10 smart tips to manage your money!

You never know what’s in store for you! For instance, we cannot control outside events like recession. No matter what you do, it is going to affect all of us in some way or other. However some simple tips like optimum asset allocation, debt reduction, keeping emergency cash will help you tide over the rough times, without much damage.





Check your expenses and adhere to your budget
People tend to forget that good times don’t last forever. If you spend lavishly during good times and continue the trend without adapting to changes in circumstances, very soon you will land in financial trouble. Hence to ensure you lead a consistent lifestyle, always draw out a budget and ensure you stick to it religiously. E.g. if you have allocated Rs 500 per month towards your entertainment expenses, don’t spend a rupee more than Rs. 500. It will not only help you handle your finances better but will develop your willpower by delaying instant gratification.

Don’t rely on future income
Depending on future income in order to spend today, is one of the biggest mistakes we make. This has been evident during a job crisis, where youth racked up a huge credit card debt and took heavy loans. But when the salary cuts and job losses occurred, they were unable to pay off their debt. E.g. if your monthly income is Rs. 20,000 always ensure you spend well within Rs. 20,000 as pay cut or job loss may land you in trouble.

Reduce your debt
Got a bonus? Then pay off any loans that you have taken. If you have multiple loans, first pay off the loans with the highest interest rate, then the one with second highest rate and so on. E.g. if you have a credit card debt, personal loan and home loan, first clear off the credit card debt, then personal loan and finally home loan. For this you will have to plan out your debts and then go on following it systematically and steadily. It will not only save you money but will also give you mental peace.

Opt for strategic asset allocation
Though experts have consistently stated the importance of asset allocation, many investors tend to overlook this fact and invest only in the hottest asset. But remember market conditions do change and what is hot today may be out in the cold later on for a long time. So ensure you divide your portfolio amongst stocks, bonds, gold and real estate to get the maximum returns from your portfolio. Though your portfolio may under perform for some time, it will end up protecting you when the things get rough.

Keep emergency cash
You never know when a crisis can strike your family. Death, disease or job loss can end up upsetting your investments. You might be forced to sell your investments though they have not been given you any profits. Hence it is advisable to keep at least 3-6 months of your household expenses aside as emergency cash.

Sort out Your Finances
Agreed, keeping tabs on and handling your finances closely, may not sound like an interesting job, but it is a necessity. However you can reduce the boredom by putting a system in place. Once it is done, you can spend a few hours a month on this job. E.g. on Sunday, you can spend 1-2 hours to find out how your investments are performing, reading up any news concerning them or talking with your financial planner about the performance of your investments.

Plan in advance
One of the reasons many people land in financial mess is that they don’t plan their finances ahead. So it is imperative to plan your finances properly. Find out your current position, where you intend to go and set up a feasible plan to achieve your objectives. Unforeseeable events may occur and make you stray away from your plan for a short time, but ensure you get back on track at the earliest. Always remain focused and keep a watch on your progress. E.g. you are saving to buy a home and have started investing for the same. But 6 months after you started investing, you lose your job. If that happens, stop your investment, get a new job and again restart your investment.

Invest systematically and gradually
The biggest problem is that most people don’t bother saving till it is quite late. So they don’t have any money to fall back on in case of emergency. Hence it is essential to start small, but regularly and then increase the amounts later on. E.g. you can start a SIP, in which a particular sum is debited from your bank account and invested in a mutual fund. Or you can open a recurring deposit, which acts like a SIP, initiated by the bank. All this will occur automatically, so you have no excuse not to save.

Be in charge of your investments
The markets have crashed, the realty is down in dumps. What do you do? Sell off? Wrong. Unfortunately, this is what most investors do. In this situation, it is advisable to hold on to your portfolio as selling will just end up causing you financial loss. Instead increase your emergency cash reserves and periodically review your asset allocation of your portfolio.

Set a realistic outlook
The days of stocks giving a return of over 40% are over. While it is possible some of them may give you those types of returns, it is setting yourself up for disappointment if you keep your outlook very high. Instead keep a practical outlook of earning 12-15% returns from your investments.

Live forever!!!!

LONDON (Reuters) - If Aubrey de Grey's predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.

A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to "cure" ageing -- banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.

"I'd say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing ageing under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so," de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain's Royal Institution academy of science.

"And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today."

De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular "maintenance", which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.

De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.

He describes ageing as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body.

"The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic," he explained.

