What if saving money and making investments was, literally, a cup of tea? Nowadays, if you want to invest in a bank, you need a rather large sum of money in order to see any wortwhile rewards, and you have almost no control over how your money is invested. And then comes Raiz…

Raiz is a mobile app which allows you to save while spending without even feeling it. Whenever you spend money using your bank account or credit card, the Raiz app to which your account is linked rounds up each amount spent to the nearest dollar, and then it takes it and invests it for you. You are also able to set any amount as little as 1$ to be withdrawn regularly from your account and invested in the Raiz app. That’s why you don’t need a big capital in order to invest with Raiz!

Moreover, based on your age and personality, Raiz has an investment strategy just for you. Whether you are the cautious type looking to grow your savings slowly but surely or you are a more gutsy investor who doesn’t mind taking big risks, you are allowed to choose from a variety of investment portfolios. Raiz buys and sells shares from big companies in Australia and worldwide such as the Commonwealth Bank, Nestle, Samsung, and many others.

To make earning more fun and easier, Raiz has also partnered up with a huge variety of online stores such as Woolworths, Coles, Dan Murphy, Adidas, Booktopia, and many others in order to offer you a rewards program like no other. If you buy from these online shops through the Raiz app or website, these businesses will invest a certain percentage of the amount you spent with them back in your Raiz account, thereby helping you increase your savings instead of just getting loyalty points.

And finally, Raiz also went the extra mile: if you invite your friends to join Raiz – just like I am doing here – using your link, each of you will get 2.5$ invested in your accounts. This is worth 2 months subscription on Raiz (1.25$ per month to benefit from all the above). So hurry up and join now on app.raizinvest.com.au/invite/UQH9VD so that we both get our shares and start investing!

Originally posted on October 27, 2020 @ 11:26 am

It’s ironic that these people who didn’t have a job nor freelance work (I asked them if they had been busy with other projects and they responded negatively) preferred to sit at home and play with their toes than to work on a risky project that required nothing more than their knowledge, skills and time. I understand that their knowledge, skills and time cost money, but they actually also become a waste when they are not being used for anything. Think about it, when you spend money to learn something at university or through courses and you don’t use it because no one paid you to do so, the world evolves, knowledge changes and you don’t get any experience. Eventually, the knowledge you have ends up being useless because you’ve rarely used it.

When you are really free and have nothing better to do, it never hurts to take on a project for shares in it (or negotiate any type of long term deal, perks or advertising space). This helps you keep your skills honed, makes your network grow, and may even be that little risk that lands you the big money. If you don’t try, you’ll never know. After all, most great projects started with people consenting to work together for potential benefit in the future. There was never anything guaranteed when Amazon, Microsoft, Apple or Bitcoin started. In most cases, there wasn’t even a budget to start with, only the skills, the time and the dedication to do something that may or may not end up a success. However, in the long run, whether it succeeds or not, you remain the winner: if it succeeds, congratulations, you’ve just become a millionaire; if it fails, you have learned a whole lot of new skills and acquired knowledge that you couldn’t have otherwise. On the other hand, if you turned down this project and remained at home doing nothing, you will have learned a whole bunch of nothing.

In the end, humility and risk work together in business. Laughing at the people who ask for your help because they need your skills earn you nothing but bad karma, doesn’t it? However, when you are humble and generous with your knowledge and skills, you will definitely be appreciated (financially, morally, emotionally, etc…) if not by the people you helped, then by karma itself.

Originally posted on October 26, 2020 @ 8:03 am

Schools nowadays are full of anti-bullying campaigns and trying to teach kids to be nice to one another. While this may work sometimes, it fails miserably most of the time.

But why does it fail?

To answer this question, we should first try to understand the bully. In general, a bully is usually a person who is trying to hide and/or externalize personal perceived defects (such as issues at home or learning difficulties) by intimidating those around him, through threat of violence, to become more like him and less successful.

Schools nowadays teach students to see and understand the bully in this way: as a weak person trying to express himself in the only way he knows. However, when the victims do understand this ans try to approach it in the non-violent way by somehow bringing up this weakness to the bully, they end up getting beat up even worse. In such a case, even if the bully had never intended to actually use violence, he would be even more tempted to do so because his weakness is now threatened to be uncovered.

While it is important to teach bullying victims how to understand the bully, they should also be taught how to be tough. They need to be taught how to protect themselves if the need arises, and they also need to learn how to avoid putting themselves in vulnerable situations.

However, as things are now with schools trying to avoid violence, even in self defense, all they are doing is empowering the bully who may or may not be getting punished by the “authority” and weakening the victim who is forbidden from learning how to protect himself.

This is why we should not only teach our students restraint, but also self defense. Otherwise, they will grow up to be weak and broken adults. And we are seeing more and more of this in the new generation of young adults…

Originally posted on October 25, 2020 @ 8:49 am