Susan Paige

Eating can improve mood? Surely, it can. Usually, when we eat something that tastes good, we immediately get a better mood. However, not only the favourite flavour gives us a sense of happiness. Healthy foods contain some nutrients that can have quite a lasting impact on your well-being. Let’s take a closer look at them!

Magnesium
Magnesium has many functions in the body. It affects our health and mood. Low levels of magnesium are associated with low testosterone levels, and this, in turn, is associated with depressed mood, both in women and men. Magnesium also modulates the activity of NMDA receptors. This is a special type of glutamate receptors which can be found in neurons. Low levels of this mineral can cause an abnormal neuronal excitation leading to feelings of anxiety.

The deficiency of magnesium is exposed, among others, in athletes, because this mineral is lost with extensive sweat. Particularly at risk are those who are in the losing weight period, since not only they do that by doing aerobic workouts for which sweating is more intensive, it still has a reduced-calorie diet and a high risk of macro and microelements deficiencies. It is important, therefore, that diet was rich in products that contain magnesium, or in high-quality magnesium supplements. This should not be challenging since many of them fits diet perfectly, for example pumpkin seeds, bran cereals, cocoa, almonds, cereal or oatmeal.

Zinc
Zinc is mainly known for the effect of accelerating healing of the skin. Hardly anyone knows that it can increase the effectiveness of antidepressant therapy, and its deficiency promotes depression states. Zinc affects the immune system and brain homeostasis. Similarly, such as magnesium, may act as the NMDA receptors agonist, in result zinc can increase the efficiency of antidepressant therapy.

Zinc deficiency can also impair the production of testosterone, and we have already mentioned that it can lower the mood.

Vitamin D
Although depression is widely associated with vitamin D deficiency, it does not mean that its actual truth! In the winter when there is less access to the sun, many people may suffer from seasonal affective disorder, which is associated with decreased production of vitamin D.

The studies on the daily intake of vitamin D and whether its supplementation significantly affects the mood varies highly. However, if a blood test proves that we have shortages, then you can go ahead and start supplementing it with the dose of 2,000 IU per day. Obviously this is a very mean value. Everything really depends on the outcome of the study. Certainly worth watching whether the dose helps or not. You may find that it is a matter of very-individual. If we are not convinced with supplementation, it is worth to take care of your diet and enrich it with oily fish, such as eg. salmon, sardines and tuna.

Omega-3
It turns out that fish oil can alleviate clinical depression. It is a great complement to therapy. Fatty acids, essential fatty acids which are polyunsaturated are required by the body because they cannot be synthesized endogenic. There are only two types of EFAs – linoleic acid (LA) and alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). The body converts the first one in the arachidonic acid (AA) and the second one to eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). LA and AA are omega-6 fatties acids, whereas the ALA, EPA and DHA are omega-3 fatty acids. EPA and DHA constitute the majority of fatty acids in the fish oil.

DHA and EPA are mainly found in fish. Omega-3 can be found in little quantities in vegetables. For vegetarians and vegans, the only concrete source of EPA and DHA oil is algae.

Tryptophan
Tryptophan is an essential amino acid (EAA). This means that the body needs it but can not synthesize it by itself, and that’s why we must get it with food. The organism needs a minimum of 15 mg of tryptophan per kilogram of body weight per day.

Your body uses it to produce serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood. People who do not have their deficiencies are less anxious, irritable and less likely to suffer from depression.

Summary
In fact, if you have a healthy and balanced diet, you do not have to worry about the shortage of magnesium and zinc. Eat greasy fish regularly to be sure that you get proper amounts of the fatty acids – EPA and DHA. Eat food rich in tryptophan – lean meat, fish, white and yellow cheese, milk, soy products, legumes and eggs. And if you do not have access to large amounts of sun, you might consider supplementation with vitamin D. All of these nutrients can help maintain a good mood.

Aussies find credit cards great financing options thanks to their attractive reward programs and convenience. Plus, there are plenty of options, making it possible to compare them and pick a card that best suits your needs.

Just how much do we love Credit cards then? According to 2019’s data by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RSA), there were 19.1 million credit card accounts in Australia by March 2019. This number had dropped by 1.5 million in the 12 months to March 2019.

When used the right way, credit cards are great for everyday purchases or any large purchase you want to make. Below we’ll help you learn more about credit cards in Australia. Read on to learn more!

How Can I Get a Credit Card in Australia?

Roland Bleyer, the CEO and founder of Mate.com.au says that “shopping around for the best deal on credit cards is much easier today – because our technology will do all the hard work for you. This can incur huge savings that people are often not even aware of”.

Getting a credit card in Australia is pretty easy as long as you meet the requirements. So, take the time to read the terms of the card you want before applying.

