Hi everyone. My name is Damiano Shehu and I am a student at the Hubbard College of Administration.  I recently finished a course on Financial Planning for my associate degree and I would like to share my wins with you guys. First of all, I really enjoyed this course because it is as applicable in business affairs as it is in everyday life. I mean everyday, whether it is business or personal matters, we deal with financial decisions. So, wouldn’t it be great to have a practical and applicable guide to base your financial decisions on? Well, that’s what this course did for me. I now have an understanding of what money really is and how money is exchanged within the society to form an economy. Next, if you in your personal life or business want to survive and be able to expand you will have to make more money than you spend. This seems pretty simple, right?  Well, let’s take a look at large corporations in the USA, especially during this economic crisis, and we see that these corporations are spending way more than what they make. What are the consequences of that? Massive bailout sums reaching 10s of billions of dollars. Now you are probably thinking if it was that easy everyone would do it? Well here is a misunderstanding in economics. Let’s say our company is in an emergency. We are spending more than we are making. Now, how do we solve this situation? You would immediately think of saving money by reducing the budget for promotion and lowering production rates, etc. By doing so we spend less money but also we MAKE less money. We have bills that are overdue, taxes to pay, employees and all of the other expenses. Next month, we end up economizing more and cutting off more promotion and production and we continue down this road until we meet a seemingly friendly banker that offers us a loan at really tremendous interest rates. Stuck in a corner with nowhere to go we are forced to agree to the loan, putting at the mercy of that banker. This happens to a tremendously large number of new businesses. So, what do we do to effectively handle this emergency? The first step is to PROMOTE. The only way out of an emergency is income is to promote. By doing so you make your product and services known to the public and that will result in new people coming in for services or products. This increases production and income. Now that you have successfully promoted you economize and don’t waste money on unnecessary things. But you always keep promoting, the moment you stop promoting. The moment you stop promoting your income will steeply decline. The above and many other financial theories were covered in the Financial Planning course. This is one of the best courses I have done so far and I would strongly recommend it to any business owner who wants to prosper in these dark, economic times. By Damiano Shehu, an Albanian student from Tirane on the associate degree program at the Hubbard College of Administration (HCA), Los Angeles, CA.  The HCA is a self-paced business school that offers an exceptional business administration curriculum, unique learning technology, life-changing apprenticeships and internships, assistance with job placement and a lifetime warranty for students.  I am currently on the Ethics for Business Survival apprenticeship.