Financial Planning and Advisory

Hahaha! Gone are the days when insurance agents con me into believing they are "financial advisors". It's really quite crappy when the agents who talk to me about life-planning only manage to bring across one point - Please Buy Insurance.
One even admitted, when I ask for investment opportunities and didn't want it attached to an insurance policy, that "insurance is their key business" and there is no way they would offer any sort of investment or subsidary schemes without insurance attached.

But anyway, like I said, that's all in the past for me. Just yesterday I took an entire day of work to go to varsity to do a body checkup to make sure I'm healthy (apparently the varsity administration wants to ensure I won't die in the midst of a 3 year course), meet a financial advisor from FinExis, and go back to my army camp to collect all my stuff that I left in my store since...Nov 2006.

Come to think of it...it's been an entire 5 months since I finished my national service...but only managed to squeeze salaries out of 4 months.
Back to the topic. I met Isaac from FinExis, a comprehensive financial advisory firm that doesn't align itself with any single insurance, investment, banking or financial firm. Instead, they do a complete analysis of their clients short-medium-long term goals and current financial status and then recommend a path to ensure suitable and sufficient protection, auccumulation and distribution.

But be prepared to sit down and talk for 4 hours or more to complete this "health check," so I really went through 2 checkups yesterday. And maybe some of us would have to take time to develop a trusting relationship with the financial consultants since one would essentially be revealing all of one's financial data to them. Isn't an issue to me though...since I'm quite proud of my efforts in the past 3 months to properly manage my income and investments. Never quite bothered curtailing expenditure though.
Despite the long long long time I had to talk to Isaac, I really learned alot. The greatest fact that striked me is...Mutual funds and unit trusts can actually be quite profitable. But besides that I know that I do have to have an executive's pay package to achieve all the goals I have in the medium to long term. But for now I'll just wait for the report and see what it says.
Also, I realised I really wasn't covered enough in case any accident or major illness strikes me, not to mention death. After all, I can just pay pretty low premiums since I'm still quite young and continue paying that amount until the policy is underwritten again.

So do tell me if you guys have any desire to take charge of your financial future yeah!

Sketches of my game are out!

Let me first start with a negative note. I feel kinda lost with my forex trading. No doubt, yesterday I read the indicators and felt that the short term trend for G/U is to head south, supported by the daily stachostic crossing over and gap widening since 21st April. So I shorted the G/U twice at peaks to gain 30 pips each time.
The thing is...is this the right way to go? I have a mentor, Clarence, who revealed a basic system of setting up indicators and a host of readings to improve my forex trading...but I failed to use all that information...I am still doing alot of "experimentation - freestyle" on my own with no purpose other than to see if my "luck" is good enough to get me some winning trades...

After I confirm that the first "draft" of my game is pretty much done, I'll really go back to run the system and read those books. This isn't procrastination but focusing. (Although NOT spending enough time and effort on developing the game IS procrastination!)

But well, back to the game, I got my first sketch of what the game looks like now. The general flow of game is also determined. The next step is to design the cards and play the game myself to see if everything works fine. Then it would be back to school to see if I can work anything out with my previous econs tutors...

And if I spend enough time dreaming and nuturing big dreams...I might well be building an educational game to sell to MOE to employ in teaching macroeconomics. But that aside, my motivation is still to benefit my students (so that they can learn the same principles without hearing me repeat them verbally).

I realised, though, that I need to tweak the designing to have some sort of way to show the progress of the player. It is part of making the player feel good and to enhance competition. A physical representation that indicates progress would make it obvious how well one and other players are doing. That competition would then make the game more than just economics. But nevertheless a measure of economic understanding and luck would be required.

But well...I've still to work on the cards first...so here I go...

Books Bonanza

Was at Plaza Singapure where's there's this huge "warehouse sale" put up by Carrefour...prices are really pretty low...the books were going for 3 bucks each, but of course one had to spend the time to fish for worthy ones.

So I got a few titles...one was the famous (meaning I think I heard of the title before) "Why do Bad things Happen to Good People"...and I go the "Go-Getter"...that one I could finish in an hour...basically tells a story of a war veteran who lost half the functions of his body but perseveres and never gives up on a "impossible" task set by an incredible Boss.

One important lesson in that title is the concept of "degree of the blue vase." The impossible task is as such, the man being tested for his capabilities would be asked to fetch a worthless blue vase sold at USD 2,000. Now, to make things difficult, he was given the wrong address to buy the vase from, no means of forking out the cash, an impossible time limit, and the "examiners" would even tweek details like the shop owner's name and contact number.

Well...in any case...he managed to get the "degree"...which proved his persistence and resourcefulness. And what is the lesson? It is summarised in the phrase "It'll be done."
And that brings me to the point...how many times have we seen something worth doing and say "It'll be done" regards of all the current restrictions and barriers? How willing are we to abandon our comfort zones to brave the world to try for a home run?(My apologies, that's really just questioning myself)

I know I haven't...at least not to the extremes. The closest I came to do that is when I was super-motivated by one of my BMT platoon mates to run personal bests for 2.4km run and our Standard Obstacle Course. He went on to OCS anyway, and he definitely deserved that!

In some sense, I feel like an untested stone. And I sure hope that's I'm a gold ore.

Anyway, other than that, I chanced upon another opportunity. Just moments back was chatting with Eusof (who is in Uni now) and he said he wants to take up a sales job during his 2-odd month break...and I was commenting that I think I knew what I am good at selling. I term it "unsecured investments."

So happens that I came across My Winning Funds on the forum I frequent. It's an open program that basically uses a mathematical approach to betting on horses. I didn't quite know the admin so I called them up and checked out if this is for real. Actually the concern here is capital protection. I wouldn't mind no or minimal returns, but I don't expect my money to disappear overnight.

