Beany’s Top Three Change Tips

There are plenty of self-help books around, and articles abounding on the internet on how to manage our finances, but it takes a great team at Beany, the specialist accountants to give us some top tips on how to change our financial habits. As they say at Beany, the end of the financial year always feels like a good time to think about the future, so it is the perfect time for a change.   

Without a significant motivation, change is likely to fail so people need to consider what it is that drives them and identify their goals and what they can do differently to achieve them, which is where Beany comes in with their top three change tips.

Beany’s first recommendation is to take advantage of low interest rates – they are ridiculously low right now and look set to stay there for a bit.  Buying a house is great if someone can afford it but perhaps they   could do something more productive with a loan.  This might also be the time to think about a new piece of machinery which could increase productivity in their business or they could think about investing in their team by putting in a training scheme for them. 

Secondly Beany advocate taking advantage of some new technology.  There are so many great things in the technology market, ready and waiting to remove time from our working day, and many provide easy ways to improve efficiencies and reduce cost in our business. They recommend moving  to Google Drive and working in the cloud, as hardware costs can be reduced significantly. It also allows people to bill jobs whilst they’re out on the job so they can work, bill and get paid quickly and most of these apps work on smartphones so staff don’t need to be dragging a computer around with them. There are also different payroll systems, which are subsidised by the government that will save time and money.  (Check out http://www.ird.govt.nz/payroll-employers/returns-payments/paye-intermediary/ for more information on this.

Thirdly, Beany recommend people should think about the long term. We are probably all guilty of short term thinking – it’s a good survival strategy but it may not be the best strategy for building long term prosperity.  Long term investment is probably the best route to long term prosperity and we should all start as soon as we can, whether it’s Kiwisaver as a young apprentice or investing in our business with growth in mind. 

The Beany team say this is a good time for people to think about their life and business and maybe set some goals, so they should go to http://www.beany.com and click on the Beany Blog.