If you are looking for financially sound future, take a hard look at your credit cards and resolve to do followings:

•From savings you started to make, pay off maximum amount of your credit cards’ debts until you completely eliminate them. •If you are unable to pay off whole amount at once, don’t just pay minimum amount required; pay out as much as you can over that limit. •Shop for credit cards with minimum interest rates – which should not be more than 12 percent – and switch to them. •Use credit cards strictly for convenience only. Don’t charge to your credit cards unless you know for sure that you will be able to pay it off right away. •Minimize quantity of credit cards you are holding. There is no reason to have more than three credit cards.

Same goes for your other consumer loans like student, car, etc.

Mortgage

The second step of your investment strategy should be to evaluate your mortgage payments. There are several very simple ways of reducing your payment time dramatically. Used scrupulously these methods can lower a 30-year mortgage to 10-15 years.

•Instead of making one single payment each month, every two weeks pay out half monthly payment. The idea behind this is, since you are making 26 payments in a year – each one of them carrying 50 percent of your monthly payment – this is equivalent to 13 monthly payments. You are generating an extra month’s payment each year, which in turn will reduce your mortgage term substantially. •Whenever possible, each month try paying ten percent more than you are supposed to. •Whenever you manage to make some extra earnings, use a portion of that to pay down your mortgage.

The mortgage calculator located at http://www.mortgages-loans-calculators.com/Calculator-Mortgage -Payoff.asp will help you to see your progress.

Keep track of your expenses

If you don’t do it yet, resolve yourself to keep an expense ledger of all spending. Just mere act of jotting down all your expenditure will reduce your expenses up to 20 percent. The reason is when you start keeping track of money you spend, you become more careful and discerning in your buying decisions, which in turn help you cutting back and saving hard earned money.

Discovery Procedures

Think of this phase as all things coaching staff does up to and including first pre-season team meeting. It is where overall missions and goals are set, with clear effectiveness criteria established. Certainly team may set it sights on championship, but what about kicking team or linemen? Each part of your organization must have meaningful and measurable performance criteria mapped out in this phase.

Management Objectives

Establishing objectives and criteria requires close scrutiny by management of what really contributes to overall company mission. Departmental goals must be aligned with company goals. To illustrate with our football analogy: running backs may propose a goal of 5,000 total yards rushing in a season. This may or may not be beneficial to team goal, whereas an aligned goal might be to achieve an average of +5 yards per run. The latter may be more appropriate for a highly pass-oriented offense.

System Action Plan

In your discovery phase, once your objectives and effectiveness criteria are agreed upon, you can create your action plan. This step is simply broad roadmap covering remaining 4 phases of building your management system.

The Discovery Phase generally takes from 2-4 weeks, and represents approximately 12% of total process.

Planning Procedures Phase

In part two of this series, we will take a look at one of most critical and also most overlooked phase in building your quality management system – Planning Phase.