggestions?

 Only through dedicated work does a man fulfill himself.
-William Carlson

We have all had the experience where we get excellent service from a waiter, waitress, or flight attendant. My challenge for you this month is to reflect on how to provide better service to your customers and achieve more fulfillment.

We all have a choice in how we approach work. We can see it a necessary hardship or we can choose to make it a fun and rewarding experience.

Here are the essentials to be a productive and fulfilled worker:
1. Choose to make work fun
2. Focus on that which is within your control
3. Get organized and productive
4. Deliver what your customer needs
5. Be reliable

Let’s get started.

Choose to make work fun
“What would it look like to have fun at work?” This is a question that a colleague named Tom taught me to ask. His enthusiasm for interacting and working with people was contagious. You always wanted to work with Tom because he complimented people, saw every challenge as an adventure, and genuinely loved to work. I asked him how he came to love work. He told me that when he was young, a coworker taught him to ask the question, what can I do to make work fun every day? When Tom was 65 our company offered a generous buy-out package. He reluctantly took it and expressed to me how he was going to miss working with his coworkers. What would make your work fun? Imagine complimenting others, seeing the challenges of the day as an adventurous journey, and making work fun with your natural gifts and talents.

Focus on that which is within your control
You have a choice on whether you focus on things that you control or things that you don’t control. When you focus on things you control you increase your effectiveness. When you focus on things you can’t control you risk becoming a complainer. Taken to an extreme a complainer can become the chronic ‘boss hater’.

When you communicate with your coworkers you can significantly affect the tone of the conversation by changing your questions. For example, instead of asking the generic How is it going? Ask, What’s going well? or what’s fun on your project? You’ll be amazed how the majority of your conversations will be positive and end in you feeling great about the conversation.

Get Organized and Focused
In my experience, getting organized and productive is one of the hardest challenges. An eye-opening book that really helped me improve significantly is Getting Things Done by David Allen. I recommend that you borrow a copy from your local library.

The strategies that David recommends are to get clutter out of your brain, maintain a simple system of physical and electronic inboxes that you empty regularly, and dealing with short tasks immediately.

A powerful principle that David advises is to reduce the clutter in your brain by not requiring your brain to track your open tasks and commitments. Keep a single to do list and reliably use your calendar. He recommends that when you create your to do list, add a column where you identify the next action step. I found his recommendation of adding your next action step for each open task to be helpful. I now schedule many things that I need to do directly in to my calendar.

I successfully implemented his strategy for emptying physical and electronic inboxes. I typically get 100 emails a day and would historically have over a 1000 emails in my inbox. For a period of time I was able to keep my work inbox near zero emails. At the moment I am struggling to get back down to zero emails as I balance many competing deadline.

A very useful recommendation is to immediately complete and close short tasks and requests. Instead of letting lots of little tasks pile up, just complete any item that takes less than 1 minute. For my job I have found that it is beneficial to complete any task immediately that takes less then 5 minutes. For a few days it felt like I was spending a lot of my time completing a lot of short tasks, but this really did reduce my sense of stress.

Deliver what your customer’s needs
I had a work experience that has changed the way that I approach my work. I had worked with a team of people for many years. We often would identify and work on improvements that we thought would help our customers. One day we got a new manager who interviewed our different customer segments. Her survey method was to ask each customer to prioritize his or her needs from 1 (most important) to 5 (5th most important). She shared the results with us and then we went to work addressing the customer’s requests in the appropriate priority. Over the course of 5 years we repeated this process every 6 months. We were able to provide some customer needs quickly, while other challenges took persistence and time to complete. In our customer’s opinion we went from being one of the worst to the best suppliers within just a couple of years. By the fifth year we were proactively developing solutions that were not needed for several years.

The key lesson that I learned from that experience was to build a relationship with your customers. Ask them how you can improve and what you are doing well. If you keep asking this question and focus on improvement you will help your customers win.

Be reliable
We all appreciate it when other people complete work and commitments by agreed upon deadline. I recommend that you make being reliable foundational to your work. Being reliable not only means delivers work on time, but also providing clear communication if you become aware that you can’t meet a deadline. You will have the most peace if you honestly let your customers, colleagues, or boss know immediately as you become aware that a delay is occurring.

Life Application
What can you do today to become more productive and fulfilled? What can you do to make your work fun? This month take on the challenge of being more productive and fulfilled in your work.
 

