Financial freedom: Growing your means by taking ACTION!

Five Cents Ten Cents has moved to http://fivecentstencents.com

Please bookmark the new website as this blog will not be updated after 21 March 2008.

Thank you.

Panzer

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One of the pillars of financial freedom is to grow your means. You can do that in many ways. The most obvious way that occurs to you would be to hunker down, work hard and work smart to get ahead in your career or business.

Growing your means, a paradigm shift…
Get that promotion. Gain that increment. Grab that career move that pumps up your income and earnings. That is one way to grow your means.

The other way that is increasingly evident in our globalised economy that is Singapore Inc. is to seek alternate sources of income. Investment income is one such way. In generally, Singapore’s tax laws are laid out such that interest is not taxed. Dividends from stocks and shares for certain exempt sectors are also free from tax. Even for dividends from companies taxed at 18%, you get a tax credit to offset the taxes on your dividends that result in you only paying tax on dividends at your effective personal tax rates.

Internet income is starting to become a reality. I can’t quit my day job but AdSense revenue is paying for my web hosting for this blog. Hence, my blogging efforts are able to generate enough money to make my blog more professional with its own domain name as well as paid web hosting. The new paradigm in our ever changing value-chain is to diversify your income sources. Relying on your job for 100% of your financial security gets riskier with age and with winds of change blowing through the business landscape.

Growing your means, taking action!
My own foray into growing my means has been really using AdSense and blogging to explore how you can make some additional sources of income from non-traditional activities of trading time for money. Don’t get me wrong, AdSense requires still some trade-off but it gives you some flexibility in working on your blogs when you have time and at your own schedule.

Based on what I’ve read, unless the main stream media picks up on my blog and gives me free publicity to a few hundred thousand people, my humble blog would be challenged to generate anything close to even my investment income. I realise I need to either sell my own product or services through my websites where I’ve build up a small audience. That is the way to go. This revamp of Five Cents Ten Cents seeks to make my blog more adaptable to change as the look and feel can move very quickly using Wordpress templates. In addition, I can also add functionality that exceeds what Blogspot can do for me.

To grow our means is to be open to opportunities and to try. Almost one year ago, I started out Five Cents Ten Cents as an experiment. What this experiment has proven is that it can generate real dollars and cents and it has also allowed me to get re-aquainted with Web 2.0 technologies and to marry my skills in writing, personal finance, information technology as well as some dabbling with designs and photography. Increasingly you will note that Five Cents Ten Cents uses photos from my own Flickr! albums that were taken on my trips overseas as well as my activities in toastmastering, kidsREAD and others.

How are you growing your means? What concrete steps, however small, have you taken to grow your means. In our current low returns from fixed deposits and treasury bills, even if you can generate $10 a mth from whatever alternate source, it represents $12,000 that you would have needed to set aside at 1% (Fairprice Plus savings rate) to get the same returns. So don’t underestimate the power of this alternate income source.

Be well and prosper!