In my post: What can Games teach us about money Part 1 , I introduced some basic elements about money skills and how we can learn these skills from games such as Monopoly and Farmville. This post is a continuation of the same topic and is approached by digging deeper into other games such as World of Warcraft which of – course – is rich of many financial definitions.
What’s the economy inside games such as World of WarCraft (WoW) like. The virtual currencies that they use inside these games is the attention of many gold (a virtual currency term) hunters. Please read my old post Trading Virtual Money for an in-depth coverage of the opportunities of Game currencies. The gaming industry (including game currencies) is milking real money- with huge quantities. Many economists studied the economical signals such as the GDP of these games. In my other posts I wrote about how these games can teach you about money. Its not just that but such skill or craft can be lent to those who want to have virtual money easily (players). I have seen many financial tools being used in MMORPG games such as World of Warcraft which helps you to manage many business aspects inside the game. In wow there is an auction house , trades and crafts which generate goods-that can be sold and you have to deal with expenses and incomes during play time. All these aspects are very similar to real business life. Many skilful players are selling their expertise outside the game in the internet by offering guides on how to make virtual money . The trade tools (addons) being made by players who understand wow money system well are getting popular and a must for any player who wants to profit from the virtual market. For example, there are charts in particular addons, these addons resembles technical analysis charts that are used in IRL (in real world) investing by sophisticated investors. In the case wow, you need these tools to understand the market (auction house). The auction house is very similar to popular auctions in real world and how they operate such as eBay. Like eBay, understanding the market and utilizing the necessary tools is vital in obtaining results.
What does this topic has to do with my blog niche “entrepreneurial tools” you may ask . It does a lot by learning how to understand the multitude of business operations that are being operated in the wow economy , you can learn a lot of concepts that you can apply in real life. You can learn about item pricing and by using some tools you can spot under, fair or over priced goods. You can also learn about bidding and item listing expiry. You can also learn negotiation with other players when they post their items in the trade channel ( a chatting channel). You also learn that you can make money not just by specializing in a trade, but by becoming a trader and profiting from prices arbitrage ( a very important concept in economy). You will also learn the best times to list items and when not to by understanding the market trends and this is also a very important lesson for real world trading. You can also exercise your entrepreneurship skills in wow by being creative in offering new services or unique items for other players. There are many players who learnt from wow lessons and started to play in the real economy. Like Rich dad said : playing (money) games benefits you in real money, which I totally agree with.Being good at it gives you the inspiration to ask your self , if I’m good at virtual money why not apply my skills in real world. It can not be as simple as that but it could be a good start.
Tags: Accounting, Auction House, Ebay, Economy, Finance, Gold, make money online, MMORPG, Virtual Money, world of warcraft, WoW
I would like to share with you a very nice website that hosts a variety of free software- all free no trial (according to the website owners). The website is called “I Love free software” . In this post I’m going to dig into one category- which is related to my blog niche (entrepreneurial tools). The category is financial tools: such as accounting (my major 
), budget, money manager, personal finance software.The tools/software work on either your computer or online- software as a service (SAAS). There are also investment tools: such as stock charts, portfolio manager & price watcher. Please click on the image to go to the portal. Enjoy 
Tags: accounting software, Budget software, Entrepreneurial resources, Finance, free software, money, money management, online entrepreneur tools, personal finance, productivity tools, stock chart, stock portfolio
Posted by osama on Mar 27, 2010 in
Finance,
Guest Post Global Financial Crisis, Global Economic Crisis, Credit Crunch, Credit Crisis, Mortgage Crisis etc, no matter how names are different, it seems that crisis is part of the economic reality. When taking a look on the economic history around the world we will find many crises happened in several places during a different period of times. Even the most powerful economic countries, like US, UK and EU countries, could not avoid a big crunch. Take for example the US economic history, during the past one hundred years, the United States of America had suffered from many economic crises, some of those crises were so bad up to a point of the collapse of the whole country’s economy, and others had an impact on some sectors only.
Let’s take some interesting examples of the main crisis that happened in the US before 2007 which related in someway to the recent financial crisis:
1- The Great Depression (1929): It was granddaddy, longest and most extensive crisis in the US history. Many sectors suffered during this crisis, mostly the stock market. Experts have not agreed on the exact reasoning behind it; there are differences in analysts’ view. One of the strongest views emphasized that the crisis started as normal; however, Federal Reserve policies contracted the money supply which caused the situation to be exacerbated. The idea of Fannie and Freddie started after this depression, which has a strong impact on the 2007 crisis.
2- The Dot-com Bubble “I.T Bubble” (2001-2002): At that period of time, many people were attracted to the technology companies because of the great improvement and accomplishment they achieved year after year, especially when Google came on the scene in 1999-2000 and achieved fast and great technology improvements and gained huge profits. As a result, people tend to buy companies’ stocks that have dot-com at the end of its name, as believing of the technology strong future. Later on, it is reality that markets correct prices sooner or later, and the dot-com bubble burst to cause an open fall in the stock market especially in the technology stocks. The related issue of this crisis to the 2007 crisis is that Federal Reserve had reduced the interest rate as a helpful way to stop more loss, which attracted many big investors to invest their money in the US market after that year.
