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Should I pay off a 0% car loan?
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Between now and October, your $3,000 will earn $30 in your savings account. If you are late on a payment for your 0% loan, your interest rate will skyrocket. In my opinion, the risk is just not worth the tiny gain you are trying to achieve in the savings account. If it was me, I would pay off the loan today. A few more thoughts: There is a reason that businesses offer 0% consumer loans. They are designed to trick you into thinking that you are getting a better deal than you are. Businesses don't lose money on these loans. The price of the loan is built into the cost of the purchase, whether you are buying expensive furniture, or a car. Typically with a car, you forfeit a rebate by taking the 0% loan, essentially paying all the interest up-front. Now that you have the loan, you might be ahead a few dollars by waiting to pay it off, but only because you've already paid the interest. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you can come out ahead by buying things at 0%. It's really not free money. In the comments, @JoeTaxpayer mentioned that fear of mistakes can lead to missed rewards. I understand that; however, these 0% loans are full of small print designed to trip you up. A single mistake can negate years and years of these small gains. You don't want to be penny wise and pound foolish.
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Trading with Settled / Unsettled Funds (T+3)
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The issues of trading with unsettled funds are usually restricted to cash accounts. With margin, I've never personally heard of a rule that will catch you in this scenario. You won't be able to withdraw funds that are tied up in unsettled positions until the positions settle. You should be able to trade those funds. I've never heard of a broker charging margin interest on unsettled funds, but that doesn't mean there isn't a broker somewhere that does. Brokers are allowed to impose their own restrictions, however, since margin is basically offering you a line of credit. You should check to see if your broker has more restrictive rules. I'd guess that you may have heard about restrictions that apply to cash accounts and think they may also apply to margin accounts. If that's the case and you want to learn more about the rules generally, try searching for these terms: You should be able to find a lot of clear resources on those terms. Here's one that's current and provides examples: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/trading/avoiding-cash-trading-violations On a margin account you avoid these issue because the margin (essentially a loan from your broker) provides a cushion / additional funds that avoid the issues. It is possible that if you over-extend yourself that you'll get a "margin call," but that seems to be different than what you're asking and maybe worth a new question if you want to know about that.
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Open Interest vs Volume for Stock Options
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You are asking 'what if', do you have some anticipated answers? Having volume smaller than open interest is the norm. As far as I can tell, having only one trading day and no previous open interest only affects someone trying to sell a contract they are holding. Meaning that if you only have one day to sell your contract then you need to offer it 'at market' or at the bid price (or even lower than the bid price). If you cannot sell your contract then you have to let it expire worthless or you have to exercise it. Those are your three options: let it expire, sell it (perhaps at a loss), and exercise it. Edit: be careful about holding an in-the-money option. Many brokers will automatically exercise an in-the-money contract if you hold it till expiration date.
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Deductible expenses paid with credit card: In which tax year would they fall?
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According to this discussion, there was a Tax Court ruling that likened deductibility for charitable giving by credit card to business expenses incurred by businesses operating under cash-basis accounting. (The point is made by Larry Hess on that site.) Short answer: According to this argument, you can claim the deduction when the charge is incurred. You don't have to wait until you pay it back. (Again this is for cash basis.) Publication 538 states that "under the cash method of accounting, you generally deduct business expenses in the tax year you pay them." I think the ruling above was meant to clarify when the expense is "paid". In my totally unofficial opinion, I suppose this makes sense. If I go to Office Depot to buy a box of envelopes, I walk out with the envelopes at the same time regardless of whether I paid cash or swiped a credit card. I wouldn't walk out thinking: "HA! I haven't actually paid for these yet." If the shoplifting alarm went off at the door and I was asked if I had bought those, I'd say yes, right? If this doesn't convince you, you can always get professional tax advice.
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Website for managing personal cash inflow and outflow, applicable to India?
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I like Pocketsmith for simple cashflow forecasting. I use Moneycenter for more complex tracking.
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Value of credit score if you never plan to borrow again?
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According to Money Girl, home insurance premiums are higher if you have a poor credit score. You might self-insure though if you are wealthy.
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How is my employer affected if I have expensive claims on my group health insurance?
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Many big companies self insure. They pay the insurance company to manage the claims, and to have access to their network of doctors, hospitals, specialists, and pharmacies; but cover the costs on a shared basis with the employees. Medium sized companies use one of the standard group policies. Small companies either have expensive policies because they are a small group, or they have to join with other small companies through an association to create a larger group. The bigger the group the less impact each individual person has on the group cost. The insurance companies reprice their policies each year based on the expected demographics of the groups, the negotiated rates with the network of providers, the required level of coverage, and the actual usage of the group from the previo year.. If the insurance company does a poor job of estimating the performance of the group, it hits their profits; which will cause them to raise their rates the next year which can impact the number of companies that use them. Some provisions of the new health care laws in the US govern portability of insurance regarding preexisting conditions, minimum coverage levels, and the elimination of many lifetime cap. Prior to these changes the switching of employers while very sick could have a devastating impact on the finances of the family. The lifetime cap could make it hard to cover the person if they had very expensive illnesses. If the illness doesn't impact your ability to work, there is no need to discuss it during the interview process. It won't need to be discussed except while coordinating care during the transition. There is one big issue though. If the old company uses Aetna, and the new company doesn't then you might have to switch doctors, or hospitals; or go out-of-network at a potentially even bigger cost to you.
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ISA - intra year profits and switching process
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You're overthinking it. The ISA limit applies to the amount you invest into the ISA. In your example, £10,000. Whether that then fluctuates with performance is irrelevant. Even if you realise aprofit or a loss, nobody is watching it. You merely count the amount you originally contributed into the ISA wrapper. When they add up to £15,000; that's the limit reached. (And by the way, remember that only money going into the ISA is counted. It doesn't matter if you -let's say - put £15k in, then remove 10k. You've reached the limit. You don't again have the chance to put £10k 'back in'.
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Debit card funds on preauthorization hold to paypal: can it be used for another transaction?
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Imagine the following scenario: You have a credit limit of $1000 and you want to by a tablet from a store. It costs $600. You then walk next door and buy a TV for $600. You would expect that you would go over your limit and the second transaction will be rejected. As long as that hold is in place, you don't have access to those blocked funds. That makes sure that you can't promise to pay more than you have funds on the card. Holds can get in the way if you are close to your credit limit. People run into this problem if they reserve a hotel room, rent a car, or purchase gasoline. The hold is set at a specific level to make sure you have enough funds for the typical transaction. This distance between vendors is not relevant. The bank is blocking funds based on a request from a vendor. They have to block the funds because you might use the multiple times in the same store. It is possible that the card company might release the hold based on the request by the vendor, but they generally don't. If this is a debit card linked to a bank account, the bank can have access to the overdraft system or a linked savings account. If is is a credit card they can decide to to increase your credit limit, and offer you what is essentially a loan. Plus they can hit you with fees. But if the card is a prepaid debit card or gift card they don't want to allow you to go beyond your limit. If this is a card that you plan on recharging, you could put extra funds on the card to allow both the old hold and the new hold to co-exist.
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How does the market adjust for fees in ETPs?
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Because ETFs, unlike most other pooled investments, can be easily shorted, it is possible for institutional investors to take an arbitrage position that is long the underlying securities and short the ETF. The result is that in a well functioning market (where ETF prices are what they should be) these institutional investors would earn a risk-free profit equal to the fee amount. How much is this amount, though? ETFs exist in a very competitive market. Not only do they compete with each other, but with index and mutual funds and with the possibility of constructing one's own portfolio of the underlying. ETF investors are very cost-conscious. As a result, ETF fees just barely cover their costs. Typically, ETF providers do not even do their own trading. They issue new shares only in exchange for a bundle of the underlying securities, so they have almost no costs. In order for an institutional investor to make money with the arbitrage you describe, they would need to be able to carry it out for less than the fees earned by the ETF. Unlike the ETF provider, these investors face borrowing and other shorting costs and limitations. As a result it is not profitable for them to attempt this. Note that even if they had no costs, their maximum upside would be a few basis points per year. Lots of low-risk investments do better than that. I'd also like to address your question about what would happen if there was an ETF with exorbitant fees. Two things about your suggested outcome are incorrect. If short sellers bid the price down significantly, then the shares would be cheap relative to their stream of future dividends and investors would again buy them. In a well-functioning market, you can't bid the price of something that clearly is backed by valuable underlying assets down to near zero, as you suggest in your question. Notice that there are limitations to short selling. The more shares are short-sold, the more difficult it is to locate share to borrow for this purpose. At first brokers start charging additional fees. As borrowable shares become harder to find, they require that you obtain a "locate," which takes time and costs money. Finally they will not allow you to short at all. Unlimited short selling is not possible. If there was an ETF that charged exorbitant fees, it would fail, but not because of short sellers. There is an even easier arbitrage strategy: Investors would buy the shares of the ETF (which would be cheaper than the value of the underlying because of the fees) and trade them back to the ETF provider in exchange for shares of the underlying. This would drain down the underlying asset pool until it was empty. In fact, it is this mechanism (the ability to trade ETF shares for shares of the underlying and vice versa) that keeps ETF prices fair (within a small tolerance) relative to the underlying indices.
