All these talk about Meralco and the high cost of electricity has made me wonder what the average Filipino household’s power bill looks like.

To make the comparison fair, why don’t we divide our electricity bill with the number of persons living in the house, including babies. I think the little darlings consume a bigger amount of electricity compared with the average person (need for airconditioning etc.)

For April, I paid P805.88 per person.

How does that compare with yours?
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Quote for the day:

People think they can invest P20,000 and grow that to a million if they are smart enough. That’s an urban legend. Truth is, you need money to attract money. Capital formation is very important.

– Augustus J.V. Ferreria, senior executive vide-president of Generali Pilipinas, in a MoneyMakeover session May 5, 2008.

The idea of investing is sexy. We are all in a hurry to do it. The more technical and highfaluting, the better. Stocks, bonds, forex, real estate – bring them on!

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With ten short days to go before Landbank of the Philippines ends the offering period for its long-term negotiable certificates of deposit, confused overseas Filipino workers are still at a loss on how to access the offering.

At the heart of the problem are Landbank’s feeble presence overseas and a ticklish issue on documentary requirements. You will find many examples of those concerns from MoneySmart readers in my previous posts on the LTNCDs here and here.

Joey Sale, a senior analyst at Landbank, said the bank has held meetings on these issues Monday afternoon, conscious of the difficulties the OFWs are facing.

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How do you prepare yourself for a loved one’s death?

Not exactly a peachy thought on a MoneySmart Monday, I know. But as they say, there’s no going around death and taxes. And while it may be easy to prepare for the loss of a loved one financially, the emotional part is something else again. Can you attache a peso sign to that?

This story from MoneySense about a widow’s journey from tragedy to triumph is worth the few minutes it will take to go through it from start to finish.
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Investment professional Alijeffty Gonzales has a simple idea for Filipinos working overseas who want, at the very least, to protect their capital and still get their feet wet in the equities market at the same time.

In his blog post here, he says any OFW can do this by putting at least P13,699 in Landbank’s long-term negotiable certificate of deposit and investing P6,301 for any equities fund of his choice and voila – you have an equity-linked note or ELN. Sounds highfaluting, eh?

An ELN basically combines a zero-coupon note with an instrument that invests in more volatile (exciting) securities like stocks. As the zero-coupon returns 100% of the face value at maturity, any residual value of the stock portfolio becomes “gravy” at the concurrent reckoning date.

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