Oruchuban Ebichu ep. 24 (eng. subs)

Ep. 24 Ebichu the Housekeeping Hamster. (You can drink whatever You want.)

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Debt Management, Budgeting and Financial Controls - Planning The Budget

Planning the Budget

In the previous exercise, we have identified all costs and all income and now have a clear picture of the current situation. Using this information, the budget we set will, in effect, be an overview of how we live our lives from this point on. There will be certain rules that we have to stick with, but we will know that sticking to the rules will allow us to achieve our future financial goals.

The next part of the process is a little more painful and certainly more laborious than the last, but nevertheless must be done. Begin with the easy stuff first. This is the middle section on the budget sheet, i.e.:

- motoring expenses;

- food and housekeeping;

- miscellaneous goods and services;

- personal and leisure;

- sundries and emergencies.

There will be lots of low hanging fruit here (easy savings to be made).

For example, let's say your daily expenditure diary reveals that on your commute to work you buy a newspaper at the railway station and a coffee while you wait for the train. You buy lunch at the deli around the corner, but go to the local pub for a sit down lunch and a drink on a Friday. You have a drink with colleagues after work on average 2 nights a week and buy an evening paper to read on the train on the way back from work. This is what this expenditure looks like over the week:

Morning coffee: 1.50 x 5 = 7.50

Morning paper: 0.60 x 5 = 3.00

Lunch at the deli 2.50 x 4 = 10.00

Bar lunch: 7.50 x 1 = 7.50

After work drinks: 2.80 x 2 = 5.60

Evening paper: 0.50 x 5 = 2.50

Weekly total: 7.50 + 3 + 10 + 7.50 + 5.60 + 2.50 = £36.10

Look at this again. Every single item is discretionary, yet it will cost you £144.40 in a 4 week month.

You may not be able to give everything up on the list, but taking a flask of coffee to work with a packed lunch may be a start. Many newspapers now offer yearly subscriptions that will cut the weekly bill by more than half - if you still need to have a newspaper every morning and every evening (do you?). The pub lunch could be dropped and the drinks with the colleagues after work cut back to one drink one evening a week - still sociable enough for most people.

In this example we might get back something like £130 per month. If there are two of you doing it, it might be more like £260 per month.

You need to do this type of breakdown and cost reduction exercise on each line item. Drop things like takeaways to a once a month treat and (if you do not already) learn to cook and cut out ready meals and other prepared food. You will not only save money, you will find you start living healthier too.

Examine closely how you do your motoring. Could you mange with one car instead of two? Could you get rid of the gas guzzling 4 x 4, which would reduce insurance, maintenance, road tax and fuel bills - all at once? Hopefully you are getting the idea by now.

Once the individual figures have been reviewed and cost reductions identified, you can put the new figures into the budget sheet and we can now start to see the new budget taking shape.

Next we can look at the first section. That is:

-housing costs;

-rates and utilities;

-important household services;

-personal insurances.

These are largely fixed costs, but there are opportunities here too. Housing costs such as rent or mortgages can be reduced. Mortgage deals can be switched to take advantage of new lender deals, or fixed rate schemes taken on if interest rates look like rising in the near future. The term of the loan can be extended or (if things are really tight) payments dropped to interest only for a while. You need to ask the question.

If you are renting, could you manage with a smaller property, or a one in a less fashionable area? Could you move closer to work at the same time and reduce daily travelling costs?

Take a look at what seems to be fixed costs such as personal, or household, insurances and compare rates and benefits. Deals in this area change literally every week.

Gas and electric costs can be reduced by switching supplier or, better still, turning down the heating and switching off lights and appliances when they are not being used. Focus on this for a while and you might be pleasantly surprised at the difference it will make.

And so on.

The last cost section is the credit card and unsecured debt one. Much like insurances this may be a more flexible area than you think. If your credit rating is good then you have lots of room here to take on new cards and deals with 0% interest rates. Make sure when you do this that you close down the accounts you are transferring from. That is, you do not increase your overall indebtedness, or availability of debt.

If your credit rating is already poor, or bad, this may not be an option for you, so you will have to find other ways to reduce your repayments. One thing that creditors like to see is that their debtors are in control of the situation. A well put together budget sheet like the one we are in the process of outlining here can be a huge help.