Basically, you must be 18 years or older to apply. Also, you must be an Australia citizen or a permanent resident. If you’re a temporary citizen, there are also certain cards you’re eligible for.

During the application, be sure to provide your valid personal details, such as name, date of birth, ID, contact details, address, and referee details. You’ll also need to provided and verify your financial information, such as income sources, assets, expenses, and outstanding debts.

Be sure to provide your current employment status. If you’re employed, creditors will want to know your employer’s address, manager’s name, and contact details.

Understanding Credit Cards

If you don’t like carrying around cash when shopping, credit cards are a convenient solution. They also make it possible to shop online or over the phone.

They allow you to borrow up to a certain limit as long as you can keep up with your repayments. Basically, you qualify for a credit limit depending on different factors, such as your credit score, annual income, assets among other factors. If you keep your creditor happy, you can get a credit limit increase. Or, you can apply for it if you want.

Regarding interest rates, credit cards have slightly higher rates than other types of credit. The rate majorly depends on the features the card offers. You’ll be charged interest on all outstanding transactions if you fail to pay the balance (the amount you owe) each month.

Credit terms differ widely. Some have interest-free periods while others don’t. If your card has no interest-free period, you’ll pay interest from the day when you make a purchase or when you receive your monthly statement. Also, the interest is usually high when you use the card for cash advances.

When making repayments, you should strive to make more than the minimum amount. Paying the minimum repayment amount only every month will keep your interest high. Plus, you’re likely to take longer to complete your balance.

Type of Credit Cards

In Australia, there are different types of credit cards, each specifically designed to meet the needs of different consumers and groups. Here are the types of cards you need to know:

• Low-interest cards – These cards have low-interest rates than average and they’re great for those who tend to carry a balance.
• No annual fees cards – With these cards, you don’t pay any annual fees. You can consider them if you want a card for emergencies.
• Low-income cards – Creditors offer these cards to people in the low-income bracket. Those earning between $15,000 to $30,000 a year. Students and retirees can also qualify for them.
• Student credit cards – For students, these cards provide a starting point for using cards. They have fairly low-interest rates and you must be a full-time student to qualify for them.
• Rewards credit cards – If you’re a heavy spender and want to earn something back for using your card, rewards credit cards are ideal. You can earn purchase discounts, frequent flyer points or cashback.
• Prestige credit cards- Do you need luxury perks? Then, consider gold, black, platinum, and titanium cards. They have a higher credit limit, but very strict eligibility requirements.
• Business credit cards – If you want to separate your business expenses from personal ones, these are the cards to get. They offer features like travel extras and business tools.

You can apply for any of the above cards as long as you meet the requirements. Keep in mind that the more the features a card has, the higher the interest rate and the stricter the eligibility requirements. Your choice will also depend on the amount you want in terms of the credit limit.

Essential Credit Card Features

When looking for credit cards, their features determine your interest rate and credit limit. Cards with more features can be pretty appealing, but they might not be the right option for you. But still, it’s important to review the features.

If you want prestige cards, ensure they offer insurance. This can be travel insurance, price protection, purchase protection, and retail cover. The level of cover will depend on the annual fees and the quality of the card.

Prestige cards also offer airport lounge access. So, you’re applying for a platinum or black card, you might want to inquire about this feature. Depending on your card, you can single-entry airport passes or unlimited access through an annual membership.

Also, ask about interest-free days for those people who clear their balance on time. This can help you cut down the cost of owning the card. However, keep in mind that account balance transfers are excluded from the surety of interest-free days.

If you travel overseas frequently, consider getting a card that has no foreign transaction fees. In this case, you won’t be charged for using your card in another country, particularly for transactions made in a foreign currency.

Final Thoughts

Credit cards can be pretty useful in making purchases during your destitute moments or when you want to supplement your budget. There are plenty of options out there. For that reason, tools, such as Mate, make it easy for you to compare credit cards and pick one that’s ideal for you.

Take the time to review the options you have, and the features they offer. Keep in mind the interest rates and the credit limit, too. Most importantly, keep an eye on your balance as you use the card.

For many Australians, financial matters are getting pretty overwhelming at times, particularly when made aware that the Australian household wealth shed $257.6 billion in the last three months of 2018. This rate was faster compared to the previous seven years before 2018.

The 2.1 percent fall was due to a plunge in property prices and stocks. Combined with the 0.1% drop that happened in the third quarter of 2018, the total value of Australia’s household wealth stood at $10.18 trillion. On an individual level, the household wealth declined by $10,198.10 to $404,319.80, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). But there is more to this.

Roland Bleyer, the founder and visionary behind DEBTCO says that “Thousands of Australians now struggle with debt and they risk default: we’re there to help them prevent insolvency and to carry out swift debt negotiation. In some cases their debts are even written off completely”.