I think I've secured enough trust to invest with them, which would add to my portfolio of assets.

So for now, it is to quietly watch the cauldron and stir it once in a while to make sure nothing goes wrong. Of course, every and anything can go wrong, but that investing...and I can't manage the risk, but I at least do understand how my money is managed.

Conclusions

I did abit of thinking and found that I don't quite have any need for the detailed expenditure listing I am doing now. After all, I don't do budgeting and I really don't like to limit how much I spend, since my expenditure is pretty consistent (except for the occasional splurge on food).

So I decided I shall give up noting down the nitty gritty I spend on. But as long as, for these few months till late July, I don't go into more than what my expenditure account holds...then that's fine. Would still be ok for me to dig a bit deeper into a negative 100+ region as long as I can foresee I can earn enough to get it out of the red.

Thinking of my game now...my gf said I should start by "playing the game"...meaning design what the gameplay is like and then derive the rest...

So my next step is to sketch out the game I suppose? But I realised different game models are designed to get at certain aims...so I do have to give some thought to the most fundamental aims of my game...ok...so that's the task for today: 1. Sketch the game & 2. Think of the aims

Can I handle 2 major goals in a day, or even a week? I wonder...

My accting book went missing!

Haha...I am really laughing at this situation...I misplaced my small little accounting book which I record my daily expenses and bank account balance.

And I honestly thought that it is "life-threatening"(meaning I panicked and worried about the issue) to have lost that book. After all, l had that with me for more than 2 months and the book is symbolic in that I started properly watching my expenses and cashflow with it's establishment.

But...as always, things aren't so bad. And I found a better way out...And that solution is called and computer and Excel Sheet. Haha, so now all I have to do is write a formula once and copy it all over the place. That kinda saves me time from punching in numerous figures into the calculator...but I sometimes enjoy that process of seeing numbers grow...

Haha...in any case, the loss of the book led to greater growth and efficiency, which is pretty desireable. Just one issue left to settle: should I continue with the daily expenditure recording? I suspect I won't be doing so, but I have to give it some extra thought.

Anyway, I managed to type out the draft agreement for investors in the AHF and will be sending it to Kiat Loong.

Customer Service! (Lessons applied)

I love my weekend! I can't help but shout that out. Cos I gotta do a roadshow on friday and saturday. Well...to be honest(I phrase I commonly use at the roadshow) I enjoyed friday's more than saturday's...not because it is slacker(less busy) though...

But because the lesser volume left more alot of time to spend with customers with whatever assistance they need. Similar one earlier roadshow, I got some namecards from my customers. One namecard I got this time, however, established a strong relationship between the customer and I. For all my customers who enjoyed and allowed me to exercise quality customer service, a huge "Thank you" and note of gratitude to you guys!

Actually I'm pretty glad to be working in two positions within my company(both as temps)...One benefit is that I can assist my customers at the roadshow beyond the usual scope of advising on our services etc...Because of my admin job, I can actually offer to help with their problems, though still limited by my knowledge and authority.

mmm...if only we can have amazon.com's customer service staff's authority to make on-the-spot decisions. But at the very least, an espisode last thursday at my usual office job taught me how to bring problems to the official customer service people within the company. So that means I can help customers beyond my scope of duty should they require that in future.

For now...it is back to work...and to follow up on cases that I promised to get back on over the weekend!

Customer Service

I recently picked up a book I read years back (just a year back really, shows my penchant for exaggeration eh?) titled "amazon.com - Get Big Fast." And the most fascinating part about the company is its focus on customer service. This time round, I haven't quite come across my favourite example but I was so impressed I can literally share the story with you guys off-hand.

The story starts with a customer ordering a softcover version of a title and expecting it to be in the mail a few days down the road in his mailbox. To his surprise(well they never quite mentioned what the customer's reaction was) he found a hardcover version of the same title with a note, handwritten, informing the customer that amazon.com ran out of the softcovers for that title and is sending him a hardcover one at no extra charge!

Another story tells of a customer who sent a postal order to pay for his purchases...well honestly I can't tell the story as well...so here's the Robert Spector's version. "Soon after launching the site, the company received an order from a customer who lived overseas. The customer sent Amazon.com a money order that was for the wrong amount. "Then he cancelled part of the order, so that we now owed him(the customer) money," recalled Barton-Davis. "But he decided to order some more books. He wanted to merge that order into the one he had already put in, and he wanted to pay for it with the remainder of the money order and a new money order.""

Wanna guess the response? "Jeff's(Amazon.com's founder) response to this was that the customer gets it his way."

Can you imagine that, despite the massive accounting and financial headache such an event would cause, Amazon's vision is that the customer gets what he wants as long as it is physically possible with the system.

I'll be honest, I really like that attitude! There were many times in my part-customer-service-part-administrative-duties job when I wished I could do more for the customer. One of the point that baffles me is why shouldn't I (or anyone else in my position" shouldn't be equipped and trained to handle a wider-range of customer enquiries since we(I represent my company) are calling the customer in the first place. It is disappointing (read: sucks) that I had to trouble customers to call our hotline for simple issues which would have been logically under my duties.

But I do try to be more jovial and attempt to match the styles of the customers I speak to. If the customer is in a rush, I speak faster, or ask if there's a more convenient time to give him/her a call. And I would schedule calls way back to check if a problem is solved, which gives me more work, having to track all this "extra" tasks. But it really is important and great to have problems solved for the customer.

mmm...maybe I should send appeal to my superior regarding this issue. The very least I should do now is to give suggestions as to what we can improve on to make ours a truly exceptional customer experience!