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Need exit strategy for aging mother who owns aging rental properties, please
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I debated whether to put this in an answer or a comment, because I'm not sure that this can be answered usefully without a lot more information, which actually would then probably make it a candidate for closing as "too localized". At the very least we would need to know where (which jurisdiction) she is located in. So, speaking in a generic way, the options available as I see them are: Contact the mortgage companies and explain she can't continue to make payments. They will likely foreclose on the properties and if she still ends up owing money after that (if you are in the US this also depends on whether you are in a "non-recourse" state) then she could be declared bankrupt. This is rather the "nuclear option" and definitely not something to be undertaken lightly, but would at least wipe the slate clean and give her some degree of certainty about her situation. Look very carefully at the portfolio of properties and get some proper valuations done on them (depending on where she is located this may be free). Also do a careful analysis of the property sales and rental markets, to see whether property prices / rental rates are going up or down. Then decide on an individual basis whether each property is better kept or sold. You may be able to get discounts on fees if you sell multiple properties in one transaction. This option would require some cold hard analysis and decision making without letting yourselves get emotionally invested in the situation (difficult, I know). Depending on how long she has had the properties for and how she came to own them, it MIGHT be an option to pursue action against whoever advised her to acquire them. Clearly a large portfolio of decaying rental properties is not a suitable investment for a relatively elderly lady and if she only came by them relatively recently, on advice from an investment consultant or similar, you might have some redress there. Another option: could she live in one of the properties herself to reduce costs? If she owns her own home as well then she could sell that, live in the one of the rentals and use the money saved to finance the sale of the other rentals. Aside from these thoughts, one final piece of advice: don't get your own finances tangled up in hers (so don't take out a mortgage against your own property, for example). Obviously if you have the leeway to help her out of your budget then that is great, but I would restrict that to doing things like paying for grocery shopping or whatever. If she is heading for bankruptcy or other financial difficulties, it won't help if you are entangled too.
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Where can I borrow money for investing?
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Have you considered social lending (for example: Lending Club)?
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What size “nest egg” should my husband and I have, and by what age?
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For most people, a million dollars is about right. Here's the back of the napkin math that you should consider to find your own estimate: If you take 1 and divide it by 2, that's roughly the size of the nest egg you'll need to live indefinitely. For example, if your retirement investments are earning 5% a year, and you want to live on $50,000 a year, you would need a $1,000,000 nest egg (50,000 / 0.05) Note that you don't have to make any assumptions about how long you'll live. The whole idea of a nest egg is that you live off the interest it earns each year without ever dipping into the principle. It's the gift that keeps on giving! When you die, you can pass it along to children, charities, etc.
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Consumer Loans vs Mortgages
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Here's a good definition of a consumer loan: What is a Consumer Loan? As@Pete B. pointed out, there are some states (California loves to be the oddball, doesn't it?) that treat some loans in a more unconventional manner, but the gist of it is that a consumer loan is normally unsecured, meaning there's no collateral or lien associated with it. A signature loan would be a good example of a consumer loan. Many times, loans made by non-banks (finance companies that loan for consumer purchases, for instance) would be considered to be consumer loans. I hope this helps. Good luck!
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What forms of payment am I compelled to accept?
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I think cash, travelers checks (little iffy about this one: they're legal tender cash equivalents), and money orders are the only ones that you'd be a little weird to not accept. You certainly don't have to accept regular checks, credit cards, or barter. In the end though, you don't HAVE to accept anything. Accept only small bills, accept only checks from certain banks, accept only the diners card. Your sale, your rules.
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How can you possibly lose on investments in stocks?
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Easiest thing ever. In fact, 99% of people are loosing money. If you perform worse then 10% annually in cash (average over 5-10 years), then you better never even think about trading/investing. Most people are sitting at 0%..-5% annually. They win some, loose some, and are being outrun by inflation and commissions. In fact, fall of market is not a big deal, stock indexes are often jump back in a few months. If you rebalance properly, it is mitigated. Your much bigger enemy is inflation. If you think inflation is small, look at gold price over past 20 years. Some people, Winners at first, grow to +10%, get too relaxed and start to grow already lost position. That one loose trade eats 10% of their portfolio. Only there that people realize they should cut it off, when they already lost their profits. And they start again with +0%. This is hard thing to accept, but most of people are not made for that type of business. Even worse, they think "if I had bigger budget, I would perform better", which is kind of self-lie.
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Reinvesting dividends and capital gains
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No, the reinvestment is done as a courtesy. Consider, one can have, say, 100 shares of a $50 stock. A 2% dividend is $100/yr or $25/quarter. It would be a pretty bad deal if brokers charged you even $5 for that trade. When cap gains and dividends are grouped as you suggest, it refers to Mutual Funds. My funds will have a year end dividend and cap gain distribution. In a non-retirement account, one has to pay the tax due, and be sure to add this to your cost basis, as it's money you are effectively adding to your account. It does not mean cap gain the same as when you sell your shares of Apple for a huge gain. Those check boxes seem to offer you a chance to put all your holding on the same reinvestment plan for div/cap gain. You should also be able to choose one by one what you'd like to do.
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which types of investments should be choosen for 401k at early 20's?
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If you don't want to pay much attention to your investments, target date funds -- assuming you find one (like Vanguard's) with no management fees beyond those acquired from the underlying funds -- are usually a great choice: when the target date is far off, they invest almost entirely (usually 90% or so) in (mutual funds that in turn consist of many) stocks, with the remainder in bonds; as the date gets closer, the mix is automatically shifted to more bonds and less stocks (i.e. less risk, but less potential return too).
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Trouble sticking to a budget when using credit cards for day to day transactions?
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You can fairly simply make a spreadsheet in your favorite spreadsheet application (or in Google Docs if you want portability). I like to make an overview page that shows how much I take in per month and what fixed bills come out of that, then break the remaining total into four to get a weekly budget. Then, I make one page per month with four columns (one per week), with each row being a category. Sum the categories at the bottom, and subtract from your weekly total: voila, a quick reference of how much you can spend that week without going over budget. I then make a page for each month that lists what I bought and how much I spent on it, so I can trace where my money's gone; the category total is just a summation of the items from that page that belong in that category. Once you have a system, stop checking your bank balance except to ensure your paycheck is going in alright. Use the spreadsheet to determine how much you can spend at any time. Then make sure you pay off everything on the card before the end of the month so you don't incur interest.
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Why haven't there been personal finance apps or softwares that use regression modeling or A.I.?
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What would they be trying to predict? The value YNAB and Mint provide is objective truth about what you've spent. They can force you to think about the tradeoffs inherent in budgeting by showing that you've overspent one category, and making you decide where to find the money to cover it. They can call your attention to a credit card swipe that's larger than you intended, to a subscription you didn't intend to keep, etc. by just generally getting you to read and think about your transaction history and the sums of transactions per category and overall. Prediction doesn't really enter into it. One way to understand Mint's business model is as a service that collects training data for machine learning models that do try to predict things, such as how stock prices will move or whether users will click on certain ads.
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Why is gold not a good investment?
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I think what the person meant to say is that Gold is not a one stop solution. There's nothing wrong with having Gold in an otherwise diversified portfolio but you need to be aware about the potential downsides: The problem with gold is that its value nowadays depends mainly on investor confidence, or the lack of it (actual demand for gold cannot explain the rise in value gold had after the crisis). If people are afraid the world and currencies with it will go to hell, the gold price will go up. Why? Because if currencies seize to exist, Gold will still be accepted. It can replace currencies. What many people tend to forget: let's consider the extreme example and currencies really cease to exist and all hell breaks lose. What good are gold bars at the bank, or even at home, for that matter? You'll be better off with gold coins to use in barter and to pay off marauders. But that's not about investing anymore, that's survivalism.
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Finance options for a new furnace.
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You walk into the finance company with a written quote from the supplier for the equipment you want to buy. You then fill out forms and sign a promissory note. The finance company then writes out a check to the supplier for the amount of the quoted equipment. Usually you need to provide at least 3 things: They will require you to provide your social security number and sign a document allowing them to check your credit history which they will look up using the social security number. Note that banks will generally give better rates on a personal loan than a finance company. People usually only use finance companies when their credit is so bad that a bank will not loan them money. Heating and cooling companies that provide equipment will often loan the money to buy that equipment. As a point of advice, it is generally poor financial management to take out personal loans and may indicate a person that is wasting money or be in financial difficulties. For personal loan items (furniture, cars, clothing, jewelry, etc) you are far better off saving money to buy the item, not borrowing beyond your means. If you need a new furnace and it is an emergency, for example, if it were winter (which it is not) and your furnace could not be repaired, then that might justifiable. But borrowing money at a high rate to just upgrade a furnace or get a luxury like AC is unwise.
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Payroll question
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Ask the company if they can make an adjustment for the next paycheck. If they can't then do the following: Increase the number of Federal exemptions by 1. In 2014 a personal exemption reduces your apparent income by $3950. If you are in the 10 % tax bracket and you are paid every two weeks you will see the amount of taxes withheld drop by ($3950*0.10/26) or ~$15. The 13 Paychecks later change it back. If you are in the 15 % tax bracket and you are paid every two weeks you will see the amount of taxes withheld drop by ($3950*0.15/26) or ~$23. Then 9 Paychecks later change it back If you are in the 25 % tax bracket and you are paid every two weeks you will see the amount of taxes withheld drop by ($3950*0.10/26) or ~$38. Then 5 paychecks later change it back. Remember the money isn't gone, it has just been transferred prematurely to the federal treasury. You could also wait until you complete your taxes this spring, then see if you needed to make an adjustment to your exemptions. If you normally get a large refund then you should be increasing your exemptions anyway. If you are always writing a check to the IRS then you weren't getting enough withheld. Also make sure that payroll has the correct numbers. Most companies include the number of federal and state exemptions on the paycheck stub, or the pdf of the stub.
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Should I close unused credit cards before applying for another?
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If you're looking for cause-effect, applying for another card won't matter at all if you're not paying any interest, or not looking to get another installment loan for which the rate you get depends on your credit rating. If you are looking to get another installment loan, then having more credit at your disposal might hurt a small amount. I wouldn't want to cancel your oldest card. The GEMB card looks like a good candidate if you want to cancel because you're not using it, and it's a relatively new card.
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How can I have credit cards without having a credit history or credit score?
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For instance and to give a comparison to the US - in Austria, almost everybody gets a credit card (without a credit history (e.g. a young person) / with a bad credit history & with a good credit history). The credit history is in the USA much more important than in Austria. In future, the way to assess a credit history will change due to analysis of social networks for instance. This can be considered in addition to traditional scoring procedures. Is your credit history/score like a criminal record? Nope. I mean is it always with you? Not really cause a criminal record will be retained on a central storage (to state it abstract) and a credit history can be calculated by private companies. Also, are there other ways to get credit cards besides with a bank? That depends on the country. In Austria, yes.
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Is it better to ask for a raise before a spin-off / merger or after?
