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Stocks go down and go back up, that's their nature... Why would you sell on a low point? Stocks are a long term investment. If the company is still healthy, it's very likely you'll be able to sell them with a profit if you wait long enough.

I carelessly invested in a stock on a spike near the peak price. How can I salvage my investment?

The answer is simple. You can generally claim a deduction for an expense if that expense was used to derive an income. Of course social policy sometimes gets in the way and allows for deductions where they usually wouldn't be allowed. Your rent is not tax deductible because this expense is not used to derive your income. If however you were working from your home, example - you had a home based business, and you dedicated a part of your home for your work, say an office, then part of your rent may then become tax deductible.

Why isn't money spent on necessities deductible from your taxes?

This is a "stress" period, much like the 1930s and 1970s. At a time like this, it is smart to be debt free, and to have money saved for the likely emergencies. There are growth periods like those of the 1980s and 1990s, probably returning in the 2020s and 2030s. At such times, it makes sense to play it a little "looser" and borrow money for investments. But the first order of business in answering this question is to look around you and figure out what is going on in the world (stress or growth).

How smart is it to really be 100% debt free?

The difference in interest is not a huge factor in your decision. It's about $2 per month. Personally I would go ahead and knock one out since it's one less to worry about. Then I would cancel the account and cut that card up so you are not tempted to use it again. To address the comments... Cutting up the card is NOT the ultimate solution. The solution is to stop borrowing money... Get on a strict budget, live on less than what you bring home, and throw everything you can at this high-interest debt. The destroying of the card is partly symbolic - it's a gesture to indicate that you're not going to use credit cards at all, or at least until they can be used responsibly, not paying a DIME of interest. It's analogous to a recovering alcoholic pouring out bottles of booze. Sure you can easily get more, but it's a commitment to changing your attitude and behavior. Yes leaving the card open will reduce utilization and improve (or not hurt) credit score - but if the goal is to stop borrowing money and pay off the other card, then once that is achieved, your credit score will be significantly improved, and the cancelling of the first card will not matter. The card (really both cards) should never, ever be used again.

What should I do with $4,000 cash and High Interest Debt?

As observed, there is no answer that will fit all, but below are some considerations: Your monthly requirement is 5000, so you have 3000 left to pay the monthly instalments (EMI). However, if you do pay 3000, you will have no money left for any other activities (holidays etc.) till your EMI is finished Set off a sum, let us say 500-1000, per month (you shall have to decide), for other expenses The rest of the money, in this case 2000-2500, you can pay as monthly EMI If you indicate that your monthly EMI to the bank, they will be able to tell you how much of loan you are eligible for and for how long the EMI would last. This is your benchmark If this loan amount is 750,000 or more, you do not need to put in your own money. So the decision then becomes how fast you want to pay off your loan and as accordingly you shall utilize your 500,000 However, if the EMI will not cover a loan of 750,000 (more likely case), you have options between the following: a. Max out on your loan that 2000-2500 EMI/month (in terms of years as well as amount) can get you and put the rest from 500,000. b. Min your loan in terms of amount and time and put your entire 500,000 c. The middle ground is to balance between the loan and your own money, which is the best approach, there is no figure here that works for all, you have to take the decision based on your circumstances. However, in general, the shorter the loan term (in years) better it is as in aggregate you pay less money to the bank. If you are 1-2 months away from buying the house, one exercise you could do is to keep the EMI money in a separate bank account and see how you fare with the residual cash, this would give you a good reality check. Hope this helps, thanks

Buying a house, how much should my down payment be?

Goldprice.org has different currencies and historical data. I think silverprice.org also has historical data.

Free Historical Commodity Prices in txt?

If the insurance policy is a whole-life (or variable life) policy, it might have a surrender value that the owner of the policy might be able to get by surrendering the policy in whole; if it is a term life policy, it has no surrender value. In many cases, the owner of the policy is also the insured and so ask Uncle Joe whether he would be willing to surrender the life insurance policy and give you the proceeds now instead of making you wait till he passes away. If it is a term life policy, ask him to consider not renewing the policy and from now on, just give you the premium he would have been paying to the insurance company. Whether he will pay you increasing amounts in later years (as a renewable five-year level term policy might require) is a more delicate matter that you can negotiate with him. On the other hand, if the policy owner is Aunt Annie but the insured is Uncle Joe (and you are the beneficiary), talk to Aunt Annie instead; she is the one who can cancel the policy, not Uncle Joe. And for heaven's sake, don't grease the skids to facilitate Uncle Joe's first step onto the stairway to heaven; there are, depending on where you live, various laws prohibiting payments to beneficiaries who have had a hand in arranging for the happy event to occur.

Is it possible to get life insurance as a beneficiary before the person insured dies?

Can you afford to replace it? What does that mean? Even if insuring means overpaying, it does spread the risk. NB: This example is not about the Applecare program, which I think is a waste of money for many people. Others have explained very well if it would work for you or not. I have a Macbook but no Applecare. I have an expensive smartphone with insurance for dropping and water damage, but not theft. After one year I cancel this insurance. I don't have $200K in my bank account.

Is insurance worth it if you can afford to replace the item? If not, when is it?

If you're simply a futures speculator, then yes, it does seem like gambling. If you're a farmer producing a few thousand bushels of wheat, futures can be a mechanism for you to hedge against certain kinds of market risk. Same if you're running a heating oil company, etc. I just read somewhere that the bad spring weather in South Dakota has prevented farmers from getting corn planted -- nothing is in the ground yet. This is "objective data" from which you might infer that this year's corn harvest could be late and/or smaller than normal. So maybe if you're a buyer for General Mills, you use corn futures to control your costs. In this case you'd have some idea based on experience what to expect for the price of corn, what your production line requires for input, how much you can charge for finished product, etc. These all factor in to the price you'd be willing to pay for corn futures.

Are buying and selling futures based on objective data?

Per their merchant agreements, Visa and MasterCard say that the signature on the back of the card is the proper way to identify the card holder. If a card is not signed, the merchant is supposed to check your ID and make you sign the card before accepting it for payment. Merchants are not allowed the require an ID for paying with a signed card. Of course, store employees rarely know all these things. Some will gladly accept an unsigned card. Some will try to make you show your ID.