3- Sub-prime Crisis “Mortgage Crisis” (2007): After termination The Dot-Com Bubble and making a substantial improvement in US market, and because of the decrease in interest rate many countries, like China and the oil-exporting countries in the Middle-East, invested their money in the US market and banks. As a result, US banks got a large amount of liquidity from leading depositors who were expecting fair value from the US market. Later on, and as a result of more drop in the interest rate in 2003, a new phenomenon appeared on the scene when banks found it a brilliant opportunity for investing that huge amount of money by giving sub-prime mortgages to borrowers. Banks thought it was a less risky option with high return. Unfortunately, banks were unconcerned about the quality of the customers because most of them do not meet standard criteria for acceptable credit quality, such as credit history, repayments ability or good income.
Later, when banks found out that they hold mortgages more than liquid money they started to move in securitization order by classifying these mortgages to three levels, AAA, BBB, CCC, and sell them as assets to mortgage companies, like Fannie and Freddie, who own almost 90% of the US’s secondary mortgages. Mortgage companies started to sell these assets in the market as securities, but as a safe side they covered them in the large insurance companies, like AIG. Because of the government-sponsored enterprise, like Fannie and Freddie, sub-prime mortgages grew from $173 billion in 2001 to reach $665 billion in 2005 which indicates that the mortgage bubble is going to explode one day. At that moment two issues should be considered, in one hand, banks were still giving more easy mortgages-loans which cause houses price to continue rising. In the other hand, sub-prime borrower credit scores also raised causing many borrowers to experience difficulties in repayment, however, because houses prices were still valuable they found it an opportune time to sell their houses and pay their loans back.
This environment led many houses for sale which cause the houses prices to slow down, and then turned to negative in many states. Later on, more borrowers became unable to meet their mortgage repayments because of the raise in the interest rate from 1% in June 2003 to 5.25% in June 2006; furthermore, they discovered that their loans are much more expensive than their houses prices and it does not make any sense to continue paying their loans, they decided to stop paying their loans and return their houses to the banks, which causes banks to be shifted from easily available credit to tight credit which caused the situation to be worse, because many businesses defected for lack of liquidity, so they started to sell their assets in the stock market cheaply to obtain liquidity, and that causes an open fall in the US stock market. Also, deterioration of real estate prices and borrowers defaults in repayment caused a huge negative impact on many sectors, like mortgage companies, insurance companies, banks and holders of mortgage securities.
Finally, we should acknowledge that there is no single entity to blame in this crisis, because those problems were like dominoes each one has an impact on the other. Even experts have different views, some blamed Federal Reserve policies, others blamed the government-sponsored enterprise which encouraged banks to provide more mortgages loans, and some said it because the greed of banks to increase their profits rapidly. In this stage, it is regrettable to note that banks were acting with confidence because they had always believed in the following statement “If anything happened the government will be there to catch us, because if we go down the country goes down!”, and this is what exactly happened later.
Tags: Credit Crisis, Credit Crunch, Finance, Global Economic Crisis, Global Financial Crisis, Mortgage Crisis
Posted by Sulaiman Alhasawi on Sep 19, 2009 in
Finance,
iPhone,
iPhone apps To continue my previous article : iPhone productivity apps , I will add more tools that will help you take care of your finance .
- iSpend – Track and categorize expenses. You can also generate reports and view them inside your computer as excel files.
- QuickBooks – Manage your QuickBooks account by taking care of your customers, invoices and reports.
- Bloomberg- App that offers stock quotes, charts, analysis and latest news.
- Budget - Easily track your budget. Perfect for something like the iPhone because you won’t forget to input your expenses.
- Pricecheckah – Quickly search online for the latest low prices for anything in the market.
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Tags: Finance, iPhone, iPhone apps
Posted by Sulaiman Alhasawi on Jun 30, 2009 in
Finance,
Scheduling In my post Tweet your Spendings I mentioned how to manage your expenses and keep a good track of them. Paying bills is also part of that procedure , it requires management and planning. So I will show you a web based tool that can help you do that.
BillQ does the following :
- Adds your bill name and amount.
- Schedules the due date.
- Reminds you by email or sms.
- Reports summary as a graph , data can be exported too.
The good thing which I found about it : its a mix of a to-do and finance tool .
Tags: Finance, Scheduling
Posted by Sulaiman Alhasawi on Jun 18, 2009 in
Finance,
Twitter Every Entrepreneur should take care of his business money. The sign of a healthy business or a startup is positive cash flow.
So to manage your money well you need to take a good look at your expenses . I saw many softwares and web tools free and commercial, but there is one which attracted my attention . A Twitter related tool Tweetwhatyouspend can help you manage your costs . Its so simple and straightforward.
It actually does a good way on how to track your spendings by :
- Categorizing your expenses.
- Setting daily limits and alerts if you exceed them.
- Tracking your average daily spending.
- Showing you a graph about expenses.
- Enabling you to export your expenses statement to an Excel file.
So what does Twitter has to do with it ? You can update your expenses in your Twys’ journal through Twitter account by typing : ‘ d twys anything $cost ‘ . The letter ‘d’ in Twitter is a command which means direct message and ‘twys’ is Tweetwhatyouspend.
Good Luck and enjoy
Tags: Finance, Twitter
