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Term life insurance, as a concept is fairly easy to understand as opposed to understanding what term life insurance is the best for you. It is very important that you give long and good thought to what term life insurance would be suited to your best interest. Term life insurance remains in effect for only a limited time that has a predetermined span of time. An individual who holds a term life insurance pays a standard premium only during the specified term of his life insurance policy. In the event of the death of the insurance holder during the term, the death benefits directly end up going to the beneficiary.

Most of the various life insurance policies today offer a variety of options but term life insurance is one of your best options as it offers you maximum flexibility. It is however true that all sorts of options are more readily available with other kinds of insurance solutions. Still, despite the simplicity and limitations, term life insurance is yet a more sensible and of best utility among a large spread of customers.

For those individuals who require a temporary life insurance protection, a term life insurance policy is best. Term life insurance is best to fill a gap like when the case is such that an individual is not protected under any life insurance policy due to whatever reasons. Under such circumstances the term life insurance is best as it can still protect the necessary financial interests of the concerned family. If you are looking for a life insurance coverage for just a short period, then too term life insurance is best opted for.

By and large term life insurance is best suited for young working people who have families. You can easily find the best term life insurance quote for you by making use of the Internet. However when you do get around to searching for term life insurance quotes online you must keep certain points in mind like for example the premium that is to be paid, the term of insurance, the rate, authenticity of the company and so on. You will find affordable term life insurance schemes by searching for life insurance companies that have websites with complete details. By comparing the policies offered by different companies you can settle upon the best term life insurance policy for you.

Real Estate Investment can be a very fortuitous career path, providing you know what to do. Too many people think that investing is easy and requires no skills at all. While this is true in some cases it is very often not. More and more people are investing badly because they’re not doing what they should be. Knowing a little about the trade always helps, and there are actually a wide variety of tips and tricks out there that can make Real Estate Investment a lot easier and profitable.

One of these tips has to be simply to network. Networking simply means just to get talking to people. It sounds stupid, but this is often the first step to finding a real investment gold mine. Getting involved with your community can gain you some fantastic contacts, as well as good gossip on places that might soon be coming up for sale, or areas that are on the rise when it comes to housing prices. Talking to people and actually listening often is one of the easiest ways you can gain knowledge on the area you’re considering investing in, which leads me on to the next essential tip you need to know.

Know the market, and know it well, spend some time getting to know the area or areas in which you’re looking to invest. As well as getting to know the locals, try going to a few open houses and get talking to the agents to find out as much about the area as possible. It would also be beneficial to drive the area looking for houses for sale by owner, or houses that appear vacant or in disrepair. Then learn how much homes are selling for in the area, so you can give yourself a good idea of how much profit you would be likely to make. Find out about crime within the area, if there is any, and if the area is growing? This information is vital when it comes to investing, so it’s important that you learn as much about it as possible.

Another tip is to never buy a property without at least one exit strategy. What I mean is that with every offer you make you should know exactly how much you’re going to make back from it. Whether it’s going to give you more as a rental or a re-sale, or whether you want to renovate it and how much the expense would add up to, and overall, whether it would be worth it. Always run your numbers and if they don’t add up to a decent profit, do not do the deal, no matter how much you like the property, the numbers don’t lie!

And finally, get yourself a good real estate agent. Agents can often make or break your investment business, and a good one is definitely worth tracking down. A good real estate agent will often do a lot of the leg work and bring you some good potential deals. They will often have experience with the area and can help you stay away from potential bad investments. They can even find you good, reliable buyers for your investments, and can show them around whilst you’re out taking care of other investments. They will often work only on commissions based on the sale price of the properties that they sell on your behalf.

Real Estate Investment is one of the most fortuitous businesses in the world, so it’s obvious that you’ll want to do it right. Making the right investments isn’t difficult, and as long as you follow these tips, you’re sure to be bagging some real property gems in no time.

Copyright (c) 2010 Brad Hess

It has been said that the only thing that’s constant is change, and if you’ve been in business for any length of time, you know how true this is. If there’s one thing that sets companies that have been successful over the long haul-think IBM, General Electric, Wal-Mart or Microsoft, for example-apart from all the others, it’s their positive reaction to change.

Adapting to change impacts a company’s ability to capture and hold onto its market, grow its business and profitably sell its products and services. However, every small business owner or manager must learn to differentiate between those business processes that must evolve and those that should remain stable.

When Change Is Destructive

While evolving in order to meet changing consumer demands and an ever-shifting technological environment is essential, there are some business processes where change and evolution are counter-productive, even destructive. Financial accounting is one of these.

The accounting scandals that brought down several large corporations in the early 2000s illustrated the destructive potential of getting too “creative” when it comes to financial accounting. While the government passed legislation that attempted to tamp down such accounting irregularities, it’s still primarily the responsibility of business owners and their accounting professionals to create and provide financial information that is what I call ARTistic: Accurate, Relevant and Timely.

Accounting rules can and do change over time to reflect changing business models and new types of business transactions. However, financial accounting as a business process should remain stable, evolving only after careful thought is given to the potential implications of reporting transactions differently.