Are cashiers required to check a credit card for a signature in the U.S.?

Why would a bank buy government bonds? Why couldn't they just deposit their money in another bank instead? Generally, banks are limited by laws and regulations about how much they must set aside as reserves. Of the money they receive as deposits, they may loan a certain amount, but must keep some as a reserve (this is called "fractional reserve banking"). Different countries have a different amount that they must set aside in reserves. In countries where bank deposits are guaranteed, there is almost always some upper limit to how much is guaranteed. The amount of money that a bank would deposit in another bank would be far greater than the guarantee.

Why would anyone buy a government bond?

Let me add a few thoughts that have not been mentioned so far in the other answers. Note that for the decision of buying vs. renting a home i.e. for personal use, not for renting out there's a rule of thumb that if the price for buying is more than 20 year's (cold) rents it is considered rather expensive. I don't know how localized this rule of thumb is, but I know it for Germany which is apparently the OP's country, too. There are obviously differences between buying a house/flat for yourself and in order to rent it out. As others have said, maintenance is a major factor for house owners - and here a lot depends on how much of that you do yourself (i.e. do you have the possibility to trade working hours for costs - which is closely related to financial risk exposure, e.g. increasing income by cutting costs as you do maintenance work yourself if you loose your day-time job?). This plays a crucial role for landlords I know (they're all small-scale landlords, and most of them do put in substantial work themselves): I know quite a number of people who rent out flats in the house where they actually live. Some of the houses were built with flats and the owner lives in one of the flats, another rather typical setup is that people built their house in the way that a smaller flat can easily be separated and let once the kids moved out (note also that the legal situation for the landlord is easier in that special case). I also know someone who owns a house several 100 km away from where they live and they say they intentionally ask a rent somewhat below the market price for that (nice) kind of flat so that they have lots of applicants at the same time and tenants don't move out as finding a new tenant is lots of work and costly because of the distance. My personal conclusion from those points is that as an investment (i.e. not for immediate or future personal use) I'd say that the exact circumstances are very important: if you are (stably) based in a region where the buying-to-rental-price ratio is favorable, you have the necessary time and are able to do maintenance work yourself and there is a chance to buy a suitable house closeby then why not. If this is not the case, some other form of investing in real estate may be better. On the other hand, investing in further real estate closeby where you live in your own house means increased lump risk - you miss diversification into regions where the value of real estate may develop very differently. There is one important psychological point that may play a role with the observed relation between being rich and being landlord. First of all, remember that the median wealth (without pensions) for Germany is about 51 k€, and someone owning a morgage-free 150 k€ flat and nothing else is somewhere in the 7th decile of wealth. To put it the other way round: the question whether to invest 150 k€ into becoming a landlord is of practical relevance only for rich (in terms of wealth) people. Also, asking this question is typically only relevant for people who already own the home they live in as buying for personal use will typically have a better return than buying in order to rent. But already people who buy for personal use are on average wealthier (or at least on the track to become more wealthy in case of fresh home owners) than people who rent. This is attributed to personal characteristics and the fact that the downpayment of the mortgage enforces saving behaviour (which is typically kept up once the house is paid, and is anyways found to be more pronounced than for non-house-owners). In contrast, many people who decide never to buy a home fall short of their initial savings/investment plans (e.g. putting the 150 k€ into an ETF for the next 21 years) and in the end spend considerably more money - and this group of people rarely invests into directly becoming a landlord. Assuming that you can read German, here's a relevant newspaper article and a related press release.

Why invest in becoming a landlord?

Buy them a physical stock certificate... you can request them from a broker, or buy through a company like http://www.oneshare.com. Other options:

What is a good investment vehicle for introducing kids to investing?

Most people cannot use pgp/gpg and setting it up would, in order to do that correctly, require voice fingerprint verification. Don't. Just write a word doc and either encrypt it when saving using the "save as" function or encrypt it using zip and email that to them. Then call them and tell them the password. Done.

Is it safer to send credit card number via unsecured website form or by e-mail? What safer options are there?

If your returns match the market, that means their rate of return is the same as the market in question. If your returns beat the market, that means their rate of return is higher. There's no one 'market', mind you. I invest in mutual funds that track the S&P500 (which is, very roughly, the U.S. stock market), that track the Canadian stock market, that track the international stock market, and which track the Canadian bond market. In general, you should be deeply dubious of any advertised investment option that promises to beat the market. It's certainly possible to do so. If you buy a single stock, for example, that stock may go up by 40% over the course of a year while the market may go up by 5%. However, you are likely taking on substantially more risk. So there's a very good chance (likely, a greater chance) that the investment would go down, losing you money.

What does the term “match the market” mean?

Sorry, even if you never file a claim for Employment Insurance (EI), you don't get your premiums back. So, yes, if you paid into EI and never filed a claim, your contributions are, as you put it, "wasted" – insofar that your premiums provided no direct benefit to you. However, your premiums may have provided a benefit to society, perhaps even your previous colleagues. Yet, some would point out that a good chunk of EI premiums are likely wasted on excessive administration of the program itself. That's government. A couple of cases I'm aware of where you may be refunded some of the EI premiums paid are: Meaning, a legal way to avoid paying into the EI system altogether is to run your own business. Of course, you won't be able to file an EI claim if your business evaporates overnight. Other kinds of claims unavailable to those who don't pay into EI include maternity, parental*, and sickness benefits .. although they recently made some changes to permit the self-employed to opt-in for some special benefits. * except in the province of Quebec, where there is a separate Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP) that also covers the self-employed.

Is the contribution towards Employment Insurance (EI) wasted if I never get fired, or are my premiums refunded?

