The 3 Best Personal Finance Games For Kids
Published January 4, 2012 | 
They say that the best time to learn is when you’re young and you can teach your kids about personal finance today in a fun and educational manner. The best thing is that kids are always asking you for games to play to keep them entertained and there’s nothing better than learning while having fun. This article gives a rundown of the 3 best games kids can play to learn about personal finance.
1. Monopoly – a legendary and highly educational board games. As adults we probably played this game ourselves in our younger days and had heaps of fun. The money lessons from this game are still relevant today. Kids are forced to make decisions as to whether to buy or sell property and then as their financial situation changes, make further decisions. We, as adults, make financial decisions everyday and so it’s great that kids get exposed to that early.
2. Game of Life – a more modern game, yet still very educational. If you haven’t heard about the game, it explores the decisions we make and the paths we take in life. Eventually, the amount of money that we earn gets affected and you learn how to manage this. The closest thing to a real life game.
3. Cash Flow For Kids – invented by financial expert and motivational speaker, Robert Kiyosaki, it is probably the first game ever invented with the goal of making children more financially literate. It introduces kids to the concept of assets and liabilities as well as passive income. Probably the best game for kids out there today.
Whatever you decide to do, you must try to financially educate your kids from a young age. You may use other means with which to do this, but there’s probably nothing more exciting than personal finance games for your kids.
Finding The Best Entry Level Finance Jobs
Published January 4, 2012 |
In the financial job market, there are many obstacles for graduates seeking to rise quickly in their professional lives. Financial organizations, ranging from banks to international stock-brokers, adopt high standards for their middle and upper management professionals. Indeed, the delicacy of the marketplace and the attitudes of individual clients towards their financial situation requires a high level of experience and good aptitude for a management position. The financial graduate who is just leaving university to find a job, however, can accelerate the process of rising quickly in the field of finance by choosing the right entry-level finance job.
The first consideration for professionals looking for entry-level finance jobs is their short term goals. If a graduate is concerned with making a good salary immediately, working with an international company or a larger bank may be the wisest move. However, those who want to build experience and rise through the ranks may wish to consider smaller organizations, such as financial planning firms, where there is more contact between executives, managers, and entry-level workers. This is an important consideration, as it can set you off on the right or wrong foot immediately.
Another important thought on entry-level finance jobs concerns the amount of upward mobility available for exceptional finance graduates. The graduate, who works for an international bank, can certainly rise to prominence within the company and the industry in general. Indeed, there is plenty of opportunity for such a professional to rise to local, regional, national, and international positions. For the graduate who works with a smaller company, mobility may be more difficult because of the relatively fewer positions between president and entry-level worker.
A third consideration on entry-level finance jobs is the nature of the job that a graduate accepts. Indeed, the chances of rising through the ranks decrease if a professional doesn’t enjoy their job and bring the same level of effort day in and day out. A professional who wants to help people directly may wish to work as a financial planner or advisor and rise to departmental management after years of commitment to client success. Another professional that thinks of finance in terms of larger companies, or even governments, may desire to make their way as a stockbroker or corporate financial professional, rising through the ranks by networking with prominent clients. All these considerations are important when thinking of the best entry-level finance job for a particular graduate.
Motel KPI for Finance and Overall Lodging Management
Published January 4, 2012 |
We all want to make our work easier and that includes the motel managers. If you are one of them, you surely want to get a hold of the key statistics that will tell you about the performance of your company. This can be easily obtained through the use of motel KPI or key performance indicators for motels. Whether or not you are positioned as the motel manager for the finance department or you are the operation manager who is in charge of all the processes within the organization, it does not matter. This is because the motel KPI can help you keep track of any area in the business efficiently.
Motel KPI for finance and motel administration can be about the cash position at bank. This is an example of a key performance indicator for the finance department of a motel wherein you will be able to learn how much you still have available after you have reconciled your check book. This is a good measure that will keep you updated about the money that you still own even after you have paid your dues or loans from the bank.
Meanwhile, if you are from the operations department or that you are responsible of checking the processes within the enterprise, you can use stock-take discrepancies as one of your measures. This is an effective motel KPI that will aid you in monitoring the efficiency of all the departments in the company. In addition to that, this is one of the rare motel administration indicators that put the administrative systems in the right position. However, you should keep in mind though that this type of indicator needs to be simple and easy for your staff to understand. This way, the results will be obtained quickly and defining the impact of the results will also be effortless.
Apart from the KPIs that have been mentioned above, you can use other indicators for motel accommodation including total accounts due which will state the amount that you still owe, the total accounts payable, which is usable for those that have large motels especially those that contain restaurants and return on investment. Return on investment or ROI is a common motel KPI that will tell you about the profit that your motel makes. This is gauged as a return on the percentage of the amount that you have invested on it. This will tell you whether or not your income is sufficient.
You can also monitor the efficiency of your processes and your financial department through the use of taxes owed and sales and costs. Taxes owed motel KPI is employed to monitor the taxes that are not paid by the time that they are collected. Thus, this will tell you how much money you have to pay at a given point in time so that you will not spend the cash. Sales and costs motel KPI shows the actual figures in comparison to the allocated budget of the firm for a particular period. If you want to see the real figures and percentages, you can use this as one of your motel administration indicators.