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Is there a country that uses the term “dollar” for currency without also using “cents” as fractional monetary units? | Going through the list of economies that currently use the dollar, all of them list cents as a fractional unit. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, the 1/100 fractional unit is still called a cent, but it's no longer in circulation in coin form and only finds use in financial markets or electronic payments. In countries like Mal... |
Primary Residence to Investment Property - Changing PMI Terms | You could be in a bit of a bind. I wouldn't push it any more until you read your loan papers very carefully. Going back to the lender for a refinance after you converted it to a rental (presumably without their knowledge) is risky. I doubt they'd let you refinance anyway, as the house is underwater. If the loan is pe... |
Does it make any sense to directly contribute to reducing the US national debt? | It doesn't make any financial sense for you personally, because the impact on the debt would be so little it would have no significant benefit to you, and you'd be out the money you donated. |
How do I account for 100 percent vendor discounts in GnuCash 2.6.5 | The answer was provided to me at the Gnucash chat by "warlord". The procedure is as follows: After doing this you will have: |
How to refuse a Clearxchange payment? | Your bank uses ClearXchange, not you. It is not a website where you open an account, like many others, but an inter-bank transfer system based on email addresses, kind of like free wire transfers between everyone. You don't have to set anything up, just accept the payment, and the money appears in your account (assumin... |
What is the easiest way to back-test index funds and ETFs? | check pastsat-backtesting , backtesting tool, where one can can test on well known technical indicators without coding skills |
How long can a company keep the money raised from IPO of its stocks? | Yes, that is correct. There is no limit. An initial public offering of common stock by a company means that these shares remain outstanding for as long as the company wishes. The exceptions are through corporate actions, most commonly either |
Remote jobs and incidental wage costs: What do I have to consider? | In the US we have social security taxes, where for a full time employee the company pays half and the employee pays half. When you work as a business, what we call 1099 for the form that the wages are reported on, then the contractor pays the full amount of social security tax. There are times when a contractor can ne... |
In a house with shared ownership, if one person moves out and the other assumes mortgage, how do we determine who owns what share in the end? | Market value and assessments are two different things. No matter how amical the agreement seems on buying and selling, the future could result in damaged relationships without an absolute sale. I would strongly recommend getting into an agreement to split the purchase of a house as a means to save money. If it's too la... |
Freehold and Leasehold for Pub/Bar? | Freehold is simple - it's when you own the building and the land it's on. There's no rent to pay (but you will still have to pay taxes!). Leasehold is when the property is leased - rented out for a fixed period that could be anything from 6 months to 199 years. There will be a rent to pay. The person who owns the pr... |
Why should we expect stocks to go up in the long term? | Stocks "go up 5-7% every year. This has been true for the last 100 years for the S&P500 index...." This was true in the 20th century in America. It was not true (over the whole century) for other major countries like Germany, Russia, Japan, or China. (It was more or less true for Britain and certain Commonwealth countr... |
Does FHA goes hand in hand with PMI ? | I don't know that FHA loans have better rates than conventional loans. I've never heard that and some quick googling didn't yield anything (please correct me if I'm wrong). So if you have the necessary down payment to get a conventional loan, I'm not sure I see any benefit for looking at FHA loans. I think the only b... |
Why is Insider Trading Illegal? | To be flippant: it is illegal because it is against the law; there is no considered involved, it just is. To elaborate, part of the illusion of the stock exchange and other market-like entities is that of (apparent) fairness. If I think a stock will go up because it is involved in a growing industry, that is generally ... |
Should I buy a house with a friend? | Sure, form an LLC with an attorney's advice. You need a buyout clause, operating agreement, etc. If you're not married, never buy a home for personal use with someone else. |
Evidence For/Against Real Estate Investing Vis-a-vis Investing in ETFs | Real Estate potentially has two components of profit, the increase in value, and the ongoing returns, similar to a stock appreciating and its dividends. It's possible to buy both badly, and in the case of stocks, there are studies that show the typical investor lags the market by many percent. Real estate is not a h... |