His company is re-writing the rules on how Aussies deal with debt. But how did Australians get into so much debt and how can they prevent insolvency en-masse?

Rising Household Debt

The worrying news in the ABS’ report is that the household-debt-to-income hit a new record of 200 percent. In fact, it’s one of the highest in the world with a total household debt of $2.466 trillion, representing 199.7 percent of disposable income.

The increasing debt is crunching consumer spending, and the retail sector suffers the most as more people cut back on spending. Consequently, this is likely to amplify the economic downturn.

According to the ABS, lower interest rates, easy access to finance, and high housing prices are some of the core factors fueling the debt. In the fourth quarter of 2018, there was a slight decline in household liabilities, but the effect was insignificant since income growth collapsed.

In the same quarter, housing prices across Australia’s capitals fell by 2.4 percent, the highest percent since 2003. The trend was the same in early 2019, led by Australia’s largest and expensive markets, Sydney and Melbourne. While low housing prices might be a win for potential buyers, it will be a blow to households with debt. Why?

Basically, such households risk going into negative equity. This means that the value of their home is likely to be low compared to the amount they owe. As such, selling the home won’t suffice in paying the debt.

A Decrease in Housing and Construction Jobs

While the official job data has revealed that the job market is mostly resilient, some sectors, notably the housing and construction sector, indicate otherwise. Plus, money matters are increasingly taking a toll on Australia’s workforce.

A 2019 report by Ceridian HCM Holding Inc. revealed that more than half of the workers are looking for new jobs. Among their reasons included poor job salary, lack of job security, and uninteresting work.

Even with some workers looking for new jobs, job vacancies slowed in February to a 2-year low of 9.9 percent. Even though this isn’t generally a negative outlook, most lead indicators are weak. The housing sector experience job losses by more than 4 percent, recording the highest downturn since 2012.

Other sectors that experienced job losses include retail, manufacturing, real estate, and rental services. Jobs in the private sector declined by about 1.3 percent. The public sector recorded some gains, seeing an increase of 4.8 percent in jobs.

At one point, construction jobs accounted for 10 percent of the total jobs, hitting a 100-year high record. But the overall numbers started to drop in 2018, and the trend is expected to continue given the slump in housing prices.

Strangely, the ABS report had some intriguing figures, revealing that the construction sector had an increase in job vacancies in 2018. Interestingly enough, the figure was 11.6 percent from 8.1 percent, the strongest across all industries. This increase is majorly attributed to the growth of the non-residential construction sector.

Australia has an unemployment rate of about 5.2 percent, as of August 2019. However, with the per-capita recession the country is experiencing, the unemployment rate is likely to shoot up.

Managing Your Debts

Given the rising household debt and the forecasted job losses, it’s pretty important to be smart about your finances and debts. If you hit the proverbial bottleneck, the best way is to hand over the matter to debt negotiators and distance yourself from direct dealings with creditors and banks.

For those who manage it themselves, the first step is to tally up your debts to know where you stand. Getting a clear picture of what you owe will help you create a budget plan that supports smooth repayment.

If your debt problems are sprawling out of control, it’s not a show of weakness to ask for help. Some community legal centers, community organizations, and government agents offer free financial counseling. They can provide the necessary steps to take to regain control of your financial life. Very obviously a professional debt negotiator (such as DEBTCO) have a few more aces up their sleeve than the average government worker.

Create a realistic budget that gives you a clear picture of where your money is going. Once you have a budget, it’s easier to know how much you’re left with so you can plan your repayments. Also, use your budget to identify areas you can cut back on spending.

You can also consider debt consolidation and refinancing loans, but they can only work effectively if you have to pay less in interest rates and fees. In most cases, these options usually offer a short-term fix, particularly when you’re unable to meet the new repayment terms.

Final Thoughts

Inasmuch as it’s a growing problem, you shouldn’t panic at the thought of rising debt in Australia. The national outlook doesn’t in any way reflect your individual situation. Like any other problem in life, there are several workarounds for addressing your debt issues. Property bubble or not – the way to deal with debt traps is always the same.

As long as you’re committed to your financial goals, it’s easy to get on top of your debt. But this means you have to make certain lifestyle changes and budget cuts to help you with the repayments. Always avoid insolvency. If you’re lucky – and have debt written off by a swift and efficient debt negotiator – well consider that a bonus!

Banks deal with a huge amount of data on a daily basis and some of the major banks across the globe have implemented Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to reduce human errors and minimize human efforts.

Processing of requests, often taking days to complete in the past are now reduced to a matter of a few hours or minutes. The huge bonus for banks is that the processing costs have fallen by 30% to 70%. RPA technology has increased efficiency and is freeing bank employees to focus on more complex tasks, including customer service and business expansion. The generic advantages of RPA, as reported in the news, naturally means that it is not just limited to finance.