A complete overview of the basics of financial accounting is way beyond the scope of this article. However, by sharing a few standard accounting concepts with you, I hope I’ll motivate you to perhaps take a little bit closer look at the financial statements your CPA slides across your desk next month.

The Chart of Accounts

Let’s start at the beginning: with the financial data recording system that’s known as the chart of accounts. This is a systematic listing of all ledger account names and associated numbers used by your company, arranged in the order in which they will appear in your financial statements (more on them in a minute): usually Assets, Liabilities, Owner’s or Stockholder’s Equity, Revenue and Expenses.

A chart of accounts allows the orderly reporting and summary of all of your company’s financial transactions. For example, you can go back and look at all vendor invoices paid during a specific time frame to determine exactly what work was done, why it was done and what organization benefited from the expenditures.

Think of the chart of accounts as a collection of buckets, each with a particular kind of data inside. There might be a bucket for each asset your company owns, each debt you owe, each product or service you sell, and each type of expense you incur to sell products and services.

The chart of accounts is an organized, comprehensive list of all these buckets. The buckets, in turn, are labeled with the appropriate account number and arranged by the kind of data they hold. They can be rearranged during the accounting process as their contents are counted and checked (usually monthly) so reports can be produced that summarize the data they contain.

The General Ledger

No, this isn’t the person who secretly runs the accounting department and issues all those reports nobody can read! The general ledger is the place where all accounting transactions ultimately come to rest, and the data source for your financial statements.

Think of the general ledger as a large, old-fashioned scale that is always kept in balance by adding and subtracting an equal and offsetting amount of weight to each side. All of the buckets that appear in the chart of accounts are arranged in one or the other of the trays. As transactions occur, you add to each bucket the appropriate data that represents the financial effect of that transaction.

When something is added to a bucket on the Asset side, for example, something else of equal value either must be taken away from the Asset side (such as the cash paid to acquire the asset) or added to the Liability side (such as a loan taken out to pay for it). This way, the scale always remains in balance and your company has a self-checking system to ensure that the entire transaction has been recorded properly.

The Financial Statements

These are the real “meat and potatoes” of small business accounting. There are three primary financial statement formats that appear in annual reports and most business’ internal monthly financial reports:

o Balance Sheet: This shows the financial condition of the company as of a particular date, usually the end of a month, quarter or year. It lists all of your company’s assets on one side and all of your liabilities on the other. The difference between the carrying value of the assets and liabilities is equal to the equity interest accruing to the owners.

o Income Statement: Also commonly referred to as the Profit and Loss Statement, or the P&L, this recaps all of the company activities that were intended to produce a profit. It lists the amount of sales, all the costs incurred in making those sales (or the cost of goods sold), and the overhead costs incurred in running your company’s operations (e.g., salaries, rent, utilities, etc.).

o Statement of Cash Flow: This shows the effect of all the transactions that involved or influenced cash but didn’t appear on the income statement. For example, if you borrow money and deposit it in your checking account for use later, no income or expenses have been created, so this activity can’t be reflected on the income statement. Instead, it would go on the statement of cash flow. Every transaction that occurs in your company between any two balance sheet dates will be reflected in either the income statement or the statement of cash flow, and from those two reports the summarized results appear in your balance sheet in the form of net changes to balances.

Make Better Business Decisions

The key to sound decision-making will be your ability to understand and use these critically important business reports. They are the condensed result of every financial transaction your company has undertaken, and the result needs to be accurate, relevant, timely and understood.

This is a role that cannot be delegated. Don’t shy away from asking your accounting department or CPA to explain any aspect of these reports until you really understand them. The success of your business depends on it.

A lot of people would like to be able to predict the yearly performance of the stock markets in order to make money. It’s been deemed by most to be a relatively impossible feat. If you could, it would be like having a license to print your own money from the stock market. Oddly enough, academics Michael Cooper, John McConnell and Alexai Ovtchinnikov have developed a system for it.

In their paper entitled ‘The Other January Effect’, they provide a detailed analysis of the U.S. Stock Market from 1940 to 2006, the aim of which to determine if their was a significant correlation between the performance of the stock market in January compared to the remainder of the year. The results were astounding.

According to statistical evidence, the performance of the S&P 500 in January compared to the rest of the year boasts a direct correlation with an impressive 88 percent strike rate. That’s right. 88 percent of the time when the stock markets go up in January, they continue to advance for the remainder of the year. Likewise, in years where January takes a bearish turn, the rest of the year tends to be very bearish as well.

Personally, this theory gets me very excited as I’m currently holding onto a bullish portfolio as of January 2010 in writing this article. The markets seem to be making a breakout, which, if Michael Cooper’s theory holds sound which it has so many years in the past, this could be a great year for recovery.

The only years in which this particular January effect haven’t held true in the stock market have been years in which a significant event took place to dramatically shift the course of the overall economy, such as the 9/11 attacks in 2001 that ended up being the harbinger of a significant recession. I would play this card only if such an event never managed to take place.

Learn from the Best

John Wooden, the famed UCLA basketball coach, was famous for warning that “If you always do what you have always done you will always end up where you have always been.” Marketers who’s goal it is to increase market share at the expense of their competition must heed those words. Taking customers from your competitor’s coffers involves a change in behavior from those customers. That, according to Coach Wooden, dictates that you cannot continue with business as usual — something you are currently doing must change.

