It’s graduation season, and time for commencement speakers to offer a few words of wisdom. The class of 2009 has had more than its share of challenges. It began college in one of the most competitive pools ever and is graduating into one of the worst economies in decades.

But it’s not the first to face these challenges. We asked several prominent individuals about the best and worst financial advice they received—and their guidance for this year’s grads.

David Bach, author of the best-selling FinishRich books:

Mr. Bach says one of the most important financial decisions of his life was buying a home with a friend shortly after college. “It made me a financial adult in my early 20s,” he says. He had to get a crash course in mortgages, taxes and insurance.

Best advice: To buy the house and work hard. Working hard in your 20s and 30s could determine how successful you are later in life.

Worst advice: Selling the house too soon before home values soared in California.

Advice to grads: Mr. Bach graduated in 1990 when the economy was horrible and “California was a mess.” Don’t give up if you’re not finding a job. Ask someone for an informational interview. At the meeting, get three more names of professionals to meet. That’s how he eventually landed a job.

Paula Deen, restaurant owner, author and Food ­Network host:

Ms. Deen learned about life and Southern cooking from her grandmother. Years later, she launched a catering business with $200 and her family recipes. The catering evolved into restaurants, cookbooks, television shows and even furniture.

Best advice: A lot of great advice, she says, came from her aunt and uncle. Among other things, her uncle told her not to complain about paying taxes because “if you’re paying taxes you’re making a living.”

Worst advice: To not repay a note she had co-signed. (She didn’t take the advice.)

Advice to grads: Get all the experience you can and be persistent.

Robert Kiyosaki, businessman and author of the best-selling “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” books:

Mr. Kiyosaki writes and speaks about his rich and poor dads, “both of whom were good men.” He bases his poor dad on his own father, who was highly educated but not business savvy, and his rich dad on his best friend’s father, a successful commercial real-estate investor.

Best advice: From his rich dad, who recognized that Robert had the potential to be a successful business owner. He told him to learn how to make sales if he wanted to be a successful entrepreneur.

Worst advice: From his poor dad, who told him to take the safe path and “to go to school and get a job” when he returned from serving as a pilot in Vietnam. He didn’t recognize that Robert would “never be a corporate guy.”

Advice to grads: “If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, find a successful one who will teach you.”

John W. Rogers Jr., chairman and CEO of Ariel Investments:

Mr. Rogers, who graduated from Princeton, launched Ariel Investments in 1983 when he was 24.

Best advice:“To come home to Chicago.” A lot of friends went to New York but he returned home. “My family knew people who could open doors,” he says. “Friends and family became my first clients.”

Worst advice: “I was getting a lot of advice to go to law school. That would have been unnecessary. I wasn’t interested in it, and I was eager to get started as an investor.”

Advice to grads: “You want to be known as the best teammate in whatever organization you join. Look out for your teammates every step of the way. Be a good listener, teammate and friend, and live up to the commitments you make. Whatever you promise you’re going to do, you’ve got to do that.”

Mary L. Schapiro, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission:

Ms. Schapiro is the first woman to serve as the agency’s permanent chairman.

Best advice: From her parents: “Be careful abut getting into debt.”

Worst advice: When she got out of law school, friends advised her to delay saving until her salary was higher. “That ignores the value of saving even small amounts over a long time,” she says. “It also ignores the importance of getting into the habit of saving.”

Advice to grads: “Live within your means.” People need to know how to manage debt so don’t borrow without understanding the implications of the debt and how you’ll repay it.
 
Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, ­president of the Charles Schwab Foundation:

Ms Schwab-Pomerantz learned a lot about investing and saving from her famous father, Charles Schwab.

Best advice: “Live frugally and save for a rainy day.” “Saving for a rainy day is in my DNA,” she says. “I’m also judicious about credit cards. I’ve always had one or two cards and use them for convenience, not to extend my income.”

Worst advice: “Buy any mutual fund.” Fortunately, she didn’t listen. She opened an IRA and built a diverse portfolio.

Advice to grads: “Live off 90% of your income.” Save the other 10%, first as a cash cushion. “When you’re young you don’t need all the bells and whistles in life,” she says.

–Ms. Mincer is a Dow Jones Newswires reporter in Jersey City, N.J. She can be reached at jilian.mincer@dowjones.com.

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When I Was Your Age…

In these difficult economic times, everyone is seeking a better way to manage their personal finances. And at a time when even the newly elected president can’t be separated from his wireless device, two undergraduates from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed an open source solution that combines smart personal financial management with your smartphone.

The computer science students, who are part of the Rensselaer Center for Open Software (RCOS), have developed an application for Apple Inc.’s popular iPhone that allows users to log, track, and manage their personal spending.

The application is called Vault, and it is available for free to anyone around the world seeking a better way to manage their money. The code used to develop the software is open source, which means that there are no restrictions on distribution or modification.

Developers Amit Kumar and Devin Ross, juniors majoring in computer science, describe the application as “Quicken for the iPhone.” It seeks to replace the check register at the front of personal checkbooks, a financial relic that students like Kumar and Ross have never even owned.

“People are always carrying their phone everywhere already,” Ross said. “We saw the potential to centralize a task that many people could use daily.”

The software has a place to add expenses in different categories. Some categories, such as groceries, are automatically programmed in the system, while other categories can be added by the user. The application then logs the transaction and modifies the user’s account balance. The application also uses GPS to locate the closest bank branch, and then allows users to directly link to their bank’s Web site or place a call to the bank.

