What questions would you ask in a job interview?

OK, we all have been in job interviews gunning for that dream job, and one of the certain questions that your interviewer will ask you is "Do you have any questions you would like to ask us?". So what do you ask?

If I was looking for a job, not that I am looking for a job, the following would be in my top 5 questions to ask...well, maybe only from a financial perspective anyway.

If there is zero income coming into the business today, how much longer are you able to keep trading before declaring bankruptcy?

By hiring me, how will I help the company's bottom line?

What is the salary ratio between the companies highest paying job and my job?

How will you ensure that my job is secure for the next 2 years?

How high is my welfare on the companies priorities?

These questions are framed from a perspective of job security. One of the worst things that you can do is to join a company that is on a downward slope and you are not in a position to influence it to be come an upward slope. It is like jumping into a sinking ship with a smile...

Most people that I know of go to an job interview to secure an income, so what not ask the questions that would directly affect your personal bottom line.

What are some of your questions?

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GTDing the GTD

I have been trying to embrace the notion of getting things done (GTD). Although, I don't strictly follow the methods that David Allen's books, there are a number of things that you must do to ensure that it works. This is true no matter what GTD system you are using.

• Write down all everything - In your list, make sure that you write everything that you want to do. Be as specific as you can. Writing something like, build a toy for my son, is probably not useful as it is too generic. Something like, build a small swing in the back corner of the yard for my son, is probably something that you can aim at.
• Prioritise the task - Attach priority to each task that you have. With the priority, you are associating importance to the task. A task like picking your son up from child care this afternoon is more important than remember to buy the milk on the way home from work.
  
• Read your list everyday - At the start of each day, don't just look at your list. Make sure that you read it, and check if you are able to complete any of it.
  
• Simplify the tasks - If some of the tasks on the list has been there for a more than two weeks, it is a good chance that the task is too complex, consider breaking it down to simpler tasks.
• Carry your list with you all the time - Having your todo list with you at all times allow quickly jot down that task whenever it pops into you head. For me, I found that if I don't jot it down immediately, I tend to forget about it and it never gets done.

My current system is the todo application my Palm T3 organiser and Outlook at my work desktop PC. Every morning, I synchronised the todo list with Outlook's tasks. I would spend some minutes in the morning and going through the list, perhaps re-prioritise some tasks or add more tasks. I have found that I am ticking off about 10%-15% of the tasks by the end of the week. This well short on meeting my number 1 goal for 2008, but I am making headway.

By the way, David Allen has published a series of free articles which you can conveniently download and read offline.

Planning our meals

I have been doing some research on meal planning and its affects on money saving. Several PF bloggers such as Nicole Humphrey over at Families.com and Kris over at Simply Us have been some insightful reasons why meal planning is the way to go if we want to save money.

Back in June 2007, one of the articles that I wrote also advocate the planning of meals. Practicing it is a different story. This is our strategy in an attempt to plan our meals better.

We have a lot of food magazine like Super Food Ideas, Delicious and Good Taste, and frequently try the recipes in them. So our idea is to us a display folders with a few empty inserts. We take a recipe from one of these magazines and placed them into one of the empty inserts. We usually just tear the page out from the magazine.

Each of these recipes are for each weekday. Currently, we are only focusing the evening meals, but we are planning to cook that little bit extra so that the left overs can be use for lunch the next day.

Do you plan your meals, and what strategy do you us to keep it interesting and on track?

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ALDI newsletter

A few post ago, I wrote about how we are going to give ALDI another go. Recently, we have found that the weekly specials that ALDI have are literally running out the door. On the day of the sales, the weekly specials are sold out within two hours! Apart from receiving the ALDI catalogue in your mailbox, it is difficult to know what the specials are.

Searching through the website, I discovered they can email you their weekly specials in a form of a e-letter. I have signed up, and have began to receive regular emails with the weekly specials. Sign up for the newsletter here if you are interested. You can unsubscribe at the same location as well.

cheap on-line photo printing

One of the family's favourite past time is to snap away at photos. When the digital camera revolution arrived about 4-5 years ago, the number of photos that we took seem to have tripled. Most of them ending up on the PC, and only a small selection of them ever made on to printed media as we have found that it is quite expensive to print out the photos.