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Corporate restructuring makes everything a flux, so you might as well revisit some core fundamental questions. Here's how to do this professionally: Start floating your CV now. Line up interviews in competing companies. Attend to them. Score a job offer, and have it put into writing, with exact salary, which should be at least 10%++ of your current one. Take a clear empty page, and write on top: "Business value provided". Put down your major contributions, and achievements. Wherever possible, put the company's expected dollar value near to it. For bonus points, sum it up on the bottom, and minus your current salary. Difference is "Profit provided directly to the company's bottom line". Float this to your manager's desk. At this position, you have only one fundamental question to your boss: "match or pass?" :) A corporate spin-off is a good time to do this: 1, to ensure, that your position will not be made redundant; 2, if it is, you have a backup plan. If the parent company's "getting rid of you", however, there are even more fundamental questions you might want to ask yourself: is this really a profitable division, or merely a loss leader? Does this company have a future, and the adequate growing options for you, personally? To answer these questions, you must have an opportunity cost estimation; and for that, you must have second (and preferably, third) options -hence, the strategy above. To conclude, the best time to do your job research is every other month; and the best time to ask for a raise is always now :) Good luck!
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What drives the value of a stock? [duplicate]
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For XOM if you were lucky enough to purchase on 20 Jan 16, at 73.18/share and sold on 15 July at 94.95 you would achieve a 29% return in six months. Awesome. You'd also get a dividend payment or two adding another percentage point per to your returns. The one year chart for FB shows it increasing from ~95/share to ~129. Yet no dividend was paid. However, the 35.7% YTD for 2016 should make anyone happy. Both of these require excellent timing, and those kind of returns are unsustainable over the long haul. Many people simply hold stocks. Having the dividend is a nice bonus to some growth. Why to people buy stocks? For profit. Sometimes dividend payers offer the best option, sometimes not.
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Is there any reason to choose my bank's index fund over Vanguard?
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Basically, no. Selecting an actively managed fund over a low-fee index fund means paying for the opportunity to possibly outperform the index fund. A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel argues that the best general strategy for the average investor is to select the index fund because the fee savings are certain. Assuming a random walk means that any mutual fund may outperform the index in some years, but this is not an indication that it will overall. Unless you have special information about the effectiveness of the bank fund management (it's run by the next Warren Buffett), you are better off in the index fund. And even Warren Buffett suggests you are probably better off in the index fund: This year, regarding Wall Street, Buffett wrote: “When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. Both large and small investors should stick with low-cost index funds.”
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Should I sell my stocks to reduce my debt?
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Simply put, the interest you're paying on your loans is eating into any gains you have in the stock market. So, figure out how much you're paying in interest and consider the feasibility of paying off some of the loan. Also figure in if you would be selling the stock at a profit or a loss. Generally speaking, a home loan is typically long-term, with a high principal. I believe the consensus is that it is typically not worth paying down extra on it. A car loan, though, is much shorter term, with a lower principal. It may be worth it to pay that down. I would certainly consider paying down the loan with 10% interest, even without running any numbers. What about doing this without selling stock? The reason I suggest that is that you should not sell the stock unless you truly need the money or for some material reason(s) related to the company, the market, etc. (Of course, one other reason would be to cut losses.) Unless I was looking to sell some stock anyway, I would try other ways to come up with the money to pay down the highest interest loan, at least. If you are thinking of selling stock to pay down debt, definitely run the numbers.
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Are investor's preference for dividends justified?
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This question is predicated on the assumption that investors prefer dividends, as this depends on who you're speaking to. Some investors prefer growth stocks (some which don't pay dividends), so in this case, we're covering the percent of investors who like dividend paying stocks. It depends on who you ask and it also depends on how self-aware they are because some people may give reasons that make little financial sense. The two major benefits that I hear are fundamentally psychological: Dividends are like mini-paychecks. Since people get a dopamine jolt from receiving a paycheck, I would predict the same holds true for receiving dividends. More than likely, the brain feels a reward when getting dividends; even if the dividend stock performs lower than a growth stock for a decade, the experience of receiving dividends may feel more rewarding (plus, depending on the institution, they may get a report or see the tax information for the year, and that also feels good). Some value investors don't reinvest dividends, as they believe the price of the stock matters (stocks are either cheap or expensive and automatic reinvestment to these investors implies that the price of a stock doesn't matter), so dividends allow them to rebuild their cash after a buy. They can either buy more shares, if the stock is cheap, or keep the cash if the stock is expensive. Think about Warren Buffett here: he purchased $3 billion worth of shares of Wells Fargo at approximately $8-12 a share in 2009 (from my memory, as people were shocked that be bought into a bank when no one liked banks). Consider how much money he makes from dividends off that purchase alone and if he were to currently believe Wells Fargo was overpriced, he could keep the cash and buy something else he believes is cheaper. In these cases, dividends automatically build cash cushions post buying and many value investors believe that one should always have cash on hand. This second point is a little tricky because it can involve risk assessment: some investors believe that high dividend paying stocks, like MO, won't experience the huge declines of indexes like the SPY. MO routed the SPY in 2009 (29% vs. 19%) and these investors believe that's because it's yield was too desired (it feels safer to them - the index side would argue "but what happens in the long run?"). The problem I have with this argument (which is frequent) is that it doesn't hold true for every high yield stock, though some high yield stocks do show strong resistance levels during bear markets.
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Are there contracts for fixed pay vs. fixed pay rates?
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Software Contractors are not employees of the company that is procuring the software. Software Contractors necessarily work for another legal business entity. There is a business to business relationship between the procurer of the software and the entity producing the software. Therefore, the company procuring the software is not required to pay a minimum wage, or adhere to any other employment law. When any individual or company orders a software product and agrees to pay for it, that is a fixed priced contract. This happens millions of times a day. The amount of time taken to produce the software has no direct bearing on price. For instance, there is no minimum price for Microsoft Word based on the number of hours taken to produce it. Generally a Software Contractor will be a director and shareholder of a limited liability corporation. Directors are exempt from the standard protection offered under employment law. If the company producing the software was employing non-directors to produce the software, rather than sub-contracting to another business then employment law would apply.
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What to make of historical stock market volatility?
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The first thing to realize is that the type of chart you saw is not appropriate for long-term comparisons. The vertical axis uses a linear scale, where each unit occupies the same amount of space. This is visually misleading because the relevant information at any point in the chart is "how much is the value going up or down?" and "how much" change depends on how much the value of the investment is at that moment. For example, if you buy something at $10 and the price changes $1, that is significant, 10%. If you buy something at $1000 and the price changes $1, that is not so significant, only 0.1%. The problem in that chart is that 100 Dow points occupy the same space whether the Dow is at 870 or 10800. To get a better feel for the volatility, you should use a log (logarithmic) scale. Google has an option for this. Using it shows: In this chart you can see that the volatility appears much less extreme in recent years. True, the 2006-2009 change is the largest drop, and there might be slightly higher volatility generally, but it is not nearly as extreme-looking. The drops in 1974 and 1987 can be seen to be significant.
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Whole life insurance - capped earnings
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Pretty simple: When is Cash Value Life Insurance a good or bad idea? It is never a good idea. How can life insurance possibly work as investment? It can't. Just as car, home, or health insurance is not an investment. Note for counter example providers: intent to commit insurance fraud is not an investment. Why not live your life so in 15 or 20 years you are debt free, have a nice emergency fund built and have a few 100 thousand in investments? Then you can self-insure. If you die with a paid off home, no debt, 20K in a money market, and 550,000 in retirement accounts would your spouse and children be taken care of?
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IRA contributions in a bear (bad) market: Should I build up cash savings instead?
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You have heard the old adage "Buy low, sell high", right? That sounds so obvious that you'd have to wonder why they would ever bother coining such an expression. It should rank up there with "Don't walk in front of a moving car" on the Duh scale of advice. Well, your question demonstrates exactly why it isn't quite so obvious in the real world and that people need to be reminded of it. So, in your example, the stock prices are currently low (relative to what they have been). So per that adage, do you sell or buy when prices are low? Hint: It isn't sell. Yes. Your gut is going to tell you the exact opposite thanks to the fact that our brains are unfortunately wired to make us susceptible to the loss aversion fallacy. When the market has undergone a big drop is the WORST time to stop contributing (buying stocks). This example might help get your brain and gut to agree a little more easily: If you were talking about any other non-investment commodity, cars for instance. Your question equates to.. I really need a car, but the prices have been dropping like crazy lately. Maybe I should wait until the car dealers start raising their prices again before I buy one. Dollar Cost Averaging As littleadv suggested, if you have an automatic payroll deduction for your retirement account, you are getting the benefit of Dollar Cost Averaging. Because you are investing the same amount on a scheduled interval, you are buying more shares when they are cheap and fewer when they are expensive. It is like an automatic buy low strategy is built into the account. The alternative, which you are implying, is a market timing strategy. Under this strategy, instead of investing regularly you try to get in and out of investments right before they go up/drop. There are two MAJOR flaws with this approach: 1) Your brain will work against you (see above) and encourage you to do the exact opposite of what you should be doing. 2) Unless you are clairvoyant, this strategy isn't much better than gambling. If you are lucky it can work, but because of #1, the odds are stacked against you.
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How can I legally and efficiently help my girlfriend build equity by helping with a mortgage?
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I'm looking for something simple, legal, reasonably formal, easy to setup and tax efficient. You just described marriage. Get married.
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How to check the paypal's current exchange rate?
