Back in February I wrote about freebie blagger Mike Essex and his new book – Free Stuff Everyday – on how how to get sent loads of exciting products from different businesses for free.

Since then Mike has continued his blagging journey and has now published another book entitled How To Be A Blagger, which looks at his quest to get 100 products for free in one year and details the lessons he learnt from this.

Amongst the many tips that Mike provides for securing free stuff, the one that really stands out is the need to develop a unique proposition that will convince a manufacturer / publisher / producer / distributor to send you their exciting new gadget, book or beauty product for nowt.

In Mike’s case a key component of this proposition is his blog (naturally hosted for free on the Blogger platform), which carries all of his product reviews.  Mike covers pretty much everything on his blog, but if you have specific interest, you could focus your niche towards one product category that really interests you, such as smartphone reviews or writing about different types of cosmetic products.

So back to the book, is it any good?  Overall yes it is.  Just like his last book, Mike has a nice, chatty writing style and mixes his blagging lessons in amongst product reviews and descriptions of the various funny situations he got himself into whilst undertaking his quest.

As they both focus on the same subject, there is some overlap with his previous book and I have to admit I skimmed past most of the product reviews, although for somebody starting their own review site, these should provide some good examples of how to write a fair and honest review.

You can pick up your own copy of How To Be A Blagger from Amazon – see the link below…

Whilst I’m not a great fan of DIY, I’ve put up enough wonky shelves in my time to know how important it is to have the right tool for the job.

The same applies when choosing a savings account to keep your hard-earned cash in.  Get it wrong and you could be losing out on valuable interest earnings or be unable to access your money in an emergency.

So to help you decide on the right savings tool for the job, here is an introductory guide to choosing the account best suited to your situation.

Saving For A Treat Or An Annual Expense

Anyone with their money-head well screwed on will know it is better to save up to buy a holiday or a new gadget, rather than just whip out the credit card and buy on the never-never.

However you may have a few different short-term saving goals (a holiday, a new telly, your annual car insurance payment, etc) and tracking the progress of your savings to each goal, when all the cash is in a single savings account is not ideal.

Fortunately quite a few banks offer multiple savings accounts, which allow you to separate your different pots of money into smaller, virtual accounts within the main savings account.

I currently use Halifax, but there are other banks such as ING Direct who also provide this service.

You won’t see much interest on the money you save and there won’t be any tax relief, but considering you are only likely to be saving for a couple of months to reach each saving goal, the interest and tax will both be negligible, plus your money can be accessed instantly once you are ready to buy your brand new iPad.

Saving For An Emergency

The age-old emergency fund advice recommends we hold enough savings to cover three months of living expenses for use in times of need.  Having six or even nine months coverage helps even more, but to be fair, that is a lot of money to save and considering most people probably have less than one month’s coverage, three months seems like a reasonable goal.

As we are talking emergencies, the key requirement is to be able to access your cash ASAP.  No waiting three working days for the money to be transferred to your current account or having to pay a large penalty for making an early withdrawal.

One option therefore is to open an instant access savings account.  If you want to be able to get money out through a cashpoint, opt for a bank with a network of branches, although you may find slightly better rates of interest at online-only banks.

Many banks tend to offer more favourable interest rates on savings accounts if you move your current account to them.  This could be beneficial, but check the small print to confirm the length of the deal.

It is worth remembering that three months expenses could be £6,000 or more and (hopefully) you won’t have to touch this money for years, so you don’t want to lose value through tax and inflation.

So another option is to put your emergency savings into a tax-free ISA.  Unlike an ordinary savings account, you will not need to pay tax on the interest that you earn.  This will help you combat the effects of inflation.

But it is important to check the interest rate on your ISA, as some banks and building societies will try to get away with paying a lower rate, just because you are not charged tax.

Another factor to consider with ISAs are the restrictions on how much you can save into them during a single tax year (At the time of writing this is £5,640.00, but this figure is liable to change and worth checking on the HMRC website).

Also, once you have withdrawn money from an ISA, you cannot put that money back in, so effectively your ISA limit is reduced by any amount you withdraw during the financial year.

Of course, if your emergency savings exceed the ISA limit, there is nothing to stop you from splitting your emergency fund between an ISA and an ordinary instant access savings account.

Saving For The Long-Term

If you have just inherited a lump sum of cash or have been squirrelling away savings for years and want to put it all somewhere safer than the stockmarket – but also protect it from inflation, then you should consider fixed rate bonds.

With fixed rate bonds, you give the bank or building society your lump sum of cash and they hold onto it for a set period of time, ranging between one to five years.

During this period of time the bank will pay you a fixed rate of interest and generally speaking the longer the term of the agreement, the better the interest rate you will receive.

However, you should only put money that you know you will not need into a fixed rate bond, as you will not be able to access it during the term of the agreement (or at least without major interest rate penalties).

Another thing to consider is that the rate of interest on your bond will not rise if the Bank of England rate rises, so you need to look at market trends and take these into account when deciding on the length of the agreement.

