Archives for November 2020

How to Quit Your Job in 2020

November 3, 2020 by Guest Post 3 Comments

Quitting a position is an uncomfortable reality that nearly every working adult will face at some point in their career. When you think of quitting, you might think of Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) making his rousing speech in Jerry Macguire or Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) tossing her phone into a Parisian fountain in The Devil Wears Prada. While these emotional exits might be satisfying, unlike Jerry or Andy, you might want to avoid burning bridges.

In 2020, the competitive job market and unusual working conditions have made leaving a position even harder than usual. If you are trying to make a career transition without burning bridges, use these tips to guide you through your resignation process.

Tidy Your Files

In a brick and mortar office, your replacement would likely take over your desk when you leave making it easy to transfer files and resources. In a remote position, the transition may not be as seamless. To help your manager, organize your files and tools and summarize the locations in a document. This will give your successor a helpful place to reference as they get acclimated.

Setup a Virtual Meeting

When it is time to leave a position, the first thing you might think to do is give your supervisor a heads up and submit your notice letter. In an in-person office, that meeting with your manager would happen face-to-face but online, it is not as clear. The best practice is to plan a formal phone or video meeting even if you primarily communicate through email or chat.

Outline Your Talking Points

Resigning can be an emotional task. You might be angry, upset, excited, or scared and if you aren’t careful those emotions can get the best of you on your way out. To preserve your relationships it is helpful to outline your talking points before your meeting. This will help you clearly articulate your notice and provide thoughtful feedback if it is appropriate.

Thank Your Coworkers

The classic farewell office party is a great opportunity to thank your coworkers and wish them well. In remote positions, signing off for the last time is a little more abrupt. Though it is not as natural, send a thank you email or message to your coworkers and initiate a continuing relationship.

It doesn’t matter if you love or hate your current job, resigning from a position can be difficult. As you approach quitting, communicate with grace and professionalism and you will help your career in the long run. If you are considering making a career transition, use these tips to maintain your references and network in 2020.

9 finance habits to inculcate for personal finance management

November 3, 2020 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Photo by free pictures of money on Foter.com / CC BY

You have just started your business and look forward to a healthy growth trajectory. One of the critical factors that startup owners and entrepreneurs must keep in mind is managing their personal finances well. It’s really important to develop a ratio of how much money you intend to spend, save, and invest.

Frugal living as a lifestyle goes a long way in inculcating healthy personal finance habits, which help you make the most of your income by reinvesting it in your business and using the bare minimum for personal expenses.

Here are a few steps that you can take to inculcate a frugal lifestyle:

Observe your Monthly Spends

For one month, deeply observe your monthly spending. Track every expense and categorize it into different heads like food and groceries, entertainment, utility bills, etc. after a month, analyze your spending and put them under two heads – controllable and necessities.

Control avoidable lifestyle expenses

It is human nature to spend more when you have more. This phenomenon is termed lifestyle inflation. And as a startup owner, you mustn’t give in to this tendency because sometimes, in keeping up with societal expectations or the latest trends, we tend to lose sight of the difference between what is necessary and what is not. So, make sure to maintain control over avoidable lifestyle expenses.

Create a crisis fund

Savings is the most important part of personal finance management. No matter what, make it a habit to save a certain portion of your monthly income and add it to your emergency fund for unforeseen circumstances. While it may seem tempting, instill discipline that you shall not touch this fund unless there’s an actual emergency. In case you need money for a regular expense, you consider borrowing money through an app that offers flexible repayment options without any collateral instead of breaking your crisis fund.

Safeguard yourself against online fraud

Cybersecurity is becoming more important than ever before with the increasing number of online scams and fraudulent transactions. And it is imperative to be vigilant of your online accounts, app permissions, and security settings. Here are a few steps that you can take to safeguard your personal accounts:

Be conscious of any suspicious activities and set alerts on all your bank accounts.
Monitor your bank statements, account history, and credit reports routinely
Ensure that your passwords are strong and not easy to guess/hack
You may have several close aides, friends, and relatives who are supportive of your venture. But beware of placing absolute blind trust in any person.

