Download Firefox and become instantly cooler...

Don't um and ah. Just do it. Here's the link. If you're someone who needs a reason...I spend more time online than you and know what I'm talking about.

Install it and then we can get busy making your online experience full of sunbeams and happiness.

Custom Extensions

This is why you're going to love Firefox (or FF...if there's some geek in IT you need to impress); the ability to to make your browser do cool things for you.

There are currently...well, a lot of extensions for Firefox, but I've selected a few of the one's that I think you'll find most useful, so let's get cracking.

Xmarks - this synchronises your bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers. If you've got a work computer and a home computer and want your browser setup to be the same on both - get this installed. It also does a bunch of other stuff that I don't really care about...but just having this functionality is enough to make your life instantly better.

FaceMod - ever yearned for the ability to make known your negative feelings about something someone posted on Facebook? Now you can, by installing this extension. When you do, you'll see a new icon appear in your list of options and you'll be free to punish nonsense status updates from your friends:

Three things you need to know about this:

1. Only people who also have the extension installed will be able to see that you dislike something. It doesn't somehow magically alter Facebook's original interface - it's just some clever programming. It also means that if none of your friends have it - your displays of displeasure will be nothing more than a personal joke echoing through the emptiness of cyberspace. If you're my friend on FB though - I promise to dislike at least 83% of what you say.
   
   
2. This extension is classed as experimental - meaning it's technically a prototype and hasn't been fully tested. It has already been downloaded 150,000 times though, so make up your own mind.
3. It will add some more ads the right side interface of FB. Not really an issue, but just a heads up.

Morning Coffee - this one's great. If you check a number of sites daily / regularly and find yourself going through the same routine of opening new tabs and then finding your saved bookmarks - install this add-on.

It sits as an icon next to the address bar and once you have set it up, it automatically loads all the sites that you want to open into separate tabs.

But the best part is that you can customise different days of the week. If your browsing habits are different on Thursdays and weekends, for example - just add a different set of sites in the configuration panel. Then when you hit the coffee cup icon on that day, the correct set of sites will open up for you. Knock out!

Ad Blocker - no explanation needed really. Stops ads appearing on websites. In general, I have no issue with ads - people need to make a living...but certain sites load so many ads that they become slow to the point of unusable. Installing this speeds up performance.

Tab Mix Plus - gives you a metric ton of control over how your tabs behave. Highlights include:

- Undoing closed tabs
- Recovering tabs if your browser crashes
- Duplicating tabs
- Highlighting unread tabs (this is worth the install alone)

Very useful, if like me, you browse with mutliple tabs open (current count: 14)

Honourable Mentions

Download Status Bar - manages your downloads without the download window getting in the way of your browsing. Handy little add on to keep things flowing.

Greasemonkey - this is only if you're feeling a little more adventurous and I almost left it out as installing this might might damage your non-geek cred.

Greasemonkey is an extension that lets you load other scripts that control the way your browser works. For example - want a script that completely changes the Gmail interface; or lets you do multiple friend accepts in Facebook; or changes the way information is presented in Amazon?

You can install this extension and then head over to userscripts.org where they have thousands of scripts that change anything and everything to do with your browsing experience.

So that's it. Next time I'll show you how to put in search short-cuts into the the browser - which, for example, makes looking things up in Wikipedia a snap. And it's not the way you'd probably think to do it either.

Happy browsing.

Haven't installed Firefox yet? Stop being a bed-wetter and download it now.

• Hong Kong's 40 wealthiest tycoons are worth a combined US$135 billion. A 65% increase on last year.
• We're still in front of the mainland's top 40 who are worth US$107 billion
• Li Ka Shing leads the way with 15% of the combined total
• The richest 10% control 40% of Hong Kong's wealth

Full article here (paywall - subscription required).

If you love documentaries and free things then this site is for you. It's exactly what it says - a site where you can watch or download free documentaries - and their collection is pretty extensive.

(If you've never watched any Adam Curtis then you're in for a treat. - they have both The Power of Nightmares and The Century of Self.)