There are variations of these products available, which provide an interest rate that tracks the market, allowing you to take advantage of rising rates; but these are less attractive when interests rates are so low.

Alternatively you could look at putting your money into a fixed rate ISA, which will provide the added bonus of the tax-free wrapper.  If you are able to secure a good deal on the interest rate, then this combined with the tax-free allowance could surpass a fixed-rate bond.

Again as the ISA option will only allow you to invest up to £5,640.00 limit, anyone with a larger lump sum of cash might be better to max out the ISA limit and then invest the rest in a fixed-rate bond.

Children’s Savings

Proud new parents can invest in their children’s future by starting their savings journey through a small range of specialist accounts.

A regular savings account requires you to commit to specific monthly contributions, but will provide a better rate of return than standard accounts.

If you want your child to be able to dip into their savings from time to time, then opt for an instant access savings account.

An alternative is to open a junior ISA.  These have taken over from child trust funds which were recently phased out by the government and like their adult equivalents enable your children to earn interest without having to worry about tax.

One potential downside of a junior ISA is that unlike a savings account, your child will not be able to access their money until they are 18 years old, although this does protect the money for potential use to cover uni fees or a house deposit (or for buying a fast car on their 18th birthday!).

Choosing A Savings Account To Match Your Needs

As with all financial products, there is no hard and fast rule on what to choose – it really depends on your personal circumstances and tolerance to risk, but for cash savings in particular, the key is to achieve the balance between flexibility and being able to stave off the effects of the dreaded inflation.

Measuring your wealth is a bit like going to the doctor for an annual checkup – it is a way of looking at your financial health to detect early warning signs of problems that are developing, such as carrying too much debt or having too little liquidity (not been able to access cash savings in an emergency).

Once you know there is a problem, you can do something about it, plus knowing where you currently stand helps with financial planning and setting saving goals – especially when you want something big like a house.

Calculating Your Net Worth

Either on a spreadsheet or a piece of paper, make one list of all your assets (along with their current values) and one list of your debts (along with their current values).  If you keep a budget then you should have most of this information to hand.

Your list of assets is likely to include:

• Cash savings in bank accounts, saving certificates and ISAs
• Stock market investments, such as individual shares or managed funds
• Your home and other property, such as a buy-to-let flat (use online property portals to gauge current values)
• Valuables and collectibles (online auction sites could provide some clue to their value or you might need to take them to an auction house for a valuation)
• Pension funds (you should receive an annual statement which will show the value of your fund and many pension providers also have a facility to check the value of your pension online)

Your list of debts will potentially include:

• Credit cards
• Store cards
• Student loan
• Hire purchase loans
• Mortgage

With your two lists complete, simply total up the value of each column and then subtract the total value of your debts from the total value of your assets to figure out your net worth.

Using The Information

Depending on your personal circumstances, you will either have:

• A negative net worth – value of debts is higher than the value of assets
• A positive net worth – value of assets is higher than the value of debts

Knowing your net worth can help you make some important decisions about the way you manage your money.  For example, if your net worth is negative, the main objective will be to find ways of reducing your debts, before focusing on building up your wealth.

Having a positive net worth will be more reassuring, but you may find that all of your wealth is tied up in one property, leaving you with little room for manoeuvre if you need to access a decent sum of cash in an emergency or to cover a period of unemployment.  So in this situation the objective would be to begin building up some cash reserves.

Calculating My Own Net Worth

At the moment the net worth of the Suter household is looking pretty rosy.  The only debt that my wife and I have is our mortgage, which due to the drop in house prices is on par with the value of the property – effectively bringing us back to zero.

We also have our pension money and a fairly substantial pot of savings for our next home.  So you could say that we are in extremely good position…

However, having thought about this, I am a little bit dubious about including the value of our home in our total net worth calculation, as I think it provides a false sense of comfort.

The issue I have is around liquidity and the mortgage debt.

As we live in the property, we cannot make any money renting it out, so the only way to extract  value out of the home would be to sell it, but doing this would then leave us homeless.

This is why I can never quite understand people who claim that their home is their pension – just how do they plan to extract the value to support their cost of living?

Additionally the mortgage debt is costing us money due to the interest that the bank charges on our monthly repayments.  Debts cost you money, whilst assets (should) make you money or at least increase in value.

So I have taken a much more pessimistic approach and removed the value of the property from the assets column in my net worth calculation, but left the mortgage in the debt column.

This places us on a negative net worth to the tune of just over -£7,000 (savings pot and pension savings minus mortgage debt).  Funnily enough, that figure makes me feel much happier, even though it is nowhere near as rosy as my initial calculation, as it provides a clear debt reduction goal and highlights the risk of holding the mortgage.

I always tend to err on the side of prudence with financial calculations, but whether you decide to include the value of your home in your net worth calculation is entirely up you and should be based on your own personal circumstances.

What I would recommend though is to undertake a net worth calculation every six months or so and use this fairly simplistic financial barometer to help keep your money management on track.

