Where do you put your extra money for your passive or additional income?

As an ordinary worker that put effort from 8am-5pm in the office (well, sometimes up to 10pm), I tend to try to put my savings to some programs that could bring me some passive income. I have tried some HYIP (High Yield Investment Programs) Online and got scammed twice. The good thing is that I only invested there around $10-$50 to test their program. Now, I never trust those HYIP Online anymore. If some of you really get good return, then, good luck to you and stay safe.

I tried also playing FOREX and it really consumed my time to search and monitor the progress. Being greedy, I lost about $1000+ in the process. Finally I stopped playing it myself and put my money in managed fund handled by FXCM. So far, I got a return of 20%-50% a year. Not much? At least I am not wasting my time looking at the chart, news, and reports.
Similar to FOREX, I tried to understand options trading. Option trading is a derivative of stocks trading. I signed up for a virtual trading in OptionsXpress and learn it by myself. In the end, I stopped it as well because it consumed my time to monitor the news and movements everyday. I have read that some people could only spend 2 hours per day and get profit out of that. Well, may be I am not smart enough or discipline enough to just spend 2 hours per day and understand the positions.

From 2 years ago, I put some of my money in mutual funds. I choose big investment houses like Schroders and Fortis to manage my funds. Why? Because it is easier for me to trust them as compared to small investment houses that have just started up and promising big returns. So far, they gave me return around 30%-50% a year for my aggressive portfolio.

Please take note that even I have benefits some passive incomes from forex managed funds and mutual funds, there are NOT risk free. Those kind of investments involve risk of losing money. They put it clearly on the form when I signed up. Thus, only put your additional money that you can risk on those types of investments.

How about you? What programs did you join to bring you additional income or passive income? Please share it with me by putting in comments?

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Choosing Your Web Hosting

I have been using web hosting services for more than 5 years now. Back then, I was not really look for hosting companies outside my country (Indonesia) because the difficulty in term of payments. I started to rent a hosting space for as low as 10MB just to host my tiny sites with low costs. The first feature that I look is always a reliable tech supports because I did not know much about technical things. This helped me a lot when installing some script and creating some cron jobs.

Time passed by and Paypal accepted Indonesia to send and receive money. This opened an opportunities for me to choose more webhosting companies with competitive prices. The disadvantages is that some reviews I read is not updated nor objective. Once, I bought a hosting space with very low prices ($1/month for 1G space) and it had a good review. Unfortunately, the reviews were kind of old and I had problem with the hosting company. Their responds to the support ticket that I submitted took days. This was a headache in my part when I wanted to install some new scripts and had problems. Other than that, the hosting was ok to host my simple html or php sites.

Based on this experience, it is always better to research more about your web hosting company before you finally choose them. Try to submit ticket or email them or chat with their live support to know their response time before buying the hosting. In addition, there are a lot of hosting review or hosting directory sites available. One of them is webhostingchoice.com . Try to look some tips to find the cheap web hosting there. I like a sentence of

“Just because a host is cheap does not mean that you will receive 'cheap' service, but you must be careful.”

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My Blog got PageRank (PR) 4

I did not realize that my blog now has PR4. I just read in the forum that Google is finally uploading the PR data to most data centers recently to update all PRs. After reading the forum, I checked my blog. Surprisingly for me, I got PR4 :D

To those who still does not know what PR is, you can try reading it at wikipedia page rank. The summary is that the higher your PR, the higher your popularity in term of Google Page Rank algorithm. For some webmaster, PR means nothing! The important is site traffic and how the traffic converts into cash. Well, they are right. But I am personally happy this this PR update because it means something for a beginner like me who just started to make this blog 3 months ago.

So, what did I do for the last 3 months to have my PR increased from PR0 to PR4?

1. I did exchange links to related websites or blogs. Many said that exchanging link with related site with higher PR will surely increase my PR. But I did not find many of high PR blogs wanted to exchange links with my PR0 blog. So, I did exchanges with mostly PR0 as well. Some are kind enough to give me link from their high PR blogs.

2. I put comments on blogs with DOFOLLOW and high PR. They remove the NOFOLLOW attribute because they believe to give rewards to pass a little PR juice to commentators. Ofcourse, do not spam the comments. I always read their posts and only comment when I understand the topics and wanted to comment. In the end, I kept coming to their sites and becoming their loyal readers. We became friends. One of them even put a post link to my site. Thanks mates. My blog is also now has DOFOLLOW attribute.

My task now to keep and even increase my blog PR further. So, those are the two major things that I did the last 3 months. Nothing specials and nothing fancy. I am sure you can do the same :D

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I need to re-start my Asset Management

A long way ago, I have read the book of Robert Kiyosaki. It opened my eyes on how he gives an example of asset management. The major one is that he does not consider a property as an asset unless it gives back money from rent. We usually think that a property is an asset because it increase the value over the time. But we sometimes do not realize that the increase of values does not bring us any profit when we bought it using loans and the interest is higher. Not to mention that other expenses that we need to pay monthly or yearly for the property asset. Of course that the real estate agent will tell you the property is a good investment for your asset management. But try to do the computation yourself before taking any decisions.

In the book, I read how he manage the asset. It is not using any asset management software. In fact, I can do it in Excel. You do not need to attend asset management training to understand the concepts.

The bad thing was when I started to put some of my asset in my digital asset management excel, I got busy and loose track of it after several months. Well, busy should not be a reason.. because what i need is proper time management. Now, I am going to be back and restart my personal asset management.

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