Browsing Category: "Economic Times"
Bad Economic Times Affect our Children
“What did you get for Christmas?” This is one of the first questions that a child asks his friends when they return to school after the holidays. With this year’s economy forcing parents to cut back, experts believe it is a good time to teach children about some of life’s challenges.
Children’s psychologists agree that it is more important to be together during the holidays than to simply buy gifts because the love children feel from the attention you give them will last longer than any present. And when we teach our children the value of giving to others, it gives the holidays new meaning.
Many parents are also going to have to make some difficult decisions about the cost of childcare because they simply cannot afford it anymore. To qualify for childcare assistance through the Department of Social Services, a person must be working.
Over 10 million Americans are out of work and another 6.7 million Americans are working part-time. More than 7 million Americans are working part-time. As parents lose employment, as their hours are cutback, they are taking their children out of organized child care and making due with whatever affordable situation they can find. One problem: families with no resources for childcare are turning to young family members to care of their younger siblings.
Families rely on childcare when they are at work, but it is also a great social outlet for children who look forward to it every day. But today, more and more families are being forced to drop out of childcare, due to the economy. This trend signals difficult times for families.
According to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Parent Referral Agencies, day care costs nationwide can run from $3,380 to $10,787 a year for just one preschool-age child.
Some other interesting statistics on the current economy and its impact on children include:
Apx.11 million children under age 5 spend a portion of their day, every week, in the care of someone other than Mom.
-A child of a working mom spends about 36 hours a week in childcare.
With the current economic crisis, quality child care is even more important to the healthy development of each child. For many low income families, child care is the only place that children receive a nutritious meal and snack, given that food is often one of the first places parents sacrifice.
Parents must unders that when it comes to childcare, each state has a star rating system. The more stars required, the higher educated childcare employees must be in order to meet the standards.
One way to cut costs without sacrificing is to seek lower cost, in-home childcare. And remember that once a child hits school age the working parent would regain that income.
Maybe the growing economic stress will demand that businesses find ways to be more family friendly and find ways to work parents who have young children.
Iipm Guest Lecture By Mr. T K Arun – Editor, Delhi Edition Of The Economic Times
Name of the speaker: Mr. T K Arun – Editor, Delhi Edition of The Economic Times,
Dr. Amir Ullah Khan – Director, India Development Foundation,
Prof. K K Srivastav – Head, Faculty of Business Economics, IIPM
Topic: Is the Indian Economy overstated?
IIPM, New Delhi in association with the IDBI Bank, hosted a seminar for B-School students to find solutions to the question “Is the Indian Economy overstated?” The seminar was addressed by an elite panel consisting of Mr. T K Arun (Editor, Delhi Edition of The Economic Times), Dr. Amir Ullah Khan (Director, India Development Foundation) and Prof. K K Srivastav (Head, Faculty of Business Economics, IIPM).
Offering the key note address, Mr. Arun highlighted the apathy faced by the rural economy and the rural mass against the privileges offered to the urban populace. In true journalistic tone, he said, “Over the years, various government agencies and bureaucratic systems have regularly contributed in systematically ruining the rural economy.” He also shared with the audience how in the past, religious tolerance for minority groups was ingrained in the fabrics of society, which unfortunately has not been the case currently. He emphasized the need to educate the rural mass and make them financially independent by making micro-finance easily available to them.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Amir Ullah Khan commented, “It is really disturbing to see that till today, even after 6 decades of independence, the percentage of college going youngsters who actually finish college is very low. Count with it the huge gender bias that has mushroomed all over the country – be it in education or at the workplace – this will not help in the multi-dimensional growth that we are looking forward for India in the 21st century.” He also exposed the charade behind inflation much to the delight of the audiences. “Much needs to be done for the education sector if India has to grow strongly,” he added passionately.
Convening the entire session, Mr. K K Srivastav enlightened the audience with interesting economic facts and figures.
IIPM truly cares for the intellectual net worth of its students and this exercise was another striking example in this regard. Through this seminar, IIPM reemphasized its academic supremacy in the field of management and economics; as such events have become a regular affair at the institute. To make this seminar more wide based, their were students from other institutes as well, which included the FORE School of Management, MDI, Gurgaon, amongst others.