The picture quality varies - but then again did we mention they're free?

http://freedocumentaries.org/

But, according to two research papers by NYU and Yale, consumers actually ended up consuming more calories after the changes were made. So much for transparency. I can think of a number of reasons why this might fail, but two spring to mind:

1. If you're ordering a super-sized anything at a fast food restaurant, worring about calories probably ain't at the top of your list of things you're worrying about.

2. I'm sure your brain is probably going - "wow, if I order the slightly larger one, my cost per calorie just fell. Score!".

Great ad. Website, less so.

You see, high income and high net worth are highly correlated - a fancy statistical term meaning that people with high incomes are more likely to be wealthy. But this is not always the case. If you drive expensive cars, live in expensive property, take lots of expensive holidays and generally live a high consumption lifestyle - what's left over at the end of the month, might not add up to a great deal.

Wealth & Weight

I've always thought the formula for wealth is very similar to the formula for losing weight: getting wealthy is about spending less than you earn and losing weight is about burning more calories than you consume. Both are simple formulas but deceptively hard to carry off consistenly and require discipline and sacrifice. (For the pedants - yes there is more to building wealth than just spending less than you earn - but not much).

Hong Kong Millionaires

Hong Kong has around 37,000 millionaires, (down 61% in this economy) or roughly 0.53% of the adult population. Given that 2.9% of households earn a monthly income of over HK$100,000, shouldn't there be more?

Which leads to the question of how wealthy should you be and are you on track to joining the ranks of the rich?

How To Calculate How Wealthy You Should Be

The smarty-pants Ph.Ds who wrote The Millionaire next door came up with a formula for determining how well you're doing on the wealth accummulation front. Using the formula:

(your age x realised annual income) / 10 - any inheritance money = your expected net worth.

Let's look at an example using the median household income in Hong Kong which is HK$18,400.

Age: 30

Annual Salary: HK$220,800 (before tax)

Investment Income: HK$17,000

Inheritance Money: HK$0

= 30 X 237,800 = 7,134,000 / 10 - 0 = HK$713,400

Now you have a basis for understanding how wealthy you should be on a relative scale. Having a US$1,000,000 is great, but if you're 50 years old with an annual income of HK$3.6M and only HK$7.75M net worth when you should be closer to HK$18M - then, in the parlance of the book, you are an underaccumulator of wealth, a UAW.

How do I stack up? I perform below average for my age and income. Bummer. It's not drastically below, but it has forced me to review certain goals and milestones and we're making changes in our life to try and close the gap. Certainly, some of it is to do with current investment values, so I'm not particularly worried at this stage. I would, however, like to prevent myself from becoming a UAW, sail past AAW (Average Accumulator of Wealth) and soar into the PAW camp - Prodigous Accumulator of Wealth.

How do you stack up?

Use the formula above to figure out where you should be and if you need some help calculating your current net worth, you can use this handy calculator.

Check them out if you're wondering how this works:

Life Inurance

Life Insurance - How Much?

As an added bonus, check out his peice on Estate Planning.

This is in stark contrast to publicly traded companies like Three (Wikipedia) and PCCW (Wikipedia) who are horrible to deal with. I hate them!

Here are 3 things the Government have done to inspire these warm, fuzzy feelings.

Friendly Service

I have been applying for a work visa for an employee and the officer in charge of the case file was super. Very friendly; a pleasure to deal with on the phone and incredibly helpful at guiding us through the application process. We didn't have a huge amount of contact with her, but when we did, it was great.

Responsive

In my effort to reduce the amount of paper I receive, I thought I'd be a good citizen and sign up for eTax. This was thwarted by a technical error on their side (they didn't support my browser version)*.

I promptly emailed them, it was a Saturday, included a telephone number and recevied a call on Monday afternoon from their tech team apologising that I couldn't sign up and that my browser version would be supported in November. Brilliant!