We have tried the two popular options, either printing the photo out ourselves, or using one of a photo kiosks.

Printing the photo has its benefits. It gives me some satisfaction that I have hand crafted a photo worth putting in a album, but it also ends to be about $0.45 per print. We did all the frugal things like cutting up an A4 photo paper in a four A6 paper, and also using non-genuine inks. We have never managed to get below $0.30 per print. We even switched to an Epson printer where each colour has its own cartridge so only the empty cartridge is replaced, not the whole cartridge.

The photo kiosks are quite cheap, but they are rather inconvenient. Our closes photo kiosk is a five minute drive away, and using it frustrates my wife endlessly as it is badly designed. She usually get a couple of of the details wrong and the whole batch is ruin. It is something we try to avoid. The cheapest photo kiosk that we have found cost $0.19 per print.

Recently, one of our friends from our ante-natal classes pointed us to www.getdigital.com.au. For standard 10cm x 15cm, it cost $0.10 per print, and there isn't any minimum quantity! You can order 1 print if you wish. They will usually turn your photos around 1 one working day, definitely in two working days. You also have a choice of picking it up at a shop for a service fee of $2.00 or have it delivered to you for $8.50.

We tried it and send across 67 photos to be printed and be picked up at our local pharmacy. The results were pretty good, definitely good enough for putting into a photo album. It cost a total of $8.70 for 67 prints , sweet!

One word of warning, the website does not appear to be compatible with the Firefox browser. However it works pretty well with Internet Explorer. We discovered this after spending 1 hour uploading the photos!

Using www.getdigital.com.au has certainly help us the printing cost of photos and have saved us many dollars since we have discovered them.

photo credit: V Fouche

Don't Panic!

The current financial crisis that we are experiencing is quite nerve racking. Today, the All Ords feel by about 7% and all the gains, if not more, made over the last 12 months. Today, it closed at 5222 points, down by 408 points. As reported by The Age, this is the one day biggest drop in the share market in the 18 years, and the longest losing streak since January 1982.

Luckily, it does not really impact me significantly as we only own a small parcel of Telstra shares, which was purchased during the T2 offering. However, the real impact to us would be how our superannuation will be performing. Like many other Australians, some part of our superannuation are invested in the local Australian share market. With the investment mix of my superannuation, about 10%-15% is expose to movements of the sharemarkets. The way I view it, superannuation is a long term investment and is not due to mature for another 30 years for me. So I have decided not to panic and leave the investment mix alone to ride the down slide out.

My friend calls this the sleep factor. If the situation is affecting you to an extend that it is disturbing your sleep at night, it is probably time to be less aggressive with the investment mix.

The market did slide down quite significantly when the dot com bubble busted just after the turn of the century and my superannuation net worth actually went down, but it recovered in spectacular fashion.

For some people whom superannuation are about to be accessible in the next few years, these are certainly nervous times. I would say to them to get some profession advice.

measuring dollar economy on the car.

We have been driving the new car for about a two months, and I was thinking "how do I measure the affect it was having on the household financials?" Since the car is a novated leased car, I need to keep detail record whenever I visited the petrol station and fill it up with petrol. The information that I keep are

• Cost of the petrol
• The amount of petrol I pumped into the car
• The odometer reading when I pumped petrol into the car
• Date and time

Fortunately, these information are all on the collected, printed out on the receipt and handed to you by the station attendant. The standard measure is fuel economy which measures how much fuel is used over a set distance. So far, the car's fuel economy is 13.55 ltr per 100km. I felt that this is more a measure of how the car is performing and does not really give you a sense on how it is affecting the wallet.

From a dollars and cents perspective, I converted this figure to become dollar economy by multiplying the amount of fuel by the average cost of the fuel. This was calculated to be about $18.5 per 100km. Obviously, this figure will fluctuate with the price of fuel, and that is a good thing as it clearly shows the true value of your fuel usage.

To put that dollar figure into perspective, if we drove to Ballarat to visit the in-laws, the trip would cost about $20 on fuel alone. Plus the $20 for the trip home.

I am gathering a spreadsheet to help perform this calculation quickly. If you are interested in getting a copy of the spreadsheet, send me an email tehn.yit.chin @ gmail . com or leave a message in the comments. The spreadsheet should be available in the next few days.