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I cannot speak for Paypal specifically and I doubt anyone who doesn't actually work on their internal automated payment systems could. However, I can speak from experiencing in working on automated forex transaction systems and tell you what many institutions do and it is often NOT based on live rates. There is no law stating an institution must honor a specific market exchange rate. Institutions can determine their own rates how and when they want to. However, there is some useful information on their website: https://www.paypal.com/an/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/sell/mc/mc_convert-outside "The most readily available information on currency exchange rates is based on interbank exchange rates. Interbank exchange rates are established in the course of currency trading among a global network of over 1,000 banks, and are not available through consumer or retail channels." This leads me to believe they pull exchange rates from either Oanda or XE periodically and then use these rates throughout the day to conduct business. Paypal does not disclose who they use to determine rates. And it's highly doubtful they do this for every transaction (using live rates). Even if they did, there would be no way for you to check and be certain of a particular exchange rate as paypal states: " Consumers may use these rates as a reference, but should not expect to use interbank rates in transactions that involve currency conversion. To obtain actual retail rates, contact your local financial institution or currency exchange, or check the rate displayed in your PayPal transaction." This is partly because rates can change by the second just like stock prices or anything else which is susceptible to the open market's variables of supply, demand news events etc. So, even if you check the rates on Oanda (which you can do here: http://www.oanda.com/currency/converter/) you are not going to get a 100% accurate representation of what you would get by doing an exchange immediately afterwards from Paypal or any other financial institution. However, if you want to estimate, using Oanda's currency converter will likely get you close in most scenarios. That is assuming Paypal doesn't charge a premium for the exchange, which they may. That is also assuming they use live rates, it's also possible they only update their rates based on market rates periodically and not for every transaction. You may want to test this by checking the exchange rate on your transaction and comparing that to the Oanda rates at the same time.
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What does a well diversified self-managed investment portfolio look like?
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I would like to first point out that there is nothing special about a self-managed investment portfolio as compared to one managed by someone else. With some exceptions, you can put together exactly the same investment portfolio yourself as a professional investor could put together for you. Not uncommonly, too, at a lower cost (and remember that cost is among the, if not the, best indicator(s) of how your investment portfolio will perform over time). Diversification is the concept of not "putting all your eggs in one basket". The idea here is that there are things that happen together because they have a common cause, and by spreading your investments in ways such that not all of your investments have the same underlying risks, you reduce your overall risk. The technical term for risk is generally volatility, meaning how much (in this case the price of) something fluctuates over a given period of time. A stock that falls 30% one month and then climbs 40% the next month is more volatile than one that falls 3% the first month and climbs 4% the second month. The former is riskier because if for some reason you need to sell when it is down, you lose a larger portion of your original investment with the former stock than with the latter. Diversification, thus, is reducing commonality between your investments, generally but not necessarily in an attempt to reduce the risk of all investments moving in the same direction by the same amount at the same time. You can diversify in various ways: Do you see where I am going with this? A well-diversed portfolio will tend to have a mix of equity in your own country and a variety of other countries, spread out over different types of equity (company stock, corporate bonds, government bonds, ...), in different sectors of the economy, in countries with differing growth patterns. It may contain uncommon classes of investments such as precious metals. A poorly diversified portfolio will likely be restricted to either some particular geographical area, type of equity or investment, focus on some particular sector of the economy (such as medicine or vehicle manufacturers), or so on. The poorly diversified portfolio can do better in the short term, if you time it just right and happen to pick exactly the right thing to buy or sell. This is incredibly hard to do, as you are basically working against everyone who gets paid to do that kind of work full time, plus computer-algorithm-based trading which is programmed to look for any exploitable patterns. It is virtually impossible to do for any real length of time. Thus, the well-diversified portfolio tends to do better over time.
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Will there always be somebody selling/buying in every stock?
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Will there be a scenario in which I want to sell, but nobody wants to buy from me and I'm stuck at the brokerage website? Similarly, if nobody wants to sell their stocks, I will not be able to buy at all? Yes, that is entirely possible.
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How to calculate my estimated taxes. 1099 MISC + Self Employment
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There are a couple of things that are missing from your estimate. In addition to your standard deduction, you also have a personal exemption of $4050. So "D" in your calculation should be $6300 + $4050 = $10,350. As a self-employed individual, you need to pay both the employee and employer side of the Social Security and Medicare taxes. Instead of 6.2% + 1.45%, you need to pay (6.2% + 1.45%) * 2 = 15.3% self-employment tax. In addition, there are some problems with your calculation. Q1i (Quarter 1 estimated income) should be your adjusted annual income divided by 4, not 3 (A/4). Likewise, you should estimate your quarterly tax by estimating your income for the whole year, then dividing by 4. So Aft (Annual estimated federal tax) should be: Quarterly estimated federal tax would be: Qft = Aft / 4 Annual estimated self-employment tax is: Ase = 15.3% * A with the quarterly self-employment tax being one-fourth of that: Qse = Ase / 4 Self employment tax gets added on to your federal income tax. So when you send in your quarterly payment using Form 1040-ES, you should send in Qft + Qse. The Form 1040-ES instructions (PDF) comes with the "2016 Estimated Tax Worksheet" that walks you through these calculations.
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How are RSU's factored into Income during loan qualification?
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Long ago when I was applying for my first mortgage I had to list all my income and assets. At the time I had some US Savings Bonds from payroll deduction. I asked about them. The loan officer told me that unless I was willing/planning on selling them to make the down payment, they were immaterial to the loan application. So unless you have a habit of turning RSUs into cash, or are willing to do so for the down payment, it is no different from having money in a 401K or IRA: the restrictions on selling them make them illiquid.
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What is the effect of a cancelled stock order on a stock and the market?
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That article, like almost any article written by a non-expert and quoting only "research" from lobbying groups, hugely misses the point. The vast majority of orders that end up being cancelled are cancelled as a standard part of exchanges' official market-maker programs. Each exchange wants you and me to know that it has liquidity -- that when we go to buy or sell some stock, there will be someone waiting on the other side of the trade. So the exchange pays (via lowered fees or even rebates) hundreds of registered market makers to constantly have orders resting in each product's order book within a few ticks of the current NBBO or the last trade price. That way, if everyone else should suddenly disappear from the market, you and I will still be able to trade our shares for a price somewhat close to the last trade price. But market makers who are simply acting in this "backstop" role don't actually want to have their orders filled, because those orders will almost always lose them money. So as prices rise and fall (as much as tens of times per second), the market makers need to cancel their resting orders (so they don't get filled) and add new ones at new prices (so they meet their obligations to the exchange). And because the number of orders resting in any given product's order book is vastly larger than the number of actual trades that take place in any given time period, naturally the number of cancellations is also going to hugely outweigh the number of actual trades. As much as 97% to 3% (or even more). But that's completely fine! You and I don't have to care about any of that. We almost never need the market makers to be there to trade with us. They're only there as a backstop. There's almost always plenty of organic liquidity for us to trade against. Only in the rare case where liquidity completely dries up do we really care that the registered market makers are there. And in those cases (ideally) the market makers can't cancel their orders (depending on how well the exchange has set up its market maker program). So, to answer your question, the effect of standard order cancellation on a stock is essentially none. If you were to visualize the resting orders in a product's book as prices moved up and down, you would essentially see a Gaussian distribution with mean at the last trade price, and it would move up and down with the price. That "movement" is accomplished by cancellations followed by new orders. P.S. As always, keep in mind that your and my orders almost never actually make it to a real stock exchange anymore. Nowadays they are almost always sent to brokers' and big banks' internal dark pools. And in there you and I have no idea what shenanigans are going on. As just one example, dark pools allow their operators and (for a fee) other institutional participants access to a feature called last look that allows them to cancel their resting order as late as after your order has been matched against it! :( Regarding the question in your comment ... If Alice is sending only bona fide orders (that is, only placing an order at time T if, given all the information she has at time T, she truly wants and intends for it to be filled) then her cancellation at a later time actually adds to the effectiveness of and public perception of the market as a tool for price discovery (which is its ultimate purpose). [In the following example imagine that there are no such things as trading fees or commissions or taxes.] Let's say Alice offers to buy AAPL at $99.99 when the rest of the market is trading it for $100.00. By doing so she is casting her vote that the "fair value" of a share of AAPL is between $99.99 and $100.00. After all, if she thought the fair value of a share of AAPL was higher -- say, between $100.00 and $100.01 -- then she should be willing to pay $100.00 (because that's below fair value) and she should expect that other people in the market will not soon decide to sell to her at $99.99. If some time later Alice does decide that the fair value of AAPL is between $100.00 and $100.01 then she should definitely cancel her order at $99.99, for exactly the reason discussed above. She probably won't get filled at $99.99, and by sitting there stubbornly she's missing out (potentially forever) on the possibility to make a profit. Through the simple act of cancelling her $99.99 order, Alice is once again casting a vote that she no longer thinks that's AAPL's fair value. She is (very slightly) altering the collective opinion of the entire market as to what a share of AAPL is worth. And if her cancellation then frees her up to place another order closer to her perceived fair value (say, at $100.00), then that's another vote for her honest optinion about AAPL's price. Since the whole goal of the market is to get a bunch of particpants to figure out the fair value of some financial instrument (or commodity, or smart phone, or advertising time, etc.), cancellations of honest votes from the past in order to replace them with new, better-informed honest votes in the present can only be a good thing for the market's effectiveness and perceived effectiveness. It's only when participants start sending non-honest votes (non bona fide orders) that things start to go off the rails. That's what @DumbCoder was referring to in his comment on your original question.
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Why do people always talk about stocks that pay high dividends?
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If you assume the market is always 100% rational and accurate and liquid, then it doesn't matter very much if a company pays dividends, other than how dividends are taxed vs. capital gains. (If the market is 100% accurate and liquid, it also doesn't really matter what stock you buy, since they are all fairly priced, other than that you want the stock to match your risk tolerance). However, if you manage to find an undervalued company (which, as an investor, is what you are trying to do), your investment skill won't pay off much until enough other people notice the company's value, which might take a long time, and you might end up wanting to sell before it happens. But if the company pays dividends, you can, slowly, get value from your investment no matter what the market thinks. (Of course, if it's really undervalued then you would often, but not always, want to buy more of it anyway). Also, companies must constantly decide whether to reinvest the money in themselves or pay out dividends to owners. As an owner, there are some cases in which you would prefer the company invest in itself, because you think they can do better with it then you can. However, there is a decided tendency for C level employees to be more optimistic in this regard than their owners (perhaps because even sub-market quality investments expand the empires of the executives, even when they hurt the owners). Paying dividends is thus sometimes a sign that a company no longer has capital requirements intense enough that it makes sense to re-invest all of its profits (though having that much opportunity can be a good thing, sometimes), and/or a sign that it is willing, to some degree, to favor paying its owners over expanding the business. As a current or prospective owner, that can be desirable. It's also worth mentioning that, since stocks paying dividends are likely not in the middle of a fast growth phase and are producing profit in excess of their capital needs, they are likely slower growth and lower risk as a class than companies without dividends. This puts them in a particular place on the risk/reward spectrum, so some investors may prefer dividend paying stocks because they match their risk profile.
