Unfortunately, when talking about investing, you also have the potential of losing a decent amount of money. Some have even had to file bankruptcy to cover the cost of their losses. That is why it is so important to know what you are getting into, and that you are prepared and educated.

Finances

The first, and most important, step is to sit down and go through your finances. You need to have a few things in order before moving forward with your investing plans. First of all, if you have any debt, you should pay it off first. That means any back debt, such as student loans or bank loans. No need to include monthly expenses because that will be in your budget, which is next. If everything is budgeted in, and you have some money left over, you need to consider one more thing. It is suggested that you have a savings account big enough to cover 3 to 6 months of expenses, “just in case.” If everything is in order, and everything is covered, feel free to go to the next step.

Approach

You will need to decide how you are planning to invest. You need to analyse yourself and truthfully answer a few questions. Are you educated enough to make your own investments? Do you have the time to monitor your investments and keep them positive? Do you enjoy crunching numbers? Do you like completing research every day? Now you need to decide if you are going to do everything by yourself, if you plan to hire someone, or if you plan to use an online platform that will do most of the work for you.

Education

No matter what direction you plan to take, you need to understand the lingo. That means that you need to look over a glossary of terms and keep it saved. There are basic terms that everyone in the business will use, so you need to be able to understand them if you want to be able to make an informed decision.

Decision

You need to decide how risky you want to be. You must remember that the higher the risk that you take, the more money you can make. But it means that you have a higher chance of losing some big money. It all comes down to you, so you need to decide how you want to approach it. The best thing that you can do would be to take a medium risk stance. You will not profit as much, but if you do end up losing it will not be the end of your world.

Scams

Be careful of who you choose to deal with, and to whom you give your investment money or information to. As with anything else that deals with finances, people will target others that are unaware of how they do things. “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” That is an old saying, but one that is full of truth.

Final Thoughts

The best thing that you can do before investing, and after you have some money in the pot, is research. If in doubt do not invest in it. If you are using an online platform or going through a professional investment financer, you will still want to keep track of your interests. You truly never know what can happen, so stay educated and make informed decisions.

To ensure that your life is continually being bettered, you have to resolve to make smarter financial decisions. You can start in this instance by determining to make and embrace the five decisions listed below.

1. Accept help whenever you need it

Stubbornness will get you nowhere when it comes to money. You need to be open to the idea of accepting financial help whenever it’s offered, as that could be the difference between you keeping your head above water and you drowning in debt.

The help that you accept could come in a plethora of different shapes and sizes. It could, for example, involve your parents offering you a lump sum to get you on the property ladder, or it could even come in the form of taking out a loan so that you can pay off debt that desperately needs clearing. The point is, there will always be someone or something out there willing to help; you just need to accept their assistance when they offer.

With regards to the latter, a loan company making a quick cash injection available to you, be sure to never dismiss this route as being financially dangerous. If you know that you are going to be able to repay the money that you borrow by the deadlines imposed on you to do so, there’s nothing wrong with taking out payday advance loans online. Whatever you do, just think it through and don’t make any rash decisions based off of fear or greed. Try to keep your borrowing down, and always use a reputable lending company.

As soon as you understand that the pride of not accepting financial help is not worth the fall that it eventually causes, you’ll find it much easier to accept the assistance you need to better your life.

2. Save all of your small notes

Whenever a small note finds its way into your purse or wallet, tuck it away into your ‘rainy day’ jar. If you do this every time you pick up a $1, $5 or $10 note, you’ll find yourself saving $100s in no time. What you do with that money, whether you keep it stored away for emergencies or whether you use it to pay for a much-needed vacation, will be ultimately dependant on what you think is going to better your life.

The best thing about this saving method is the fact that it doesn’t even feel like saving. It might mean going without a coffee every now and again, but the speed at which this money accumulates will feel like you’re growing money out of thin air.

