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This is how to calculate Personal finance Math; your score might shock you

You might be surprised by your score when you calculate Personal Finance Math

You might be surprised by your score when you calculate Personal Finance Math

 

This is how to calculate Personal finance Math; your score might shock you

This is how to calculate Personal finance Math; your score might shock you

This week we are going to do some maths.

Personal Finance is all about planning for and deploying your cash flow to meet financial goals whilst managing risk. Personal Finance covers your income, expenses, assets, and liabilities. It seeks to answer money questions like, how much liquidity is appropriate for you? How much should you save there?

This week we will highlight some personal finance metrics and how to calculate them. These are calculations that you can do on an excel sheet or a calculator, all that is needed is the raw data. (No algebra)

Savings:

Savings is the start of any financial journey and the hardest of the process. When you earn and do not spend, you have saved. There can be no investment without savings; thus, the goal of salvation is to ensure that as income increases, our savings rate also increases. The target is to save a percentage of income and not a nominal value, so the target is to save, for example, 5% of income rather than a nominal figure. The measurable goal is the Savings Rate, simply a percentage of savings to total income.  if you make N1000 and spend N900, then you have a Savings rate of 10, which is calculated as

(Savings/Total Income) *100; (100/1000)*100= 10%

Unsure of what saving rate to adopt? In practice rule of thumb is to save 10% of your income, but do not do this if your budget will be stretched. Instead, start small and adjust your budget to reduce expenses or earn more and meet your target savings. A higher savings rate is preferred because it equips you, the investor, with a tool (cash) to invest.

A good activity is to keep a detailed spending journal, possibly using an app like Modify; this allows you to track back and see where you can adjust savings to raise your savings rate.

Cash flow:

Cash flow is essentially how much you are earning, subtracted from how much you are spending. In essence, are you living within the means of your income? If you have a high savings rate, your cash flow will be increased; if your saving rate is low or negative, your cash flow is negative. The calculation of cash flow is super easy, All cash inflow less all cash outflow. (Note the emphasis on cash)

Keep in mind debt is income to you; thus, when calculating cash flow, ensure you subtract out the cost of any debt incurred to attain that cash. The target is to have a positive cash flow.

Emergency Fund:

As the name implies, an emergency fund is set up to cover unforeseen events that require finances to resolve a medical emergency. Having emergency funds helps avoid liquidating an investment portfolio to meet this unplanned need.

An emergency fund is recommended for 3-6months of your non-discretionary expenses, meaning expenses you must make like food and rent. The emergency fund is usually cash or near cash assets.

We take liquid assets divided by monthly non-discretionary expenses to calculate an emergency fund. Let’s assume we calculate non-discretionary expenses to be 100,000 every month, and we have accumulated 300,000 in liquid assets. Our emergency fund ratio will be 300,000/100,000 or 3. This means the finances can support three months of emergency spending without another inflow. The key to this equation is a proper and accurate determination of “non-Discretionary” expenses.  An emergency fund ratio is three is preferred.

Net worth:

It is a straightforward calculation; Net worth is your total assets, less your total liabilities.

The real work is scheduling all your assets and segmenting them into income-earning and non-incoming assets. Thus, an apartment you own and rent out will be an income-generating asset, while a gold watch will be a non-income generating asset. Similarly, a car you own bought with a bank loan will be an interest-bearing liability for liabilities. In contrast, a zero-interest loan from your employer will be a non-interest-bearing liability.

Then arrange those categories from most liquid to less liquid. Thus, cash in the bank will come before a corporate bond. Similarly, credit card debt will arrive before the principal repayment of a bond you issued for liabilities; Then net off. On my network sheet, I always compare what I earn from my income-bearing assets to what I am paying on the liability side, just as an anchor.

Debt to Asset Ratio:

Keeping a tab on debt is extremely important. Debt allows the acquisition of assets without the payment of cash. For some assets like a home, the cash cost is very high that it makes sense to leverage up to acquire it. Debt is only advisable to buy assets that generate income or reduce an existing expense. A measure to use for debt is the Debt to Asset Ratio, which is Total Liabilities/Total Assets expressed as a percentage.

If your total liabilities are calculated at 25m whilst your total assets are valued at 30m, the debt ratio will be 25/30 or 83%, meaning 83% of your assets are financed by debt. The objective for debt is to trend down level of debt gradually. So, as you begin to approach retirement years, your interest-bearing debt must be significantly reduced or eliminated.

Debt Coverage Ratio: The debt coverage ratio measures how much your cash income meets debt obligations. For instance, if your earn 100,000 a month and you have two loans; an auto loan of 2500 a month and a mortgage of 2000 a month, then your debt coverage ratio will be

100,000/ 2500+2000

100,000/4500 or 22 times cover.