It will depend largely on your broker what type of stop and trailing stop orders they provide. Saying that, I have not come across any brokers yet that offer limit orders with trailing stop orders. Unlike a standard stop order where you can either make it a market stop order or a limit stop order, usually most brokers have trailing stop orders as market orders only, where you can either set the trailing stop to be a dollar value or percentage from the most recent high. Remember also, that trailing stop orders will be based on the intra-day highs and not the highest closing price. That means that if the share price spikes up during the day your trailing stop will move up, and if the price then spikes down you may be stopped out prematurely, after which the price might rally again. For this reason I try to base my trailing stops on the highest closing price by using standard stop loss orders and moving it up manually after the close of trade if the share price has closed at a new high. This takes a few minutes each evening (depending on how many stocks you have to check and adjust the stops for) but gives you more control. Using this method will also enable you to set limit orders attached to your stop loss triggers, and you won't have to keep your trailing too close to the last high price thus potentially causing you to get stopped out prematurely. Slightly off track but may be handy if you set profit targets, my broker has recently introduced Trailing Take Profit Orders. The way it works is, say you have a profit target of 50%, so you buy at $2 and want to take profits if the price reaches $3, you could set your Trailing Take Profit Trigger at say $3.10 or above and set a Trail by Amount of say $0.10. So if the price after hitting $3.10 falls to $3.00 you will be stopped out and collect your profits. If the price moves up to $3.30 and then falls to $3.20, you will be stopped out at $3.20 and make some extra profits. If the price continues going up the Trailing Take Profit will continue to move up always $0.10 below the highest price reached. I think this would be a very useful order if you were range trading where you could set the Trailing Take Profit trigger near recent resistance so you can get out if prices start reversing at or around the resistance, but continue profiting if the price breaks through the resistance.

Set different trigger and sell price for Trailing Stop Limit

The most succinct answer is "Banks are in the Money business". Not construction, not real estate, not any of the other things they may find find themselves sometimes being dragged (foreclosure) or tempted (construction) into. "Money" is their core competence, and as good business people they recognize that straying outside that just dilutes their focus.

Why do banks finance shared construction as mortgages instead of financing it directly and selling the apartments in a building?

They are already indirectly paying these expenses. They should be built into your rates. The amount per job or per hour needs to cover what would have been your salary, plus the what would have been sick, vacation, holidays, health insurance, life insurance, disability, education, overhead for office expenses, cost of accountants...and all taxes. In many companies the general rule of thumb is that they need to charge a customer 2x the employees salary to cover all this plus make a profit. If this is a side job some of these benefits will come from your main job. Some self employed get some of these benefits from their spouse. The company has said we give you money for the work you perform, but you need to cover everything else including paying all taxes. Depending on where you live you might have to send money in more often then once a year. They are also telling you that they will be reporting the money they give you to the government so they can claim it as a business expense. So you better make sure you report it as income.

How can contractors recoup taxation-related expenses?

This is another version of an old scam -- "let me have a check deposited in your account because I can't open one for some reason, and I'll share some of the money with you." Here the scammer is promising to "start a business" with you as a way to gain your confidence and trust. The first danger sign is that you only know this person from online. They are not someone you are friends with in the "real" world. They could be anybody. They used the name of a big company as a way to make what they're doing sound legitimate, but it's all a fraud. They could be depositing a faked Exxon check into your account, which could land YOU in huge trouble. Here's the thing -- The only way Exxon (or any other company) can deposit money in a bank under someone's name is if that person provides the account and routing numbers to an account that already exists. No company can just create an account in another person's name. That's Hollywood movie stuff, but it's not how banking works. To open an account, the bank would need identification on the account holder, so your "friend" already has an account if Exxon has allegedly deposited money. Further, Exxon isn't going to take back money that has already been deposited. In fact, they can't take it back. If the account is in his name, they can't do anything to the account or with the account. This is a situation you should run away from and never look back. Nothing about this story sounds right or legitimate, but this is one of the oldest scams out there since the beginning of the Internet. You would be well advised to stay VERY far away from your supposed friend, because they're anything but your friend. You are being SCAMMED. Don't be a victim. Stop communicating with this person immediately, and DON'T give them any personal information of any kind. They're crooks! I hope this helps. Good luck!

A friend wants to use my account for a wire transfer. Is this a scam or is it legitimate?

In general, if you think something even MIGHT be a scam, the answer is"yes".

Is This A Scam? Woman added me on LinkedIn first, then e-mailed offering me millions of dollars [duplicate]

Bank every dollar possible to have more cash available for investing during the 2008/2009 crisis.

What one bit of financial advice do you wish you could've given yourself five years ago?

401Ks and IRAs are types of retirement accounts. They have rules regarding maximum amount of investments per year; who can invest; destructibility; and the tax treatment of the growth. Stock, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs are all types of investments that can exist either inside or outside of the retirement account. Some 401Ks restrict the type of investments you can have, others allow you to own almost anything. Any investment is a risk, and there is no guarantee that it will grow. Look around the site for beginning investment advice. You should start with the 401K offered by your company especially if they have matching funds. That is free money. Many suggest you invest enough to get the match, then invest with an IRA. Look into IRAs because under US tax law you can still make a 2013 investment up until tax day 2014. Take the time before tax day to decide on Roth or Regular IRA. The more exotic investments take more time to understand and should not be a concern until you have laid out your basic retirement accounts.

Are there any other investing methods I should look into?

Just to get the ball rolling, here's an answer: it won't affect you in the slightest. The pound happened to be tumbling anyway. (If you read "in the papers" that Brexit is "making the pound fall", that's as valuable as anything else you've ever read in the papers.) Currencies go up and down drastically all the time, and there's nothing you can do about it. We by fluke once bought a house in Australia when that currency was very low; over the next couple years the currency basically doubled (I mean per the USD) and we happened to sell it; we made a 1/2 million measured in USD. Just a fluke. I've had the opposite happen on other occasions over the decades. But... Currency changes mean absolutely nothing if you're in that country. The example from (2) was only relevant because we happened to be moving in and out of Aus. My various Australian friends didn't even notice that their dollar went from .5 to 1 in terms of USD (how could it matter to them?) All sorts of things drastically affect the general economy of a given country. (Indeed, note that a falling currency is often seen as a very good thing for a given nation's economy: conspiracy theorists in the states are forever complaining that ) Nobody has the slightest clue if "Brexit" will be good bad or indifferent for the UK. Anything could happen. It could be the beginning of an incredible period of growth for the UK (after all, why does Brussels not want your country to leave - goodwill?) and your house could triple in value in a year. Or, your house price could tumble to half in a year. Nobody has the slightest clue, whatsoever about the effects on the "economy" of a country going forward, of various inputs.

How will the fall of the UK Pound impact purchasing my first property?