3. Keep tabs on your bank

It’s easy to ignore your bank account, especially when you’re convinced that you’re not going to like what you see on there, but doing this will get be sure to land you in financial trouble sooner rather than later. By keeping tabs on your account regularly, you give yourself a much better chance of spotting irregularities with your outgoings, and you can stop fraud in its tracks before it has the opportunity to sink its claws into you. What’s more, by knowing how much you can afford to spend, you stop yourself from overspending, getting yourself into debt, and making life a lot harder for yourself as a result.

4. Always think in the longterm

As important as it is to keep track of your current spending habits, it’s also just as important to think in the longterm when it comes to your finances. Amongst a great deal of many other positive effects this will have on your bank balance, doing so will allow you to save an appropriate amount of money to suit your future endeavors. Perhaps you need a certain amount of spending money for a vacation you’re taking in 6 months? If you think in the longterm, you’ll have no trouble saving up this sum of money and, as a result, you’ll be able to truly enjoy your time away from home.

If there’s one thing for sure, it’s that thinking in the longterm will definitely open up your eyes to the amount of money that you spend and have the potential to save. If you’re wise about your money, you’ll take this newfound information on board and use it as inspiration to help you curb your spending. For example, once you understand just how expensive a daily Starbucks can be and how much money it has the potential to drain from you over a sustained period of time (having a $4 latte every day will see you spend over $21,000 over ten years), you’ll no doubt cut back on your caffeine fix. Whether this means avoiding coffee altogether or taking a flask to work each morning, the stark realization of how much you spend will be sure to scare you into saving. Just imagine what you could do with that extra $21,000 in ten year’s time.

5. Use cash, not credit

The biggest mistake you can make as a credit card owner is to treat your credit like it’s free money. By continuing to use your credit card freely and dismiss the spending that you do on it as being a problem that you’ll face another time, you’ll always find yourself in debt of something and owning money to someone. Whether you owe $10 or $100, when you’re in debt, it’s hard to put money aside that is going to better your life.

Instead of using credit to finance your lifestyle, use cash instead. This will see you keep a far tighter rein on your spending, and you’ll end up having more money to spend on yourself going forward. Whatever you do, just put the money that you do save to good use (remember, those lattes will soon add up!).

By making the five smart financial decisions listed above, your life will no doubt end up being a whole lot better.

The Enterprise Investment Scheme Association (EISA) has released a national and investor representative piece of research, gauging whether the British public and its investors feel that they will be wealthier in a post-Brexit UK, and how they feel the negotiations have gone.

With the date that Britain leaves the EU edging ever closer, the Enterprise Investment Scheme Association (EISA) has launched The Brexit Wealth Index 2018. Based on research conducted across a sample of 2007 respondents - of which - 1,122 were nationally representative investors, the data outlines the wealth creation opportunities available to them post-Brexit. Providing anecdotal and quantitative analysis as to whether the country will be richer after leaving the European Union, the survey specifically questions whether they feel their individual wealth will and has increased after the decision to leave was made.

Three in 10 British investors - 8.75 million - believe that securing a good deal with the European Union will be crucial to their continuing investments into UK SMEs. This is opposed to 5.75 million investors who do not agree that a good deal will affect their investments into SMEs in the future. British investors - 12.5 million of them (43%) - believe that the Government's actions affect their investment decisions more than ever before. This is opposed to four million (14%) who do not believe this to be the case. Moreover, 13 million investors believe that Brexit will not make them wealthier. This amounts to 44% of British investors, versus a fifth (19%) who believe that Brexit will make them wealthier. Of the wider sample, half of British investors - 14.5 million - believe that their wealth has not increased since the referendum decision in June 2016, while 5.5 million do believe that their wealth has increased since the vote to leave the European Union was made.