How to prepare to purchase a house? (Germany) | Figure out how much money you earn, what you spend it on, and how that will change when you have kids (will one of you stay at home? if not, how much will daycare cost and how do you finance the first few month when your child is still too young for daycare?) You will usually plan to spend your current Kaltmiete (rent ... |
If you buy something and sell it later on the same day, how do you calculate 'investment'? | You're confused because the source you cite leaves out one number that isn't relevant to the argument they're making: total costs. The number you're expecting, $9 x 365 or $3285 is the total cost of buying the jewelry which, when subtracted from the $3650 sales volume gives us the net profit of $365. The investment is... |
What can I do when the trading price of a stock or ETF I want to buy is too high? | For equities, buy direct from the transfer agent. You have to buy one full share at a minimum but after that dividend reinvestment is free. There are others like share builder and foliofn that let you buy fractional shares. As the other poster said their roster is limited so you cannot buy every ETF out there. With y... |
California tells me I didn't file documents for an LLC that isn't mine. What do I do? | Did it show just your address, or was your name on it as well? You didn't share how long you've lived at the address either, so it makes me wonder whether a former tenant is the one who filed that paperwork. It's also possible that someone used your address when making a filing. Whether that was deliberate or accid... |
Online service that computes implied volatility | My broker (thinkorswim) offers this from the platform's trade tab. I believe this feature isn't crippled in the PaperMoney version which is effectively a "free online service." |
How can I find a checking account that allows for automated transfers of dynamic amounts? | Almost any financial institution has the technical ability to do this (simply called sweeps, auto sweeps, or deposit sweeps); the issue you face is finding an institution that is willing to do it for you. I think you will have the most luck at your primary financial institution where you currently keep the majority of... |
Credit Card Approval | Three big ones that are common in almost all banks (though, individually, they may have other criteria): Other criteria I've seen (while working in the banking industry - varying by bank): the average balance you keep on deposit accounts (checking/savings/CDs/etc), number of overdraft fees in the past 12 months (one ba... |
How do I explain why debt on debt is bad to my brother? | The key idea he should focus on is that every debt includes interest - the money he didn't borrow, but now owes. The interest goes straight to the lender pocket and the debtor has to get money somewhere for that interest. That's the key reason of why getting another loan only increases pressure on the debtor - with the... |
Do I need to report to FInCEN if I had greater than $10,000 worth of bitcoin in a foreign bitcoin exchange? | Firstly you have to know exactly what you are asking here. What you have if you "own" bitcoins is a private key that allows you to make a change to the blockchain that can assign a piece of information from yourself to the next person. Nothing more nothing less. The fact that this small piece of information is consid... |
How can I get free or discounted checks for my bank account? | Although not required, #2 would work best if you used magnetic ink... That is an extra cost which you may or may not want to pay for. You can often get a free checking account and a free set of checks if you can meet the minimum requirements. This often means a higher average daily balance, direct deposit, or some comb... |
Can I withdraw from my Roth IRA retirement account to fund a startup? | Chris's answer is a great start. Keep in mind that when you withdraw from a Roth IRA, you "shrink" the size of the IRA (i.e. if the start up flourishes, you can't put the $10k you withdrew back, as you're limited to ~$5k in contributions per year). You may want to consider funding your startup with a credit card (ideal... |
How to calculate stock price (value) based on given values for equity and debt? | Adding assets (equity) and liabilities (debt) never gives you anything useful. The value of a company is its assets (including equity) minus its liabilities (including debt). However this is a purely theoretical calculation. In the real world things are much more complicated, and this isn't going to give you a good ide... |
In what order should I save? | This is a bit of an open-ended answer as certain assumptions must be covered. Hope it helps though. My concern is that you have 1 year of university left - is there a chance that this money will be needed to fund this year of uni? And might it be needed for the period between uni and starting your first job? If the ans... |
Credit report - Not able to establish identity | I suggest you begin by double checking what kinds of credit products you have and to which credit bureaus your bank reports. Not all financial institutions report to all bureaus. For example, if your bank only reports your one and only line of credit to Experian, TransUnion still won't have a file on you. Also, some li... |
