Earning By Saving

This is not the typical save to earn strategy. The Legacy fiasco is too recent to forget and its negative impact to the saver-investors cannot be ignored just yet. Anyway, I hope there’s not that many café owners who hitched to that bandwagon to nowhere. To the uninformed, the Legacy fiasco is a double your money in five year scheme that a group of rural banks offered to the public and failed. The amount of interest for the money deposited to the schemer’s banks were almost ten-fold those of the regular savings accounts in commercial banks, many were enticed to part with their savings only to be left with the proverbial empty bags.

I could guess that not that many café owners got victimized by the Legacy scheme. There’s just not enough earnings to save and invest on such kind of deal. The industry is at its low point nowadays, a true accounting of income and expenses would show many are just barely breaking even on their operations. Some may not even be able to recover their investment before their computer units become obsolete and unusable for some business models of choice. So what’s this earning by saving that I am talking about?

Is it about cutting costs of some variables in café operations? Yes, that could be one but if you come to think of it, you could only apply this on saving electricity which could be tricky to some. Putting off your air-conditioners may send your customers to competitors who don’t shutdown theirs. While you will not go wrong in cutting down your electrical consumption, be very careful not to inconvenienced your customers when you do so.

The cost-cutting or earning by saving scheme that I have in mind is really about an important variable in your café operation, your DSL connection. I understand that many of you have been using your current ISP (Internet Service Provider) for sometime and may be happy with it. My question is have you tried looking at the other ISPs available in your area? Are the others offering the same specifications at lower monthly recurring charge (MRC)? If yes, why not look at them seriously and see if you can save on their service?

Here is a comparison of the MRCs of the two (2) leading ISPs in the country that I took from their websites. Globe Broadband has various specifications for a café owner to choose from as shown below (All plans include a landline):

PLAN >>>   384 Kbps         1 Mbps        3 Mbps         5 Mbps

MRC* >>>     PhP 995         PhP 1,295     PhP 2,295      PhP 3,295

Download > 384 Kbps      1,024 Kbps  3,037 Kbps    5,120 Kbps

NOTE: The MRCs indicated are E-VAT inclusive already.

PLDT, on the other hand, has the following plans in their website (landline not yet included):

PLAN (Small Biz) >>>  Lite             Jr                   Sr

MRC* >>>>>>>>>  PhP 4,000   PhP 8,000   PhP 14,500

Download >>>>>> > 3.5 Mbps    4.5 Mbps       5.0 Mbps

CIR** >>>>>>>>>> 128 Kbps    256 Kbps       384 Kbps

NOTES: * – The MRCs indicated are E-VAT exclusive and ** –  the CIR value shown means committed information rate.

I present the above figures to prove that there could be some areas where you could save and possibly earn money. I leave it to you to determine the applicability of any of the plans presented above. I know DSL applications vary from café to café but who knows, you may be spending unnecessarily on your current ISP.

NOTE: Your comments are welcome here but you may wish to proceed to Café Forum for your questions and comments.