More Wealth Resources

Back in September 2010 I tried to conceptualise positive and negative net worth with the Wealth Grid.  I guess it is a little bit like the game of snakes and ladders, with the aim of moving to the top of the grid, without falling back down into debt.

Alternatively there is the Wealth Creation Pyramid which provides a pictorial guide to the steps you need to take after you have worked out your net worth.

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/cushinglibrary/

I’ve recently finished reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, who has taken many of the principles of lean manufacturing developed by Toyota back in the day and applied them to successful startup businesses.

Despite the startup title, this book is a fascinating read for both the entrepreneur and intrepreneur alike, so even if you are not intending on starting your own business, there are plenty of valuable lessons on how to innovate within your organisation – which will be both beneficial to your employers and to your own career.

My advice to anyone looking to build their career or start a business in this increasingly fast-paced and unpredictable world is to get hold of a copy as soon as possible and begin implementing the advice.

In the meantime, here are some key takeaways:

Not Just Tightening Your Belt

Traditionally lean has tended to be quite a negative term – “these are lean times”, meaning that people have less money to spend and in many cases have to make do without.

In other circumstances though, being considered lean is a very positive status.  You only need to look at the world’s of sport and fashion to see how people strive to make their bodies as lean as possible.

But to the Lean Startup there is much more to it.  Being lean is all about being efficient, minimising waste, testing different concepts and continuously improving.

Efficiency

Startup businesses only have a matter of months to begin generating sustainable revenue.  Failure to do so, will result in them running out of money and going bust.

This means that every second, every penny and every piece of material or resource has to be made to count, putting enormous pressure on the entrepreneurs to ensure they invest in the right strategy, target the right market and create the right product.

Get the product wrong and you could literally waste months of development time producing the killer app that doesn’t quite make the kill (in a business sense!).

Iterative Development

To ensure they don’t waste time, money or resource with the wrong product, lean entrepreneurs and business innovators carry out plenty of testing to get feedback and continuously modify the product based on this feedback.

However they don’t bother with focus groups or questionnaires – these will only give you a limited insight.  Instead they make a very basic version of the product and release it onto the market – warts and all.

If the product is a success and sells well, they will continue developing it and if the product is a complete flop, then at least they will have not wasted too much time trying to perfect something that nobody wants.

In some cases the entrepreneur or intrepreneur has to pivot the business – either re-targeting the product to a different market, introducing a different product to the same market or even creating a variation of the product for a new market.

Knowledge Is Key

Continuously developing and testing different iterations of a product or service provides innovators with a huge amount of knowledge and learning about their target markets.

This enables them to create new ideas about what will sell and get those ideas onto the market to test customer response, so that once an ideas goes BOOM, they know they can focus on developing it into a sustainable business.

This is essentially the essence of lean startups.  Throughout the book, Eric Ries uses examples from both his own and other people’s lean startup experiences, and discusses both the triumphs and mistakes that he and other entrepreneurs have made with their own businesses.

For intrepreneurs, there are plenty of tips for dealing with inter-departmental politics and achieving managerial buy-in with a completely different take on the way performance is measured for developing new products and strategies.

So whether you are building your career or building your business, it will be well worth your while investing in a copy of this book.

Buy the Lean Startup from Amazon:

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses

Photo from Betsyweber

Here is a selection of articles from the UK personal finance blogosphere that I have enjoyed reading during April.

11 Price Comparison Sites Rated

Originally the consumer’s friend, comparison sites are probably more akin to an online version of the traditional insurance broker and there are other ways to find a bargain.  But nonetheless they are here to stay and this posts turns the tables on them by comparing the comparison sites…
http://money-watch.co.uk/9313/11-price-comparison-sites-rated

Does your landlord have permission to let your home?

If you are renting you will know how much of a song-and-dance your landlord probably made about ensuring you can pay the bills, but the growing number of accidental landlords means that tenants should be taking steps to ensure their landlords are actually allowed to rent out their homes…
http://www.totallymoney.com/blogs/landlord-tenant-rights/

Money for all seasons I: income, spending and age

I like this post a lot and I think it is because it encapsulates a whole host of money lessons into one place and neatly describes what you should be doing during the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter stages of your life…
http://www.themoneyprinciple.co.uk/2012/money-for-all-seasons-i-income-spending-and-age/

Five tips to Save Money and Retire Early

You may have heard these timeless tips before, but Ermine takes the story forward by showing how he has used them effectively to reach his goal of early retirement…
http://simple-living-in-suffolk.co.uk/2012/04/five-tips-to-save-money-and-retire-early/

Spring cleaning our passive investing HQ

Make a brew, put the telly on, take a seat in your favourite armchair and smile smugly whilst your money works hard to grow itself.  The passive investing area of Monevator.com has had a spring clean and eagerly waits to show you how to invest with minimal effort…
http://monevator.com/2012/04/17/passive-investing-guide/

UK Personal Finance Blogosphere 2012 – Updated

Nine additional UK personal finance blogs added to the blogging superstars infographic – sorry I missed you last time round guys !!!

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