• 17 million (59%) do not think the Government is doing a good job in securing a deal for the UK’s financial services sector
• 12.5 million (43%) of British investors feel that the Government's actions now affect their investment decision more now than ever before
• 8.75 million (30%) believe that securing a good deal with the EU will be crucial to their continuing investments into UK SMEs
• Half of British investors – 14.5 million – have seen their wealth decrease since the referendum decision
• 13 million (44%) do not believe that Brexit will make them wealthier
• Nearly half (45%) - 13 million – believe that there will be a Brexit deficit which will make the UK poorer after March 2019
• Four in 10 – 11.5 million – believe that the Brexit deficit will make the UK poorer after March 2019
• A third of British investors – 10 million – feel that there will be more opportunities to invest into SMEs in post-Brexit Britain
• Four in 10 – 11.5 million British investors – feel that there will be more opportunity for wealth creation and entrepreneurship post-Brexit
• A third of British investors - 10 million – believe that there will be a Brexit dividend which will make the UK richer after March 2019.

Overwhelmingly, 17 million British investors do not think that the Government is doing a good job in securing a deal for the UK’s financial services sector. Six in 10 (59%) of respondents believe this to be true.

A third of British investors (32%) - 9.5 million – do not believe that there will be more opportunity for wealth creation and entrepreneurship post-Brexit. However, nearly four in 10, (39%) - 11.5 million – do. This sentiment continues as 10 million British investors believe that there will be more opportunities to invest into SMEs in a post-Brexit Britain while seven million disagree.

A third (34%) of respondents believe that there will be a Brexit dividend which will make the UK richer after March 2019. This amounts to 10 million British investors. However, 11.5 million – 39% of respondents – disagree with this. In fact, when asked, I feel that there will be a Brexit deficit which will make the UK poorer after March 2019, 45% of respondents – 13 million – agreed, while just over a quarter (27%) disagreed.

Mark Brownridge, Director General of the Enterprise Investment Scheme Association (EISA), commented on the results of the survey: “It is clear that from this research that British investors feel that Brexit has not made them wealthier to date, and they do not believe that it will in the future either. Moreover, they feel that our Government does not have their back, and in fact, is contributing to the negative sentiment surrounding Brexit. The fact that so many investors feel this way is going to have a knock-on impact on the rest of the country and the economy.

However, there is some positivity, with many feeling that there will be great opportunities for wealth creation, entrepreneurship, and investment into SMEs in a post-Brexit Britain. We must remain optimistic yet cautious, we need to ensure that investors have the confidence to continue to look to UK SMEs as a viable investment, and also ensure that there is enough capital for investors to reinvest back into UK businesses.’

(Source: EISA)

An independent study commissioned by Dun & Bradstreet reveals a UK business community that believes it has already lost out due to the EU referendum. When asked how the Brexit process has affected business finances, 43% of business leaders say they have felt a negative financial impact since the Brexit vote. More than a third (37%) say they have lost out on potential revenue and, on average, businesses say 19% of their revenue will be put at risk by Brexit.

Two years on from the vote, almost a third of business leaders (32%) reveal that their organisation has or is planning to reduce UK investment, and almost a quarter (23%) have already halted or slowed their plans for expansion in the UK. This suggests businesses could be considering moving activities elsewhere in the EU or beyond, or simply downsizing the scale of activities in the UK.

When asked about their initial reaction to the 2016 EU referendum in a previous survey, business leaders’ views mirrored those of the general population, with 42% saying it was positive and 41% negative. Despite this fairly even split of opinion initially, it appears that optimism has waned significantly since then. The recent study found only 23% of leaders feel that the impact of Brexit has been positive, with 42% citing that Brexit has had a negative influence on their business.

Political instability, including Brexit, has been the biggest challenge that the majority (51%) of businesses have faced over the past two years. Many are still unsure of how the negotiations and outcomes will affect their business and views remain split. Almost a quarter (24%) say leaving the single market will impact them most, followed by the regulatory landscape (18%), the length of the potential transition period (15%) and the settlement on migration (13%).

However, the research also highlighted that not all businesses believe Brexit will have an impact on their business, positively or negatively, and in fact, a fifth (21%) of businesses believe that Brexit will have no impact at all. Moreover, over half (51%) of business leaders feel the impact of Brexit has not been as negative as they first anticipated. Perhaps most critically, over half of businesses are confident that they will survive and thrive after Brexit.