How to make a decision for used vs new car if I want to keep the car long term? | In a perfect world scenario you would get a car 2-5 years old that has very little mileage. One of the long standing archaic rules of the car world is that age trumps mileage. This was a good rule when any idiot could roll back an odometer. Chances are now that if you rolled your odometer back the car was serviced so... |
Best way to start investing, for a young person just starting their career? | I started my career over 10 years ago and I work in the financial sector. As a young person from a working class family with no rich uncles, I would prioritize my investments like this: It seems to be pretty popular on here to recommend trading individual stocks, granted you've read a book on it. I would thoroughly rec... |
In the stock market, why is the “open” price value never the same as previous day's “close”? | The simple answer: The opening price is the price of the first trade of the day and the closing price is the price of the last trade of the day. And since the stock price change from trade to trade they are usually different. |
Confused about employee stock options: How do I afford these? | I've been offered a package that includes 100k stock options at 5 dollars a share. They vest over 4 years at 25% a year. Does this mean that at the end of the first year, I'm supposed to pay for 25,000 shares? Wouldn't this cost me 125,000 dollars? I don't have this kind of money. At the end of the first year, you will... |
Is it sensible to redirect retirement contributions from 401(k) towards becoming a landlord? | Here are the issues, as I see them - It's not that I don't trust banks, but I just feel like throwing all of our money into intangible investments is unwise. Banks have virtually nothing to do with this. And intangible assets has a different meaning than you assume. You don't have to like the market, but try to under... |
How to help a financially self destructive person? | You can't help people that don't want help, period. It just doesn't work, and you will waste your time and energy while making the other person mad. Both sides end up in the same place they started except now they are frustrated with each other. In a normal situation I would advise to stop enabling her by giving her mo... |
Free/open source Unix software that pulls info from all my banks/brokers/credit cards? | As far as I can tell there are no "out-of-the-box" solutions for this. Nor will Moneydance or GnuCash give you the full solution you are looking for. I imaging people don't write a well-known, open-source, tool that will do this for fear of the negative uses it could have, and the resulting liability. You can roll-y... |
Wash sale rule with dividend reinvestment | You sold all shares? The potential wash sale effect goes away after 30 days from the dividend date. Selling all shares of a stock where a wash existed effectively negates the wash and you can take the loss. |
Are there any statistics that support the need for Title Insurance? | There seems to be no such information available. What is available is that number of claims are high and the Title Insurance companies have gone bankrupt as per the wikipedia article In 2003, according to ALTA, the industry paid out about $662 million in claims, about 4.3% percent of the $15.7 billion taken in as premi... |
How should I be investing in bonds as part of a diversified portfolio? | For most people, you don't want individual bonds. Unless you are investing very significant amounts of money, you are best off with bond funds (or ETFs). Here in Canada, I chose TDB909, a mutual fund which seeks to roughly track the DEX Universe Bond index. See the Canadian Couch Potato's recommended funds. Now, you li... |
If a startup can always issue new shares, what value is there to stocks/options? | The short answer, probably not much. Unless you have a controlling interest in the company. If at least 50%+1 of the shareholder votes are in favor of the dilution then it can be done. There are some SEC rules that should protect against corporate looting and theft like what the Severin side is trying to make it app... |
F-1 student investing in foreign markets | You cannot have off-campus employment in your first year, but investments are considered passive income no matter how much time you put into that effort. Obviously you need to stay enrolled full-time and get good enough grades to stay in good standing academically, so you should be cautious about how much time you spen... |
What are the ins/outs of writing equipment purchases off as business expenses in a home based business? | Keep this rather corny acronym in mind. Business expenses must be CORN: As other posters have already pointed out, certain expenses that are capital items (computers, furniture, etc.) must be depreciated over several years, but you have a certain amount of capital items that you can write off in the current tax year. |
Is a stock's trade size history publicly available? | You can buy the data and process it on your own. http://www.nyxdata.com/Data-Products/Daily-TAQ |