This means the total income earned can cover the interest-paying obligations twenty-two times. This is good.  A low or negative coverage ratio will indicate that your current cash income cannot cover or repay your existing debt.

Another calculation of debt related to income is the long-term debt to Gross Income. This calculation seeks to determine how much of your gross income can be earmarked toward the repayment of longer-termed debt like a mortgage. Most mortgage companies will score your mortgage application based on a variation of this formula. The frame of this measurement is to assume that only a certain percentage of your gross income can be deployed towards long-term loans.

Let’s assume a mortgage company has a 30% debt to a gross income hurdle rate; it essentially means you can only deploy 30% of your gross income to repay the mortgage. In other words, if 30% of your payment cannot refund for your monthly mortgage obligation, you will not qualify for the loan.

Finally, The 72 rule this s a simple hack to know. If you take the rate of return of any investment and divide it by 72, the answer tells you how long before that investment can double your money.

E.g. If I invest in an apartment building with ten rooms and it costs me N10m to build, I expect to earn an 8% return from the rental property. How long before I double my N10m

Using the 72 rule, I divide 72/8 or 9 years.

Remember, the use case of these calculations is to enable you to measure your progress towards a goal. If applied early and adequately, these rations can help you adjust your spending or investment behavior. If you want to buy a home, you know that you have to reduce your other long-term loans to create sufficient space to keep your mortgage payments under the lenders’ recommended hurdle rate.

CREDIT:|| Nairametrics

Sitemap Generators For Faster, More Productive Crawling

Sitemap Generators For Faster, More Productive Crawling

Sitemap Generators For Faster, More Productive Crawling

Ensure more pages are indexed and crawled. Get it done with these top 10 best sitemap generators (with recommendations for every budget).

 

Sitemaps are a powerful tool for SEO pros and webmasters. They help Google and other search engines navigate through a website and find new pages and content.

It’s not guaranteed that search engines will index the content but telling them what pages are important can make a significant difference.

Sitemaps can help you:

  • Get an overview of your website’s structure.
  • See which pages are being crawled by Google and other search engines.
  • Know how frequently the pages are being crawled.
  • Identify pages that are not being indexed.
  • Determine which pages have errors that need to be fixed.

With help from sitemap generators, the search engine crawls of your website will be faster and more efficient.

If you have a small site i.e., less than a few hundred pages, managing your sitemap on your own is doable.

But if you have a medium or large site and regularly add a significant amount of new content, you may want to consider either adding a dynamic sitemap to your site or looking into a sitemap generator.

A dynamic sitemap automatically adds new pages to the sitemap file.

It is usually faster and requires fewer resources than writing to a static file.

Choosing A Sitemap Generator

If you decide on a sitemap generator, many tools are available online – but which one is the best for you?

Here are 10 of the best sitemap generator tools I’ve found for SEO pros:

1. Google Sitemap Generator

This plugin for WordPress creates a sitemap for your website that will be compatible with all Google requirements.

It’s easy to use and works for all sizes of websites.

The plugin also comes with various translations which can be a great add-on.

2. Screaming Frog

One of the most popular crawlers in the SEO community, Screaming Frog can be used to create sitemaps for any size website.

It also offers an XML sitemap generator.

This tool is a bit more advanced and is specifically designed for larger websites.

The XML sitemap generator follows this progression: Crawl The Website > Click Sitemaps > XML Sitemap > Select Pages To Include.

One of my favorite Screaming Frog features is it allows you to create a sitemap from a list crawl.

For example, if you want to check the status codes of a list of URLs and perform a list crawl, you can create an XML sitemap from that list crawl quickly and easily.

3. XML-Sitemaps.com

This sitemap generator tool allows you to create sitemaps for your website quickly and easily.

It also offers a range of features such as support for multiple languages and the ability to include/exclude certain pages.

With the online generator, you can create a small sitemap for up to 500 URLs.

Check for over 130+ common website issues and get special reports about your site’s crawlability, internal linking, speed & performance, and more.

If you need to create a bigger sitemap (up to 1.5M pages), there’s a pro model.

4. Yoast SEO Sitemap Plugin

A popular WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your website for search engines, Yoast SEO also includes a sitemap generator tool that can help you easily create sitemaps for your website.

One of the most appealing features about the Yoast sitemap generator is its set of sensible defaults for what goes into the sitemap – and for excluding many pages that should not be there.

Yoast SEO chooses to break larger sitemaps into smaller sitemaps. Their sitemaps hold up to 1,000 connected URLs.

5. Inspyder

This website software company offers an XML sitemap generator that is super easy to use and can handle complex sites.

