All I Can Handle

When I first heard about Grammarly, I was a bit skeptical about its usefulness. I thought that the spelling and grammar checker equipped with word processors was already enough. However, when I tried using Grammarly, I immediately realized how much more powerful Grammarly is than the regular spelling and grammar checker. But aside from being a spelling and grammar checker, Grammarly can also be an incredible tool for bloggers and college professors to check for plagiarism. Bloggers can use Grammarly to find out if someone copied their article and college professors can check if an essay is indeed original. The vocabulary enhancement feature of Grammarly is also a must-have for every blogger out there. You know how you sometimes use the same word over and over again? Well, Grammarly can help you with that, it will provide you with an array of alternative words to use whenever it detects an overused word. Grammarly, primarily, though is a very powerful proofreader and in my ex

“What if … what if heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or …” Mam’s pancakes with Mars Bar sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, “Sleep tight don’t let the bedbugs bite" I was reading a novel, and that part of the novel reminded me how peculiar and vague our idea of "heaven" is. For most people, heaven is a place where they see dead relatives who behaved well during their time on Earth. For others, it is a place where you don't have to worry about food or water or anything else, and you just live forever. The more that I think about the heaven that religion paints for us, the more skeptical I become. Is living forever without any conflicts whatsoever truly heaven? What then becomes our purpose in heaven after becoming a spirit being and not having to worry about earthly wants and needs? I read an article which said that heaven is what Earth

I'm not sure how it all started or if it is indeed just a recent development, but I keep on hearing people say thanks God when they should be saying thank God (without the s). Here are some examples: Thanks God the plane landed safely Thanks God it stopped raining In English TV programs, I always hear this as 'thank God', without the 's' in thanks. I'm not sure, but I think people are confusing 'thanks, God' and 'thank God'. The former is a declarative statement wherein you are thanking God for something. This is similar to when you say thanks to your friend or your coworker. The latter is an imperative sentence wherein you are asking someone (sometimes yourself) to thank God for something. Most often, it is a treated as a phrase. I'm not completely sure about the grammatical rule behind it, but this is the way I understand it. Thanks, Abigail! CORRECT Thanks for the food. CORRECT Thank God you came. CORRECT Thank heavens the ra

I know that a lot of us want to donate to charities but don't have the money to do so. Well, there is a way for you to donate without spending anything; and you won't just be donating for someone's education, house, or food, you'll be donating for someone's LIFE. I started donating whole blood back in college in 2005. The Red Cross people went to our school and tried to encourage us to donate blood. I remember them saying that donating blood will make you look 20 years younger, and we were all laughing because we weren't even 20 years old back then. I regularly donated whole blood until I left Zamboanga City. In Metro Manila, I found the location of the nearest Red Cross blood center to be inaccessible, so I only donated a few times when GMA 7 held mass blood donations in a mall in Quezon City. A few weeks ago, I learned from Facebook, that there is a new Red Cross blood center along EDSA Boni near where I currently live. One Saturday, I decided to visit t

Lack of proper perspective can often lead people to overspend. I often hear people say that they feel "deprived" whenever they don't buy something. Just a few days ago, I heard a co-worker say that she is finding it so hard to save money and that she feels so "deprived" whenever she doesn't go on her weekend shopping sprees. Another co-worker told me that whenever you wanted to buy something, you should just do it and that you should never "deprive" yourself of anything. Does that sound familiar to you? I'm sure it does because chances are you have heard the same thing from other people already. But do you see what is wrong with all these statements? Here are people who have good jobs, have a home, can eat three times a day and snack in between, and yet can feel "deprived" if they forego certain luxuries in life! This is an extreme case of people lacking in proper perspective! These are people who think that simply not going out

It was an afternoon filled with gaiety, food, and goodwill to men.  I arrived at the Manila Polo Club for the Sinag awarding ceremony at exactly 11:30 AM. I initially wanted to take mass transportation (just to show that I practice what I preach) but was thankful that I didn't once I arrived at the venue and realized what a long walk it would've been from the gate of the Manila Polo Club. Sinag is  Sun Life's Financial Literacy Digital Journalism Awards. It is part of Sun Life's advocacy to make every Filipino financially literate.  I'm happy that I got to meet big names in the personal finance industry like Randell Tiongson and Fiitz Villafuerte  (I was actually starstruck). I also met fellow personal finance bloggers like Lianne Martha Laroya of thewiseliving.com . Most of them are already RFPs (Registered Financial Planner) and even have their own books. I think I was the only one with a day job. The first runner-up was Noem Lardizabal-Dado (

I have always struggled to marry the concepts that "Rich Dad" Robert Kiyosaki and "Money Lady" Suze Orman teach. I listen to both financial gurus, and both teach conflicting lessons about money. Robert Kiyosaki does not like living below your means while Suze Orman does. If you have read my other articles on personal finance , you'll know that I am big on living below your means and frugality. So let's look at why Robert Kiyosaki doesn't like frugality. Wealth is abundant and is limitless; therefore frugality doesn't make sense. This school of thought can be found in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. If you think about it, wealth is infinite and, in fact, can be created by anyone who wishes to do so. Robert Kiyosaki tells us to EXPAND our means instead of to live below our means. Another reason Robert Kiyosaki does not like frugality is because it can drive you to stagnation. If you live below your means, you might find yourself too c

A friend of mine once asked me how one should deal with spending for leisure. For this person, it is hard to say no to eat outs, night outs, parties, and out of town trips. Frugality is the efficient management of wealth, spending primarily on NEEDS; so this begs the question: is spending on wants an inefficient way of spending? Not necessarily. This is where knowing how to budget and control spending becomes very important. Before we even talk about budgeting, let us start with this: Happiness is Subjective . Your happiness is different from someone else's happiness. When we buy something or travel somewhere because we saw how happy people were who have bought that same thing or have gone to that same place, what we actually want is to be happy as those people and not the thing that they purchased or to go to the place that they went to. When you emulate the things that your friends do that make them happy, you are forgetting that what makes them happy will not necessarily

photo source: unknown According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, 2014 inflation was at 4.1% . Theoretically, something that cost 1 peso at the beginning of 2014 is now worth around 1 peso and 4 centavos.  If you are saving money with  BDO , Chinabank , or  BPI , you are currently just earning 0.25% interest per year on your savings and let's not forget that the interest earned is still being taxed at 20%. This means that the money you parked in a savings account actually depreciated, losing about 4% of its value just this year. Time deposits are just a bit better but nowhere close to being able to combat inflation. Beating inflation is one of the reasons why people invest. Were it not for inflation, we'd all probably be content with just saving money. Because of inflation, savers become losers. But what if you weren't able to beat inflation? Should you feel bad if your investments failed to beat inflation?  This depends on your investment goal. If you are in