Using the budget sheet you can identify all income and expenditure that needs to be made before handling your unsecured debt. This will leave you a set amount that can be used to negotiate reduced payments to your creditors.

This is a separate subject in its own right, but showing you are in control of your own finances may allow you to negotiate a reduced payment plan with the companies concerned.

Any other thing you can do in this area to consolidate debt and reduce overall interest payments needs to be examined closely.

However, you need to resist the temptation to make any loan consolidations that involve using your property for security. There is probably another way, so explore the other ways first.

The last section is income. You may have been tough with yourself in the cost section, but the other dimension to the budget is of course income. The more you increase your income, the less you need to cut back (or the bigger the benefit if you do).

Whilst writing 'increase your income' is very easy for me to do, in reality it is much harder to do. However, there may be opportunities you had not considered which may be worth exploring such as overtime, weekend shifts, unsociable shifts, additional responsibilities that could be taken on, or even a second job. Switching jobs could also be an option as could be starting a completely new career.

In other words increasing income is not always about getting further up the greasy pole, sometimes it is about taking a sideways move into any area you had not considered before.

One last point on income: while you have the budget sheet in front of you it is worth evaluating the cost of work. In other words, when you add up travel, parking, fuel, dry cleaning, child care, work wear etc then subtract it from your income - that will give you a true figure of what you earn.

Finalising the Budget

The above represents a substantial investment in time and effort. The end result will be a budget sheet which is accurate, personally optimised and which puts you in control of your own finances.

Having made this effort, you should now have identified specific allowances for each item and you now need to be sure that money is allocated each month to cover those items whether they occur weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly.

It is unlikely that you will be able to reduce all of your costs, move house, change jobs, etc, all at once, so you may have recognised already that this budgeting exercise can be a progressive thing that happens over time.

Therefore, to begin with, you will need to ensure that costs are under control and, as a minimum, outgoings equal income. Over time you will look for cost savings and income increasing opportunities and, once taken advantage of, you can then revisit the budget sheet, put in the new figures and move on.

One completely free benefit to all of this is that, once it is all complete and you are sticking to it, you get a full night's sleep whenever you want.

Next

Sticking to the budget

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Home Organizing Tips : How to Create a Household Organizer

Create a household organizer by using a file drawer or big notebook with different files for each family member. Whether creating a system to write down phone messages or chores to be done, organizing a family's busy schedule is simple and easy with ideas from a professional house cleaner and organizer in this free video on housekeeping. Expert: Ann Myrick Bio: Since 1997, Ann Myrick has been a professional decorator, house cleaner, home organizer and planner. Filmmaker: Tim Brown

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Housekeeping Tips : How to Remove Sweat Stains

In order to remove sweat stains from clothing, use a combination of water and aspirin to make a mixture for cleaning spot stains. Wash a piece of clothing in the washing machine after cleaning sweat stains with help from a professional house cleaner in this free video on removing stains and cleaning tips. Expert: Rachel Yatuzis Contact: www.greenkleeninc.com Bio: Rachel Yatuzis is a professional house cleaner in Nashville, Tenn., specializing in using everyday household items for cleaning purposes. Filmmaker: Tim Brown

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How to make a proper habbo retro [no debbo] [no hamachi]

Here are all download links: holo cms: rapidshare.com winRar: www.rarlab.com MySQL: dev.mysql.com xampp: www.apachefriends.org Microsoft Visual C#: www.microsoft.com TortoiseSVN: tortoisesvn.net -------------------------------------------------------------------------- v23 dcrs link: rapidshare.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- local host link: localhost (remember to have Apache and MySQL running or it wont work) local host change password localhost local host admin: localhost ----------------------------------------------------------------------- dcrs for lazy people: External Texts field: www.habbohotel.co.uk External Variables field: www.habbohotel.co.uk Habbo DCR field: images.habbohotel.co.uk ----------------------------------------------- how to add the v23 dcrs to your retro: Installing your own dcr's: 1. Download the V23 DCR's in the link above. 2. Extract them to your Desktop. 3. Now you'll have a folder on your desktop with the DCR files in it. 4. Make a folder in C:\xampp\htdocs\ and call it v23. 5. Put all the stuff in the map to the map you've created in htdocs. 6. Open external_variables.txt. 7. Search for: ''yourip'' without quotes for some times untill you've got them all. 8. Change them to your ip, 127.0.0.1 or your Hamachi IP. 9. Save. 10. Go to Housekeeping. 11. Go to Site & Content. 12. Fill everything in, it will look like this: External Texts field: OpenDNS External Variables field: OpenDNS Habbo DCR field ...