Shared insights in RPA in finance:

Avi Benezra, one of the masterminds behind RPA and chatbot integration, shared some useful insights on how RPA disrupts and improves financial services. Roland Bleyer, a credit card comparison expert also credited the work of Benezra and his team on making credit card transactions a lot safer.

How is RPA used in banking?

Robotic automation, often combined with artificial intelligence, automates a whole range of activities previously undertaken by employees. They include data entry and basic communication with banking clients. RPA can be implemented to existing operating systems in banks enabling the accurate and efficient completion of database tasks. Some of the processes where RPA technology is making its presence felt include:

1. Customer Service

The nature of banking is such that they are bombarded with queries on a daily basis. These range from account inquiries, loan inquiries and fraudulent transactions. Customer service teams can’t keep up with the workload and the turnaround time for these types of queries has been reduced significantly with the help of RPA. This is because the customer service team can now allow the RPA to resolve the low priority queries, which require less human intelligence, while they solve the high priority ones.

2. Accounts Payable

The monotonous process of Accounts Payable (AP) requires digitizing invoices through Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The process extracts information from the invoices, validates it, and then processes it. RPA automatically reconciles for errors and validations before it credits payments to the merchant account.

3. Compliance

Financial institutions are constantly receiving new compliance regulations that they have to ensure are observed; something which RPA effortlessly undertakes. With RPA, compliance functions 24/7, the process is improved and the employees can spend those working hours doing less monotonous tasks.

4. Mortgage Processing

Mortgage closing times can take almost two months because of the number of checks and verifications that banks require. These include credit checks, employment verification, house inspections before the approval can be issued, with errors often slowing the process down.  RPA uses a fixed set of rules and algorithms to accelerate the process.

5. Credit Card Processing

Issuing credit cards has also just got much easier with RPA. Customers now no longer need to wait for weeks for validation and approval and the RPA software gathers the necessary documents, does background checks, credit checks and makes the decision according to the set parameters.

6. Fraud Detection

Increased incidents of fraud because of technology have made it difficult for banks to identify patterns manually or to check every transaction. RPA is programmed to watch transactions within accounts and flags them if they appear suspicious, e.g. multiple transactions within a short period of time. The bank can immediately investigate these transactions.

7. Know Your Customer (KYC) Compliance

The KYC compliance entails the use of hundreds of work hours to perform these critical customer checks required of banks. It has been estimated that some banks spend as much as $384 million per year on this, which entails collecting customer data, screening it and validating the collected data. RPA completes the process in a shorter time, with fewer errors and fewer working hours.

8. Automated Reporting

Another compliance process within banks is the preparation of reports about their various processes. These are presented to the board and other stakeholders and indicate the performance of the bank. Accuracy is required in these reports and it is important that they are presented in an understandable format. RPA is invaluable as it gathers information from the required sources validates and arranges it before sending it to the relevant people.

9. General Ledger

Updating the general ledger for the preparation of the financial statements of a bank requires the collection of an enormous amount of information. Financial statements are made available to the public media and the stakeholders and have to be prepared without any errors.

RPA collects information from previous financial statements, assets, liabilities, revenues, and expenses, validates them and also updates errors.

10. Processing Account Closures

Account closures entail client requests and also closures due to clients who do not furnish the required proof for maintaining their account. Since banks deal with numerous such requests on a monthly basis, requiring a high volume of data, RPA can run through the checklists needed for customer validation requirements and send out reminders to those who may be at risk of having an account closed. Account closure requests are also dealt with by the system in a queue based set of rules, ensuring fast and accurate account closures.

Benefits of RPA to banks

The major benefit of RPA may seem to be the reduced costs, but there are other benefits that are just as important to the way banks function.

Efficiency in ensuring faster processing has a direct effect on industries, which in turn influences the economy of a region. Even though RPA initially requires employee training, governance and comprehensive setup, once it’s in place, all the processes become faster and more efficient.

Flexibility and agility to do business in a globalized economy require banks to be able to respond to situations across the globe at any time. RPA ensures that banks are prepared to respond and also make certain flexibility in daily tasks allowing them to look at other growth strategies.

Banking processes are taking far less time than ever before offering faster process execution across all tasks and the response time has decreased significantly. The implementation of RPA does not require new infrastructure and can be used across the whole banking system, including sales, HR, administration, and finance.

Final scoop:

The advantages of RPA enhance the customer experience while adding value to the services offered by banks, and those banks that are implementing it have a competitive edge over other players. It is clear that the financial / technology solutions implemented by genius contributors like Avi Benezra and SnatchBot – are making huge improvements in the financial industry as a whole.