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Credit card grace period for pay, wait 1 day, charge?
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If I understand you correctly, no you shouldn't be charged interest. Lets say you have a billing cycle of monthly (which usually isn't true). You charge $XX per day, ending up at $1000 at the end of January. So February 1st, your bill for your January billing cycle is $1000, due by Feb 15th (lets say). On February 1st, you continue to charge $XX per day. You go to pay your bill online on Feb 14th (to be safe), and you'll usually see on your credit card website something like: You'd hit "Pay my bill", and you'd usually see these options: At the date your cycle was due (Feb 15th), if you haven't paid your full latest statement (lets say you paid $500), they will charge you interest on the entire balance for the period (so interest on $1000, or lets say $50). The other $500 will roll over to the next month, so your next month you'd be somewhere near a $1550 bill.
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Home Renovations are expensive.. Should I only pay cash for them?
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I know that both Lowes and Home Depot (in Canada at least) will offer a 6 month deferred interest payment on all purchases over a certain dollar amount (IIRC, $500+), and sometimes run product specific 1 year deferred interest specials. This is a very effective way of financing renovations. Details: You've probably seen deferred interest -- It's very commonly used in furniture sales (No money down!!! No interest!!! Do not pay for 1 full year!!!) (Personally, I think it's a plot by the exclamation point manufacturers) It works like this: Typically, I manage these types of purchases by dividing the principal by 6, and then adding 5%, and paying that amount each month. Pay close attention to the end date, because you do not want to pay 22% interest on the entire amount. This also requires that you watch your card balance carefully. All payments are usually put to current purchases (i.e. those not under a plan) first, before they are applied to the plan balance. So if you are paying 250 a month on the new floor, and run up another $150 on paint, You need to pay the entire new balance, and then the $250 floor payment in order for it to be applied correctly. Also <shameless plug> http://diy.stackexchange.com </shameless plug> Consider doing it yourself.
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Do you know of any online monetary systems?
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Congratulations! You see the problem. You can't get away from unstable currencies. The other problem is that the US will shut down anything that appears to be providing a replacement for the US Dollar. Once a token or medallion or gift certificate or whatever starts being used outside the confines of one business or one network of businesses, it will be shut down, quickly. It happened with Las Vegas gambling tokens. Another more recent attempt was with the Liberty Dollar, gold and silver coins and certificates that not only had precious metal backing, but whose proponents encouraged taking them to retailers and paying with them as if they were US Dollars. There were other problems with this idea, but it was the competitive stature of the Liberty dollar that got the headquarters raided and the main site shut down. Basically, all signs point toward dealing with currencies and their state of being systematically eroded over time. If you do find one that appears to exist, be wary, because the rules can change at any time, and the "money" will be nowhere near as liquid as a proper currency.
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Credit Card Points from Refund
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That transaction probably cost the merchant $0.50 + 3% or close to $5. They should have refunded your credit card so they could have recouped some of the fees. (I imagine that's why big-box retailers like Home Depot always prefer to put it back on your card than give you store credit) Consider yourself lucky you made out with $0.15 this time. (Had they refunded your card, the 1% of $150 credit would have gone against next month's reward) Once upon a time folks were buying money from the US Mint by the tens of thousands $ range and receiving credit card rewards, then depositing the money to pay it off.. They figured that out and put a stop to it.
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Do I need to own all the funds my target-date funds owns to mimic it?
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Over time, fees are a killer. The $65k is a lot of money, of course, but I'd like to know the fees involved. Are you doubling from 1 to 2%? if so, I'd rethink this. Diversification adds value, I agree, but 2%/yr? A very low cost S&P fund will be about .10%, others may go a bit higher. There's little magic in creating the target allocation, no two companies are going to be exactly the same, just in the general ballpark. I'd encourage you to get an idea of what makes sense, and go DIY. I agree 2% slices of some sectors don't add much, don't get carried away with this.
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Are 'no interest if paid in in x months' credit cards worth it?
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It has been reported in consumer media (for example Clark Howard's radio program) that the "no interest for 12 months" contracts could trick you with the terms and the dates on the contract. Just as an example: You borrow $1000 on 12/1/2013, same as cash for 12 months. The contract will state the due date very clearly as 12/1/2014. BUT they statements you get will take payment on the 15th of each month. So you will dutifully pay your statements as they come in, but when you pay the final statement on 12/15/2014, you are actually 14 days late, have violated the terms, and you now owe all the interest that accumulated (and it wasn't a favorable rate). That doesn't happen all the time. Not all contracts are written that way. But you better read your agreement. Some companies use the same as cash deal because they want to move product. Some do it because they want to trick you with financing. Bottom line is, you better read the contract.
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Where should I invest to hedge against the stock market going down?
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If you were certain you would probably do best by short selling an ETF that tracked the index for the market you think was about to tank. You'd certainly make a lot more money on that strategy than precious metals. If you were feeling super confident and want to make your money earn even more, you could also buy a bunch of put options on those same ETF funds. Obligatory Warning: Short selling and options can be extremely risky. While most investments cap your potential losses to your total investment, a short sale has no theoretical limit to the amount of money you can lose.
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Given a certain yearly savings, how much can I spend on a capital improvement? NPV of future cash flow
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This investment does not have a payback period as the net present value of your investment is negative. Your investment requires an initial cash outlay of $40,000 followed by annual savings of $2060 for the next 20 years. Your discount rate is 5% at which the NPV is $-14327.85 as calculated below by using this JavaScript financial functions library tadJS that is based on a popular tadXL add-in for Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013.
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What is a Student Loan and does it allow you to cover a wide range of expenses relating to school?
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Short answer: student loans are loans given to people that are currently enrolled in school and yes, you can use them for personal expenses. Long answer: be very careful because you can easily be financially ruined if you borrow too much and can't repay it quickly. Once the loans get beyond a certain size relative to your income, you can find it hard to stay ahead of the interest payments let alone actually pay off the principal. These are the facts you need to know:
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Saving tax for long term stock investment capital gain by quiting my current job?
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Reducing your income by 20k is guaranteed to lower your tax bill by less than 20k (because there are no tax rates greater than 100%). Your goal shouldn't be to minimize taxes but to maximize total net income.
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What does it mean for a normal citizen like me when my country's dollar value goes down?
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One more effect that's not yet been mentioned is that companies based in Australia and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, but which do most of their business overseas, will increase their earnings in AU$, since most of what they earn will be in foreign currencies. So their shares are likely to appreciate (in AU$).
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Are you preparing for a possible dollar (USD) collapse? (How?)
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I am not preparing for a sudden, major, catastrophic collapse in the US dollar. I am, however, preparing for a significant but gradual erosion of its value through inflation over the space of several years to a decade. To that end, I've invested most of my assets in the stock market (roughly 80%) through major world index funds, and limited my bond exposure (maintaining a small stake in commodity ETFs: gold, silver, platinum and palladium) due to both inflation risk and the inevitability of rising interest rates. I don't think most companies mind overmuch if the dollar falls gradually, as the bulk of their value is in their continuing income stream, not in a dollar-denominated bank account. I also try to keep what I can in tax-deferred accounts: If, after several years, your stocks were up 100% but inflation reduced the dollar's value by 50%, you're still stuck paying taxes on the entire gain, even though it was meaningless. I'm also anticipating tax hikes at some point (though not as a result of the dollar falling). It helps that I'm young and can stand a lot of investment risk.
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Shorting Obvious Pump and Dump Penny Stocks
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Assuming you have no non-public material information, it should be perfectly legal. I suspect it's not a great idea for the reasons that Joe outlined, but it should be legal.
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How to read Google Finance data on dividends
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However, you have to remember that not all dividends are paid quarterly. For example one stock I recently purchased has a price of $8.03 and the Div/yield = 0.08/11.9 . $.08 * 4 = $0.32 which is only 3.9% (But this stock pays monthly dividends). $.08 * 12 = $0.96 which is 11.9 %. So over the course of a year assuming the stock price and the dividends didn't change you would make 11.9%
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Pros/Cons of Buying Discounted Company Stock
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Assuming US. The only con that I know of is that hassle factor. You have to remember to sell when you get the new shares, and your taxes become a bit more complicated; the discount that you receive is taxed as ordinary income, and then any change in the price of the stock between when you receive it and you sell it will be considered a capital gain or loss. It's not hard to account for properly if you keep good records.
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What kinds of information do financial workers typically check on a daily basis?
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Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance would be a couple of sites you could use to look at rather broad market information. This would include the major US stock markets like the Dow, Nasdaq, S & P 500 though also bond yields, gold and oil can also be useful as depending on which area one works the specifics of what are important could vary. If you were working at a well-known bond firm, I'd suspect that various bond benchmarks are likely to be known and watched rather than stock indices. Something else to consider here is what constitutes a "finance practitioner" as I'd imagine several accountants and actuaries may not watch the market yet there could be several software developers working at hedge funds that do so that it isn't just a case of what kind of work but also what does the company do.
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Is insurance worth it if you can afford to replace the item? If not, when is it?
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Generically, like farnsy noted in the other answer, you will only come ahead in dollar terms when you are significantly riskier than the average insuree. Otherwise the insurance company would have higher rates to make a profit. In the case of Apple Care there can arguably be other factors involved. If you did not insure your $2000 laptop and it broke (unfixably) just after the warranty period, would you replace it with a new Apple product? Maybe not, so Apple could lose a customer. That means they have an incentive to keep you happy. If your product breaks but insurance replaces it, you are a happier customer and more likely to buy other Apple products. This is not an incentive for traditional insurance companies that only do business in insurance. Now, with the profit margins Apple likes in general, I don't know if they've underpriced their insurance. I sort of doubt it even. But their margins on it are probably not high, meaning it's a closer call even if you are only averagely risky.
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Solid reading/literature for investment/retirement/income taxes?
