In the last lesson we asked how good you really are with your money, and looked at the 5 components you need to understand to be good you’re your money. In this fifth lesson in the Smart Consumer Skills Guide for Brilliant Kids series we look at what you need to be doing to helping curb that impulse buying resulting from good and clever marketing.

Remember only you are responsible for making the decisions to buy or not. No-one else is responsible for this. So take this responsibility seriously and let’s have a little fun. Before you spend, you need to do some thinking and analysis, by asking a series of questions to help you take the emotion out of the decision and decide on a more objective basis.

 This is the second lesson in the Smart Consumer Skills Guide for Brilliant Kids series. In the last lesson we talked about a businesses job is to make money from you.

Business is not there to help and assist with daily life – that is your job – they merely provide you the products, tools and knowledge to do that. Because they want profit, this can work in your favour. So how can you use this to your advantage?

You can do this by comparing the offers by different companies for the same product or service. Make them truly compete against each other – play them off against each other, and see which is more motivated to make the sale, and in the process give you a saving. A business that is motivated to make the sale is also more likely to provide a better customer or after sales service.

If they are switched on enough to make an effort to get your custom, then they are going to try to keep it, as they will realise that the value of a loyal customer is far greater. A good impression increases the chances of future sales – “better the devil you know, than the one you don’t”.

So what are the strategies can you use to help you do this?

Online

• Google or Yahoo search – compare 2 or 3 sites and you will get a good feel for the price
• Price comparison sites – always a good place to start from. I would try a couple to get a good indication. Whilst they are good, you can still get products cheaper outside, as these sites rely on online retailers – if a business is offline, it won’t appear in their search results. And not all online retailers will appear on these sites either – only those who run affiliate programs – that is, they are willing to pay the comparison site a commission for each click or sale. This is how these sites are funded and make money.
• Ebay – you can get a whole load of items cheap here, but look make sure you check the sellers statistics – how long have they been on Ebay, how many items have they sold, what feedback have they had, what payment methods are they using – stick to paypal, as any other method requires you part with your money upfront, do they give any guarantees or do they have a returns policy. Many powersellers are effectively retailers who use the Ebay model.
• Amazon – Amazon now offer other retailers to promote their produces on the Amazon site. 

Offline

• Check the local papers for who has offers and sales – show these to other retailers to see if they will at least match the discounted price.
• Word of mouth – who do your friends and relatives recommend and why. Do they know the business owner sufficiently well to get you a discount.
• Shop at the end of the day. The end of day strategy is really good for perishables and foodstuffs – especially at market stalls where they will sell at a large discount, rather than throw away the fruit or vegetables. At supermarkets, look out for marked down items which have reached their “best by” or “display until” date. These items are still good to eat, and have not spoiled. These dates are telling us that the item will retain it’s best and freshest quality until the date displayed. The difference in quality is very small and not noticeable. The nutritional value does also is affected similarly. The price might be up to 80% less, for a small 5% drop in quality.
• Shop at end of season if the item is seasonal or coming to the end of the product range’s life. This strategy works really well, provided you are not going to need to keep going back for more items, and you can pick some superb quality products at deeply discounted prices. For Example, retailers will stock up for the winter 3 – 4 beforehand, and will clear their summer ranges during August and September – a good time for bargain hunting. The winter stock is usually sold off in January.

Apply these strategies, talk about them, teach your kids, and get them involved in this process as a fun exciting exercise and they will pick up these smart habits.

In our next lesson, we will talk about the tricks and strategies companies and retailers use to persuade you to buy from them.

www.MyBrilliantKidz.com

This is the next part in the my brilliant kidz re-programming series and the first in the self talk mini series.

Most people have not heard affirmations, self talk or incantations or know what they are. We thought it would be important to give our readers an overview of this useful but little known technique.  You do, however, need to remember that this is a technique to help re-program yourself, and in order for it to work, the nature of this technique is that it has to be applied repeatedly, consistently and needs to be reinforced. The good news is that once you have set it up (which does not take long), the whole technique takes 5-10 minutes, meaning that you can repeat it as many times as you like and almost anywhere.

Why do we need to do this? The answer is to improve ourselves in order to create a daily positive environment that our kids can copy the good and the positive from, giving them a greater opportunity to excel and be brilliant kids. A small change in our daily lives can have a huge impact on our children!

