Budget, Plan and Buy.

It is always good to plan before buying big ticket items such as TV (Plasma/LCD), Car, Game Console, Furtuniture, Sofa, Bed set etc. Budget and Planning are cohesive; if you plan more your will buy good stuff with everybody’s blessing (wife, kids, in-laws etc).
Soon after marriage, I took my wife to buy a tv.My budget was $200.00 and I didn’t had any plan which tv to buy. My wife liked Sony model, because she was familiar with only that brand name from India and she wanted that. But I was looking for low end models to fit in my budget. My wife asked me to buy it. I said my budget won’t allow us to buy it, we can buy Daewoo TV model same size as Sony and I argued that we would get $ 100 as mail in rebate. She got angry and whisked away from the shop and sat in the car. So we didn’t buy anything that day. There after. I’m using formula (Plan, Budget and Buy) that first I go for good brand and news.com reviews and then we would narrow one or two models.Finally after debate about pros and cons of the narrowed model, we both will decided on one.Later when I decided to buy a PC , I chose the same formula. For desktop buying experience, I narrow HP or Dell model. Second factor is budget, based on current budget Dell is 100% within my range, but not HP. But drawback for Dell is they don’t have good customer support so I have decided to stick with HP. For the increased budget, I decided to wait one more month for Stock dividends pay back and some interest amount. And used that for the increased budget and we happily bought our current HP desktop with printers. The 10% premium I’m paying for HP was good decision since 2 times I had an issue with CPU cooler buy HP customer support fixed it within a week. I planned to buy Plasma TV 18 months ago, I spent 3 months of researching, 2 months of capital raise, and finally bought Panansonic after 6 months of planning and budgeting. Next planning is for Blueray ,wife didn’t approve it since she thinks it’s still very expensive and early for it.

Women Spend Nearly 9 Years Shopping.

According to a recent study by GE Money, the average woman spends 399 hours and 46 minutes shopping each year. That adds up to nearly three years of retail therapy over one's lifetime. Total hour per year is 8790 - 400(for shopping) we have 8390 for other activity the main one is sleeping at 8 hours per day then total time for sleeping is 2920, and we need to work to fuel shopping including commute I'm guessing 10 hours per work day 2300. Self care, body wash and make-up we need 4 hours per day that itself 1460. So our final number is 6680. Oops I forgot to add cooking and dine out 2 hour per day. Final number is 6680+730=7410 So we have free time to spend with family is 980.We are spending only 11% of our time with kids and family. Is this the way life should be?

Social Engineering.

Most articles I’ve read on the topic of social engineering begin with some sort of definition like “the art and science of getting people to comply to your wishes” (Bernz 2), “an outside hacker’s use of psychological tricks on legitimate users of a computer system, in order to obtain information he needs to gain access to the system” (Palumbo), or “getting needed information (for example, a password) from a person rather than breaking into a system” (Berg). The one thing that everyone seems to agree upon is that social engineering is generally a hacker’s clever manipulation of the natural human tendency to trust. Here trust is leading to hack our identity. So we have to not trust anybody at all. I think we need to exercise common sense to separate good people and “Social Engineering (SE)” minded people. If somebody crosses red line with in 2-3 meetings by asking questions like birth date, mother’s maiden name, he or she is SE minded people. But we are all human being, tend to make mistakes. The better way to protect ourselves is to use tools to monitor our wealth by using software Quicken(sync with your bank accounts and credit card accounts daily), enrolling some inexpensive credit monitoring service or at least checking credit history once a year(hey..It is free now).

Real Estate burst or natural phenomenon.

The way of life should be includes homeownership. Homeownership is each individual’s dream and must have one. But the current trend thinks me twice to make home buying decision. The matter of fact is already 69% American household are homeowners so we have 31% potential buyers out there to join this American dream. But last week I did read an article in Chicago Tribune that 38 Million American living insecure food intake range, which means, 38 Million American living very low income and they are a generation away to join homeownership club. If you subtract this 38 Million people from potential buyer list then we have only 20% of potential buyers.The future house market will be driven by upgrades, like town home owner moves into single family house and single family house owner will move into some bigger house. So on and so forth…..Here now real winner is whoever already sold house at higher prices in last year peak.

Don't enjoy at success time

Every human will be success at some time of there life span. Some lucky ones will be success for all the time in there life span. It is law of nature; we deserve that and all we need to do is be at right place at right time. Once you reached success, don’t settle down and start dropping balls. Ordinary people try to enjoy the success time overwhelmingly hence they would end up struggling later. We have to plan for future while we enjoying success at same time.
If Microsoft didn’t plan for XBOX or ZUNE while they are enjoying tremendous success with windows operating system, they won’t be now number two in gaming console market or MP3 player in North America.
If Google didn’t plan for Google earth while they are enjoying exponential success with search engine, we won’t get mega glorious software of century Google earth in our desktop.
Somebody can argue that they are doing business so they have plan new products to stay in market. But there are lot of corporation in America and even all over World failed because they were enjoyed too much success but not planning for future products. Classic example would be GM, FORD.
You can compare corporation life with human life very easily, because corporation also has same life cycle of human. Born (Start-up), Teen age (Mid-size), Adult (Corporation). One difference is nobody will buy or merge with other human but corporations can merge or acquired by other corporation.