How to check the paypal's current exchange rate? | The Paypal 'classic' site option has now been removed and you will not know what you will be charged UNTIL YOU COMMIT TO BUY. Paypal told me today ( brexit day 24th ) that their site is NOT connected to the Ebay site so when Ebay tells me '$77.00 approximately £52.43' for an item I would in fact pay £59.62. You wil... |
Isn't an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) a surefire way to make tons of money? | A sure-fire way to make money? Hell no. There are tonnes of scams and money grabs out there, not to mention the fact that most ICOs are based on projects that are going nowhere. Having said that, there are many ICOs each month that will do very well in the future. The best thing to do is to shortlist a number of proj... |
Is the stock market a zero-sum game? | Suppose everybody stopped all economic activity right now. No more work for others, no payments, no trade in kind or otherwise. Would average wealth stay the same? Of course not. Economic activity is not a zero sum game. Most of our economic activity is organized in the form of companies. If the companies manage to mak... |
Stock Certificate In two names | The DOW is just an index, which is simply a group of stocks meeting the criteria for inclusion. In the case of the DOW, it's the 30 US stocks with the largest market capitalization, but other indices include many lesser stocks (such as the S&P500 or the Russell 2000). The fact that Holobeam is no longer a constituent o... |
Are all financial advisors compensated in the same way? | No, they certainly are not compensated the same way. Some are paid by commission that they earn from the products they sell (ie, certain mutual funds, insurance, etc.) Others are paid for their advice based on an hourly fee, or a percentage of the portfolio you have to invest. This is a great question, because too ma... |
What are institutional investors? | Professional investors managing large investment portfolios for "institutions" -- a college, a museum, a charitable organization, et cetera. I'm not sure whether those managing investments for a business are considered institutional investors or not. The common factor tends to be large to immense portfolios (let's call... |
I can make a budget, but how can I get myself to consistently follow my budget? | Lazy man's budget. Four separate accounts for timing of expenses: short (monthly; utilities etc.), medium (quarterly+; property taxes), long (yearly+; house improvements) and retirement. Set target levels for each account, to cover 1 full cycle. The short target is smallest; it should comfortably cover a month. Fo... |
Should I get a car loan before shopping for a car? | Yes, you are correct to go to the credit union first. Get approved for a loan first. Often, upon approval, the credit union will give you a blank check good for any amount up to the limit of the loan. When you buy the car, make it payable to the dealer, write in the amount and sign it. Enjoy the new car! |
How does the yield on my investments stack up against other investors? | From an article I wrote a while back: “Dalbar Inc., a Boston-based financial services research firm, has been measuring the effects of investors’ decisions to buy, sell, and switch into and out of mutual funds since 1984. The key finding always has been that the average investor earns significantly less than the return... |
Apartment Security Deposit refunds in Maryland | In Maryland, a landlord must hold your security deposit in an escrow account and pay you interest when returning the deposit. The interest is simple interest; it does not compound. The interest rate that they must pay has changed over the last 43 years. Before October 1, 2004, the rate was 4%. Until January 1, 2015,... |
Total gain of portfolio including sold stocks? | You could create your own spreadsheet of Cash Flows and use the XIRR function in Excel: The formula is: |
How accurate is Implied Volatility in predicting future moves? | How accurate is Implied Volatility in predicting future moves? How would you measure this? If the implied volatility says that there's a 1% chance that a stock will double, and it doubles, was it "right"? You could also say that it says there's a 99% change that it doesn't double, so was it "wrong"? What you could ... |
When filing for an NOL, do you have to file the amended previous years' returns after the NOL return? | Your CPA doesn't need to file anything, so don't worry about him being sidetracked. You are the one doing the filing. Since the amended returns have to be filed on paper, you'll actually go and mail a package to the IRS (each return in a separate envelope). The reason the CPA suggests to file the amended returns after ... |
How to calculate my estimated taxes. 1099 MISC + Self Employment | One way to do these sorts of calculations is to use the spreadsheet version of IRS form 1040 available here. This is provided by a private individual and is not an official IRS tool, but in practice it is usually accurate enough for these purposes. You may have to spend some time figuring out where to enter the info.... |
“Infinite Banking” or “Be Your Own Bank” via Whole Life Insurance…where to start? | Can't tell you where to go for a good policy, but I can tell you that most brokers make a hefty commission out of your payments for at least a year before you even start funding the tax sheltered investment account that you're trying to buy under the umbrella of life insurance. You'll have to do a lot of homework to hu... |