Commenting on the results, Edward Thorne, Managing Director UK of Dun and Bradstreet said: “As we move closer to the Brexit deadline, it’s evident that there is still a high level of uncertainty amongst UK businesses about their future in a post-Brexit era. Our research suggests that businesses have already been affected financially and are still unclear about further impacts once the UK does leave the EU. How businesses get ahead and plan for Brexit will be crucial to their future success.”

(Source: Dun & Bradstreet)

Budgeting time is here, and you’re likely going to make some safe assumptions on the budgeting based on previous years, experience and forecast. But is are these backed by actual real data? Below John Orlando, CFO at Centage Corporation, talks Finance Monthly through data integration in budgeting, looking at specific trends we can expect in 2018.

At the present moment, the economic future looks good. Unemployment is dropping, inflation is manageable and both the House and Senate passed tax bills that will slash the corporate income tax rate, giving them added cash to grow. Over the past few months I’ve talked to many CFOs who say their companies are eager to expand and they’re actively building growth assumptions into their budgets.

However, even in the best of times, there are risks to growth since at any time some world event can affect economic conditions. Performance monitoring and forecasting are part and parcel to business success in a growth economy, and to the end, 2018 will see some positive data-driven trends emerge that will make it easy for executives to keep a watch over their businesses.

The data goldmine: CFOs and financial teams will look to the robust data-generated HR, CRM and other platforms to feed their budget models

Many mid-size companies have implemented third-party HR and CRM systems, platforms that generate robust datasets. For instance, PEO providers maintain detailed records on every type of employee or contractor who works with the company, as well as their benefit requirements. Salesforce.com tracks virtually any type of sales and metric important to the company. This data, much of it market-tested, offers a level of detail it would take an army to create. By entering or importing it into a budget model, finance teams can create highly detailed and robust budgets in a remarkably short time frame.

Organizations will be more assertive with their assumptions

With robust and accurate data from internal systems populating the budget, executive teams will have access to variance reporting that is far more accurate than ever before. Moreover, this level of specificity will prompt CFOs to be more assertive in their assumptions, as well as provide the confidence management teams need to execute on their growth plans.

Greater accountability in business decisions

Marketing pioneer John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” He wouldn’t say that if he were alive in 2018. The combination of robust data and better performance tracking will make it easier to assess the outcomes of virtually all business decisions (including advertising campaigns). The result will be greater accountability in business initiatives as CEOs obtain the tools to compare current results to the budget, forecasts and what occurred in the past.

With greater accountability comes greater learnings and more success

Armed with a better sense of what worked and what didn’t, business leaders will have keen insight into which activities, markets or initiatives are worth repeating. I can envision companies establishing new metrics with a greater degree of specificity than was possible in the past, supported by data-driven budgets and the ability to track budget versus the actual on a constant basis.

Forecasting will be the next big innovation in budgeting

Looking at the budget software market itself, I believe the next big innovation will be easy forecasting, driven by customer demand. CEOs in particular want streamlined and simple forecasting whether it be monthly, quarterly or half year, and will pressure their providers to deliver it.

I, of course, support this demand. As anyone responsible for a budget knows, within a few months of a budget’s completion, there’s a good chance some or all of it will be out of date. Benchmarks must be reset regularly as market or economic conditions change. If a particular product suddenly begins selling better than another, the company will no doubt want to rejigger resources in order to exploit the opportunity (or retrench in the face of disappointing sales). This is particularly true when companies are embarking on ambitious growth plans.

Growth opportunities and market conditions will move CFOs away from spreadsheets to budget models

Ten years ago, 90% of mid-size companies built their budgets in spreadsheets; today from what I see, it stands at 80%. As more and more executive teams realize the inherent power of a budget, I suspect that number will go down quickly, replaced by budgeting software that allows them to monitor performance much more frequently. But don’t expect a public mudslinging between budget-software providers. Growth in our market will come from first-time customers, rather than

Rob Mellor, General Manager at Wherescape, explains the process from data to decision, and how any business, large or small, needs to make its data amalgamation efficient in order to move forward.