Improve credit score

A good credit score will help you secure personal loans, auto loans, and any other credit at cheaper rates. To improve your score, first, see your score by approaching a credit bureau and generating your credit report. Then identify any gaps that may have lowered your score like outstanding payments, overdue, etc. and clear all of them. This will typically improve your creditworthiness.

Start investing

To manage your personal finances well, invest a certain portion of your income in mutual funds, stock market, long term bonds, etc. wherever you find comfortable. You can even consult an experienced person in your family, approach a consultant or you can take help from stock market websites, stock market analysis tools, etc. They can guide you on this subject to make sure that you are investing money in the right place.

Get Insurance

Insurance rates are much cheaper when you are young, healthy, and fit. You can get theright insurance package for yourself at a fantastic rate when you plan it much earlier in life, and this builds a security system for yourself and your family when you reach a later age.

Alternate source of money never hurts

You can use your assets, your skills, and your time to generate alternate income sources. For example, if you have great knowledge in your field, you could try out blogging, setting up a YouTube channel, or tutoring kids over the weekends. You could also think of subletting or renting out your assets to generate income.

Be up to date on maintenance

Ensure you regularly maintain your assets – be it household appliances, your car, your home, etc. Annual maintenance contracts make look like an overhead today. Still, they prove to be useful in maintaining the health of your asset and do not dent your budget in the long run with significant breakdown expenses.

Author Bio

Lily Tran is a content writer, working for MoneyTap, who writes about all things Finance. Her passion for credit, debt, loan & investment drives her to help readers get an insight about everyday finance.

Using Technology to Support Your Business Growth Strategy

November 3, 2020 by Lauren Wiseman Leave a Comment

Source: pexels.com

Yes, employees are the backbone of your business, and their hard work, loyalty, and productivity are the key ingredients in the long-term success of your company. Innovation, on the other hand, fuels your employees’ productivity and engagement, so relying on the latest tech solutions in your operations can make all the difference in your ability to grow your presence.

Now more than ever, companies have realized just how essential certain tech and digital tools can be. As soon as we’ve started responding to the pandemic, more companies have transitioned to working remotely, which itself requires advanced software solutions to empower your teams to stay productive.

With that new knowledge and awareness, you can begin to utilize technology to boost your business growth more than ever. Here, we’ve listed a few key ways you can put tech solutions to use and enable your employees to thrive, as well as your organization to grow in a manageable, scalable way.

Boosting cybersecurity across the board

Doing business online and communicating with customers via digital platforms calls for greater investment in cybersecurity. Without protecting your business and customer sensitive information and keeping all of your interactions secure, as well as all of your transactions, you risk tarnishing your reputation. Business growth requires inspiring trust and of course, ensuring data protection for all those who share their data with you.

You can utilize tech tools to boost cybersecurity in your business. From software solutions such as antivirus and antimalware tools, to web filtering, and hardware and software firewalls, your business does need robust protection from hackers, and tech is the best bet against malicious threats.

Improving client or customer satisfaction

Regardless of the type of business or organization you run, how you look after your clients or customers matters. From erp for universities so that you provide the best student experience possible, to CRMs that help manage customer expectations from lead to paying customer, there are plenty of ways in which technology is helpful in improving customer satisfaction levels.

Expanding your financial potential

As you already know, your business growth heavily depends on your financial potential and the stability of your cashflow. With that in mind, you can utilize technology to make sure you grow your finances, and thus grow your business in various ways. For example, as cryptocurrencies become more widespread, investing in bitcoin mining is a brilliant way to grow your company’s financial stability.

These currencies are becoming more promising and their application more accepted in different transactions, so building up your business finances in various assets can be extremely helpful for your growth. You can use bitcoin as a perk for employees, and you can adapt your business to accept bitcoin payments for your products or services, thus expanding your customer base. Bitcoin trading is another worthy endeavor for modern businesses, so consider that as another benefit of your initial mining efforts.

