Sticking to Personal Finance

Hello all, I believe you would want to beat with a stick after reading this Post.

There is a good news and a bad news. I am going to stop the talks of how to make money on the internet. Instead I shall continue with my niche here i.e. Personal Finance specific to India. Is this the proof of my lack of focus? I guess yes. I apologize for that.

However, the good news is that I am gonna move the entire online marketing discussion to another brand new website.

I did so because of the following critical reasons:

I had to spend an awful lot of time to modify the the tags and the categories. Almost one month spent and as I know that the task is not worth pursuing if it breaches the time limits.
After understanding a little bit of SEO i came to know that this website is indexed by google for some keywords which are related to Personal Finance.

Based on the above two reasons I will stick with the personal finance content here.

I shall be sharing the coordinates of my new website soon on this blog. I shall be taking the content related to passive income and making money online to the new blog.

Till the next post Ciao!!

10 Step Guide to Successful Affiliate Marketing-Part 1

After writing my goals for 2012 I have started working on them. I have established a niche site (one of my goals), I started a website in the niche: Photography. While researching for ways to monetize my niche I came up with the term Affiliate Marketing. I thought of sharing my extensive research on affiliate marketing in this post. So here is my 10 step guide to successful affiliate marketing,

Before I start let me explain what Affiliate marketing is?

Simply put,  you sign up for a program with someone to help make a sale of his/her product or a service. In exchange for the help you get a commission or a percentage cut from the sales that a customer is making.

From my research I’ve found out that affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative ways to make money online, with costing no fortune or having your own products/service. I also believe that this could be one of the best ideas for generating passive income. However, I suggest that you to carry out your own study in addition to the material presented in this post.

So here are the 10 steps to jump-start your affiliate marketing program.

Step One: Get Advice

If you are starting out in the niche, It is better to take advice from an affiliate marketing expert, and by getting advice I mean reading their experiences, listening to podcast or video interviews. This way you would better understand the ins  and outs of the business. You’ll learn from their mistakes and apply their experiences to your own niche. The concept I understood by doing this exercise is as follows. The various companies who are offering affiliate program are already carrying out their marketing. They have their own marketing budgets and their marketing team is already hard selling the products through various media. This made me understand that I have to soft sell the product.

Step Two: Soft Sell the Product/Service

“What is soft selling? “, you might ask. Well anything which the company is not doing while marketing the product. Begin with the various readers and your target customers of your niche. Build up your community and then recommend the product.

Step Three: Finding the Affiliate Program

In the first two steps you have understood the business and you have decided the product or service to promote. Now you need to find an appropriate affiliate program for the product.  The best answer is; “Google it!” or for the loyalist you can Bing or Yahoo it as well. You shortlist an affiliate program, make sure you read the program’s terms and conditions and the whole contract; especially the payment terms and termination clauses before signing up for any affiliate marketing program.

Step Four: Know the Product

You need to clearly explain the benefits you derived from using the product/service. Yes, it is essential to use the product. It’s because, using the product forms the foundation to recommend or soft selling. By using the product its implicit that you are aware of the product, the after sales service provided and other benefits which may be associated with the product in your niche. For example in my niche, I am targeting the beginners in photography, I won’t go for an affiliate program for a high-end digital camera or some studio equipment. I would suggest a typical entry level camera. Moreover I’ll suggest those cameras which I have personally used myself or handled during my photo workshops.Sure I’ll lose some money by not recommending the high end awesome cameras or equipment but it’s always better than no money. Remember you want to do a favor to the customers by recommending them the product along with building a couple of bucks for yourself. I’ll reiterate here, “Always recommend the best product for your reader or the target customer. You provide the the benefits that you have derived from using the product.Your knowledge of the product and your explanation will have a direct bearing on potential customers making a purchase through your affiliate program.”

Step Five: Placement of the Links

The placement regarding the recommendations is very important. Don’t oversell it by putting it every where in the post. Contextual strong links work best – generally you’ll have an overabundance of good fortune promoting something from the inside any post than on any sidebar. Top of the post is a hot spot. So try to place your links there. The top of left hand side bar – or even inside content – or as well as at the end associated with blog posts above comments.

At this stage I realized that this post would be a very long post and my readers would probably hate me for that. So I decided to break it into two parts. In the next part I shall explain steps how to make your affiliate marketing program more effective.