They say moving house is one of the most stressful things you can endure. Having moved recently, I can confirm the old adage rings true! And this was despite paying extra for packers to do all the 'hard work'. But here's the thing: the packers didn't really save us much time because prior to them arriving, we had to spend weeks sorting and prepping our belongings into the right piles to then be boxed and shifted! This is effectively what data architects have to do if they choose not to automate the building of a data warehouse.

Imagine if I could automate the sorting of all my belongings into neatly organised boxes. Then imagine if I could automate the sorting of many families’ belongings without having to visit their houses - even taking into account the unique requirements that each individual customer has. In effect, this is what solutions like WhereScape do: help businesses to intelligently automate the gathering of data, and allow them to dramatically speed up the time it takes to drive value from it. Automating the process of data gathering can drive real business value and provide a flexible, templated approach to automation, personalised for every business requirement.

To give a real world example, Xerox Financial Services (XFS), a $2bn business spanning 14 countries, has the challenge of putting all kinds of data requests into its data warehouse and producing rapid, accurate business intelligence for its local leasing companies across 14 countries. The rapid growth of the company led to business structures growing up in parallel, creating disparate data and variations in business processes. In the past, these data sets had to be looked at in individual silos because of their breadth and complexity. This meant getting an accurate overall picture took so long that often the information was out of date by the time it was delivered.

XFS now consolidates and transforms all of its data sets into a harmonised model using WhereScape. Integrating multiple tables of data from each source has enabled XFS to create a variety of management reports, including an up-to-date snapshot of sales performance on a daily basis, allowing senior management to ensure targets are hit.

Over the last year, XFS has doubled the number of automated processes yet maintained data quality and decision making. Whereas previously the business had to rely on a monthly 'cycle' of data, it now uploads data every day allowing agile, fast and effective decision-making based on relevant, timely snapshot and trend data. By automating this data collection process, XFS can also engage more effectively with its partners. Through monitoring the value of each relationship, they have a better understanding of the number of proposals sent in by customers, average deal size and the number of order agreements. And the most tangible outcome? The level of automated credit decision-making has increased significantly without compromising the credit quality of the portfolio with complex statistical modelling being supported by data collected daily and transformed by WhereScape. This is a huge leap forward for XFS.

The only value of data is its ability to drive the right business decision. Yet we constantly see businesses failing to do this because of avoidable failures in how they manage it. The automation process XFS has deployed with WhereScape demonstrates that it doesn't have to be that way. There is a choice, and choosing the right process will drive a significantly improved commercial outcome. Now, if I can come up with something similar for helping with my packing the next time I get to move house..!

As falsified information spreads, more people tend to believe it, and sooner or later, it’s the common knowledge and understanding. This in turn affects how we see and think, about what we buy and what we invest in, where we place our vote and how we want Brexit to turn out. But what if we’re just causing unnecessary damage in the long run?

Fake news, news with zero credibility, isn't new. But it's re-emerged as a monster during the past few years. So much so that world leaders are falsifying commentary which they believe to be true. What's worse, it's sneaked into our everyday lives with such subtlety most people don't know it's there. Adverts published by media outlets and social networks warn everyone to watch out for fake news, but when the mediums themselves are used to facilitate misleading information, things start to get confusing.

When it's used to infiltrate a country's political and economic structure, it's what Bath University's professor of sociology explains as, “An extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy.”

Most intelligent of people associate the word fake with something either false; fictionalised or to be untrue. In short, a lie. Propaganda, fake news, misinformation – is there any real difference?

You could call the people we trust to run our nation’s experts on creating, aggregating and perpetuating fake news, their lies published for all to read. Like teenagers, they use things like social media to smear the opposition. If it wasn't so serious it would be funny. It's caused more than a ripple in American politics, with obvious ramifications on its economy.