One of two things is true: You own less than 5% of the total shares outstanding. Your transaction will have little to no effect on the market. For most purposes you can use the current market price to value the position. You own more than 5% of the total shares outstanding. You are probably restricted on when, where, and why you can sell the shares because you are considered part owner of the company. Regardless, how to estimate (not really "calculate," since some of the inputs to the formula are assumptions a.k.a. guesses) the value depends on exactly what you plan to with the result.

How to calculate how much a large stock position is really worth?

From my experience you don't need knowledge of accounting to pick good stocks. The type of investing you are referring to is fundamental. This is finding out about the company, this websites should help you start off: http://en.tradehero.mobi/how-to-choose-a-stock-fundamental-analysis/ Investopedia will also be a useful website in techniques. A bit of knowledge in economics will be helpful in understanding how current affairs will affect a market, which will affect stock prices. However you need neither economics or accounting knowledge if you were to learn technical analysis, many doubt the workings of this technique, but in my experience it is easier to learn and practise. For example looking at charts from previous years it shows the last time there was a huge recession the dollar did well and commodities didn't. In this recession we are entering you can see the same thing happening. Read about the different techniques before limiting yourself to just looking at financial statements you may find a better technique suited to you, like these technical analysts: http://etfhq.com/blog/2013/03/02/top-technical-analysts/ Hope this helps.

How much accounting knowledge is needed to read financial statements of publicly traded companies?

manage the company properly. If you aren't much aware about company rules and regulation or tax matters, get an accountant so that you don't mess up later. better off paying my self a dividend of 100% profit or as an employee? That depends on how much salary you intend to pay yourself, your dividend or how much business expenses you will incur while running the business. Generally speaking you are better off paying your self a minimum salary and pay the rest as dividends. But check out the dividend tax and the income tax you might need to pay and compare which situation you are better off. If you have a partner, using the dividend way will reduce your NI outgoes. ethical and legal? Ethically the dividend way might burn your conscience but it is perfectly legal way of doing things.

Paying myself a dividend from ltd company

Altough this may vary a lot depending on where you live and your actual finance, here what convinced me buying a home instead of renting : Other benefits :

What are the economic benefits of owning a home in the United States?

You're on the right track, and yes, that small difference is subject to income taxes. Do you use a payroll service? I do the same thing and use my payroll software to tweak the salary until the paycheck is just a few dollars every month (we run payroll once a month), with the rest going to the 401(k) and payroll taxes. So we're rounding up just a bit just so there's an actual paycheck with a positive number, and a bit does get withheld for fed/state income tax. Also keep in mind you can make a company match. If your plan is a solo 401(k) with just you and your wife as the sole employees, consider the 25% match for both of you. The match is not subject to payroll taxes because it is a company expense. IRS web page: http://www.irs.gov/Retirement-Plans/One-Participant-401(k)-Plans

How much total salary to allocate to defer $17,500 to 401(k)?

Convexity refers to vega. Gamma refers to delta. Negative carry refers to time decay.

What does it mean to long convexity of options?

Your gain is $1408. The difference between 32% of your gain and 15% of your gain is $236.36 or $1.60 per share. If you sell now, you have $3957.44 after taxes. Forget about the ESPP for a moment. Are you be willing to wager $4000 on the proposition that your company's stock price won't go down more than $1.60 or so over the next 18 months? I've never felt it was worth it. Also, I never thought it made much sense to own any of my employer's stock. If their business does poorly, I'd prefer not to have both my job and my money at risk. If you sell now: Now assuming you hold for 18 months, pay 15% capital gains tax, and the stock price drops by $1.60 to $23.40:

Do the tax consequences make it worth it for me to hold ESPP stock?

It's a gift if there are no strings attached. If you are rationalizing it to try to make it a gift for tax or any other purpose when there really is a connection between the transactions, or when you expect any kind of value or benefit in return for it, then it's not a gift... don't make it one and don't call it one. That would indeed likely be fraud. Play be the rules and sleep easy, is how I like to live.

Is giving my girlfriend money for her mortgage closing costs and down payment considered fraud?

No, it makes no sense. The US national debt is different from other debt on TWO KEY WAYS : 1.) The national debt is not money we owe to our government IT IS MONEY WE OWE TO OURSELVES. 2.) If the GNP of our country can grow at a rate equal to or greater than the national debt interest, then the figure of national debt has no bearing on anything. So a more philanthropic endeavor would be to help grow the economy.

Does it make any sense to directly contribute to reducing the US national debt?

The main question is, how much money you want to make? With every transaction, you should calculate the real price as the price plus costs. For example, if you but 10 GreatCorp stock of £100 each, and the transaction cost is £20 , then the real cost of buying a single share is in fact buying price of stock + broker costs / amount bought, or £104 in this case. Now you want to make a profit so calculate your desired profit margin. You want to receive a sales price of buying price + profit margin + broker costs / amount bought. Suppose that you'd like 5%, then you'll need the price per stock of my example to increase to 100 + 5% + £40 / 10 = £109. So you it only becomes worth while if you feel confident that GreatCorp's stock will rise to that level. Read the yearly balance of that company to see if they don't have any debt, and are profitable. Look at their dividend earning history. Study the stock's candle graphs of the last ten years or so, to find out if there's no seasonal effects, and if the stock performs well overall. Get to know the company well. You should only buy GreatCorp shares after doing your homework. But what about switching to another stock of LovelyInc? Actually it doesn't matter, since it's best to separate transactions. Sell your GreatCorp's stock when it has reached the desired profit margin or if it seems it is underperforming. Cut your losses! Make the calculations for LovelyCorp's shares without reference to GreatCorp's, and decide like that if it's worth while to buy.