Cloud computing solutions to the rescue

Remote or not, your business needs a scalable way to grow, otherwise you will find yourself facing all kinds of infrastructure and storage complications when the time comes to expand your business. That is why all modern-day businesses nowadays utilize cloud computing solutions for smarter storage, improved cybersecurity, but also for the sake of scalable growth.

The cloud is so much more than just a safe place to store your files. It enables your company to seamlessly run various software applications without delays and interferences, and it provides a secure platform for employee collaboration. They can work on documents in real time, remotely, and waste no time on exchanging versions of the same document, thus preserving productivity and that natural creative flow.

Social media for your online presence

Your customers are online practically all the time, allowing them to interact with your business on versatile platforms, including your social media pages and profiles. Why not make the most of this simple solution to build customer engagement and grow your online presence? So many social media strategies can be implemented entirely free of charge, aside from paid and sponsored posts and advertising, that is.

By crafting an effective content strategy for your social media, you have the opportunity to build audience engagement, and grow your authority in your industry. Don’t forget to use social networks for all their worth: as advertising platforms, content publishing, but also for customer support. Encourage people to ask questions and reach out to your brand via messaging applications, and you’ll enhance your interactions even more.

VoIP for remote work stability

If your organization is relatively new to the notion of remote work, and you’ve only just switched to this model, you know that it has its hurdles. Ongoing communication without delays, tracking customer interactions, and spotting issues in how your brand message is conveyed to your target audience is impossible without a structure in place. Voice over internet protocol (or VoIP) technology enables that structure for remote work.

Your support teams can do their jobs easily wherever they are, while they can easily communicate with the rest of your employees from marketing or sales via the same platform. Using just your stable internet connection, you can boost the quality of your interactions and ensure that your remote teams are properly equipped to work sans the stress.

Building a tech-based infrastructure for a wide array of different operations will help your employees make the most of their time at work, while empowering work-life balance at the same time. Technology allows businesses to connect with customers, create engaging content, find and build invaluable financial resources, and ultimately grow. Let tech take your brand forward and you’ll find those growing pains much easier to manage over time.

12 Time Management Techniques to Find a Job

November 3, 2020 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Looking for a job can be nerve-wracking, especially in the current economic climate. With so 12.6 million unemployed people just in the United States, the job market competition is fierce. To find a job, it’s important to be proactive and strategic with your search to ensure you’re following best practices for landing a job.

On top of this, managing your time to search for a job is difficult — there’s no one-size-fits-all time management strategy that works better than the rest, so how do you know which one is right for you?

Whether you’ve just graduated from college or are an experienced worker who is newly unemployed, you should take time to determine what you want your next move to be. To do so, it’s important to find a time management technique based on your personality type and learning style — the unfortunate reality is that you’ll likely spend lots of time customizing your resume and writing cover letters just to get to the interview stage with a few potential job prospects.

It’s important to remember that different people have different time management techniques that work best for their specific style. For example, many extroverts can benefit from the Eat That Frog technique, which involves doing the tasks you like the least first thing in the day to get it over with and leave the enjoyable tasks for later. This is great for people who are not as disciplined since it prevents them from putting off tedious tasks until the very end.

Another great time management strategy is the Eisenhower principle, where you divide your daily tasks into 4 categories: important, not important, urgent, and not urgent. This allows you to take an arbitrary list of tasks and prioritize them in a way where it’s easy to create your schedule for the day. The Eisenhower principle is an excellent technique for people who are organized but can sometimes be a bit scatterbrained since it gives them a concrete schedule (and ranks in order of priority) to make the job searching process easier.

Although looking for a job or making a career change can be tiring, it’s an important part of developing your career further. Whether you’re an energetic extrovert or an analytical introvert, finding a new job can allow for more career growth and an upwards trajectory in your professional life.

Are you ready to find a time management technique that works for you? If you don’t have a foolproof time management strategy yet, check out this handy graphic by Resume-Now to get some great ideas on how to manage your time during a job search.