Auckland Travel Blog: Part 3

1-Day Hobbiton, Rotorua & Waitomo Caves Tours

New Zealand Travel Blog: Part 1

New Zealand Travel Blog: Part 2

My 2nd day in New Zealand was full of tours and the tour bus was scheduled to come at 6:30 in the morning. So I woke up around 5:00 AM to get prepared. Whenever I am in a foreign country, I get worried about not getting up on time and missing my tours, so I always set up 2 alarms. This has made me not miss any tours so far.

It was too early to go outside and have breakfast. I always keep some cereal breakfast bars with me for situations like this, so I made good use of my breakfast bar and hotel-supplied coffee. As I was waiting in the hotel lobby and keeping an eye on the street, the tour coach came right on time.

New Zealand is a country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean made of two main islands: North and South Island. On this tour, I will be staying within North Island where three-quarters of New Zealanders live and all the big cities are located.

Hobbiton, Rotorua and Waitomo Caves are all located in North Island and I will be able to complete this full trip in one day and still come back to Auckland to sleep at night.

The tour coach was a late model Mercedes Mini Bus and its operator/guide was very friendly. Somehow, he figured out that I was from North America. We would stop at a few other hotels to pick up more customers before starting our trip to Hobbiton through Waikato. Reaching Hobbiton would take 2 – 2.5 hours and the scenery is supposed to be gorgeous through the Kaimai mountain Ranges and Hauraki Plains.

Personal Finance and Kids

Kids Need to be Taught About Money

First Published: June 23, 2009 ADawnJournal.com

The Alberta Finance Minister has said that both parents and the government need to take a firm hand in teaching kids how to be financially responsible now and in the future. With the current global financial situation having some bad news for everyone, even among the growing number of positive signs, it is now viewed as absolutely essential that sound financial planning is given the emphasis it requires at all levels, rather than leaving children to find out about the intricacies of the subject first-hand when they leave college and start looking for work. The minister, Iris Evans, said that her own children – all of whom are now grown up – have succeeded in life because she made sure to teach them about money.

Although not everyone would agree with the entirety of the Minister’s speech – which made great play of the importance of each family having at least one stay-at-home parent – the message of teaching children about money and how to handle it is one that will surely recur as we work to get out of the troubled financial climate of the present. At least some of the problems that the world is currently dealing with have something to do with irresponsible consumer borrowing and spending, and if good habits are locked in at an early stage then there is all the more chance that financial crises like the present one will be rarer and shallower in future. What the government may do remains to be seen, but there are plenty of things that a parent can do to instill the right habits in their offspring.

Savings accounts are something that will often be encouraged for the very youngest kids, but when they get to around the early teens the interest seems to drop off quite considerably. Finding a way to encourage your teenage child to save and pay close attention to the value of money is not difficult. All that one needs to do in the present climate to make one’s children pay heed to the importance of sensible financial practices is watch the news with them. As banks, businesses and other organizations battle the ill-effects of financial laxity, there has never been a better opportunity to pass on a message of caution.

It may be increasingly difficult in this day and age to avoid debt in one’s everyday life – particularly if one intends to make a go of a business career at any point – but a bit of financial wisdom can give the children of today the thought processes to deal with the future in a mature and secure way. Don’t teach them to be afraid of debt, but to understand good and bad debt. Don’t let your children see loans as free money, nor see savings as being boring or cheap. Good financial sense starts at an early age, and with a bit of forward thinking can lead to a very satisfactory future. Instilling these messages will mean less likelihood of a repeat of what we are currently dealing with.

How To Increase Self-Esteem

Building Your Self-Esteem

If you want to better yourself, you need to have confidence and you can only have confidence if you have high self-esteem. High self-esteem will help you make the right decisions in your life, and it will give you the confidence to make those changes. In order to increase your self-esteem you need to do the following:

1. The first thing that you need to do is to impress yourself because to raise your own self-esteem you have to respect yourself. Find things that challenge yourself and then do it. Maybe run a marathon, write something, or just climb up a big hill, whatever you can do to raise your self-esteem. This is all part of setting goals and then working towards those goals. Achieving goals is probably the best way to gain self-esteem for yourself.

2. Look for things that bring out the best in you, including noble pursuits like academics. By learning more, you feel that you know more and that will give you more self-esteem.

3. Helping another person can make you feel better about yourself. Work at a homeless shelter, volunteer with a charity or environmental organization, become a Big Brother or Big Sister. This can be very rewarding and it can make you feel great about yourself, thereby raising your self-esteem.

4. When you know something, teach someone else how to do it. A good way to raise your self-esteem is to teach someone the skills you have. That will allow you to feel better about yourself because you are passing on something you know to someone else. You are helping a person better themselves, by being a teacher. Your self-esteem will go up and the admiration you get from the person you teach will help you have more confidence.