Stock Trade Transaction Fee - at what point is it worth it

short answer: any long term financial planning (~10yrs+). e.g. mortgage and retirement planning. long answer: inflation doesn't really matter in short time frames. on any given day, you might get a rent hike, or a raise, or the grocery store might have a sale. inflation is really only relevant over the long term. annual inflation is tiny (2~4%) compared to large unexpected expenses(5-10%). however, over 10 years, even your "large unexpected expenses" will still average out to a small fraction of your spending (5~10%) compared to the impact of compounded inflation (30~40%). inflation is really critical when you are trying to plan for retirement, which you should start doing when you get your first job. when making long-term projections, you need to consider not only your expected nominal rate of investment return (e.g. 7%) but also subtract the expected rate of inflation (e.g. 3%). alternatively, you can add the inflation rate to your projected spending (being sure to compound year-over-year). when projecting your income 10+ years out, you can use inflation to estimate your annual raises. up to age 30, people tend to get raises that exceed inflation. thereafter, they tend to track inflation. if you ever decide to buy a house, you need to consider the impact of inflation when calculating the total cost over a 30-yr mortgage. generally, you can expect your house to appreciate over 30 years in line with inflation (possibly more in an urban area). so a simple mortgage projection needs to account for interest, inflation, maintenance, insurance and closing costs. you could also consider inflation for things like rent and income, but only over several years. generally, rent and income are such large amounts of money it is worth your time to research specific alternatives rather than just guessing what market rates are this year based on average inflation. while it is true that rent and wages go up in line with inflation in the long run, you can make a lot of money in the short run if you keep an eye on market rates every year. over 10-20 years your personal rate of inflation should be very close to the average rate when you consider all your spending (housing, food, energy, clothing, etc.).

What does inflation mean to me?

The benefits and taxes thing, in my opinion is the biggie. Most people don't realize that the cost to the company for a full-time employee with benefits can be 2x or even 3x the amount they see in their paycheck. Health plans are extremely expensive. Even if you are having money taken from your check for health insurance, it is often just a fraction of the total cost, and the employer is subsidizing the rest. More expensive benefits that contractors don't typically get are 401K matches and paid vacation days. When contractors call in sick or don't work because it is a national holiday, they don't get paid for that day. Also, see that line on your paycheck deducting for Social security and Medicare? That is only half of the tax. The employer pays an equal amount that is not shown on that statement. Also, they pay taxes that go towards unemployment benefits , and may be required to pay higher taxes if they churn through a lot of full-time employees. You can usually let contractors go with relative impunity . For the unemployment tax reasons, not paying for people's days off or benefits, a lot less paperwork, and less risk to the business associated with committing to full-time employees all provide value to the company. Thus companies are willing to pay more because they are getting more. Think of it like a cell phone-contract. If you commit to a three year contract it can be a pain/expensive to get out of the deal early, but you will probably get a better rate in exchange for the risk being shifted to your end of the deal.

Why do consultants or contractors make more money than employees?

Many of my friends said I should invest my money on stocks or something else, instead of put them in the bank forever. I do not know anything about finance, so my questions are: First let me say that your friends may have the best intentions, but don't trust them. It has been my experience that friends tell you what they would do if they had your money, and not what they would actually do with their money. Now, I don't mean that they would be malicious, or that they are out to get you. What I do mean, is why would you take advise from someone about what they would do with 100k when they don't have 100k. I am in your financial situation (more or less), and I have friends that make more then I do, and have no savings. Or that will tell you to get an IRA -so-and-so but don't have the means (discipline) to do so. Do not listen to your friends on matters of money. That's just good all around advise. Is my financial status OK? If not, how can I improve it? Any financial situation with no or really low debt is OK. I would say 5% of annual income in unsecured debt, or 2-3 years in annual income in secured debt is a good place to be. That is a really hard mark to hit (it seems). You have hit it. So your good, right now. You may want to "plan for the future". Immediate goals that I always tell people, are 6 months of income stuck in a liquid savings account, then start building a solid investment situation, and a decent retirement plan. This protects you from short term situations like loss of job, while doing something for the future. Is now a right time for me to see a financial advisor? Is it worthy? How would she/he help me? Rather it's worth it or not to use a financial adviser is going to be totally opinion based. Personally I think they are worth it. Others do not. I see it like this. Unless you want to spend all your time looking up money stuff, the adviser is going to have a better grasp of "money stuff" then you, because they do spend all their time doing it. That being said there is one really important thing to consider. That is going to be how you pay the adviser. The following are my observations. You will need to make up your own mind. Free Avoid like the plague. These advisers are usually provided by the bank and make their money off commission or kickbacks. That means they will advise you of the product that makes them the most money. Not you. Flat Rate These are not a bad option, but they don't have any real incentive to make you money. Usually, they do a decent job of making you money, but again, it's usually better for them to advise you on products that make them money. Per Hour These are my favorite. They charge per hour. Usually they are a small shop, and will walk you through all the advise. They advise what's best for you, because they have to sit there and explain their choices. They can be hard to find, but are generally the best option in my opinion. % of Money These are like the flat rate advisers to me. They get a percentage of the money you give them to "manage". Because they already have your money they are more likely to recommend products that are in their interest. That said, there not all bad. % or Profit These are the best (see notes later). They get a percentage of the money they make for you. They have the most interest in making you money. They only get part of what you get, so there going to make sure you get the biggest pie, so they can get a bigger slice. Notes In the real world, all advisers are likely to get kickbacks on products they recommend. Make sure to keep an eye for that. Also most advisers will use 2-3 of the methods listed above for billing. Something like z% of profit +$x per hour is what I like to see. You will have to look around and see what is available. Just remember that you are paying someone to make you money (or to advise you on how to make money) so long as what they take leaves you with some profit your in a better situation then your are now. And that's the real goal.

I have savings and excess income. Is it time for me to find a financial advisor?

Just to aid your searching, note that what your employer has provided you with access to is a Group Personal Pension . Now, as to the question of whether partial transfers from a GPP to a SIPP are possible - the answer would appear to be Probably Yes; however you should contact the pension administrator at your employer (who will be able to give both the employer's and the scheme's points of view), and also the SIPP provider you are considering, to get a definitive answer. I'm basing this on the results I'm seeing googling for 'partial gpp transfer', eg Partial transfer from group pension possible? and Is it possible to transfer?. Add to that the fact that one of the largest UK SIPP providers explicitly includes a 'Partial Transfer' checkbox on their pension transfer form.

Can I transfer money from a personal pension to a SIPP, while leaving the original pension open?