Is it practical to take actual delivery on a futures contract, and what is the process? | As mentioned in other answers, you find out by reading the Rulebook for that commodity and exchange. I'll quote a couple of random passages to show how they vary: For CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) Random Length Lumber Futures, the delivery is ornate: Seller shall give his Notice of Intent to Deliver to the Clearin... |
Is Cost of Living overstated? | I do not believe there is a strong correlation between CPI (Consumer Price Index) and housing value appreciation. Take, for example, New York City which has the highest CPI in the US. A great deal of the CPI number is skewed by Manhattan. One can live in Brooklyn or Queens and avoid some of NYC's high CPI. I would s... |
Can I use same stock broker to buy stocks from different stock markets? | Most stock brokers are "full service" brokers. That is to say that you can so the same broker to buy different types of stocks, bonds, options, etc. in different markets. Some brokers are very specialized and won't allow you to do that. But those are probably brokers you don't want to use. |
In a competitive market, why is movie theater popcorn expensive? | In the theater, it's a person who can afford to buy expensive pop corn, cause he can buy the expensive movie ticket too... Also sitting at one place will make him feel hungry and buy something to eat... So maximum chances are that in the theater, that guy is your potential customer... Otherwise if the popcorn seller is... |
Why does money value normally decrease? | You expect interest because you forgo the opportunity of using the money as well as the risk of losing the money if the borrower can not pay you back. This is true also with gold - you would expect interest if you loaned someone your gold for a time period. When you deposit your money in the bank you are loaning your ... |
Best way to day trade with under $25,000 | You avoid pattern day trader status by trading e-mini futures through a futures broker. The PDT rules do not apply in the futures markets. Some of the markets that are available include representatives covering the major indices i.e the YM (DJIA), ES (S&P 500) and NQ (Nasdaq 100) and many more markets. You can take as... |
What are online payment options with no chargeback protection? | Generally there's no ultimate protection against charge backs. Some methods are easier to charge back and some harder, and there's always the resort of going to courts. The hardest to contest is, of course, a cash payment or wire transfer. You need to remember that imposing unnecessary/unreasonable difficulties on your... |
What evidence exists for claiming that you cannot beat the market? | The reason for this is arbitrage. In an free and open market, investments that are certain to generate above-average profits would do so by being sold cheaply, while having a high return on investment after that. But in a free market, prices are set by supply and demand. There is a high demand and little supply for inv... |
How to measure a currencies valuation or devaluation in relevance to itself | As the value of a currency declines, commodities, priced in that currency, will rise. The two best commodities to see a change in would be oil and gold. |
How much would it cost me to buy one gold futures contract on Comex? | Brokers usually have this kind of information, you can take a look at interactive brokers for instance: http://www.interactivebrokers.co.uk/contract_info/v3.6/index.php?action=Details&site=GEN&conid=90384435 You are interested in the initial margin which in this case is $6,075. So you need that amount to buy/sell 1 fut... |
What is a “fiat” currency? Are there other types of currency? | In short. A fiat currency is money that has value only because (usually) a government says it does. A counter example (non-fiat currency) is a gold coin that has intrinsic value usually because it is made of valuable materials that people would trade goods/services. That is the value comes from what you are holding mo... |
How to declare foreign gift of nearly $10,000 | Actually banks aren't required to (and don't) report on 8300 because they already report $10k+ cash transactions to FinCEN as a Currency Transaction Report (CTR), which is substantively similar; see the first item under Exceptions in the second column of page 3 of the actual form. Yes, 8300 is for businesses, that's wh... |
Does the P/E ratio not apply to bond ETFs? | The simple answer is technically bonds don't have earnings, hence no P/E. What I think the OP is really asking how do I compare stock and bond ETFs. Some mature stocks exhibit very similar characteristics to bonds, so at the margin if you are considering investing between 2 such investments that provide stable income i... |
How can I deal with a spouse who compulsively spends? | Perhaps it seems harsh, but I would get separate accounts: credit cards, savings, retirement, all the way down the line. Your only joint account should be for paying mortgage/rent and other bills. And as another poster said, delete all your saved info from browsers &c. Perhaps you even need to set up separate user i... |