False claims, politics and the economy

The Leave campaign [for the EU referendum] spurred a dangerous political game by promoting several misguided financial promises. The most protruding were the campaigns claiming that EU was costing the UK £350 million a week, and “separating” meant the money saved would be spent on the NHS. However, In March, shortly after the referendum results were announced, the agenda involving the pledge forgotten about. Earlier this year Teresa May admitted that the money pledged to the NHS would not happen.

The Telegraph reported that in 2015, the UK paid the EU £250 million a week, £100 million less than what was claimed by the Leave campaign.

Perhaps then, false claims, which certainly contributed to the win, were seen as good enough to use again to conclude the outcome of the snap general election – Teresa May has recently been accused of shaking the ‘magic money tree’ after her £1 billion deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). After May’s U-turn on social care pledges and the money she told the NHS, she doesn’t have, the nation is left wondering whether any of the financial pledges she has made in her manifesto will suffice.

May has accused the Financial Times, the Mail on Sunday and Jeremy Corbyn of creating fake news about her manifesto. Perhaps, it’s something unconsciously picked up from President Trump. After all, he has reprimanded most of the World's press, saying they all report fake news about him and his administration. The BBC got a special mention. It turns out, President Trump knows a thing or two about how influential digital information is, and how to use it. CMC Markets said, “For all the new President’s promises that a plan is on its way he continues to devote his energies at depicting the press as purveyors of “fake news”. If he devoted anywhere as much energy towards his new fiscal plans as he does in portraying himself as a victim there would in all probability be a lot less uncertainty around the prospects of the global economy than there currently is at the moment.”

Sometimes news is purely and intentionally fake. Click bait headlines to grab attention, generate traffic, and earn thousands in advertisement revenue. This kind of news can get so much traffic it trends, is picked up by major media outlets and then relayed as real news. How does that happen?

Buzzfeed's Craig Silverman said, “A largely credible outlet might see it and quickly write something up...The incentive is towards producing more and checking less.” If an enemy relies on weaknesses, unchecked content is payday.

“Checking less” certainly happens with editorial staff as breaking stories mean traffic and revenue. Southend News Network, run by Simon Harris, experienced this when a story published on yourbrexit.co.uk, a website connected to SNN, published a headline that said Jeremy Corbyn and Labour were happy to foot a £92 billion Brexit bill, after thousands of social media shares and even the likes of The Standard running the story, it emerged that Corbyn did not say anything of the sort and his words were taken out of context. Harris said he didn’t have time to fact check everything, so begs the question: in a world where we fight for information, whose responsibility is it?

Has Brexit and the false news ripple in the American system infiltrated UK politics, finances, and the overall economy?

Brexit certainly prompted politically-false financial claims and pledges, but also brought to the forefront the problems within the system. The truth is, financial markets have long been affected by the scandal known as fake news.

Andrew Clare, a professor at London's Cass Business School, warned the Financial Times back in 2012 about how fake news can skew investor decisions. The consequences are clear: “These stories ultimately lead to losses for investors once the truth is uncovered.”

Clare's comments were in response to an author who was paid to write about ImmunoCellular Therapeutics and their development of an experimental cancer treatment. The article was published on Seeking Alpha, a respected go-to website for serious investors. Upon the article being released, share prices of the pharmaceutical company shot up from $42.8 to $155.2. After a clinical update on the cancer treatment, the share price dropped to an all-time low. Not only impacting investors but also a thriving economy.

Here is where things get complicated, fake news and false claims isn't a harmless, satirical concept. It's more than hoaxing celebrity deaths and whatever sells glossy magazines and advertising; tweaking information from a grain of its truth and using it to influence people’s decisions is otherwise known as propaganda. Spreading misinformation (to instill fear and gain power) infuses the divide and conquer and mindset. Nations divided over financial and political ideals and the belief of said information.

Author: Ron Short began his career as a portfolio manager working with FTSE 250 companies in the UK. He now lives in Spain, where he enjoys a career in financial writing.