Each way you go is a little bit of a gamble. Owning equity in the company is best in situations where you can trade and sell that equity, or where the dilution of your royalty product would affect your returns, or if you can maintain a certain equity stake without working at the company or if you can hold out on taking equity to reinvest profits for the purposes of growth. The royalty is best in situations where you're getting a portion of the gross, since you get paid as a creditor, no matter how the company is performing, or if you intend to collect royalties after you leave the company. Now for your situation: if your royalties are fluctuating with profit instead of gross and your equity is tied to your continued partnership and not subject to potential growth... then they're pretty much both workarounds for the same thing, you've removed the particular advantages for each way of receiving payment. If the company ever does buy out or go public, how much of your additional X earning a month would you have to then re-invest to get an equity stake? And for royalties, if another developer came aboard, or your company bought another company, how much would this dilute your IP contribution? So, aside from the gambling nature of the issue, I'm not sure your tax calculation is right. You can take equity profit as dividend, as long as you're collecting a sufficient salary (this prevents a business from declaring all profits as a dividend). This would put those profits into a different tax bracket, 15% capital gains. Or if all profits are equitably split, you could take part as salary, part as dividend. As well, as someone who's making active income off of their IP, not passive income, you're supposed to file a Schedule C, not a Schedule E, so your royalties would include your self employment taxes. The schedule E is for royalties where the author isn't actively in the field or actually self employed in that area, or if you own royalties on something you didn't create. Should you keep the royalties then go to another job field or retire then your royalties could go on a Schedule E. Now, a tax advantage may exist on a Schedule C if you can write off certain health and business expenses reducing your income that you can't on a Schedule E, though it'd probably be difficult to write off more than the adjusted self employment cost savings of a Schedule E.

Is there any advantage to owning equity in a company compared to a royalty agreement?

If it's just you working, I'd use a ballpark figure of 35% owed - it may be a little high or low, but it's a safe margin to keep set aside for paying your liabilities at the end of the year.

Contract job (hourly rate) as a 1099: How much would I be making after taxes?

Why would you file four K-1s for each partner? You file one K-1 per partner, on which you report the total of income attributed to that partner. It shouldn't and cannot "vary". There's no variables here, the income you report is the income already earned and attributed to that partner. What's there to vary? How you decide the attribution of income is governed by your operating agreement, the IRS only needs the bottom line.

LLC Partnership Earned Income vs. Partnership Share

In the case of bank failures You are protected by FDIC insurance. At the time I wrote this, you are insured up to $250,000. In my lifetime, it has been as high as $1,000,000 and as low as $100,000. I attached a link, which is updated by FDIC. In the case of fraud It depends. If you read this story and are horrified (I was too), you know that the banking system is not as safe as the other answers imply: In February 2005, Joe Lopez, a businessman from Florida, filed a suit against Bank of America after unknown hackers stole $90,000 from his Bank of America account. The money had been transferred to Latvia. An investigation showed that Mr. Lopez’s computer was infected with a malicious program, Backdoor.Coreflood, which records every keystroke and sends this information to malicious users via the Internet. This is how the hackers got hold of Joe Lopez’s user name and password, since Mr. Lopez often used the Internet to manage his Bank of America account. However the court did not rule in favor of the plaintiff, saying that Mr. Lopez had neglected to take basic precautions when managing his bank account on the Internet: a signature for the malicious code that was found on his system had been added to nearly all antivirus product databases back in 2003. Ouch. But let's think about the story for a second - he had his money stolen because of online banking and he didn't have the latest antivirus/antimalware software. How safe is banking if you don't do online banking? In the case of this story, it would have prevented keyloggers, but you're still susceptible to someone stealing your card or account information. So: In the bank's defense, how does a bank not know that someone didn't wire money to a friend (which is a loss for good), then get some of that money back from his friend while also getting money back from the bank, which had to face the loss. Yes, it sucks, but it's not total madness. As for disputing charges, from personal experience it also depends. I don't use cards whatsoever, so I've never had to worry, but both of my parents have experienced banking fraud where a fake charge on their card was not reversed. Neither of my parents are rich and can't afford lawyers, so crying "lawsuit" is not an option for everyone. How often does this occur? I suspect it's rare that banks don't reverse the charges in fraudulent cases, though you will still lose time for filing and possibly filling out paperwork. The way to prevent this: As much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, there is no absolutely safe place to keep your money. Even if you bought metals and buried them in the ground, a drifter with a metal detector might run across it one day. You can take steps to protect yourself, but there is no absolute guarantee that these will work out. Account Closures I added this today because I saw this question and have only seen/heard about this three times. Provided that you get the cashier's check back safely, you should be okay - but why was this person's account closed and look at how much funds he had! From his question: In the two years I banked with BoA I never had an overdraft or any negative marks on my account so the only thing that would stick out was a check that I deposited for $26k that my mom left me after she passed. Naturally, people aren't going to like some of my answers, especially this, but imagine you're in an immediate need for cash, and you experience this issue. What can you do? Let's say that rent is on the line and it's $25 for every day that you're late. Other steps to protect yourself Some banks allow you to use a keyword or phrase. If you're careful with how you do this and are clever, it will reduce the risk that someone steals your money.

How safe is a checking account?

It's important to realize that any portfolio, if sufficiently diversified should track overall GDP growth, and anything growing via a percentage per annum is going to double eventually. (A good corner-of-napkin estimate is 70/the percentage = years to double). Just looking at your numbers, if you initially put in the full $7000, an increase to $17000 after 10 years represents a return of ~9.3% per annum (to check my math $7000*1.09279^10 ≈ $17000). Since you've been putting in the $7000 over 10 years the return is going to be a bit more than that, but it's not possible to calculate based on the information given. A return of 9.3% is not bad (some rules of thumb: inflation is about 2-4% so if you are making less than that you're losing money, and 6-10% per annum is generally what you should expect if your portfolio is tracking the market)... I wouldn't consider that rate of return to be particularly amazing, but it's not bad either, as you've done better than you would have if you had invested in an ETF tracking the market. The stock market being what it is, you can't rule out the possibility that you got lucky with your stock picks. If your portfolio was low-risk, a return of 9%ish could be considered amazing, but given that it's about 5-6 different stocks what I'd consider amazing would be a return of 15%+ (to give you something to shoot for!) Either way, for your amount of savings you're probably better off going with a mutual fund or an ETF. The return might be slightly lower, but the risk profile is also lower than you picking your stocks, since the fund/ETF will be more diversified. (and it's less work!)