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For the mechanices/terms of stock investing, I recommend Learn to Earn by Peter Lynch. I also like The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle. It explains why indexing is the best choice for most people. For stock picking, a good intro is The Little Book of Value Investing by Chris Brown. And then there is The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham. IMO, this is the bible of investing.
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Why do the 1 and 2 euro cent coins exist and why are they used?
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While dealing with US pennies and not 1 and 2 cent euro pieces, you may find this Wikipedia article of interest and analogous: Penny debate in the United States This article briefly summarizes both the arguments for and against retaining the one cent piece. The arguments against include: Arguments for preservation include: Already a number of countries have removed their equivalents of the one and two cent coins, including New Zealand, Sweden, Australia, Israel, and Brazil (to name a few).
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Pros/Cons of Buying Discounted Company Stock
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I see another way of looking at this that hasn't been addressed yet. By offering the discount, the company is attempting to change your behavior into doing something irrational, that benefits them at your expense. The company hopes for one (or more) of the following psychological effects to happen to you: The proper thing to do, if you have enough capital to prevent margin calls, it to short-sell the stock at the same instant the price is set, thus locking in the profit. Eventually you can take possession of the shares and deliver them to offset the short -- hopefully before you get a margin call from the stock dropping.
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Primary residence converted to a rental property & tax implications
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You will need to look at the 27.5 year depreciation table from the IRS. It tells you how you will be able to write off the first year. It depends on which month you had the unit ready to rent. Note that that it might be a different month from when you moved, or when the first tenant moved in. Your list is pretty good. You can also claim some travel expenses or mileage related to the unit. Also keep track of any other expenses such as switching the water bill to the new renter, or postage. If you use Turbo tax, not the least expensive version, it can be a big help to get started and to remember how much to depreciate each year.
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How do I cash in physical stock certificates? (GM 1989)
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which means the current total is $548,100. Is that correct? Yep Unfortunately the "current" GM stock is different than the GM stock of 1989. GM went bankrupt in 2011. It's original stock changed to Motors Liquidation Company (MTLQQ) and is essentially worthless today. There was no conversion from the old stock to the new stock. What do I do with these certificates? Can I bring them to my bank, or do I need to open an account with a stock company like Fidelity? See here for some instructions on cashing them in (or at least registering them electronically). I've never dealt with physical stocks, but I presume that a broker is going to charge you something for registering them vs. direct registration, though I have no idea how much that would be. I read somewhere that I only have to pay taxes when I cash out these stocks. But are these rules any different because I inherited the stocks? You will pay capital gains tax on the increase in value from the time your father died to the time you sell the shares. If that time is more than one year (and the stock has gone up in value) you will pay a 15% tax on the total increase. If you have held them less than one year, they will be short-term capital gains which will count as regular income, and you will pay whatever your marginal tax rate is. If you sell the stock at a loss, then you'll be able to deduct some or all of that loss from your income, and may be able to carry forward losses for a few years as well. I did not catch that the stock you mention was GM stock. GM went bankrupt in 2011, so it's likely that the stock you own is worthless. I have edited the first answer appropriately but left the other two since they apply more generally. In your case the best you get is a tax deduction for the loss in value from the date your father died.
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Clear example of credit card balance 55 days interest-free “trick”?
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Well, I answered a very similar question "Credit card payment date" where I showed that for a normal cycle, the average charge isn't due for 40 days. The range is 35-55, so if you want to feel good about the float just charge everything the day after the cycle closes, and nothing else the rest of the month. Why is this so interesting? It's no trick, and no secret. By the way, this isn't likely to be of any use when you're buying gas, groceries, or normal purchases. But, I suppose if you have a large purchase, say a big TV, $3000, this will buy you extra time to pay. It would be remiss of me to not clearly state that anyone who needs to take advantage of this "trick" is the same person who probably shouldn't use credit cards at all. Those who use cards are best served by charging what they can afford to pay at that moment and not base today's charges on what paychecks will come in by the due date of the credit card bill.
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Can signing up at optoutprescreen.com improve my credit score?
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If I had a business and was able to claim a feature, I would. It's simple marketing. If in fact, opting out helped your score, the site would promote that feature. Soft pulls for prescreened offers are not counted. No more than my constant peek at my score through Credit Karma. Opt out, if you wish. The benefit of course is less mail, which saves trees. Less risk of identity theft, someone can take the application and try to forge from there. Less risk of an infected paper cut opening this mail (don't ask.) I am a compulsive mail shredder, so I peek and these and shred. A year ago I received an offer of $30,000 zero interest, max transfer fee $50. I sent the entire sum to my 5% mortgage. Now I refinanced and paying that back. It saved me $1500 over the year. Too much trouble for some, but how long does it take to make $1500? For 40% of this country's families, that's a week's pay. The monthly extra bill didn't bother me. This last paragraph is an anecdote, not so much addressing question. I did that first.
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How do I notify the IRS of a new member to an LLC?
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You don't need to notify the IRS of new members, the IRS doesn't care (at this stage). What you do need, if you have a EIN for a single-member LLC, is to request a new EIN since your LLC is now a partnership (a different entity, from IRS perspective). From now on, you'll need to file form 1065 with the IRS in case of business related income, on which you will declare the membership distribution interests on Schedules K-1 for each member.
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Can you recommend some good websites/brokers for buying/selling stocks in India?
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API wise there's just one at the retail level: Interactive Brokers (India). Brokerage is high though - 3.5 bps for F&O and 5 bps for cash. I've used Sharekhan (good, can get to 2 bps brokerage, trading client software, no API). Also used multiple other brokerages, and am advising a new one, Zerodha http://www.zerodha.com. API wise the brokers don't provide it easily to retail, though I've worked with direct access APIs at an institutional level.
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The board of directors in companies
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Boards of Directors are required for corporations by nearly all jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions have almost self-defeating requirements however, such as in tax havens. Boards of Directors are compensated by the company for which they sit. Historically, they have set their own compensation almost always with tight qualitative legal bounds, but in the US, that has now changed, so investors now set Director compensation. Directors are typically not given wages or salary for work but compensation for expenses. For larger companies, this is semantics since compensation averages around one quarter of a million of USD. Regulations almost always proscribe agencies such as other corporations from sitting on boards and individuals convicted of serious crimes as well. Some jurisdictions will even restrict directories to other qualities such as solvency. While directors are elected by shareholders, their obligations are normally to the company, and each jurisdiction has its own set of rules for this. Almost always, directors are forbidden from selling access to their votes. Directors are almost always elected by holders of voting stock after a well-publicized announcement and extended time period. Investors are almost never restricted from sitting on a board so long as they meet the requirements described above.
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Wash sale rule + Mutual Funds/ETFs?
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I think the IRS doc you want is http://www.irs.gov/publications/p550/ch04.html#en_US_2010_publink100010601 I believe the answers are:
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Do you avoid tax when taking a home equity loan?
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You'll be taxed when you sell the house, but not before that (or if you do some other transaction that realizes the gain, talk to your real estate attorney or accountant for more details). A Home Equity line-of-credit is simply a secured loan: it's a loan, conditioned on if you fail to pay it back, they have a lien on your house (and may be able to force you to sell it to pay the loan back).
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Why haven't there been personal finance apps or softwares that use regression modeling or A.I.?
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Consumer facing finance is heavily regulated. You are liable for the recommendations you make; if they are based on a black box you risk problems when sued. It is difficult to explain in a court of law why a neural network came to a particular conclusion. It is much easier to provide advice (models) in the "educated counterparty" market. Not only do institutional investors in general expect to pay for a quality advice (consumers in general expect to get online advice for free) but the legal implications are different.
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Is refinancing my auto loan just to avoid dealing with the lender that issued it a crazy idea?
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I’d say No, it’s not crazy. I did that even for a mortgage, because the bank tended to lose my checks or let them sit for some days, and then claim I paid late. They were known on the internet for their poor processing department, so I decided to avoid that monthly hassle with calling and arguing, and refinanced. Compare the pain with the cost for refinancing, and if you think it’s worth it, change. You might even get a cheaper credit, and save on it.
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What drives the stock of bankrupt companies?
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What drives the stock of bankrupt companies? The company's potential residual assets. When a company goes bankrupt it is required to sell its assets to pay off its debts. The funds raised from selling assets go to the following entities: The usual order of debt repayment, in terms of the lender, will be the government, financial institutions, other creditors (i.e. suppliers and utility companies), bondholders, preferred shareholders and, finally, common shareholders. Depending on the amount of debt and the value of a company's assets, the common shareholders may receive some left over from liquidated assets. This would drive the stock price of a bankrupt company.
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Found an old un-cashed paycheck. How long is it good for? What to do if it's expired?
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Look up escheatment. Companies that have unclaimed property are supposed to send it to your State government. They should have a unclaimed property department of some sort. In short, the company is going to have to pay either you, or your State (In Your Name) so they have to pay it either way. It would be easier for them to just give you new check. Expect them to give you some grief in verifying it has not been cashed and such... but if you have the original, in hand, it shouldn't be too bad. A 'Lost' check may be harder to get replaced. Not a lawyer, don't want to be.
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How can the Samsung Upgrade Programme offer 0% APR?
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Having just purchased an upcoming Samsung phone using their 0% interest I can tell you that the justification is to give you credit. I have the same with Best Buy which is 0% for a specific initial purchase. The bank (in the Samsung case is TD Bank) establishes a rotating credit line for you. The APR after is well established at the very high side of 29.99%. Nobody in their right mind should want to pay that much interest on any purchase. My last car purchase was below 3% APR. Additionally the introductory rate will still calculate their 29.99% interest as if it existed since the first day of credit and will be applied to your balance should you ever be late on any single payment. At that time the interest is factored in as if it were always there and payments are adjusted accordingly. You see, the bank wants you to pay their high interest rate. So they entice you with the 0% and hope you either finance more on that credit line (exempt from the promotional rate) or miss a payment and they can hit you with a whammy. Specifically the question asks how this offer benefits Samsung. To answer that portion; it ensures a sale at full retail price of the phone. Samsung is just an agent between you and the bank. The bank takes on the risk for a potential high reward.