Put simply the effect of these small changes can change the status from a position of “Rubbish in, rubbish out” to “quality in, quality out”, from a stressful situation to a less stressful one. If you imagine driving and someone tries to race you at the lights, this can make the difference between staying calm and carrying on your way, or getting caught up and racing, getting booked and regretting it afterwards and paying a fine plus penalty points on your licence. I hope you see the point now.

You achieve this with your tongue – through self talk, daily affirmations and incantations, and then reinforcing this other techniques.

When you “self talk”, your brain’s sub conscious ‘listens’ – actually it is listening all the time – the more it listens, the more it believes.

Think about this. If 1 person tells you are wrong – there is less of an impact than if 100 people told you that you are wrong. The chances are that they maybe correct in their assessment, and therefore you are more likely to believe them. This is your brain and sub conscious believing the 100 people.

You can now use the same principle to re-train your brain to believe that you are what you wish to be or that you do will not act in a particular way. Through your self talk you are telling your brain this repeatedly, until it starts to believe. When this happens, thought processes and habits will start to change.

So how do you go about creating a program for yourself. Your self talk should be about your goals, your desires, what you want to become, what habits you want to change and must be positively motivated.  

Now you have a better understanding of what self talk is and how it works, and the impact it can have in helping our excel and becoming brilliant, we will look at how to create the program in the next article.

www.mybrilliantkidz.com

“All men are born equal… but leave this earth unequal.  A man’s altitude in life is determined only by his attitude in life”

Your children will copy what you do, say and how you think. Any good habits will be copied along with any bad habits. What you do now may not be the best things you want for your kids to learn, and may be the wrong habits that they pick up. This will hinder their success.

In order for your kids to be successfully brilliant, you need to lead by example and put in front of them the positive things – habits, ideas, thought processes, behaviours, speech …. that they can copy, interact and learn from. This will make the task so much easier, if your children are interacting with the positive things on day to day basis as a normal part of their lives.

In order to do this, we as parents need to shed some of the emotional baggage that we all carry and make the effort. After all if we are living a life full of positives, our kids will do the same and whole raising kids’ effort becomes far more enjoyable and far less stressful. Let’s face it – it is through this stress that we tend to do things without thinking, believing that this will lead to a less stressful situation. Instead, the opposite seems to happen – stress creates more stress in our kids and it comes out, which in turn creates more stress in us as parents – a vicious circle!

We need to make a small effort daily to create this change – small steps at time.

I am starting a series of articles on making this change by “re-programming” or changing yourself.

These are next articles in this series over the next few days.

1.      What do I mean by ‘programming’ and how is it formed

2.      Why should you change 

3.      How to start the change

By the end of this you will see and understand what programming is and how this will affect your kids. If you can change your ‘programming’, it will be copied to your kids.

www.mybrilliantkidz.com

Every parent dreams of their child being brilliant, of being just that one step better then they are and keep their family and community progressing upwards to allow them to feel proud parents.

The reality is with the fast speed of living in the modern world – the rat race, that dream is probably achieved by less than 2% of the population.

There is a common perception that exists amongst the majority of parents – that you need either a lot of time to devote to your children or that you need to be wealthy enough to afford and essentially ‘outsource’ this task. Being in the rat race makes you focus on the two essential currencies in this race – time and money – trading your time (knowledge and skills) to earn the money to keep a roof over your head !

We spent a lot of time in our earlier years to acquire knowledge and skills to allow us to better trade our time in the future and earn a better rate.

Being conditioned in this way affects the way we think our children should be too. If a child could be made to rise above this with some special quality or gift, then perhaps they can get out of this rat race.

Can you help your child achieve their potential and do great things with their gifts, abilities and confidence, whilst you are working and have a tight budget? Well, the short answer is a resounding YES. You do, however, need to put some thought and planning into this, and then add a dose of discipline and commitment, and stir with a lot of love and patience.

If you can see this as being blindingly obvious, then you have the right mind set to see that there are definitely low cost, time efficient and effective ways to boost your child’s brain power, abilities and confidence, and are ready to start on this journey.

By making a few minor adjustments to your lifestyle and routine, you can make a huge difference in your children.

To start the process, we encourage you to get a notebook to do the following:

a) jot down what you do now – your daily or weekly timetable

b) how of that is time spent with your children and what is that time spent on

c) jot down how and the manner you interact with your children and be honest in assessing how motivated you are.

d) start thinking about where you can improve your interactions and find ways to make your children think differently.

We will be posting further tips on this, so look out for them for more ideas.

www.mybrilliantkidz.com