Goals 2012

Welcome to the next post on cooking money blog, your Recipe for Financial Freedom. Since this is the first month of the Year 2012 I figured I should pen down the Goals for this blog. This year’s goals are way different than the goals of 2008 and the financial resolutions of 2008 that I had posted on this blog. After putting this blog on a newer track the second round to my online presence has commenced. In the last fifteen days I have been planning the blueprint to generate smart and passive income.

Without further ado here is the list of my goals for Cooking Money

Continue reading →

Repositioning Cooking Money

This new year i.e. in 2012 I have decided to revamp cookingmoney.com and reposition it. Its been more than four years this blog has been running (pathetically though). I have ignored it for a long time. This is high time that this blog gets a makeover and change tracks for good.

Before I go any further let me discuss the current status of the blog.

This blog is:

  1. A personal money management tool.
  2. Concentrated on debt reduction and frugal living tips which i follow.
  3. Investing basics and strategies and my investments.
  4. Practices to save money.
  5. Strategies to build wealth.

Overall this blog is a personal finance blog. This blog has made a total of $ 11.00 for me from Google Adsense which is not yet received as the minimum payout for Google Adsense is $100.00. I am not upset from the results as it was not meant to make money from the start.

Now that I almost out of debt and my priorities have changed over the last couple of years combined with the fact that there are NIL readers for this blog (accept me of course and a few spammers) I assume that it will be harmless to reposition and give a new direction to the blog. Moreover, I don’t want to remain anonymous due to sharing of personal finance statistics.

What kind of repositioning I plan for this blog?
After a lot of thinking and discussions with my wife (Yes, she has a say in this too) I decided to get this blog either a niche website or a financial blog and thus the makeover.
The objective of this blog would now be “GENERATING PASSIVE INCOME”

  1. I want to make this blog as my flagship blog for generating wealth.
  2. It will continue to discuss strategies to build wealth and investments.
  3. Making money online and building a passive income source.
  4. It will still discuss some investing strategies to build a passive income.

Whats gonna change?

  • The overall look of the blog is gonna change to give a more professional look.
  • Occasional personal finance discussion.
  • No personal statistics for my money. The existing ones would would stay to track my overall progress.

In the coming months this blog will see a gradual change and makeover mentioned above. The first few steps that I foresee are setting goals for the website and getting a niche website started. The next update would be on the same.

For those of you who are still reading this blog and want to comment on the makeover you are welcome to do so.

Till the next post Ciao!!.

Stock Market India in last 10 years

Last three trading days for the Indian stock markets were carnage. Bears pulled down the market and almost every major market across the world was in Red. This is due to some or the other crisis (this time it’s a debt crisis) which I won’t delve into. Yesterday i.e. August 9, 2011 some of the markets showed some green signs.

I was little curious about the returns the markets are giving the investors. I started digging out the data for the past 10 years and found the following.


Image source : Equity Master

Indian Stock Markets have given around 400% of returns while US have given a 7% returns.

When I read this post by the Simple Dollar on the unrealistic returns I found that he was correct while sticking to 7% average annual returns (long term). However, being an Indian I am bullish on the Indian Markets looking at the past performance.

Got Lucky with Money

It is a rare occasion in India wherein people dispose of unnecessary things from their homes. Well, today I got lucky for the second time when another of my colleagues relocated to a newly purchased house near Delhi.

Apparently she decided to get some new furniture for the new house. She decided to sell and dispose off certain items.

I was lucky in a way that I was the first one whom she informed about her moving. I was immediate and asked are you disposing off your dining table. She said Yes and I was the first one to book the dining table free of cost. The table is a 6 seater wooden table with an antique look. I came to know later that the dining table is an antique and was auctioned in US embassy some 20 years back. The price that I paid for the table is Nil. I had saved some Rs. 20000 to purchase a new dining table which I was gonna purchase in a few days. I used the money to purchase some stocks in the falling Indian Stock Market.

I had got a double bed the same way I got the dining table.

This is another use of leveraging my relationships.

Buying Home? Use A Mortgage Calculator to Check Affordability

Buying a home is once in a lifetime decision for average personnel. It requires huge investment and a debt burden over a long period of 15 to 20 years. This critical decision requires careful planning on the part of the buyer. One has to carefully plan the location, the type of home to buy and most important part of planning is to ask how to finance your home.

The various avenues for financing your home could be friends and family, your own savings and last but not the least the mortgage.