How can I determine if my portfolio's rate of return has been “good”, or not?

Government registering of financial institutions usually is to make the government safe (eg FINTRAC is watching for money laundering and financing terrorism) rather than to make it's customers safe. Most governments have many levels of registrations and regulatory bodies. The most stringent requirements are usually obligatory only for banks, and they indeed often include precautions for insuring customer's deposits. Even this insurances have limits, eg in most EU countries the state guarantees deposits up to 100kEUR. If you deposit more and the bank flops - you lose everything over the limit. Companies like forex or currency exchanges usually make their best effort to avoid as many regulations as possible, just because it's costly. If a given company does have guarantee funds and/or customer insurance, it should be advertised and explained on their website. However the whole issue of trust is misguiding. You don't have to "trust" in your grocery store to shop there. There is no government guarantee that the vegetables sold will be tasty. If you buy and the product fells short of your expectations, you call it a loss and start shopping elsewhere. Financial services are no different than any other product. I recommend to your aunt to start small and see how it works. If a service turns out well, she can increase the amount sent through exchange and decrease amount sent through bank. But still, it's always prudent to send eg $1000 every week instead of $4000 once a month. It's more time consuming and cumbersome than having your bank do it - but it's the safety and convenience you're paying premium for.

Do Online Currency Exchanges' registration with the government guarantee safety and reliability?

You should also be aware that there are banks that do business in the US that do not deal with Fannie Mae, and thus are not subject to the rules about conforming loans. Here is an example of a well-known bank that lists two sets of rates, with the second being for loans of $750,000 or more (meaning the first covers everything up to that) https://home.ingdirect.com/orange-mortgage/rates

Alternative to Jumbo Mortgage

If by "investment" you mean something that pays you money that you can spend, then no. But if you view "investment" as something that improves your balance sheet / net worth by reducing debt and reducing how much money you're throwing away in interest each month, then the answer is definitely yes, paying down debt is a good investment to improve your overall financial condition. However, your home mortgage might not be the first place to start looking for pay-downs to save money. Credit cards typically have much higher interest rates than mortgages, so you would save more money by working on eliminating your credit card debt first. I believe Suze Orman said something like: If you found an investment that paid you 25% interest, would you take it? Of course you would! Paying down high interest debt reduces the amount of interest you have to pay next month. Your same amount of income will be able to go farther, do more because you'll be paying less in interest. Pay off your credit card debt first (and keep it off), then pay down your mortgage. A few hundred dollars in extra principal paid in the first few years of a 30 year mortgage can remove years of interest payments from the mortgage term. Whether you plan to keep your home for decades or you plan to move in 10 years, having less debt puts you in a stronger financial position.

Can paying down a mortgage be considered an “investment”?

The 'appropriate' amount of cash/bonds to hold will be largely a matter of opinion, but here are the general reasons why having at least some is a good idea: Cash is very liquid, and bonds are often mostly liquid. This means you can access them very quickly, without taking on losses. To get the most liquidity out of your bonds, you can do what is called 'laddering'. This means that you take out different bond amounts with different maturity dates, and periodically renew them on a schedule, so that you always have some bonds maturing, which you can access without paying an interest penalty. You can look this term up online for more details. Cash and bonds are low risk. If you have absolutely no low-risk assets, then in the event of, say, a market crash, you may have no savings to fall back on. By owning some bonds, and some equities, you are able to earn a modest return, without being too risky. However, note that some bonds are just as risky as equities - any bond which pays an abnormally high interest rate does so because the entity backing the repayment (government, company, whomever) is thought to not be guaranteed to be able to do so. The 25% figure given by your author is his opinion on the appropriate mix of cash/bonds to equities, but there are many views on the matter. Consider that any 'rule of thumb' in personal finance should be for general consideration only.

Cash or Bonds (UK)

You can find lots of answers to this question by googling. I found at least five pages about this in 30 seconds. Most of these pages seem to say that if you must convert cash, converting it in the destination country is probably better, because you are essentially buying a product (in this case, dollars), and it will cheaper where the supply is greater. There are more dollars in the USA than there are in Portugal, so you may be able to get them cheaper there. (Some of those pages mention caveats if you're trying to exchange some little-known currency, which people might not accept, but this isn't an issue if you're converting euros.) Some of those pages specifically recommend against airport currency exchanges; since they have a "captive audience" of people who want to convert money right away, they face less competition and may offer worse rates. Of course, the downside of doing the exchange in the USA is that you'll be less familiar with where to do it. I did find some people saying that, for this reason, it's better to do it in your own country where you can shop around at leisure to find the best rate. That said, if you take your time shopping around, shifts in the underlying exchange rate in the interim could erase any savings you find. It's worth noting, though, that the main message from all these pages is the same: don't exchange cash at all if you can possibly avoid it. Use a credit card or ATM card to do the exchange. The exchange rate is usually better, and you also avoid the risks associated with carrying cash.

If I want to take cash from Portugal to the USA, should I exchange my money before leaving or after arriving?

You have what is called in the biz a "thin file". Check with a Credit Union. They will get you a secured card or maybe a straight credit card. They usually will graduate you from a secured card to a real credit card in 12-18 months. Then you are on your way. You should also sign up for Creditkarma to get your credit report updated every week. They make their money on referring people to credit card companies so you might be able to kill two birds with one stone.

What is the best credit card for someone with no credit history

I think this stuff was more valid when grace periods were longer. For example, back in the 90's, I had an MBNA card with a 35 day grace period. Many business travellers used Diner's Club charge cards because they featured a 60 day grace period. There are valid uses for this: As JoeTaxpayer stated, if you are benefiting from "tricks" like this, you probably have other problems that you probably ought to deal with.

Clear example of credit card balance 55 days interest-free “trick”?

Some investors (pension funds or insurance companies) need to pay out a certain amount of money to their clients. They need cash on a periodical basis, and thus prefer dividend paying stock more.

Are investor's preference for dividends justified?

The simple answer is yes - put 20% (or more) down. In the past I have paid PMI and used a combination first and second mortgage to get around it. I recommend avoiding both of those situations. I am much more comfortable now with just a regular mortgage payment. The more equity you have in your home the more options you will have in the future.