When we grow up we often hear that education is the best investment that we can make.   Let’s answer the following question:  Is there a benefit relative to the risk of unemployment from more education?

The United States Department of Labor details the unemployment rate as a function of eduction.  Here are unemployment statistics from March 2008. 

Education Level                                     Unemployment rate
Less than a high school diploma                      9.5%
High school graduates, no college                   5.6%
Some college or associate degree                     4.1%
Bachelor’s degree and higher                            2.1% 

Table A-4. Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment

The improvement in the unemployment rate is quite dramatic (up to 4X difference) as a person obtains more education.  The improvement from high school diploma to a bachelors degree and higher reduces the risk of unemployment by over 50%!   I think it’s important for younger people to be aware of the benefits of higher education beyond the obvious benefit of increased income.

I was talking with a friend the other day and he asked me if it was better to pay off the mortgage first or focus on retirement savings.  My personal preference is to save 15% toward retirement savings and then use incremental money to pay off your house.  My post titled, Create a financial plan, outlines my 10 recommended steps to retirement security.

If you have incremental money to put toward your mortgage here is a strategy to pay off your mortgage in half the remaining time of your loan.  In brief you create an amortization table and double up on principal payments.  The accelerated payment method that I’m describing worked for fixed loan mortgages. 

Step one of the process is to create an amortization schedule for your mortgage.  An amortization schedule details your principal and interest payment for each month.  I found a good amortization calculator at Bankrate.  Simply enter the loan amount, number of payment periods (in years or months, the interest rate, and the starting date of the loan.  The calculator will calculate both your monthly payment and the principal and interest payment for each month.  The Bankrate calculator also has the option of adding an incremental payment each month, adding an incremental payment each year, or adding a one time payment. 

To cut your mortgage payment time in half, simply send an incremental payment each month that matches the principal payment corresponding to the month that you are in.  Here’s an example:

Loan amount:  $200,000
Loan term:   30 years
Interest rate:  6%

The calculator determines that your monthly payment is $1199.10

In the first month, $199.10 goes to principal and $1000 goes toward interest.  In month 1 then send in an incremental $199.10 and your loan duration will shrink by an incremental 1 month. 

In the second month $200.10 goes to principal and $999.0 goes toward interest.  In month 2 send in an incremental $200.10 and your loan during will shrink by an incremental month (your loan will now end two months earlier). 

In an alternative scenario if you are 10 years into this same loan and want to begin this process, the incremental payment would be $341.20.  Simply print out the amortization schedule and begin paying the principal payment amount. 

The great thing about this recommended process is that you can send in incremental money and quickly determine the decrease in the loan term.  One way to apply this process is to print out the amortization schedule for your mortgage.  Whenever you send in an incremental principal payment for the current month then you cross off the last month on the schedule.  This has the benefit that you can visually see the the progress that you are making toward eliminating your mortgage.

One of my  motivations for writing this post is to warn you off of expensive software packages ($1000 to $5000) that supposedly help you pay off your mortgage faster.  You are much better off putting that money toward your mortgage payment. 

Follow your dreams, Achieve your goals! 

Help others!  Spread the challenge to Get Financially Fit!   

Do you know how safe the cosmetics, hair products, baby products, and skin lotions are that you use?  A non profit group called the Environmental Working Group reviews over 25,000 health care products at the site called Skin Deep  (Web site http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/)

One thing I really like about the site is that they rate each product as low hazard (0-2), moderate hazard (3-6), or high hazard (7-10).   It amazed me to learn that there can be quite a difference between two products that appear similar.  For example:

Colgate Cavity Protection Fluoride Toothpaste is safe (low hazard), while Colgate Luminous Toothpaste Crystal Clean Mint is moderate risk with ingredients that are linked to cancer.

As you look through the database you will quickly conclude that a consumer can significantly improve the safety of products with a little research.  I encourage you to start out first researching products that you use daily such as shampoos, toothpaste, and cosmetics.  In time you can improve the safety of the portfolio of products that you use.

Skin deep also does a great job of encouraging all of us to become safe cosmetics advocates.  Unfortunately the United States does not regulate the safety of products to the level that Europe and Japan does. 

 Here is a quick video that provides a quick tuturial for using the Skin Deep web site.

Follow your dreams, Achieve your goals!