How can I estimate business taxes / filing fees for a business that has $0 income? | Is the business an S-Corp, LLC or Sole Prop? I am going to guess based on the question that it is an LLC that you never closed with the state and you live in a state (NY) that charges a fee for having an LLC in the state in which case you owe those fees to the state. I am not aware of any taxes on the mere existence of... |
How to reconcile a credit card that has an ongoing billing dispute? | You could make an entry for the disputed charge as if you were going to lose the dispute, and a second entry that reverses the charge as if you were going to win the dispute. You could then reconcile the account by including the first charge in the reconciliation and excluding the reversal until the issue has been res... |
Investing for Dummys | Have a look at my answer to a similar question (asked by a 22 yo) ... Basically |
Why are some long term investors so concerned about their entry price? | This is not hypothetical, this is an accurate story. I am a long-term investor. I have a bunch of money that I'd like to invest and I plan on spreading it out over five or six mutual funds and ETFs, roughly according to the Canadian Couch Potato model portfolio (that is, passive mutual funds and ETFs rather than specif... |
Shorting versus selling to hedge risk | If you already own shares in a company and sell some, you won't be short selling these shares if sold from the same brokerage account, because your existing shares with that broker need to be sold first before you are able to short sell any. If you own a portfolio of shares however, you may be able to short sell an ind... |
Can I use balance transfer to buy car? | You do not say what country you are in. This is an answer for readers in the UK. Most normal balance transfer deals are only for paying off other credit cards. However there are "money transfer" deals that will pay the money direct to your bank account. The deals aren't as good as balance transfer deals but they are of... |
Should I avoid credit card use to improve our debt-to-income ratio? | If you pay it off before the cycle closes it will look like you have 100% available credit. So if you credit card statement closes on the 7th pay it off on the 6th in full don't pay it when its due 2/3 weeks later. Then after three months of doing that your credit score will go up based on the fact that your debt rat... |
Should I exclude bonds from our retirement investment portfolio if our time horizon is still long enough? | I've had the same thoughts recently and after reading Investing at Level 3 by James Cloonan I believe his thesis that for the passive investor you're giving up too much if you're not 100% in equities. He is clear to point out that you need to be well aware of your withdrawal horizons and has specific tactics for shifti... |
Is it better to buy put options or buy an inverse leveraged ETF? | You don't have to think it is going down, it is currently trending down as on a weekly chart there are lower lows and lower highs. Until there is a higher low with confirmation of a higher high, the downtrend will continue. The instrument you use to profit from a market drop depends on your risk profile, the time fram... |
What are some good ways to control costs for groceries? | For a while I tried shopping multiple grocery stores, checking fliers each week from three different stores and then making the trip to all three stores to save ten cents on each item. After a couple months, I decided it just wasn't worth it. So, I picked my favorite store. I shop once a week, after reviewing the fli... |
What does pink-sheet mean related to stocks? | It's an over-the-counter stock quote system. Read all about it. Or visit it. |
Why invest for the long-term rather than buy and sell for quick, big gains? | Plenty of good answers here, but probably the best answer is that The Market relies on suckers...er...investors like you. The money has to come from somewhere, it might as well be you. So-called "day traders" or "short-term investors" are a huge part of the market, and they perform a vital function: they provide capi... |
Must a company have a specific number of employees to do an IPO? | While there is no legal reason to have a minimum number of employees, there can be a practical reason. They want to look like a good solid investment so that investors will give them money, which is what an IPO is, really. Hiring lots of people is part of that. Once the investors are committed, they can cut expenses... |
Why does the share price tend to fall if a company's profits decrease, yet remain positive? | Let's say you see a café. You're looking to buy a café so you walk into one and ask the manager how much profit he makes in a year. He says $N and you walk out and think to yourself, "I'd be willing to pay $500,000 for this café." You arrange to meet again to discuss purchasing the business (and he's looking for someon... |