It does not matter if your product or service is direct to consumer, business to business or a mixture of both. It does not matter if you are in the packaged goods category, tourism industry or bio-tech market space. When you need to steal markets share from a formidable competitor you need to think differently. The traditional marketing changes and adjustments that everyone uses and employs simply do not work very well.

Coach Wooden has much to teach marketers who want to win, and while he never mentioned marketing in anything he ever said, what he did understand was human nature. He knew how to change behaviors and how to squeeze every ounce of benefit out of the hand he was dealt. Without the benefit of freshman eligibility Coach Wooden led UCLA to 10 national Championships in 12 years. It is a record of success that will most likely never be equaled in any team sport.

The Basics Are Overlooked

On his first day of practice, Coach Wooden would spend the entire day teaching his highly touted recruits how to properly put on their socks and sneakers. The likes of Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton watched patiently as Coach Wooden demonstrated the proper way to put on athletic socks and tie shoes.

It seems silly and frivolous to speak of this, until you realize that Coach was teaching his team to pay attention to the minute details that form the foundation of their preparation. He showed them that neither a world-class vertical jump nor a seven-foot frame was immune to failure if your shoes became untied or if the socks bunched up and created a blister that limited your play. He was telling his players that the greatness of their game was subject to the very foundation of their preparation.

As you make your marketing plans to steal share, your brand permission forms the same foundation as putting on your socks and tying your shoes and carefully. Brand work is responsible for the ultimate success or failure of your best plans. Coach once said, “The most important key to achieving great success is to decide upon your goal and launch, get started, take action, move.”

Goals

So, what is your goal? Stealing Share? Business as usual would tell you to increase the advertising budget, launch a new ad campaign, hire a new agency, conduct more focus groups, or find a new unique selling proposition (USP). We ask you to think differently because those old tactics just do not work. “Never confuse activity with accomplishment,” warned the Wizard of Westwood, and neither should you.

Having the right brand message is your only opportunity for success and it is also the Achilles heel of your competitive set. Your competition employs the same tactics as everyone else. They have mistakenly believed that their brand meaning just says that they have a rightful claim to play in a specific category. (Convenience and friendliness, if you are a bank — low prices, or selection if you are a supermarket –great returns, if you are a mutual fund — better sandwiches if you are a food service etc.) Your brand, a brand that actually increases your share, must do a great deal more than just that. It can actually provide your marketing with an advantage over your competitors and can make every advertising message or marketing communication, you produce more effective. Brand is the foundation that makes all of your messages more persuasive and therefore more cost efficient. It provides you with greater ROI.

Brand is a Bad Word

Unfortunately, the very word “brand” is so misunderstood that most marketers overlook it. It has been relegated to a trite phrase that is so often used that most of us assume we understand exactly what it is and how it can help us. We are mostly wrong. Brand is not your logo, your category, your promise, your consistency, and your position in the market or your look and feel. Brand is who the customer believes THEY are when they buy it.

Despite millions of dollars in adverting, McDonalds was unable to sell adults the Arch Deluxe hamburger, for no other reason than the fact that their brand (a customer’s belief in who they were when they ate there) did not have permission to sell “great adult food.” The McDonalds brand has permission for something else. No amount of advertising money, thrown at the problem, was able to change that.

How your customer perceives your brand sets the stage for how they respond to your advertising, not the other way around. If they see themselves as hip and cool for having purchased your brand (like iPod, for example), the brand does not have permission to sell serious business equipment. If iPod advertised a product innovation that flew in the face of this permission, it would be dismissed as an unbelievable claim.

Set the Stage to Increase Your Market Share

Truly setting the stage to steal share means starting at the very beginning, looking at your brand for meaning beyond the category table stakes. The FedEx brand is not about next day delivery, convenience, reliability, or price… those attributes are descriptors of the next day delivery category in general. A brand cannot own a category benefit, even if you invented it.

Once you build your brand around the precepts of the customer, your brand is noticed despite the din of market clutter because it is as if every message comes hand engraved with a personal message of importance. It cannot be ignored because it is about them, the customer, and not simply about a product or service. It carries more weight, is more memorable, and can change a loyalty behavior because the customer is not only choosing a solution to a need, they are choosing themselves.

Find the Preceptive Essence

If you do not infuse your brand, with this “customer essence,” two things can happen and both of them are bad. They might never assign a real brand meaning to your product, in which case you have no other meaning beyond USP or category benefit, or they will fill the void with their own belief in which you do not have one brand but 100,000 brands. In both cases, changing their behavior and asking them to choose differently becomes almost impossible unless you lower the price point, which emphatically says, “this is a commodity, and we are the cheapest.”

Before you launch your new ad campaign, hire a new ad agency, or commission the new research study, does it not make sense to fix your brand — to make sure your socks are put on properly and your sneakers are securely tied?

When Coach Wooden said, “Ability is a poor man’s wealth” he could have just as easily said “brand is the outspent company’s ace in the hole.”