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Is buying a home a good idea?
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A home actually IS a terrible investment. It has all the traits of something you would NEVER want to plunge your hard-earned money into. The only way that buying a house makes good money sense is if you pay cash for it and get a really good deal. It should also be a house you can see yourself keeping for decades or until you're older and want something easier to take care of. Of course, nothing can replace "sense of ownership" or "sense of pride" other than owning a house. And your local realtor is banking (really, laughing all the way to the bank) on your emotions overcoming your smart money savvy. This post really goes to work listing all the reasons why a house is a horrible investment. Should be required reading for everyone about to buy a house. Why your house is a terrible investment - jlcollinsnh.com TLDR; - You must decide what is more important, the money or the feelings. But you can't have both. If you read the article linked and still want to buy a house...then you probably should.
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How to know which companies enter the stock market?
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Thanks to the other answers, I now know what to google for. Frankfurt Stock Exchange: http://en.boerse-frankfurt.de/equities/newissues London Stock Exchange: http://www.londonstockexchange.com/statistics/new-issues-further-issues/new-issues-further-issues.htm
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Where to start with personal finance?
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This Stack Exchange site is a nice place to find answers and ask questions. Good start! Moving away from the recursive answer... Simply distilling personal finance down to "I have money, I'll need money in the future, what do I do", an easily digestible book with how-to, multi-step guidelines is "I Will Teach You To Be Rich". The author talks about setting up the accounts you should have, making sure all your bills are paid automatically, saving on the big things and tips to increase your take home pay. That link goes to a compilation page on the blog with many of the most fundamental articles. However, "The World’s Easiest Guide To Understanding Retirement Accounts" is a particularly key article. While all the information is on the free blog, the book is well organized and concise. The Simple Dollar is a nice blog with frugal living tips, lifestyle assessments, financial thoughts and reader questions. The author also reviews about a book a week. Investing - hoping to get better returns than savings can provide while minimizing risk. This thread is an excellent list of books to learn about investing. I highly recommend "The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing" and "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need". The world of investment vehicles is huge but it doesn't have to be complicated once you ignore all the fads and risky stuff. Index mutual funds are the place to start (and maybe end). Asset allocation and diversification are themes to guide you. The books on that list will teach you.
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Is it worth investing in Index Fund, Bond Index Fund and Gold at the same time?
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I'd say neither. Index Funds mimic whatever index. Some stocks that are in the index are good investment opportunities, others not so much. I'm guessing the Bond Index Funds do the same. As for Gold... did you notice how much gold has risen lately? Do you think it will keep on rising like that? For which period? (Hint: if your timespan is less than 10 years, you really shouldn't invest). Investing is about buying low, and selling high. Gold is high, don't touch it. If you want to invest in funds, look at 4 or 5 star Morningstar rated funds. My advisors suggest Threadneedle (Lux) US Equities DU - LU0096364046 with a 4 star rating as the best American fund at this time. However, they are not favoring American stocks at this moment... so maybe you should stay away from the US for now. Have you looked at the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries?
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Why do I get a much better price for options with a limit order than the ask price?
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I can often get the option at [a] price [between bid and ask] The keyword you use here is quite relevant: often. More realistically, it's going to be sometimes. And that's just how supply and demand should work. The ask is where you know you can buy right away. If you don't wanna buy at ask, you can try and put a higer bid but you can only hope someone will take it before the price moves. If prices are moving up fast, you will have missed a chance if you gambled mid-spread. Having said that, the larger the spread is, the more you should work with limits mid-spread. You don't want to just take ask or bid with illiquid options. Make a calculation of the true value of the option (i.e. using the Black Scholes Model), then set your bid around there. Of course, if not only the option but also the underlying is illiquid, this all gets even more difficult.
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Problems with Enterprise Value and better valuation techniques
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This is a tough question SFun28. Let's try and debug the metric. First, let's expand upon the notion share price is determined in an efficient market where prospective buyers and sellers have access to info on an enterprises' cash balance and they may weigh that into their decision making. Therefore, a desirable/undesirable cash balance may raise or lower the share price, to what extent, we do not know. We must ask How significant is cash/debt balance in determining the market price of a stock? As you noted, we have limited info, which may decrease the weight of these account balances in our decision process. Using a materiality level of 5% of net income of operations, cash/debt may be immaterial or not considered by an investor. investors oftentimes interpret the same information differently (e.g. Microsoft's large cash balance may show they no longer have innovative ideas worth investing in, or they are well positioned to acquire innovative companies, or weather a contraction in the sector) My guess is a math mind would ignore the affect of account balances on the equity portion of the enterprise value calculation because it may not be a factor, or because the affect is subjective.
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What evidence exists for claiming that you cannot beat the market?
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No such evidence exists, because many people do beat the market. And many people fail to earn market rate of return. The way you achieve the former is generally to take risks that also increase the likelihood of the latter. The amount of time and effort you invest may bias that result, but generally risk and potential reward tend to track pretty closely since everyone else is making the same evaluations. You can't prove a negative. We can't prove unicorns don't exist either. We can advise you that hunting for one is probably not productive; many others have been trying, and if there was one we'd probably have seen at least something that encourages us to continue looking. Not impossible, but the evidence is far from encouraging. Market-rate-of-return can be achieved fairy reliably with minimal risk and minimal effort, and at mostly long-term tax rates. I consider that sufficient for my needs. Others will feel otherwise.
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Solid reading/literature for investment/retirement/income taxes?
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You bring up some very high level stuff, each of which can be the subject of a life's work. For taxes, I first read J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax. I actually read it cover to cover instead of using it as a reference guide. I hit topics that I'd otherwise have never looked up on purpose. Once you familiarize yourself with the current tax code, keeping up on changes to the code goes pretty well. As far as investing goes, William Bernstein has two titles, “The Four Pillars of Investing” and “The Intelligent Asset Allocator”. Others have liked “Personal Finance for Dummies” by Eric Tyson. These are great introductory books, the classic is “Security Analysis” by Graham & Dodd. Warren Buffet was a student of Benjamin Graham and he did fine applying these principals. For retirement, The Number by Lee Eisenberg was a good read. I consider retirement an extension of the investing education, only the money flow is reversed, withdrawals, no new deposits. Of course this is an oversimplification. In my own reading list, I include books such as “Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds” by Charles MacKay and “The Great Crash 1929″ by John Kenneth Galbraith. Understanding how these bubbles happen is critical to a complete education. I'm convinced that when it comes to investing if I can teach my daughter to understand the concept of Risk and Reward and to understand there are certain common alerts to such bubbles, the simplest of which is the term "this time is different" as though a hundred years of market dynamics can change in a matter of a few years. Last, there are books like "Stop Acting Rich" by Dr Thomas Stanley. Not quite investing, per se, but a good read to get an idea of how we have a distorted view of certain signs of wealth. Keep reading, no harm in taking books out of the library and returning if the first chapter or two disappoints.
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Brokerage account for charity
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I don't understand the logic in the other answer, and I think it doesn't make sense, so here is my take: You pay taxes on income, not on sales price. So if you put X $ of your own money in the account and it becomes X + Y $ in the future, at the moment of liquidation, you will own taxes on the Y $. Never on the X $, as it was your own (already taxed) money to begin with. The difference between long-term and short-term gains just influences the tax rate on Y. If you donate the gain alone (the Y $) to charity, you can deduct Y from your tax base. So adding Y to your tax base and then deducting Y again obviously leaves your tax base at the old value, so you pay no extra taxes. Which seems logical, as you didn't make any money in the process. Aside from extreme cases where the deductible gain is too large a percentage from your income or negative, I don't see why this would ever be different. So you can take your original 100 $ back out and donate all gains, and be fine. Note that potential losses are seen different, as the IRA regulations are not symmetric.
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Where should I park my rainy-day / emergency fund?
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I am using ING for my emergency savings, but sometime last year I discovered SmartyPig. As of 4/24/2010 they offer 2.1%, which is even better than the 1 year CDs at most banks. I've switched two small accounts to SmartyPig and plan to switch my emergency savings. Their accounts are geared around monthly contributions, but you don't have to use that feature.
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I'm upside down on my car loan and need a different car, what can I do?
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Dealerships make a lot of money in the finance department. One of the thing they play upon is your emotional reaction of purchasing a new vehicle (new to you in this case). They perform all sorts of shenanigans, like adding undercoat, selling gap insurance, or extended warranties. They entice you with a promise of a lower interest rate, but really what they are trying to do is back you into a payment. So if you can fiance 20,000, but the car you are buying is 16,000, then they will try to move that figure up to the 20K mark. In your case it sounded like some borderline (at the least) illegal activity they used to fool you into paying more. It sounds like you regret this decision which puts you a step ahead of most. How many people brag about the extended warranty or gap insurance they got included in the sale? As mentioned in another answer the best bet is to go into the dealership with financing in place. Say you were able to get a 3% loan on 16K. The total interest would be ~1600. If you avoid the finance room, you might avoid their dubious add ons that would probably cost you more then the 1600 even if you can get 0%. If you are going to buy a car on time, my advice would be to not fill out a credit app at the dealership. The dealership people through a conniption fit, but hold your ground. If need be get up and walk out. They won't let you leave. One thing I must mention, is that one feels very wealthy without that monthly pain in the a$$ payment for a car. You may want to try and envision yourself without a car payment, and make steps to making that a reality for the rest of your life.
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Making higher payments on primary residence mortgage or rental?
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You're in the same situation I'm in (bought new house, didn't sell old house, now renting out old house). Assuming that everything is stable, right now I'd do something besides pay down your new mortgage. If you pay down the mortgage at your old house, that mortgage payment will go away faster than if you paid down the one on the new house. Then, things start to get fun. You then have a lot more free cash flow available to do whatever you like. I'd tend to do that before searching for other investments. Then, once you have the free cash flow, you can look for other investments (probably a wise risk) or retire the mortgage on your residence earlier.
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What is the difference between “good debt” vs. “bad debt”?