CHALLENGE

Exactly how far and how fast life expectancy will increase in the future is a subject of some debate, but the trend is clear. An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be a million centenarians across the world by 2030.

To date, the world's longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010.

Some researchers say, however, that the trend towards longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.

De Grey's ideas may seem far-fetched, but $20,000 offered in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review journal for any molecular biologist who showed that de Grey's SENS theory was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" was never won.

The judges on that panel were prompted into action by an angry put-down of de Grey from a group of nine leading scientists who dismissed his work as "pseudo science".

They concluded that this label was not fair, arguing instead that SENS "exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt."

CELL THERAPY
For some, the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, either, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope.

But de Grey says that's not what he's working for. Keeping the killer diseases of old age at bay is the primary focus.

"This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health," he told Reuters. "This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health."

De Grey divides the damage caused by ageing into seven main categories for which repair techniques need to be developed if his prediction for continual maintenance is to come true.

He notes that while for some categories, the science is still in its earliest stages, there are others where it's already almost there.

"Stem cell therapy is a big part of this. It's designed to reverse one type of damage, namely the loss of cells when cells die and are not automatically replaced, and it's already in clinical trials (in humans)," he said.

Stem cell therapies are currently being trialled in people with spinal cord injuries, and de Grey and others say they may one day be used to find ways to repair disease-damaged brains and hearts.

NO AGE LIMIT

Cardiovascular diseases are the world's biggest age-related killers and de Grey says there is a long way to go on these though researchers have figured out the path to follow.

Heart diseases that cause heart failure, heart attacks and strokes are brought about by the accumulation of certain types of what de Grey calls "molecular garbage" -- byproducts of the body's metabolic processes -- which our bodies are not able to break down or excrete.

"The garbage accumulates inside the cell, and eventually it gets in the way of the cell's workings," he said.

De Grey is working with colleagues in the United States to identify enzymes in other species that can break down the garbage and clean out the cells -- and the aim then is to devise genetic therapies to give this capability to humans.

"If we could do that in the case of certain modified forms of cholesterol which accumulate in cells of the artery wall, then we simply would not get cardiovascular disease," he said.

De Grey is reluctant to make firm predictions about how long people will be able to live in future, but he does say that with each major advance in longevity, scientists will buy more time to make yet more scientific progress.

In his view, this means that the first person who will live to 1,000 is likely to be born less than 20 years after the first person to reach 150.

"I call it longevity escape velocity -- where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing. And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies further as time goes on," he said.

"What we can actually predict in terms of how long people will live is absolutely nothing, because it will be determined by the risk of death from other causes like accidents," he said.

"But there really shouldn't be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born. The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely."

Want to improve memory? Meditate, sleep

Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation programme appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain's grey matter.

"Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day," says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's senior author. "This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing."

Previous studies from Lazar's group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced meditation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.

For the current study, MR images were take of the brain structure of 16 study participants two weeks before and after they took part in the 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. In addition to weekly meetings that included practice of mindfulness meditation - which focuses on nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind - participants received audio recordings for guided meditation practice and were asked to keep track of how much time they practiced each day. A set of MR brain images were also taken of a control group of non-meditators over a similar time interval.
Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection. Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time.

"It is fascinating to see the brain's plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life." says Britta Hölzel, PhD, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany. "Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change."
Amishi Jha, PhD, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training's effects on individuals in high-stress situations, says, "These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training. They demonstrate that the first-person experience of stress can not only be reduced with an 8-week mindfulness training programme but that this experiential change corresponds with structural changes in the amydala, a finding that opens doors to many possibilities for further research on MBSR's potential to protect against stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder." Jha was not one of the study investigators.

The research, led by Bjorn Rasch of the University of Basel in Switzerland, claims reactivating newly learned memories during sleep rather than when awake does a better job of strengthening the memory trace.
The work could have clinical implications for treating disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The study involved training subjects in a spatial memory task to learn an object's location in a grid. At the same time an odour was released - the idea being to associate the memory with the smell.
One group then went to sleep, while the second group stayed awake.

After another 20 minutes, the sleeping group were woken, and both groups were given a similar task, but the objects were in different locations and without the odour.

Half an hour later they were asked to recall the position of the cards from the original task.

Rasch and colleagues found both groups were correct about 60 per cent of the time without any odour assistance.

But once the odour was added to the test, the non-sleeping group were only correct about 42 per cent of the time, compared to the sleeping group's 84 per cent.