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The Henry Vacuum Cleaner is a Popular Vac

The idea of a vacuum cleaner as a housekeeping tool was brought to us by an Englishman named Henry Cecil Booth. In the 1950s, this man invented the very first one and dubbed it "Puffin Billy". It started as a gasoline powered machine, but nonetheless was the beginnings of the Henry vacuum cleaner.

The body of the vacuum cleaner was left outside while it was in use due to its large size, the smoke, the horrible odor and the noise. This equipment ran using lengthy, lightweight hose put through the home's window in the room that was being cleaned.

There is a change from the vacuums of the past to those of the present day.

The initial model of the Henry vacuum cleaner was very big in size and made a lot of noise. Obviously, this was not a very popular model and didn't sell well. James Sprangler introduced some simple modifications which changed the vacuum cleaner into the cleaning tool that we know today, e.g. a fan, a pillow covering, and a box type structure.

Sprangler as well as the Henry vacuum cleaner project was unable to continue with his venture, he then sold his patent to Henry Hoover whom invented the Hoover. The Henry Vacuum cleaners paled in comparison with the updated Hoover design of later years.

The Hoover brand of vacuum cleaner was a runaway success; even today the brand has its command and presence in the market, and Hoover is known as one of the few organizations that deliver on their promise. The Henry vacuum cleaner is now available for use!

After starting out with only very simple designs, the company now boasts more than six models of Henry vacuum cleaners, including cylinder, upright, centralized, wet vacuum cleaners and more!

You need to analyze each one for its strengths and weaknesses individually, in order to avoid offering so much that you don't pay attention to warning symptoms. The best for your home is not the most expensive or the most beautiful, but the one which can take care of your needs in the house. But odds are the Henry vacuum cleaner will suit your requirements.

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Meet Success: Business Profile of Sylvia Acevedo, Communicard Owner

Sylvia Acevedo needed a break from her technology job so she bought an old Victorian house to remodel into a bed and breakfast. "Being an engineer working in technology, I really felt I didn't do a lot of tangible work. But with the bed and breakfast, at the end of the day, I felt like I had actually done something."

And, of course, she had—because as she renovated the house, she transformed it into a beautiful B&B. She had no problem communicating with the construction crew, who were mostly Hispanic, because she grew up speaking both Spanish and English. "My mother was from Mexico and all of my grandparents lived there," she says.

"People would see me talking to a crew of workers and I literally would have contractors stop and hand me the phone, asking me to translate for them," she says. That's how she realized communication between Hispanic construction workers and non-Spanish-speaking supervisors was really a problem.

Being a software engineer, Sylvia's mind immediately went to solving the problem. "I think it's because I've always been an innovator and I see things maybe in a way that provides a side-door solution. I don't just look at the situation and say, 'Okay, it's a bottleneck'. I try to look at new ways to solve the problem. And in this particular situation, the problem was communication." But she didn't follow through on her ideas for a few more years.

After two years of renovating and running the B&B, Sylvia was ready to get back into the technology field, so she hired a manager for the bed and breakfast, and started a software development company with three others. A few years later, Sylvia and her partners later sold the software company.

"That was really interesting," she says, "because we sold it for stock and then the stock market crashed. But that was an important learning lesson because I learned a lot about creating a company that supported intellectual property and taking it from literally concept to actually building a company."

By this time she had also sold the B&B for a tidy little sum and was ready to solve the communication problem she saw a few years before. She realized there were a lot of non-Spanish-speaking people in the United States who were hiring people who only spoke Spanish for service jobs. "And you have a challenge because how do you direct the work that needs to be done?" she says.

The solution? The CommuniCard, easy-to-use Spanish/English communication cards. There's a deck of housekeeping cards with pictures of the tasks and English/Spanish translations, and several accordion-folded, laminated pocket cards for the construction industry showing tools, tasks and translations, and a similar pocket card for the lawncare industry. This allows the supervisor to merely show the card to the worker to communicate. For instance, one of the cards shows a person cleaning a big window with a spray bottle in one hand while using a squeegee in the other. The wording below the illustration says, "Clean the windows. Limpia las ventanas." So if the worker cannot speak English, or even read, it is clear what is being asked.

