People are clearly comfortable asking their friends and family about their finances. There is also a demand for good online advice. We must ensure people have the tools to make sensible and informed financial decisions throughout their lives. They say quality financial education is the key to helping people help themselves. Others say that this should ideally start in schools at the earliest opportunity. Here is a brief list of things business people do to manage their finances properly.

It is essential to establish a credit card with a small limit and always make the monthly payment. Making at least the required monthly payment is important for young adults because they have a short credit history and any blemish, such as a missed payment, can be very damaging to their credit score. To avoid situations when credit report says that you missed a mortgage payment which you never even had, it is recommended to obtain a free credit reports through the government mandated website. This technique will also help to control spending habits of business people in favor of more money set aside in savings.

This quick MBA tool helps to monitor your current value. If to add up the value of all current assets and to subtract current liabilities including home, other real estate, business interests, pension plans, stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other securities it is possible to calculate a net worth. Now it is important to make sure the net worth rises each year, not just by the inflation but by the rising value of those personal investments.

If you have no personal investments, do something today. For the beginning it is good to start with a money market mutual fund, setting up a regular electronic transfer of money from your bank account. Money fund yields rise as interest rates rise. Phil Laut, author of “Money is my friend” tells that the basic principles of investing is spending money that you saved, in your name, to increase your income. If all you have is an understanding of financial markets and don’t deal effectively with your own psychology, it is possible, but unlikely, that you will get rich, but you certainly won’t sleep at night.

How should couples handle money? This is a very important topic that is almost always clouded by family conditioning and foolish romantic notions. It is essential that both partners have money of their own to use as they see fit free from permission and judgment, even if only one of them is earning an income. However, always share all your financial knowledge and details of your investments with your spouse so that person won’t have to scurry around after your death, asking mostly strangers what you have been doing with your money all these years.

And finally, if you plan to express your purpose and your values you can’t afford to miss this. If you are looking for the best investment advisor, look in the mirror. No one will ever care more about your investment success than you do.

It has been two weeks since I started working on my business plan for small business consultancy. As one who always rushing to make things done this time I am tardy. There are too many things need to be done properly. And one of them is to determine a fee for my professional services. Yes, I want to get a fortune and to do it quickly, but I don’t know how much my potential clients should pay me. Well, now I am ready to think about it.

As a small business owner I can charge my customers in different ways. It can be a charge for entire project, an hourly rate, sales commission in fixed amount or in proportion.

One of the best ways other business people do is to determine the minimal hour rate by adding the wishful profit margin to overhead expenses and labor costs. By dividing the result by annual billable hours I will get my hourly rate. Next step is to adjust this rate to the market level depending on my experience.

As a former business consulting employee I earned a $70,000 a year. Shall I charge a little bit more? I think I will. Let’s say $80,000 is enough for the beginning.

Next is my overhead. I skip office rent expenses for now. I will work at home and later will determine an expense of using a one room of my house. Phone line, internet, postage, advertising, marketing and insurance will cost me about $18,000. Total result is $98,000.

Let’s say I want some 10% profit which is $9,800. Adding this to my total of 98,000 I have $107,800 which I divide by 1,280 annual billable hours (I will work 8 hours, 4 days a week during 10 months. I know it’s quite a lazy schedule). So, my hourly rate is $84 which slightly more than market level of $75 an hour.

However, I don’t adjust my rate so drastically. I stay on the level of $80. Because I compete by saving the total cost of completing a project I am still effective contractor. My motivation is to save time and money for the client, so I will work less billable hours for particular client and within the determined budget. Therefore, even my hourly rate is more than in an industry and likely more than my client’s in-house representative rate I am still able to compete by what is motivating my customer- work done on time and within the budget.

Bottom line is, once I have an indication of my total expenses and total billable hours for my business I can easily get my minimal fee I want to charge my customers by using that simple formula. My service will more competitive if I track my working time wisely eventually completing the project on time.

 “If you want to raise revenue in difficult times, you’re almost invariably going to have to raise taxes on wealthy people because that’s where the money is”, said Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s Economy.com. “In times of financial distress, the rich get hurt also,” Mr. Trump added. Is it unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense?

Well, let’s see.  Tack on an extra percentage point to the income tax rate of someone like Rupert Murdoch, who earned $23.9 million in the last fiscal year from his News Corporation salary and bonus, and the state can make an extra $200,000. That is enough to pay the salaries of about a half-dozen New York Police Department rookies.

The additional tax revenue from former Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s $1.97 million in income in 2006 — earned mostly from rental property along Madison Avenue that he owns with his family — would be nearly $17,000, or about the cost of one unequipped police cruiser.

Add up all the new tax revenue — from the Trumps and Murdochs and Jeters and 26,000 other New Yorkers who earn more than $1 million a year — and the state would be able to make an extra $1.5 billion.

Read whole article here.