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In general, all forms of debt are bad, as they keep you tied to a financial institution and can be an emotional burden for many. In the book Payback (by Margaret Atwood), debt is even described as a sin. However some forms of debt are necessary and some can help create wealth. "Good" debt: a mortgage - to purchase a home, which is an asset that usually appreciates in value. Necessary debt: car loan or lease - only when there is no other mode of transportation to get to work. Really bad debt: unpaid credit cards - for dinners out.
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Strategies for putting away money for a child's future (college, etc.)?
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Saving for school is [fundamentally] no different than saving for any other major purchase: in addition to some of the great answers already provided, here are a couple other thoughts: Just to have the [simplified] numbers handy: If you can increase that to $2000/yr, after 18 years: One final thought - I would personally avoid the 529 plans because if your child decides to not go to school (eg goes in the Coast Guard, decides to be a farmer, enters the Peace Corps, etc), you're penalized on withdrawal, whereas with any other savings/investment methodology, you won't have those penalties.
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New car cash vs finance
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The question is about the dealer, right? The dealer isn't providing this financing to you, Alfa is, and they're paying the dealer that same "On the Road" price when you finance the purchase. So the dealer gets the same amount either way. The financing, through Alfa, means your payments go to Alfa. And they're willing to give you 3,000 towards purchase of the car at the dealer in order to motivate those who can afford payments but not full cash for the car. They end up selling more cars this way, keeping the factories busy and employees and stockholders happy along the way. At least, that's how it's supposed to work out.
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How to make an investment in a single company's stock while remaining market-neutral?
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For the type of market neutrality you desire, free from crash risk, it's best to hedge the shares with covered calls when implied volatility is expensive and puts when implied volatility is cheap with the nearest at the money expirations. A put only strategy can be very expensive and should only be used with the longest term options available since they can cost many tens of % per year. Securities become almost perfectly correlated during a crash; therefore, market crash risk of one security is essentially equal to the market crash risk, so hedging the security itself makes a position market neutral for crash risk. This strategy will have intermittent opportunity cost risk in the form of slower returns during market expansion to pay for smaller losses during a crash; however, the expected long run return hedged this way should be greater than the underlying's expected long run return with less volatility.
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Online tutorials for calculating DCF (Discounted Cash Flow)?
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what do you mean exactly? Do you have a future target price and projected future dividend payments and you want the present value (time discounted price) of those? Edit: The DCF formula is difficult to use for stocks because the future price is unknown. It is more applicable to fixed-income instruments like coupon bonds. You could use it but you need to predict / speculate a future price for the stock. You are better off using the standard stock analysis stuff: Learn Stock Basics - How To Read A Stock Table/Quote The P/E ratio and the Dividend yield are the two most important. The good P/E ratio for a mature company would be around 20. For smaller and growing companies, a higher P/E ratio is acceptable. The dividend yield is important because it tells you how much your shares grow even if the stock price stays unchanged for the year. HTH
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IRA contributions in a bear (bad) market: Should I build up cash savings instead?
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You should consider dollar cost averaging your investments. Retirement account is perfect for that - it's long term with periodic deposits. Overall, by investing in stocks now for a long term, you'll benefit more because the stocks are at their low(er) point.
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How should I be contributing to my 401(k), traditional or Roth?
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I wrote a brilliant guest post at Don't Mess With Taxes, titled Roth IRAs and Your Retirement Income. (Note - this article now reflects 2012 rates. Just updated) Simply put, it's an ongoing question of whether your taxes will be higher now than at any point in the future. If you are in the 25% bracket now, it would take quite of bit of money for your withdrawals to put you in that bracket at retirement. In the case of the IRA, you have the opportunity to convert in any year between now and retirement if your rate that year drops for whatever reason. The simplest case is if you are now in the 25% bracket. I say go pre-tax, and track, year by year what your withdrawal would be if you retired today. At 15%, but with a good chance for promotion to the 25% bracket, start with Roth flavor and then as you hit 25%, use a combination. This approach would smooth your marginal rate to stay at 15%. To give you a start to this puzzle, in 2012, a couple has a $11,900 standard deduction along with 2 exemptions of $3800 each. This means the first $19,500 in an IRA comes out tax free at retirement. If you believe in a 4% withdrawal rate, you need a retirement account containing $500K pretax to generate this much money. This tick up with inflation, 2 years ago, it was $18,700 and $467K respectively. This is why those who scream "taxes will go up" may be correct, but do you really believe the standard deduction and exemptions will go away? Edit - and as time passes, and I learn more, new info comes to my attention. The above thoughts not withstanding, there's an issue of taxation of Social Security benefits. This creates a The Phantom Tax Rate Zone which I recently wrote about. A single person with not really too high an income gets thrust into the 46% bracket. Not a typo, 46.25% to be exact.
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How do I calculate ownership percentage for shared home ownership?
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The bottom line is that you can decide whatever you want to do. It is good of you to get everything in writing. What happens if she decides to move to a different city? What happens if she also wants to be bought out? It should also include contingencies for your husband and yourself. God forbid anything negative happens, but what happens if you two get divorced? Does your husband want to be an agreement with your sister if you pass away? There does not seem to be any math to do in this case. While she is paying the lion's share of the payment, she is also receiving the benefit of having a place to live. It is unlikely that she can rent an equivalent place for anything close to 1400/month. I would estimate it would be at least 1800/month to rent an equivalent property. So she put no money down, and she is paying below market "rent" to live somewhere. Many people would be happy to have $400/month off and handle their own repairs (let alone you still kicking in half). Now all that said, if you want to give her some equity based upon generosity or the desire to give her some dignity, then you are free to do so. Perhaps 10%?
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Has anyone created a documentary about folks who fail to save enough for retirement?
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Since your question was first posted, I happened to watch PBS FRONTLINE's The Retirement Gamble, about "America's Retirement Crisis" and the retirement industry. You can watch the entire episode online at the previous link, and it's also available on DVD. Here's a link to the episode transcript. Here's a partial blurb from a post at PBS that announced the episode: If you’ve been watching any commercial television lately, you are well aware that the financial services industry is very busy running expensive ads imploring us to worry about our retirement futures. Open a new account today, they say. They are not wrong that we should be doing something: America is facing a retirement crisis. One in three Americans has no retirement savings at all. One in two reports that they can’t save enough. On top of that, we are living longer, and health care costs, as we all know, are increasing. But, as I found when investigating the retirement planning and mutual funds industries in The Retirement Gamble, which airs tonight on FRONTLINE, those advertisements are imploring us to start saving for one simple reason. Retirement is big business — and very profitable. (... more... ) There's another related PBS FRONTLINE documentary from back in 2006, Can You Afford To Retire? You'll find a link on that page to watch the program online. Finally, I'm also aware of but haven't yet seen a new documentary called Broken Eggs: The Looming Retirement Crisis in America. Looks like it isn't available for online streaming or on DVD yet, but I expect it would be, eventually.
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How to rescue my money from negative interest?
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How about placing the money in a safety deposit box at the same bank? This will probably work out cheaper than the loss due to negative rates. Although, I'm quite sure the banks won't like this idea.
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What happens after a counterparty defaults on a derivative trade?
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The answer is in your question: derivatives are contracts so are enforced in the same way as any other contract. If the counterparty refuses to pay immediately they will, in the first instance be billed by any intermediary (Prime Broker etc.) that facilitated the contract. If they still refuse to pay the contract may stipulate that a broker can "net off" any outstanding payments against it or pay out using deposited cash or posted margins. The contract will usually include the broker as an interested party and so they can, but don't need to, report a default (such that this is) to credit agencies (in some jurisdictions they are required to by law). Any parties to the trade and the courts may use a debt collection agency to collect payments or seize assets to cover payment. If there is no broker or the counterparty still has not paid the bill then the parties involved (the party to the trade and any intermediaries) can sue for breach of contract. If they win (which would be expected) the counterparty will be made to pay by the legal system including, but not limited to, seizure of assets, enforced bankruptcy, and prison terms for any contempts of court rulings. All of this holds for governments who refuse to pay derivatives losses (as Argentina did in the early 20th century) but in that case it may escalate as far as war. It has never done so for derivatives contracts as far as I know but other breaches of contract between countries have resulted in armed conflict. As well as the "hard" results of failing to pay there are soft implications including a guaranteed fall in credit ratings that will result in parties refusing to do business with the counterparty and a separate loss of reputation that will reduce business even further. Potential employees and funders will be unwilling to become involved with such a party and suppliers will be unwilling to supply on credit. The end result in almost every way would be bankruptcy and prison sentences for the party or their senior employees. Most jurisdictions allow for board members at companies in material breach of contract to be banned from running any company for a set period as well. edit: netting off cash flows netting off is a process whereby all of a party's cash flows, positive and negative, are used to pay each other off so that only the net change is reflected in account balances, for example: company 1 cash flows netting off the total outgoings are 3M + 500k = 3.5M and total incomings are 1.2M + 1.1M + 1.2M = 3.5M so the incoming cash flows can be used to pay the outgoing cash flows leaving a net payment into company1's account of 0.
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Dispute credit card transaction with merchant or credit card company?
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You should dispute the transaction with the credit card. Describe the story and attach the cash payment receipt, and dispute it as a duplicate charge. There will be no impact on your score, but if you don't have the cash receipt or any other proof of the alternative payment - it's your word against the merchant, and he has proof that you actually used your card there. So worst case - you just paid twice. If you dispute the charge and it is accepted - the merchant will pay a penalty. If it is not accepted - you may pay the penalty (on top of the original charge, depending on your credit card issuer - some charge for "frivolous" charge backs). It will take several more years for either the European merchants to learn how to deal with the US half-baked chip cards, or the American banks to start issue proper chip-and-PIN card as everywhere else. Either way, until then - if the merchant doesn't know how to handle signatures with the American credit cards - just don't use them. Pay cash. Given the controversy in the comments - my intention was not to say "no, don't talk to the merchant". From the description of the situation it didn't strike me as the merchant would even bother to consider the situation. A less than honest merchant knows that you have no leverage, and since you're a tourist and will probably not be returning there anyway - what's the worst you can do to them? A bad yelp review? You can definitely get in touch with the merchant and ask for a refund, but I would not expect much to come out from that.
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