Consider using these 5 E-valuation factors to avoid a financial rip tide: learn to thrive, not just survive, in these trying economic times
These are frustrating economic times. Stress and anxiety is high. We all want to know what is happening out there in our economy and business landscape.
Is the de-leveraging over or is there more downside to come? What is causing all this turmoil to occur? How do we survive?
Let me suggest two key themes to consider in addressing these questions.
1) Obtain more financial education to understand; increase your financial literacy to comprehend; and search for alternative strategies to create wealth. Steve Forbes says “financial education and the resulting empowerment is the key to recovery from this ongoing financial crisis.”
2) Use the 5 E’s that are presented below as an evaluation framework to understand the scope, magnitude and drivers of this change. Stay calm and position yourself to thrive not just survive. Here is an example of a situation that frequency occurs in the summer time around popular beach destinations. Rip tides occur and some one not from the area drowns. Many tourists are panicked, full of stress and anxiety, and stay out of the water for fear of what might happen to them … all they want to do is survive. Yet the locals understand what is happening and how to work their way out of a rip tide and not just survive but thrive and have a great day at the beach.
Now, let me describe the 5 E’s of this evaluation framework. A few years ago I became aware of this framework as I was increasing my financial literacy and it helps me stay calm, understand the drivers of the change, and open my eyes to consider alternative wealth creating strategies as conventional wisdom is not working.
1 – Energy is no longer cheap. We have reached point of peak oil … meaning easy stuff to find and drill has occurred. While more oil is being found, it will be very expensive to explore, drill, pump, and distribute the oil to customers. So more and more of our budget will be used to pay for energy hence on of the interests in alternative energy sources.
2 – from west to East … there is a transfer of wealth and power underway to the Asia Pacific region, especially China. The USA is currently the world’s largest economy however it is estimated that China will be the world’s largest economy by the middle of this decade. A lot of churn and turmoil is associated with this change.
3 – the (USA) Empire is peaking out. The cost of having so many troops in so many parts of the globe and the cost of increasing the size and services of the government at home in the United States, is a key part of causing the country to go broke.
4 – the Experiment with paper money is running its course. This is known as fiat currency where your money is not backed by anything tangible like gold. When the central bank has the ability to increase money supply by printing more money, you get inflation and all the horrors associated with this activity. You might not know this but the current federal reserve system is the USA’s fourth attempt at a central bank and each of the previous attempts did not end nicely … most likely neither will the current experiment with this central banking system.
5 - the Economic cycle of the past 25-30 years, based on easy to obtain money through loans at a low cost (ie low interest rates) is over. The growth, expansion, and consumer society that we now say is the basis for our economic system is over. Something new will take its place.
By understanding that you can swim at a calm pace, in a diagonal from the current that is pulling you out to the open sea and knowing that you soon will be out of the rip tide, you will be able to go on and have a great day at the beach … you will have learned to thrive not just survive.
It is the same type of situation with our financial crisis. Obtain education in order to understand what is happening in the context of this E-valuation framework.
Stay calm knowing that conventional wisdom, the stuff we learned and grew up doing all of our life, is not working anymore. So find and pursue alternative wealth creating strategies to get out of the financial rip tide; think out of the box; plug-in and get on with our economic lives.
As an example of alternative wealth creating strategies … consider investments in non dollar-denominated assets … perhaps emerging markets … perhaps energy assets that are inherently useful like oil rigs, hydropower, or methanol plants … perhaps precious metals, water rights, oil, natural gas, potash mines, or gold mines … things hard to build, difficult to replace, and costly to substitute … definitely not financial stocks, definitely not retail stocks, definitely not commercial property.
In addition, a good book to read would be “The Bull Hunter” by Dan Denning.
I will continue to build upon “the 5 E’s” framework and introduce alternative wealth creating strategies to consider like emerging markets, oil rigs, precious metals and potash mines, in future articles and updates at my blog, over the next few weeks (see link below).