It runs on your PC. You can schedule a sitemap generation and receive an email notification when the sitemap is complete, and also get a sitemap in multiple formats – images, video, etc.

6. Slickplan

A website planning company, Slick plan offers a sitemap generator that is easy to use and offers a WordPress plugin.

A valuable feature of Slick plan’s tool is that it allows you to build a sitemap from scratch using drag and drop or start with an existing website by importing its URL, sitemap index file, or Google XML file.

Slick plan’s visual sitemap generator builds easy-to-navigate hierarchical sitemaps to help you present and test a variety of architecture scenarios for web pages.

You can also offer batch editing for large sitemaps that require numerous edits.

Another cool feature of Slick plan is that it gives users the ability to easily import a website into the application from a previously exported XML file.

Additionally, you can export your existing XML website sitemap directly from WordPress and import it into Slick plan.

7. Dyno mapper

This generator gives you a good solution for realizing and displaying the true architecture of a website with interactive visual sitemaps.

Dynomapper’s sitemap is capable of crawling 200K pages per crawl. The sitemap editor enables users to rework the hierarchy, categorize pages, and assign a workflow status to each page.

8. Sitemap Writer Pro

This is a terrific tool for creating sitemaps fast, and for managing large sites that have millions of URLs.

Sitemap Writer Pro offers eight types of sitemaps to properly index your website: Standard Sitemap, Google Image, Google News, Google Video, Google Images, Google Code Search, Google Geo, and Google Mobile.

9. Write Maps

This is another visual sitemap builder that you can use to create a sitemap without investing time in formatting.

One of the great features of Write Maps is that you can export your visual content into a PDF or share it with a unique URL.

You can also upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time.

  • Price: The monthly plans are free for three sitemaps up to 50 URLs and go up to $29.99 a month for unlimited sitemaps.

10. Octopus.do.

Eating super-fast visual sitemaps is what Octopus.do does best.

You can generate sitemap XML from visual sitemaps and submit it to Google, Bing, and other search engines to improve your visibility and SEO.

Octopus.do offers an interactive flow, taking full advantage of drag and drop.

You can also export your sitemap to various formats including PDF, PNG, TXT, and XML.

  • Price: Free for one project, then all the way up to $120 per month for unlimited sitemaps and projects.

Takeaways

These are the top 10 sitemap generators based on my experience.

There are many others out there, so be sure to do your research to find the one that is right for you.

Make sure it generates a sitemap that is formatted correctly and that you can easily upload and validate.

I’ll leave you with the following time-saving tips.

Sitemap Tips

Always create multiple sitemaps for different sections of your site. This will help you see which sections of your site have issues getting indexed.

The limit of a single sitemap is 50MB (uncompressed) and 50,000 URLs. If you have a larger file or more URLs, you will need to break your list into multiple sitemaps.

Alternatively, you can create a sitemap index file (a file that points to a list of sitemaps) and submit that single index file to Google.

Google does not consider priority in the sitemaps, so placing one URL as a higher priority will not have any impact on indexing.

Once your sitemap is created, place it on the root, add it to your robots.txt file and submit it to Google via Google Search Console.

After you’ve submitted it, watch for any errors, and check to see that the file has been submitted and read successfully.

 

Credit| (searchenginejournal.com)

 

Top Networking Trends & Developments 2022

Top Networking Trends & Developments 2022

The networking market is regularly adjusting its hardware and software components to meet the growing data demands of users, both in corporate and residential settings.

Networking use cases and network solutions are expanding as the cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing markets continue to grow.

Top Networking Trends & Developments 2022

Top Networking Trends & Developments 2022

Learn about some top networking trends that are spearheading or supporting these technological changes in the market:

[5 Top Networking Trends]

1. Enterprise Network Strategy In The User’s Home

The COVID-19 pandemic and changing workforce expectations have led many companies to a more globally distributed remote workforce.

As a result, enterprise networking infrastructure now has to support users in their individual homes.

Drit Suljoti, co-founder and CTO of Catch point, a digital experience monitoring platform provider, explained that consumer-grade networking technology does not always offer the levels of support and visibility necessary for remote work, which is increasingly becoming a problem.

“Organizations across the board have experienced the frustrations and performance volatility that can result from consumer-grade Wi-Fi, VPN clients, and increased dependence on the internet from the employee’s wider household,” Suljoti said. “At the ground level, how can IT support desks ensure they have the necessary visibility into the daily digital life of their remote employees?

“These mission-critical teams need the ability to understand the digital performance of an individual’s device, network, and applications, and the third-party providers they rely on. This is even more essential when employees are working remotely, without on-site support to troubleshoot performance issues.”

Bob Friday, VP and CTO of Mist, Juniper’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven enterprise business, believes that many companies are starting to respond to this remote work shift by increasing networking security and monitoring in their employees’ remote work environments.

