By: ABIRO BELINDA BAKANTUMA.

Bankrate and banks charges like ATM surcharges, monthly service charge on a current account/checking account and last but not the least overdraft or nonsufficient funds (NSF) are absolutely astounding. All these charges adds up to billions of earnings for banks.
This article is part of cediWISE’s focused on you money – how to get  the most out of  your banking relationships.

Now let’s talk about how to minimize these fees.

INVESTIGATE

When you’re deciding which bank to use, ask them for their fee structure so you can compare them. While you never want to be dinged for a fee, if all other factors are equal, go with the bank with the lower fees. Many banks will now refund you ATM surcharges, even if it’s another bank’s ATM, and many offer accounts with no account service fee if you meet their requirements.

Research ATM Locations

When am looking out for a bank, I look out for the bank that has got a lot of ATM branches. This is because, accessing my money shouldn’t be a problem and also I wouldn’t like to be charged much higher when using other ATM with my VISA ATM card. Most ATM’s charge high rate when you use different ATM cards which was issued by a different bank.

Fewer Charges

You may be surprised there are a lot of banks which charges far less than what you expect. I wouldn’t like to mention some banks that are really exploiting and draining the water out of us now. They talk to you as if they work in your interest but I bet you they are CHEATS!!!

By: Sumaila Mubarak

Be the master of your own finances

What do I mean? Well I mean you can have a good job with a good pay cheque and everything but as a person who wants to be financially free you can’t be content with your pay cheque and worse if you have to live from hand to mouth with it. To live above average and have your happiness in your life you need to sit up and be the master. You need to make some decisions that would push you up the financial ladder.  What exactly do you want to achieve in life? Is your pay cheque helping in that regard? If no then You’ve got to manipulate it to get you to your destination.

Invest

Did I hear you say “my salary is too little for that”? Well my friend, nothing good comes easy. Investment is diverse. You can choose what you are most comfortable in and invest in that. Don’t say you don’t have money because you might continue not having it if you are going to do nothing about it . You may read our previous article on saving to help you make a start. Try to get some information about what you want to invest in. Think! Is it in stocks and bonds, is it in insurance, or do you want to create something of your own you can monitor yourself like getting a business started and running?

Get a business started and running.

It’s my opinion right? Yes, let me tell you why I’d rather go for that. A lot of people visualize starting a business to be the biggest and hardest and most expensive thing on earth but hey if you think starting a business is owning the biggest building with a lot of people working for you and a lot of cars at your disposal,  then I understand your fears because that is certainly very expensive. The trick many people miss is that, you don’t have to start a business big, you can start with something small and then that small thing would begin to rise to become the big thing you have always wanted. Have you thought of the sort of business you want to do?

Maybe you want to own a huge supermarket where you would want a lot of people working for you. Well, that is good but maybe you don’t have that kind of money to do that and might never have considering your salary, so what do you do? Do you just fold your hands and say good bye to it? Hell no! You can start small. How much can you spare out of your salary? Nothing? Okay, why don’t you save little by little until you have enough to put up a table with some small provisions to sell? Please do, whiles you sell, the profit would start coming in and then you can use the profit you make to enlarge your little business. Before you know it, you’d have a big supermarket with more cash to enlarge it if you want to.

Don’t say your salary is too meager, or that you can’t afford to or anything that makes starting your business impossible. You could be missing out on the much money you would have made. Risk that little money now for a better tomorrow when you couldn’t care less if your salary delayed or even did not come at all because you just might be making ten times more money than what you have on your pay cheque. But all these depends on your attitude and the decisions you make in that regard.

By: Abiro Belinda Bakantuma.

Do not generalize.

You can bet your last cedi on the fact that you are not going to be the only one applying  for that particular position you seek , in fact, if even you are the only one, you can be sure that writing your resumé haphazardly is definitely not going to get you the job,  so whatever the case, you should be as specific as possible with your resume. Why? because with the thousands of people who would apply for that same position with you, you need to be as specific to the job as possible. If you are going for a job that requires certain skills, ensure that you  trim your resumé to suit the position. In this case, the resumé should emphasize the positions you  have held where those qualifications have been prevalent. You also need to make sure that you don’t use the same resumé in every job application you write.

Check for grammatical errors.

What picture do you think you would be painting about yourself sending a resume full of typographical mistakes. The unemployment situation in Ghana today hasn’t help in any way either so employers are always looking for the least mistake to drop your  application out of the race. The least mistake you make could give you the door and for that mistake to be found in your resumé means you aren’t going to get anywhere as far as that position goes. And so please check and double check before you send it. You could even have your friend or a person with better spelling and grammar look it through before you finally post it.

Here comes the BIG one!!!

Make sure it’s legible.

Put your self  in the shoes of an employer who has over thousand resumes to go through, what would you do? I’m sure you certainly would look for the best written because you would agree with me that having to read a horrific writing is really stressful and you need to consider the number you need to go through. When it comes to computers you need to be really careful because what might look to you to be a nicely formatted can come out looking terrible and unreadable when you paste it into a text box. It would be sad if a computer made sense of it and selected you only to be discarded because no one can make sense of it because it came out as gibberish.

Organize your resumé well enough.

Organization is really important because through that  you would be able to prioritize. This should be done carefully. What would you want your prospective employer to see first once he picks up your resumé? So organizing your resumé in order of importance helps. How would you arrange it then? How about your contact information, your objective, education, accomplishments, skills and then awards? If you have been out of school for a while you can flip education and accomplishments. I’m sure you want the most important material toward the front.

You should not mention references.

