1. Eat solid breakfast.
2. Eat more, small meals.
3. Avoid eating on the run.
4. Don’t eat before going sleep.
5. Drink mineral water instead of beverages.
6. Eat a lot of fruit and veggies.
7. Take fruit to your work.
8. Replace snacks with nuts and almonds.
9. It is much healthier to eat salads first, then main course.
10. Give up coffee.
11. Quit smoking.
12. Reduce drinking alcohol.
13. Don’t eat fast-foods.
14. Cut out sugar.
15. Grow your own food.
16. Buy in bulk.
17. Buy produce in season.
18. Remember to check best-before period.
19. Buy food from local farmers.
20. Avoid refined food.
21. Don’t shop when you are hungry.
22. Go shopping with a list.
23. Eat more at home.
24. Learn to cook.
25. Cook in bulk.
26. Brown bag your lunch.
27. Find your favorite, simple recipes.
28. Make use of your freezer.
29. Replace white rice with brown.
30. Don’t use microwave.
31. Reduce eating out.
32. Top, exquisite restaurant is opposite to your own kitchen: you wait very long, drink wine from crystal glass, get small dish you can’t name and pay a lot of money.
33. Sleep more. You don’t eat or spend money then.

photo credit: PoppyW

Recently, my bank has increased interest rate on saving accounts to 5,5%.

This rate is quite attractive for me. I’m not able to keep all my money on stocks, especially, when there are all the time conversations about recession and all investments have increased level of risk.

I took a more detailed look into my saving account’s details. Account opening and handling is free. I can deposit how much I want. No minimum limit. I can withdraw at any time, but only once per month free and I don’t lose earnings. Each next time costs 5zl (2,16zl is about 1$). As I already have a personal account in my bank, I can open up to four saving accounts free of charge. Transfers from my personal account to saving accounts are also free of charge.

Of course, I opened four saving accounts. Why do I need four? Is one account not enough?

In my situation, I need flexibility. Very often I stay away from the stock market, waiting for promising investments. Then I’ll keep all my money on saving account. There is no reason why not to let my money work for me. But when I see a good opportunity on stock marker, I have to withdraw my money. I can do this only one time per month, free of charge, from one account. Therefore, having four saving accounts give me possibility to make such transaction four times per month.

I am able to withdraw all my money from one account free of charge, invest part of it on stock market, and put the rest on the second account. I will be able to withdraw them from the second account free of charge as well. I can do similar with third and fourth. Four times per month is usually enough and this way I don’t pay any fees to my bank.

photo credit: vnysia

I strongly advise you to review your bank offer. It is possible you will find an interesting product, service or solution that will perfectly fit into your personal finances. I have to honestly admit, that for a long time I wasn’t up to date with my bank’s offer. Discovering such possibility with saving accounts, as well as attractive interest rate on it, positively surprised me.

Today is a Blogger Appreciation Day. Unofficial, declared by Darren Rowse from Problogger.

I like this idea very much, so I decided to join and appreciate my favorite bloggers by posting links to their blogs. Here we go:

StevePavlina.com
Zen Habits
Get Rich Slowly
The Simple Dollar
Problogger
John Chow dot Com
Dosh Dosh
Copyblogger
Dumb Little Man
Quick Sprout
How to Change the World

Check them out! These blogs are full of great and valuable content.

To supplement my last post about moving averages I will show you some examples how they are calculated. Of course, today we have computers and software dedicated to chart analysis, so we don’t have to do it by ourselves. However I think that looking into examples can help to understand how moving averages work.

SMA

Simple Moving Average is very easy to calculate. It shows the mean value from selected period. Let’s take an example of 5-day SMA. Assume that we calculate SMA for the 5th Day, and above days are previous. We have following closing prices for our stock:

1st Day – 100$
2nd Day – 102$
3rd Day – 105$
4th Day – 104$
5th Day – 104$

We sum up all values: 100$ + 102$ + 105$ + 104$ + 104$ = 515$.
We divide the result by number of data points (days): 515$ / 5 = 103$. This is value of 5-day SMA for the 1st Day.

When we have another day of quotations and we want to calculate 5-day SMA for it, we remove last day from previous SMA and add the closing price from the latest day. For example on 6th Day our stocks closes at 110$. We take following data into calculations:

2nd Day – 102$
3rd Day – 105$
4th Day – 104$
5th Day – 104$
6th Day – 110$

SMA for 6th day is: (102$ + 105$ + 104$ +104$ + 110$) / 5 = 105$

To get a nice diagram, you connect all calculated values of SMA for following days.

EMA

Exponential Moving Average is more complicated to calculate. It gives more importance to the latest data; therefore it reacts faster to all price movements. Again, to show simple example, we will calculate 5-day EMA.

1st Day – 100$
2nd Day – 102$
3rd Day – 105$
4th Day – 104$
5th Day – 104$

Uff…That was pretty tough. Fortunately, we have computers for this work. To get the nice diagram of EMA we have to proceed similar like with SMA, we connect calculated values for following days. I hope, you don’t mind that I didn’t put here calculations for one more day.

Below you have both moving averages on one chart. As you can see, EMA is closer to the price and reacts faster for price movements.

(S&P500; 5-day SMA - red, 5-day EMA - green)