Saturday, September 19, 2009

My Michael Jackson Article.

Everyone has written about the King of Pop so here's mine...

Its been a few of months since the death of Michael Jackson so I thought that maybe I should be able to write about him now without getting everyone angry at me. Please don't get me wrong, I loved Michael Jackson's music. He was indeed a legend. But unfortunately this guy knew very little about handling money. He is the perfect case study of what not to do with your money!!!

Back in the 80s or 90s he bought the rights for all the Beatles' songs. This means that everytime someone plays, remakes, or buys the Beatles' songs he makes money. Add that to his own song collection and you have passive income like no other!!! Yet how does a guy who also signed a record deal for USD500 million go nearly into bankruptcy? Its totally unbelievable. But yes Michael Jackson nearly did go into bankruptcy and he nearly lost his famed Neverland Ranch. When he died he had debts of around USD200 million. Magastos talaga siya!!!

Its a classic case to all the people who tell me that the only solution to their financial problems is to earn more money. Learn from the King of Pop. No matter how much you make if you don't know how to save and cut back on your expenses you will never have enough money.

So if you do get a salary increase, or you win a little bit of money in lotto, or you get money from inheritance, or you get a big commission or your business makes a good profit. Don't change your spending habits! You lived without this money in the past so you don't need to spend it. Save it instead... So you don't have to work hard all your life.

Oh one more thing... Don't tell anyone in your family you got this extra money... I hope you know what I mean.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Our Crazy Government

I don't normally write about politics because I try to avoid it as much as possible but I found this article in August 26 of the Inquirer so crazy that I just had to react to it!

The article stated that the government was having to export excess corn production at a loss. The government would buy corn at P10 a kilo from farmers and sell it at P8-9 a kilo to countries like Vietnam. They were doing this to stabilize the price of corn which had gone down so much because of the excess.

Now here I am thinking that's pretty silly because we are losing 1 to 2 pesos per kilo! The government was selling 150,000 metric tons to Vietnam so basically that's a loss of 150 million to 300 million pesos!!! But then I thought, that's ok because if we don't sell it, the corn will just rot in the warehouse. And then I thought that's pretty good because our farmers are producing a lot of corn which means eventually we will be able to export our corn at profits with better planning.

But guess what... The article then states that there was a surplus in corn because we IMPORTED 1.1 million metric tons of corn substitute known as feed wheat!!! This is crazy!!! So our country will lose PHP150m to PHP300m because some guys allowed this feed wheat to be imported.

Any businessman will tell you... Don't freaking import the corn substitute when you have a corn production excess.