Friends! Plan Your Finances for the Years Ahead

I’ve written this article especially for my final year friends, who’ll start earning in 2011. The year marks an important transformation in their lives and a rush of adrenalin might tempt them to spend extravagantly, jeopardizing the gains they could have made by investing early and wisely. With prudence however, they can definitely brighten future financial prospects for themselves as well as their families.

 

No matter how prosperous someone is, it always pays to save and invest well. Many people might argue about the need to plan for future so early in the career. To them I would say, “The need to save today is to secure tomorrow, to meet contingencies, and above all to pursue dreams, passions and hobbies.” In western world, people desire to retire from active work in mid 40s, so they plan their finances according to it. Although, it is not a common trend here at present; sooner or later it will be. 

The golden rule of financial planning is, ‘be wise and start early.’ One needs to figure out, what corpus, he would like to build in 20-30 years. It varies from person to person, depending on lifestyle and number of dependents one has. SIPs (Systematic Investment Plans) are ideally suited for it. They allow people to regularly invest a portion of their income to generate return and build corpus. One can invest either a fixed amount every year or increase his investments over a period of time as his salary increases. 

Keeping the hard earned money in bank deposits won’t be a wise act as inflation will eat it away and real rate of return (Deposit rate-inflation) will be negative.

For youngsters, the time is also ripe to be a part of share market.  Liberalization and continuous reforms in the last two decades have made the share markets friendly for the retail investors. The markets have doubled in the last two years and returns have been in the excess of 25 percent. Share markets are known to reward long term investors handsomely. So, one should aim to be in the game for longer time to reap better benefits. But, before investing in share market, it is strongly advised to consult a financial expert and be prudent and pragmatic.

For risk averse people, there are still other ways to generate good returns. Mutual funds and ULIPs are among them. These products invest their asset in share markets and bond markets under the guidance of capable managers. Both are equally good, but since ULIPs offer better commission to the agents, they are better marketed by the agents. 

Apart from these, one has to also look at the income tax aspect of investment. The government has also proposed to implement Direct Tax Code from 2012 and it’ll bring sweeping changes in the tax laws of this country. This should also be kept in mind while making investment decisions this year.

It is indisputable that a very bright future is waiting for the people, who would be joining industry this year and they can take it to an altogether new level through prudent financial decisions right at the start of their career. It is rightly said ‘Well begun is half done.’

Quality or Quantity: What should we strive for in higher education?

The most obvious question asked at any forum discussing higher education is, what should be preferred-quality or quantity? There are many people who say that we must not go for expansion in higher education sector as it will affect the quality of education. Well, my opinion is entirely against any move to restrict higher education in the name of quality control. India is a large country. It requires colleges in large numbers to meet the needs of its burgeoning population. We can't allow our students to sit idle while we bask in the glory of quality of our institutes.

We all know as to what is going on at present. Every year, around ten thousand students qualify for IIT. But, do we ever think about the rest of the students who got rejected? Are they less capable? There are many students who unfortunately do not go to IITs but fare better then many IITians. Same is the case with management graduates. In medical education sector, the situation is even more frightening. The country is not producing enough doctors to meet even the basic health care requirements. The government is bearing the burnt of its poor policy of limiting the number of medical colleges in the country. It is now forced to adopt a new scheme of rural doctors where the course duration would be four years only. This problem would not have arisen at the forst place had there been enough medical colleges in this country.

All these things point towards the need for change in the government policy regarding higher education. There is an urgent requirement for opening of more IITs, IIMs, central universities, medical colleges and other colleges.It's true that quality is and should be an important parameter in higher education, but keeping in purview the huge requirements of skilled manpower in our country, we must act fast to incorporate the idea of inclusive education. Let more institutions be opened and let they be functioned independently. In this present competitive world, they will surely establish their niche in the respective fields.

The question of quality comes only when the country's minimum requirements in terms of educational institutions are fulfilled. In the initial phase quality will decrease for sure as the quantity increases. But, this is a short term problem and can be taken care of over a period of time. Those who advocate quality, tend to forget that even our elite institutions are not getting faculties for teaching. Once, the problem of quantity is taken care of , they will have a large pool of contestants to choose from. Thus, improving quantity is in the best interest of the nation, the student community and above all for the educational institutions itself. If we act now, we can prevent our future generation from being deprived of one of the most basic rights of theirs: The right to access to higher education.

HACKING.........................

Hacking! Sounds dreadful! Isn’t it? The general perception about hacking is that it is a way of stealing information from computers. However that’s not true. The correct term for the method described above is cracking. Hacking is actually the intrusion into computers to expose their vulnerabilities and the security holes. Hackers are actually pranksters and most of the times are not ill-willed. There was a time when hacking was quite tough, even for the computer geeks.  However with the spread of Internet and thanks to the numerous works our forefathers did in the field of hacking, hacking at present is a little bit application of mind and lots of social engineering.  There are a large number of tools available on Internet which can help in this.

For hacking, a person must clearly understand what his goals are! Why does he want to intrude into otherwise inaccessible computers and what he intends to do once he succeeds in gaining access.  The next thing is to decide how to execute the plans like ‘what needs to be done to remotely connect to other systems without the prior permission from the system administrators’. It is always better to take consent of the person whose computer’s vulnerability are you going to expose. Now-a-days the cyber rules are quite restrict regarding hacking and any mistakes knowingly or unknowingly may have serious consequences.

Some of the important tools available for hacking are:

# KEYSTROKE LOGGERS- It’s a fun to use. Just install on the system and invite your friends to log into their email or Orkut accounts. The Keystroke Logger takes the imprint of the keys pressed and displays it. So anything which is typed will be recorded into its database and since passwords are also entered through the keyboard it records them too. These passwords can be retrieved through the database in a matter of seconds.

#MAC Spoofing- In common words MAC spoofing is the technique of changing the MAC address of one computer by replacing it with any other computer’s MAC address. This is generally done to to get unrestricted access to Internet.  For this, the new MAC must be of those computers  who have access to the internet. 

MAC is the acronym for Media Access Control.  It is the physical address of the networking cards installed inside the computer. MAC spoofing is generally done when the network administrator restricts the use of INTERNET only for a few computers on a large network.

#ROUTER HACK-   Routers are the devices that connect to different kinds of networks like wired and wireless networks. It can be hacked too. Depending on the security arrangements they employ like MAC Filter, WEP, WPA different tools such as Aircrack, KISMET are available to bypass these security arrangements and extract the data necessary for hacking.

# PORT SCANNING- If we imagine computer as a home, ports will its windows. Every port in a computer is utilized by some services. Port Scanning is a technique of finding open ports in a system.  Through these open ports one can get unrestricted access to other computer’s data. Besides these there are also some other tools which can assist you in hacking. A lot of information is available on Internet and one can take their help.

Also, It is easier to learn hacking on LINUX platforms than the WINDOWS platforms because most of the good tools for hacking are easily available on the Linux based operating systems compared to WINDOWS operating system.  The best operating system available for hacking is BACKTRACK. It can be downloaded from INTERNET and is free of cost. It contains almost all the tools available for hacking. 

Before someone attempts hacking, it is strongly advised to take into consideration its legal implications. Use hacking with prior consent of the system administrators to find out the loop holes in the cyber security measures. The best hackers in the world are also the best cyber security experts in this rapidly growing IT age.