Do the nasdaq small cap stocks or penny stocks get promoted? | The penny/pink sheet stocks you tend to see promoted are the ones a) with small public floats or, b) they are thinly traded. This means that any appreciable change in buy/sell volume will have an outsized effect on the stock's share price, even when the underlying fundamentals are not so great. Promoters are frequent... |
The spread goes to the market maker, is the market maker the exchange? | Joke warning: These days, it seems that rogue trading programs are the big market makers (this concludes the joke) Historically, exchange members were market makers. One or more members guaranteed a market in a particular stock, and would buy whatever you wanted to sell (or vice-versa). In a balanced market -- one wher... |
Stock stopped trading, what does this mean? | You have not lost value. It is just that the shares you owned, are now not tradable on US stock exchanges. You still have the value of your shares protected. In cases like de-listing of a stock, typically a trust (may be managed by a bank) is setup to help customers liquidate their stocks. You should try to search the ... |
Is 0% credit card utilization worse than 1-20% credit card utilization for any reason other than pure statistics? | The whole point of a credit report and, by extension, a credit score, is to demonstrate (and judge) your ability to repay borrowed funds. Everything stems from that goal; available credit, payment history, collections, etc all serve to demonstrate whether or not you personally are a good investment for lenders to purs... |
How much time does a doctor's office have to collect balance from me? | If they had told me that I owe them $10,000 from 3 years ago, I wouldn't have anything to fight back. Why? First thing you have to do is ask for a proof. Have you received treatment? Have you signed the bill when you were done? This should include all the information about what you got and how much you agreed to pay.... |
Best starting options to invest for retirement without a 401k | There's already an excellent answer here from @BenMiller, but I wanted to expand a bit on Types of Investments with some additional actionable information. You can invest in stocks, bonds, mutual funds (which are simply collections of stocks and bonds), bank accounts, precious metals, and many other things. Discuss... |
Is an interest-only mortgage a bad idea? | It seems you understand the risks, it seems like a fine enough idea. Hopefully it works out for you. However, you may want to talk to a few local banks about getting a short term home equity loan. I know someone who was able to do this getting a very low rate for 7 years. At the time of the loan, the prevailing rate... |
What economic growth rate is required to halve U.S. unemployment? | I believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics has published some numbers in this area... I cannot find them at the moment though. I think you need to take these numbers with a grain of salt, though, because they cannot account for productivity and automation improvements that are being aggressively implemented. Companies ar... |
Student loan payments and opportunity costs | As Mr. Money Money Mustache once said: IF YOU HAVE CREDIT CARD DEBT, YOU SHOULD FEEL LIKE YOUR HAIR IS ON FIRE Student loan debt is different than credit card debt. Rather than having spent the money on just about anything, it was invested in improving yourself and probably your financial future. This was probably ... |
Good Percentage Return on Equity? | Yes definitely Warren Buffet averaged returns of only around 21% throughout his 40 years in business. ROE of 23% is probably more than double the ROE of most companies , whats more as the saying goes its easier to grow sales from 1 million to 100 million than to grow sales from 100 million to 10 billion |
How do index funds actually work? | Now company A has been doing ok for couple of weeks, but then due to some factors in that company its stock has been tanking heavily and doesn't appear to have a chance to recover. In this kind of scenario, what does happen? In this scenario, if that company is included in the index being tracked, you will continue ho... |
why do I need an emergency fund if I already have investments? | From a budgeting perspective, the emergency fund is a category in which you've budgeted funds for the unexpected. These are things that weren't able to be predicted and budgeted for in advance, or things that exceeded the expected costs. For example you might budget $150 per month for car maintenance, and typically s... |
Debt collector has wrong person and is contacting my employer | You are talking to the wrong people. Debt collectors are not intimidated by anything you say. Call and tell them that, before you pay the debt, they need to get the paperwork from the company to verify that you actually owe them the money and the amount. You need copies of the original paperwork. This alone may resol... |
My mother's name is on my car title, how can I protect my ownership of the car in the event of her death? | It's her car. Unlike what Ross said in the comments she can't sign it over to you--she doesn't own it yet. The best you'll be able to do is have her leave it to you in her will--but beware that you very well might need to refinance the loan at that point. |
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