5. You have to be positive with yourself because if you are positive, you will believe in yourself. If you walk around making bad comments about yourself, you will have low self-esteem. You need to look in the mirror and say something good about yourself. Give yourself confidence because you are your biggest fan. You are the person who believes in yourself and you trust yourself, so if you see yourself telling you that you are a good person who can achieve anything, then you will be able to build your confidence. When you are building your self-esteem, your best friend will be the mirror because you can see yourself and talk to yourself about all the good things you are going to achieve. Your self-esteem will rise up before you know it.

Self-esteem is either high or it is low. If you have low self-esteem, you will have trouble bettering yourself because your low opinion of who you are will keep you from achieving anything. However, if you have high self-esteem, you will believe in yourself and you will achieve the things you want. Self-esteem is extremely important because high self-esteem gives you confidence. Confidence allows you to reach your goals and better who you are as a person.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com. This article originally published on the above website on Aug 14, 2010.

What Is A Mortgage?

Mortgage 101: Tips

First Published: June 24, 2009 ADawnJournal.com

You would be surprised indeed to know that a great many people do not really know what a mortgage is. If you are one of those people, don’t feel too bad about it. You’re in good company, and quite numerous company at that. For one reason or another, in early years we don’t learn that much about private finance. In school we’re busy learning reading, writing and arithmetic, then sciences, languages, history and so forth. Then it’s off to college where we specialize  in whatever we were really good at when we were at high school. After college we’re more concerned about finding a job than anything else, so by the time we get to actually dealing with buying a house we’re into our twenties and heading rapidly for our thirties.

It is therefore entirely possible to get to a certain stage in your life and all of a sudden realize that these “mortgages” of which so many of your contemporaries speak are actually an entirely foreign topic to you. You know they have something to do with houses and money, and you can probably assume that they are involved in making available the money to buy a house, but there is a whole lot more involved. Although you may well be fully aware that there is a lot more to mortgages than that, it may not be immediately clear to you what that “more” constitutes. Here are some of the basic, yet important, facts and details about mortgages.

· A mortgage is a loan taken out with the express purpose of buying real estate (see? The money-house thing was right.)

· The loan is usually paid back over a term of twenty five + years. Government plans and guidelines hint that they would prefer to make the maximum term somewhat shorter.

· Given the large amounts of money lent in a mortgage, and the extensive period of time over which they are paid back, the bank asks for security on the loan. This is almost always taken in the form of the property the mortgage is taken out to buy.

· As the above suggests, failure to maintain payments on a mortgage will possibly result in the bank taking ownership of the house via a “repossession” or foreclosure.

· The banks are then required to make the house ready for sale and take care of the sale themselves at a reduced price – therefore they prefer to look for a way of agreeing a reduced payment until the customer can pay the full amount.

At the end of the mortgage period, congratulations! You are the owner of the house you bought all those years ago. Prior to that it is part-owned between yourself and the bank, but as long as you choose a mortgage on which you can realistically keep up with payments there is no reason why you need worry. Common sense plays a huge part in picking the right mortgage, and as long as you apply your brain when choosing you should stand a good chance of keeping ahead of the game. Just make sure you have a fall-back if times get tough.

How to set realistic goals

Setting Realistic Goals

One of the biggest mistakes people make when they are bettering themselves is set goals that are too hard to achieve. Goals are very important because they will allow you to be all that you can be, but when you set goals that are too lofty, you can be setting yourself up for failure. This is why it is so important that when you set goals, you set goals that you can achieve not too easily, but not too difficulty either.

An example of this is to say that you want to develop yourself personally by losing 100 pounds in a month. Well, you cannot do this without getting surgery and surgery is often the easy way out and will not allow you to keep the weight off. This is an unrealistic goal. However, if you set a goal of losing 100 pounds in a year and a half, then you are creating a goal that is achievable, but not too easy. If you set a goal of losing 100 pounds in 10 years, you are not challenging yourself enough.

Goals will help as guide posts for your journey to becomi8ng a better person. You will be able to use your goals to determine how you are going to better yourself and the achieving of those goals will show you that you are making progress.

To ensure you do not set goals that are unrealistic, you should do the following:

1. Make a list of things you can do right now, without much money and with ample time available.

2. Looking at that list, determine what can be done sooner rather than later, and then sort the items on the list in terms of when they can be done.

3. At this point, ask yourself each time you read a goal whether you think it is realistic or not. Saying that 100 pounds in six months is not realistic is not cheating; it is being real with yourself.

4. Based on the answers you give for each question, adjust your goals accordingly so that you can ensure you have created goals that you will be able to achieve without having to set yourself up for failure.

One of the biggest reasons people fail in their goals is that they set themselves up for failure. Running a marathon is a great goal, but if you have never run a marathon before and plan to next weekend, you are only setting yourself up to fail at that task. As a result, you will want to ensure that you make that goal realistic because then when you achieve it, you will feel that much better at your accomplishment.

Goals are one of the most important things to have for yourself, and they will show you that you are doing well with bettering yourself. Talk with people about your goals and ask them whether they think they are realistic. They may say they are not, but that does not mean you have to listen to them. The only person you must listen to is yourself.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com. This article originally published on the above website on July 25, 2010.