“[A] major shift is in how enterprise-level networking trends are becoming increasingly important for personal users as well,” Friday said. “Whether you’re an executive at a company or you work in a profession that puts you into contact with sensitive information, the continued normalization of remote and hybrid work environments means that enterprise-grade networking and security will move into the home networking space.

“To ensure end-to-end network visibility, reliability, and security, we can expect enterprise-grade networking solutions to begin permeating the remote and hybrid workforce, as enterprise IT teams take an even sharper look at their network edge.”

2. Networking With Remote AI Support

Users and enterprise devices often need technical support that was normally provided in the office.

As remote work continues to become a standard approach, many companies are adopting AI solutions to assist with customer experience (CX) and support requirements of the network.

“More help is needed in managing this critical infrastructure, which is why AI has become a necessity for network management,” said Friday with Mist. “Enterprises and technology providers have already adopted AI assistants in their networking support teams. Cloud AI has enabled a new tech support model, one that has created the volume and quality of data necessary to train AI technologies.

“This AIOps model has led to incredible progress. At present, AI can answer up to 70% of support tickets with the same effectiveness as a domain expert. Eventually, this AIOps technology will move all the way to the end-user.

“And like the average human employee, AI has the ability to learn and improve over time, thus providing a better customer experience consistently and proactively. But unlike the average human employee, that skill and expertise is not lost when they retire or quit. The more that AI is used as part of the IT help desk, the more the technology can improve its answers and, ultimately, the end-user experience.”

3. The Growth Of Intent-Based Networking (IBN)

Networking technology continues to grow more sophisticated. Particularly with the more widespread use of software-defined networking (SDN), intent-based networking is being used more in enterprise networks that want additional business intelligence (BI), configuration management, and other features embedded in their networks.

Eric McGee, senior network engineer at TRGDatacenters, a data center vendor, explained why IBN is helpful to network administrators who want to better understand and manage their networks.

“One important networking technology trend that network engineers need to take note of is the emergence of intent-based networking,” McGee said. “The main role of IBN is to capture business intent and apply these insights across the network, ensuring that network administration is aligned with business intent. In other words, the IBN framework will receive an intent from the business and translate it, or encode it into the configuration of the network, resulting in the desired changes. Now, the network infrastructure is aligned to the business’s current needs.

“IBN also enables the automation of network administrative tasks involved, such as the configuration of networks, mitigation of risks, as well as the reporting and solving of network issues. Implementing IBN as a form of network administration makes the process of creating, managing, implementing, and monitoring network policies easier, simpler, and less labor-intensive. A lot of the manual effort put into traditional configuration management is made redundant when IBN is implemented.”

4. Holistic Networking Offerings

Traditional networking solutions typically require a variety of hardware and software components to work properly. However, as networks continue to evolve their software-defined, cloud, and edge, and solutions, many networking vendors are offering more holistic networking packages to manage every aspect of the network.

Patrick MeLampy, Juniper Fellow at Juniper Networks, a top global networking company, believes that enterprise client-to-cloud connectivity is one of the biggest drivers behind more unified networking packages.

“I’d have to say that there are a few key networking trends that are gaining steam and should be big next year,” MeLampy said. “Enterprise client-to-cloud connectivity service offerings will take off. This means we’ll see Wi-Fi, wired, routing, and security capabilities pulled together, all in one simple offering, making it more efficient and effective for teams to manage ever-expanding networks.”

More on networking offerings: Guide to Network-as-a-Service (NaaS)

5. Managing Network Data With Different Ops Methodologies

With more software- and cloud-based networking solutions used across the board, a number of companies are looking into new ways to manage and read their networking data.

Richard Larkin, manager of North America sales engineering at Net Brain, a next-gen network operations company, believes that the knowledge and approach of different ops teams are particularly applicable to new ways of automating network data management.

“The days of managing networks with SNMP polling and traps as well as syslog data are almost over,” Larkin said. “Many enterprises still leverage these telemetry sources, but it’s not enough. We need a more comprehensive solution harvesting data, from API, CLI, packet, net flow, and other sources, to get the complete picture as well as visibility into SD-WAN, SDN, cloud, and SaaS offerings.

“A trend that I am seeing is the blending and blurring of lines between Net Ops, Sec Ops, and DevOps. With networks becoming more software-defined and cloud-based, organizations are trying to fill the gap with the traditional network monitoring data (SNMP, syslog, etc.) with homegrown solutions using Python, Ansible, and other coding. What would be interesting is if there was an easier way to codify the knowledge of the Net Ops teams that required minimal coding and can be produced in minutes, not hours, days, and weeks.

COPY:| @Datamation