Companies rarely call references before talking to a candidate This means that you should never put references directly on your resumé. I’m  pretty sure you don’t want your references’ contact information floating around the internet. If the company wants a reference, they can ask you for it. Applying for a job on the internet is very different from the normal paper and pen application we know of.

It is really difficult finding a job these days so when applying for a job make sure you put in you best in every aspect  possible, your resumé should be one of those important things. Don’t let that simple mistake you made in your  resumé rob you of that dream job.    Good luck!!!!!!!!!!!

Think it through carefully.

When that financial emergency comes rushing in,  hey! Don’t panic. I know depending on the gravity of it,  sitting down and taking it easy is probably the last thing you want to do and you are probably about to jump into the next planet and back in a second,  but consider this, how is that going to get you out of that difficulty? You can be sure that if you think the problem is hard to deal with, panicking is going to make it even more difficult than it already is,  SO taking it easy is the thing. What you really need to do is to try to determine what caused this situation.  Being able to find ways to solve this crisis depends on how you understand the cause. Have you thought of what caused this financial emergency? What is it? Is it a natural disaster? Or maybe it is a sudden loss of money? Or you’ve been robbed of the last cedi you have. Perhaps it is some expenses mounting up so fast you can’t keep up with it. Well, what ever it is,  just do first things first, things that would lead to a possible solution of the problem and not stress and more stress.

What do you do next then!

This is really important, take a look…….

You can prioritize your expenses. This situation might be so sudden, one you least expected so you really need to take certain quite painful steps like cutting out those things you really like but do not really need. You  can do this by starting from the very important thing to the least, then you would know what you need to do before the other and what you need to remove. You can try a list where you would put food and shelter at the topmost part of your list. You can also consider which bills you can delay a little on in paying up. This would help you save up a little to take care of your emergency depending on what it is.

Look elsewhere for extra money.

Maybe you have been saving up for uncertainties like this,  but this might not be the case. The problem might not fit in the case of an insurance. On the other hand if you opened an account in a bank especially for that,  the money you may have by then might not be enough to take care of that problem. What do you do then? If it is possible for you, you can do some temporary work or maybe there is something you have that you could sell to raise the money. After you’ve taken care of that little problem you could always buy back whatever you sold and even more.

You can also borrow.

Nobody finds pleasure in doing this. I know this might be something extremely difficult, but some little help from friends and loved ones wouldn’t break a bone.  After all they say “what are friends for”.  To  help you get through that situation it wouldn’t hurt to let the people around you help. Or, you could also borrow  from a bank where the interest wouldn’t be that much to deal with.

Grab that available assistance.

If there are provisions to help people in a situation like yours either by the state or individuals, take the opportunity and go for it. If it is a job loss make sure you collect all your benefits and entitlements. Perhaps it is some form of illness either on you or a family member. You should be in a position to get the assistance the state  has put in place. An assistance like the health insurance. This means you should have registered,  right?

These things happen in life once a while. So whiles you go about your daily activities  you should endeavor to make provisions for them. Even if they happen before you ever think of protection, there is always a way around everything so you could still take it easy, okay?

Sure it’s great to own your own house but apart from the obvious financial problems of purchasing your own house immediately after college, there are other non-financial reasons I would like to take you through as well.

Don’t get me wrong though, I think it’s great to own a house but don’t buy one immediately after college!

Here’s why………..

Loss of Flexibility

When you buy a home, you lose flexibility. When you buy a house, you are putting down roots in the community and you lose flexibility in many aspects of your life. For the first five years of your professional career, your flexibility will be one of your greatest assets. As you learn what you are good at doing and figure out what you really enjoy doing, you may want to change jobs or even careers. When you buy a house, you’re restricted geographically. That could mean that a great opportunity on the other side of the country is something you can’t pursue (easily)

Learn What You Like

In the five years, take the time to look around and see what it is you like about the places you live in. What do you dislike? Until you’ve lived in a few different layouts and setups, you won’t really know what to look for. Do you really like a big kitchen or just like how it looks in photos? Will you really want a hot tub or do you just like the idea of a hot tub? Is a garage something you really love and can’t live without? Unless you’ve lived in places with these amenities, you won’t know how important they really are to you.

And now, to the more widely known financial problems of jumping into home ownership.

Unless you’re the fabulously rich heir, who can do whatever he wants with his money, listen to this…

A mortgage is a huge weight. Your first few years of graduation should be spent enjoying and exploring your freedom, not saddling yourself with tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Believe me when I say that you can be even financially irresponsible for the first few years of your life, buckle down, and still retire a very happy and fulfilled person. As long as your financially irresponsibility doesn’t rack up a debt itself, you’ll be fine.

Homes Require Maintenance

And maintenance, regardless of how handy you are, is both a headache and time sink.. Things in a house break and you’ll have to fix it. When you rent, the landlord is responsible if the roof leaks. When you own it, you are responsible if the roof leaks and roof repairs are not cheap. In fact, they may cost several thousand dollars.

Why should you write a thank you letter? If you stand out in the interview but aren’t necessarily the best fit for the open job, an interviewer might remember you for another opening, when it comes up. If the interview was just the first round and someone drops out of the second round interview, they might call you to jump in because you stood out. Thank you letters won’t land you the job but could give you a small edge.

Follow up thank you letters are very simple to write and you should send them within two or three business days of the interview. In the letter itself, be sure to fix the interviewer by name, thank them for their time and the opportunity, express your excitement for both the position and their organization, and include anything you may have missed in the interview. You can find some sample thank you letters online. Most importantly your letter should be typed and always use professional language. Avoid typos, misspellings, and incorrect grammar.