Before putting it into production she tested it extensively, first in Texas, and then across the United States. "I went to Northern California, Southern California, New Mexico, Colorado and across the South and Texas. I found the biggest needs were in construction and housekeeping," she says. She began by interviewing the people who hired these workers—everyone from Junior Leaguers, to people in office settings who hired workers, to companies and construction firms. She also began to go to day-labor sites and construction sites to interview the workers. But the supervisors weren't appreciative of her being on jobsites, even if she only spoke to workers while they were on their breaks.

"So I would approach them at bus stops, churches, and schools." And what she learned was very informative. "We began to get a lot of feedback and the product changed dramatically as a result," she says.

All in all, she spoke to over 4,000 people. After the informal research, it was time for something a little more elaborate. "We've done many focus groups, and we do them on all the products," Sylvia says. The interviews are conducted by a professional, trained moderator who's bilingual.

"And that's a very important issue," she says. "When you have a vision for a product, you really need to get customer input. But there's also a fine line between getting too much input and not enough. I didn't want to go into analysis paralysis or information overload."

One of the important outcomes of the focus groups was that one person in the first focus group had such a huge need to solve the communication problem that he approached her about investing in the company. She accepted, and for a stake in the company, he paid for the initial production of the cards.

The company is now in the middle of its second year and sales are increasing. So far, they've sold thousands of the cards, but it's slow going. Sylvia originally thought the product would be sold through retail stores, but she found that her previous distribution experience was no longer valid.

"My experience was dated. It was years before Wal-Mart had taken over and many of the people that I went to call on in the industry were no longer there. In fact, the businesses were gone."

Finding a roadblock in the path to retail distribution was a big disappointment, but the company simply adjusted its thinking and found another way. Now, instead of selling through national retail chains as she had hoped, CommuniCard products are sold through trade associations and the company's website, as well as through a few local retail stores.

To promote the innovative product, Sylvia doesn't use traditional advertising. She has found that public relations works best because it's such a new product that requires too much education and explaining.

It's a low-price-point item, with the housekeeping cards selling for $15.95 and all the others selling for less than $10, so Sylvia has found that tradeshows are not particularly effective, either. "You're competing with so many giveaways at tradeshows that I found it really diminished the value of our brand. People would say, 'Gosh, they just gave me this really cool saw that's worth 30 bucks and you're not going to give me this for $10?' So I found it to be very expensive and unproductive," she says.

Nevertheless, in its first year of business CommuniCard -- found at [http://www.communicard.com] -- sold well over 5,000 units of the housekeeping cards, and somewhat less of the others, generating just under a $100,000 in sales.

The company has branched out into consulting as well as product sales because there's a need for the expertise Sylvia has acquired through all her research. "Most marketing firms focus on selling consumer products to Hispanics," she says. Instead, she focuses on solving problems. For instance, the bus company hired her to find out why so few Hispanics ride the bus.

Sylvia was also recognized in 2004 as the National Businesswoman of the Year by the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

CommuniCard recently introduced a new set of cards for law enforcement, and police departments have had great interest in them. Sylvia offers to customize the cards with the police department's badge, and this requires an order of hundreds, which customers are readily doing.

The company has also been researching other languages to see what new products might be developed, but so far they haven't found the right match. "When we tested the (original) cards in Chicago, people wanted cleaning cards in Polish. But that's such a small market. We'd only be able to sell those in New York, Chicago and maybe Boston. Whereas the housekeeping cards in Spanish/English are selling across the country," she says.

One of the things that Sylvia made sure to do was protect her idea. She has a patent pending and, of course, everything is copyrighted and trademarked. As a result of her software engineering background, she knew how important this was. She says she often urges other women inventors to protect their assets, and she has helped several either copyright or trademark their ideas.

One of the things that has surprised her is people need these products so urgently they are willing to pay FedEx delivery charges to get them overnight. "I bet we get no less than three orders per week where people want the product so fast that they're willing to pay more in shipping than the product costs," she says, which leads her to wonder if the product is correctly priced. "We're constantly evaluating," she says.

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