According to Kumar and Ross, one of the main benefits of the system is that no personal account information needs to be logged into the application. This protects the user from identity theft if the phone is stolen.

“Creating this application gave us really direct work experience that most undergraduates don’t get,” Kumar said. “It was the first opportunity that we had to go beyond just learning how to create good code to learning how to create a great user interface and build the code around that.”

Vault is currently available for free download from the iTunes Store. The project source is located on http://code.google.com/p/rpiiphone/source/browse/ and the development blog can be found at http://rpiiphoneproject.wordpress.com/ .

Source: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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Student open-source software brings personal finance to the iPhone

Veteran sales professional, Rollis Fontenot III, has released his first book “Go Out and Sell Something – The Recession-Proof Guide to a Successful Sales Career.”

Available on Amazon and Createspace.com, the book comprehensively addresses a subject, according to Fontenot, that is of growing importance to sales professionals in every industry. The book also appeals to business owners and other professionals who are in charge of business development.

“With the economy continuing to falter, salespeople are having to adapt to a rapidly changing business environment that isn’t always clear or understandable,” Fontenot explains.

“When you consider the alarming rate of company layoffs, bankruptcies, bailouts, and restructurings, it’s understandable to feel uncertain and downright scared over what the future holds.

However, there are many salespeople who actually thrive in tough times. Their secret is developing the right thinking and mental attitude that successful salespeople possess.

The order of success in virtually any field of endeavor is BE-DO-HAVE. Our thinking or “BEing” helps us to take the right actions. Our “DOs” help us to receive, and our HAVEs are the results that we want. Our minds also need to be ready to receive the success that we want.”

According to Kari Schneider of Alliance Recruiting, “Rollis has a unique way of not only sharpening your selling skills, but also getting you mentally prepared to receive and retain the success you’ve been looking for.

His book is quick, simple to understand, and easy to implement. Rollis guides you through the slippery slopes of non-production in a recession. Basically, if you want more money – Go Out and Sell Something.”

Not just for salespeople, but for any business professional experiencing stress and anxiety over this current recession, the new book is geared to help those needing clear-cut solutions for taking proactive and positive steps to increase their sales, rejuvenate their careers, and improve their overall lives.

“Being in sales can be very rewarding,” states Fontenot. “In fact, one major advantage of a career in sales is that successful salespeople are the first to be hired and often the last to be let go. They are also among the highest earners in a company.”

While there are countless books about sales techniques and strategies, Fontenot has taken a refreshingly different approach to the subject. He has only included the most timely and relevant concepts and compiled them into an easy-to-use guide that includes recession-proof action plans that are designed to give straightforward actionable items that deliver immediate results.

“Fontenot shares his knowledge of selling in “Go Out and Sell Something along with the collective thoughts of some of the best authors in the industry such as Robert Kiyosaki, Dr. Stephen Covey, and Brian Tracy,” says Michael Waters, physician recruiter with Alliance Recruiting Resources.

“He provides an easy to read guide on how to sell from someone who has succeeded by studying the best authors, practicing their ideas, and developing his own along the way.”

“Go Out and Sell Something is an extremely useful book for the salesperson looking to not only survive but thrive in the current economy.

With unemployment at a near all time high, more people are getting commission-based sales,” says Ron Marks, author of “Managing for Sales Results” published by John Wiley and Sons.

“Fontenot’s book no only takes proven sales strategies and puts them in an easy to read format, he provides action plans at the end of each topic to help sales people implement the concepts presented. Don’t miss this book if you want to become a sales professional.”

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Go Out and Sell Something

Burning crude oil itself is of limited use.  To extract the maximum value from crude, it first needs to be refined into petroleum products such as gasoline, or petrol.

However, there are many other products that can be obtained when a barrel of crude oil is refined.  These include liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), naphtha, kerosene, gas oil and fuel oil.  

Other useful products which are not fuels can also be manufactured by refining crude oil, such as lubricants and asphalt (used in paving roads). A range of sub-items like perfumes and insecticides are also ultimately derived from crude oil.

Furthermore, several of the products listed above which are derived from crude oil, such as naphtha, gasoil, LPG and ethane, can themselves be used as inputs or feedstocks in the production of petrochemicals.

There are more than 4,000 different petrochemical products, but those which are considered as basic products include ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, ammonia and methanol. The main groups of petrochemical end-products are plastics, synthetic fibres, synthetic rubbers, detergents and chemical fertilisers.

Considering the vast number of products that are derived from it, crude oil is a very versatile substance. Life as we know it today would be extremely difficult without crude oil and its by-products.

Is the economy really improving, therefore driving up consumption of oil? Tracking the share market will not give you the real answer. In fact, we know the global economy has yet to recover.

U.S. Dollar Drives Oil

Oil is priced in U.S. dollars. According to OPEC, the relationship between oil prices and the U.S. dollar is almost mechanical. When the U.S. dollar falls in value, oil prices have to go up in U.S. dollar terms to stay constant in euro terms. Oil producers receive their oil revenues in U.S. dollars and need to be compensated for the fluctuations of the dollar.

When oil price hit too high, consumers have to spend more for gasoline, petrol and etc despite that their income didn’t go up. That’s a high price to pay.

~Aaron Loh

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Why Oil Price is going up?