"As we expected, reactivation during waking destabilised memories. In contrast, reactivation during SWS immediately stabilised memories, thereby directly increasing their resistance to interference," ABC Science quoted the researchers as saying.

Sweet dreams..

Source: India Syndicate based on release from Massachusetts General Hospital

Want to stop daydreaming? Have sex!

We often find ourselves drifting away while at work or studying but experts have said that it's bad for health - and now the best way to avoid daydreaming is to make love, it seems.

Mind-wandering turns out to be extremely common - users reported daydreaming almost 50 per cent of the time - mostly during brushing their teeth or doing other grooming, reports New Scientist.

During only one activity - making love - did the frequency of mind-wandering drop below 30 per cent.

Crucially, episodes of mind-wandering tended to precede bouts of low mood, but not vice versa, suggesting that the former caused the latter.

Matthew Killingsworth and colleague Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University conducted the study, and found that daydreams about pleasant things were linked to improvements in mood, but only slight improvements.

Thinking about neutral topics while mind-wandering was linked to a similarly modest drop in happiness, but daydreams about unpleasant topics coincided with a sharp drop.

But the claim that mind-wandering causes unhappiness needs to be further evaluated, they said, because he and others have shown the effect can run in the opposite direction.

"It's difficult to make causal claims. But it's undoubtedly the case that negative mood and mind-wandering are inextricably linked," Jonathan Smallwood at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The connection suggests that cutting down on mind-wandering, either by practising meditation or simply by keeping busy, could help people battle depression.

"The irony is that mind-wandering also underlies invention. We don't want to tell people not to do it," Smallwood said.

Curvy women 'live longer'

A heavy rear can guarantee your chances of living longer, says a new study.

This means that Jennifer Lopez, Nigella Lawson and Beyonce as well as other curvy women are in great shape to live longer thanks to their well-rounded -figures.

Scientists have found that having a big bottom and thighs could help prevent metabolic disorders like heart disease, strokes and -diabetes.he study found that fat apparently grows differently in the upper and lower parts of the adult body, rather than remaining stable in both areas.

Almost 30 men and women in the study were encouraged to gorge on ice-cream, chocolate, sugary drinks and other highly fattening food for eight weeks.

Researchers measured body fat and fat cell size before and after the unhealthy diet regime.

They found that on average the participants put on 5.5lb (2.5 kilos) of upper body fat and 3.3lb (1.5 -kilos) of lower body fat.

But there was a striking difference in that fat cells around the stomach and heart grew in size - but not number - by producing more fat synthesising proteins.he reverse was true for thigh fat cells in the lower part of the body which increased in number, but did not get bigger.

Dr Michael Jensen, research leader at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said the findings challenge the concept that the number of fat cells doesn't vary between the upper and lower body.

It also supports the idea that increased capacity to produce lower-body fat cells creates some form of protection to the upper body and potentially helps to prevent -serious metabolic diseases.

"The cellular mechanisms are different. The accumulation of abdominal fat happens largely by individual cells expanding in size - while with fat gain in the femoral or lower body it is the number of fat cells that increases. So, different mechanism, different impact," the Daily Express quoted Jensen as saying.

In -future, drugs that alter the way fat is stored around the body could be used to combat -diseases.

The study is published in US journal -Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sunless days can lead to Sadness

Days when one is not exposed to sunlight can lead to seasonal affective disorder or SAD, which can leave you depressed and lethargic, say experts.

Once dismissed by medics, the condition is now recognised by psychiatrists and doctors and its symptoms also include insomnia and aching joints as a result of a change in season.

But experts believe that because the symptoms are similar to other illnesses, it is often undiagnosed, leaving sufferers struggling to cope, reports the Daily Mail.

'Light has many physiological effects on the body,' says Russell Foster, a neuroscientist at Oxford University.

'Cells in the eyes register light so the brain knows when it is day or night. This triggers the release of certain hormones that regulate hunger and digestion, growth, mood and energy.'

Darkness causes an increase in the production of the hormone melatonin, which helps us sleep.

There is also a reduction in serotonin, crucial for keeping us alert, and often called the feel-good hormone, which also regulates the digestive system. Light triggers the release of cortisol, which helps us wake up.

'If you drive to work in the dark, spend all day indoors in artificial light, and return in the dark, your internal body clock has nothing to lock onto and normal rhythms can be thrown,' says Foster.

He recommends you should experience two hours of natural light a day, even if it's via a large window.