Before buying a home and before taking out a mortgage in order to finance your home, it is important for you decide on your affordability. It is essential for you to ask “how much mortgage can I afford ” so that you do not lose your home later. When you take out a home loan, you are required to agree to some terms and conditions of the home loan. If you are found in breach of those the terms, the lenders have the right to seize your home and auction/sell it off to recover the money they had given to you in the form of the loan.

Find out your affordability

So, you can see that it is really important for you to find out your affordability before getting a home loan and before buying a home. So, if you ask how much mortgage can I afford, and if you use a mortgage calculator to find out your affordability, you will be able to decide beforehand which house you can afford to buy and what kind of mortgage you will be required to take.
There are in fact different kinds of mortgage calculators and there are the cost calculators, monthly payment calculators, the ARM calculators, the FRM calculators, the repayment calculators, the amortization calculators and so on.

You can use the cost calculator in order to find out the total costs of a mortgage. This along with the monthly payment calculator will help you to decide as to which mortgage you can actually afford to take. As you are able to decide as to how much you will be required to pay, you may be able to decide as to which is the mortgage on which you can make payments on a regular basis.

The Adjustable Rate Mortgage helps you in finding out how the change in the interest rate changes your payments. The amortization calculator helps you in getting idea on how the monthly and regular payment actually reduces the debt amount i.e how it amortizes the loan. Other than that it helps you in finding out how the payment gets divided into payment towards the principal and the interest.

Thus, before buying a home, try to use a mortgage calculator you will be able to get free mortgage calculator from different websites if you do some research.

Website Live Again

After almost three years of downtime the website is back online. Yes its a long period, during which I have been traveling, got married, changed jobs and moved yet again to another city. After such a long period I decided to write again for the website to track my financials which I believe has improved a lot.

It was 2008 when I left the website when the economies world over were in shambles. A catch up story of my journey in the last three years is due and will be published.

WordPress has evolved in the last three years so I had to get rid of its older version. My previous design was good but then I thought revamp the design of the website as well. So you are now seeing a new professional look for the website.

Things have changed quite a bit and will continue to change over the next couple of weeks:

  • Overall design of the website has been changed completely to a more professional look, thanks to a professional WordPress theme that I am now using.
  • During this long period of absence from the financial web world, I’ve got loads of offers for guest posts (most of them were spams) and finally I decided to allow some of the guests to publish content on my blog.
  • All existing comments (believe me there are 100s of them on the website have been taken offline and are currently being refined / trashed.

I hope you like the changes, and I would like to hear your comments or feedback. And please bear with me while this website is still going to evolve and change over the next couple of weeks.

Investing With Debt

This might seem huge risk to any body who is reading this. I have applied for a loan from my employer. As per the service rules of my company I am eligible for an interest free loan of Rs 50,000/- payable in 10 equal installments. This loan would put me in some more debt (you can see my current debt position here), but this would be the first time that I would be using the debt amount for leveraging my financial position.

For me I cannot see idle cash sitting around with me and doing nothing. I want it to get moving and for this reason i went for that loan. The options that I have after taking the loan are:

  • Pay off debt
  • Invest in Tax Savings Instruments
  • Purchase of Mutual Funds
  • Go to the stock market

Continue reading →

Carnival of Financial Goals #2

After reading almost 50 posts of the Carnival of Financial Goal #2. I am bit tired now, but I think Sam has done a very good job. There were some quite interesting posts and goals to be found on the carnival. I also secured a place in the carnival, with my post which i could find using Ctrl+F ;)

The most inspiring were as follows:

Pinyo at Moolanomy has posted a really inspiring and a structured goal.

The Little Dough Girl started with goals that are very conceptual. You stick to concepts ad you’ll achieve your goals.

The Goal at Digerati Life, I would call it as a big goal and shows her futuristic thinking for a better future.

The goal posted at Plonkee inspire us to analyze ourselves for our own future

The goals posted by Millionaire Mommy Next Door were methodical and well planned.

Goals at Cash Money Life were special in their own way and induce a positive optimism in the reader.

The dividend Guy presented a scenario analysis which can be applied to many situations.

Early Retirement Extreme provides us with the purpose with which we can achieve out goals. Passion!

Yoopersmith want us to change our attitude towards money and does a pretty good job with examples.

The last post that I like very much was of Adam Freedman at Investor Journal just that I had to add to his post that I would put the Dont’s first and then the Do’s as I’ll probably learn the Dont’s first by making mistakes and then rectifying them to arrive at the Do’s

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