Proactive

This is my favourite example. Last year I managed to pay my tax twice by mistake. I had set up a forward dated transaction in my online banking but had forgotten I had done this. I had another reminder set elsewhere to pay the tax bill and logged on and manually paid (if you were wondering how one does that).

When I realised my mistake about a week later, I gave the tax department a call. The voice at the other end informed me that they had spotted the mistake and had already issued a cheque for the excess and I should expect to receive it in the next day or two - which I did. Stunningly good!

I mean, it took Ikea 6 seconds to take my money and 6 weeks to refund it. A whole lot slower than our Government. I also imagine the same call to HR Revenue & Customs in the UK. I'm sure they would have been laughing down the phone for a week.

I'm sure that there are people who have had terrible experiences. So it goes, and I hope that you provide constructive feedback.

I have no motive writing this except that when you receive great service from any organisation...well, credit where credit is due. Great service is hard to get right and so far my experiences have been excellent. Long may it continue.

*Browser version was Firefox 3.5.3. They're currently only supporting version 3.1. From a technical standpoint there is no reason why this shouldn't be supported. I suspect it's a case of over-zealous standards enforcement. I was not going to try and argue it and was just pleased to see that it was on their radar to fix. Who needs to be in a rush to sign up to pay tax anyway?

This is an important first step in any personal financial plan - knowing how and where you're spending your money - but these options are generally closed to us here, making that initial leap into personal money management a mess of excel spreadsheets, data entry and an iron will to get through it all. Let's face it - who wants to spend a lot of their precious free time categorizing their spending?

The alternative is to use desktop software - which I currently do (Quicken 2006:Mac) - but even this is tedious as it still requires entering all your transactions in order to build up a picture of your expenses.  At the very least the banks should be offering the ability to download monthly statements in a format that is easily importable into any one of these softwares. BANKS: ARE YOU LISTENING?

They hold so much data about us that could be useful if it were given back, but as far as I can tell is used to, inexplicably, send me free Hello Kitty tissue box covers if I would only be so kind as to lend them HK$1,000,000 which could sit in a bank account earning 0% interest. Thanks for the help!

You Want To Do What?

What brought all this on was my attempt to start to automate more of my cash flow so that money ends up in the right place at the right time without me having to login and manually move the money. Some things are already doable: automatic withdrawls into investment accounts; 100% of credit card bill paid off every month from the right account and various text/email alerts to keep an eye on certain things. But...

Say, I want to set up an automatic transfer from my current account to my savings account each month? Cannot (this is with HSBC). Seems I would have to go into a branch, fill out some form and then wait as they send it on some round trip to be processed by some operations centre in India six weeks later. FAIL! And that's just the simple stuff that they haven't done.

Streamlining Your Personal Finances

I've now managed to get the weekly time spent tracking this stuff down to about 30 minutes - which is about 25 minutes longer than I'd like but in the grand scheme of things is not unmanageable nor a huge burden for me. However, it's taken quite some time to get this discipline in place and the initial set up was also tedious.

What I'd like to see are better tools to help more people take control over their personal finances if and when they decide to do that. Over the next few weeks I'll be writing a series of posts covering how to automate as much of your finances as is possible in Hong Kong and with an HSBC account, as well as provide some reviews on various online tools that are available to us here, but may not be widely known.

In the meantime, if you've got any tips on how you track your expenses or look after your money, drop a note in the comments.

This is good advice. Pick up any personal finance book and they'll all tell you the same thing and quote any number of studies that basically say: 75-80% of actively managed funds will underperform the market over a longer period of time - in large part due to their fees. With a 30+ year investing horizon, even a 1% difference in performance can translate into huge differences in the final value of your savings.

So if you're just getting started in thinking about your long term savings - you should consider low-fee index funds as part of your strategy or if you're currently ploughing money into high-fee mutual funds, you might consider redirecting it and lowering your long term expenses.

I'll write a longer post about this in the future.

Disclaimer: I'm not qualified to give anyone investment advice. This is just my personal opinion and outlook. You should always do your own research.