Should I wait to save up 20% downpayment on a 500k condo?

This varies by jurisdiction somewhat but speaking as a Canadian, a small business owner, and accountant (unregistered but some courses and accounting for multiple businesses) this is the answer if you were in Canada. In Canada the cheque cashing limit is 6 months. Therefor any bank will refuse to cash this cheque. It would be totally morally and legally acceptable to ask for a replacement cheque from your employer. In Canada they would generally have no problem issuing a replacement; in other jurisdictions with differing time limits they might want to cancel the original cheque first.

Found an old un-cashed paycheck. How long is it good for? What to do if it's expired?

If anyone offers you guaranteed better than average returns, run. They are either lying to you or to themselves. (Claiming that they will try to beat the market is more credible, but that becomes a matter of whether there is any reason to believe that they'll succeed.) If anyone sends you an unsolicited stock tip, run. They wouldn't be doing so if it wasn't an attempt to manipulate you or the market or both. Most likely its a pump-and-dump attempt.

Most common types of financial scams an individual investor should beware of?

Let's consider that transaction cost is 0(zero) for calculation. In the scenario you have stated, maximum profit that could be made is 55$, however risk is unlimited. Hedging can also be used to limit your losses, let's consider this scenario. Stock ABC trading @ 100$, I'll buy the stock ABC @ 100$ and buy a put option of ABC @ strike price 90$ for a premium of 5$ with an expiration date of 1 month. Possible outcomes I end up in a loss in 3 out of 4 scenarios, however my loss is limited to 15$, whereas profit is unlimited.

How do I hedge stock options like market makers do?

If it costs more to fix the car than the car is worth, then those repairs are not worth it. Hit craigslist and look for another junker that runs, but is in your cash price range. Pay to get it looked at by a mechanic as a condition of sale. Use consumer reports to try and find a good model. Somebody in your position does not need a $15K car. You need a series of $2K or $4K cars that you will replace more often, but pay cash for. Car buying, especially from a dealer financed, place isn't how I would recommend building your credit back up. EDIT in response to your updates: Build your credit the smart way, by not paying interest charges. Use your lower limit card, and annually apply for more credit, which you use and pay off each and every month. Borrowing is not going to help you. Just because you can afford to make payments, doesn't automatically make payments a wise decision. You have to examine the value of the loan, not what the payments are. Shop for a good price, shop for a good rate, then purchase. The amount you can pay every month should only be a factor than can kill the deal, not allow it. Pay cash for your vehicle until you can qualify for a low cost loan from a credit union or a bank. It is a waste of money and time to pay a penalty interest rate because you want to build your credit. Time is what will heal your credit score. If you really must borrow for the purchase, you must secure a loan prior to shopping for a car. Visit a few credit unions and get pre-qualified. Once you have a pre-approved loan in place, you can let the deal try and beat your loan for a better deal. Don't make the mistake of letting the dealer do all the financing first.

Buying a car - advice needed

I am no expert on the situation nor do I pretend to act like one, but, as a business owner, allow me to give you my personal opinion. Option 3 is closest to what you want. Why? Well: This way, you have both the record of everything that was done, and also IRS can see exactly what happened. Another suggestion would be to ask the GnuCash maintainers and community directly. You can have a chat with them on their IRC channel #gnucash, send them an email, maybe find the answer in the documentation or wiki. Popular software apps usually have both support people and a helpful community, so if the above method is in any way inconvenient for you, you can give this one a try. Hope this helps! Robert

How do I account for 100 percent vendor discounts in GnuCash 2.6.5

never carry a balance on a credit card. there is almost always a cheaper way to borrow money. the exception to that rule is when you are offered a 0% promotion on a credit card, but even then watch out for cash advance fees and how payments are applied (typically to promotional balances first). paying interest on daily spending is a bad idea. generally, the only time you should pay interest is on a home loan, car loan or education loan. basically that's because those loans can either allow you to reduce an expense (e.g. apartment rent, taxi fair), or increase your income (by getting a better job). you can try to make an argument about the utility of a dollar, but all sophistry aside you are better off investing than borrowing under normal circumstances. that said, using a credit card (with no annual fee) can build credit for a future car or home loan. the biggest advantage of a credit card is cash back. if you have good credit you can get a credit card that offers at least 1% cash back on every purchase. if you don't have good credit, using a credit card with no annual fee can be a good way to build credit until you can get approved for a 2% card (e.g. citi double cash). additionally, technically, you can get close to 10% cash back by chasing sign up bonuses. however, that requires applying for new cards frequently and keeping track of minimum spend etc. credit cards also protect you from fraud. if someone uses your debit card number, you can be short on cash until your bank fixes it. but if someone uses your credit card number, you can simply dispute the charge when you get the bill. you don't have to worry about how to make rent after an unexpected 2k$ charge. side note: it is a common mis-conception that credit card issuers only make money from cardholder interest and fees. card issuers make a lot of revenue from "interchange fees" paid by merchants every time you use your card. some issuers (e.g. amex) make a majority of their revenue from merchants.

The Benefits/Disadvantages of using a credit card

If your employer is matching 50 cents on the dollar then your 401(k) is a better place to put your money than paying off credit cards This. Assuming you can also get the credit cards paid off reasonably soon too (say, by next year). Otherwise, you have to look at how long before you can withdraw that money, to see if the compounded credit card debt isn't growing faster than your retirement. But a guaranteed 50% gain, your first year is a pretty hard deal to beat. And if you currently have no savings, unless all of your surplus income has been reducing your debt, you're living beyond your means. You should be earning more than you're (going to be) spending, when you start paying rent/car bills. If you don't know what this is going to be, you need to be budgeting. Get this under control, by any means necessary. New job/career? Change priorities/expectations? Cut expenses? Live to your budget? Whatever it takes. I don't think you should be in any investment that includes bonds until you're 40, and maybe not even then - equities and cash-equivalents all the way (cash is for emergency funds, and for waiting for buying opportunities). Otherwise Michael has some good ideas. I would caveat that I think you should not buy any investments in one chunk, but dollar average it over some period of time, in case the market is unnaturally high right when you decide to invest. You should also gauge possible returns and potential tax liabilities. Debt is good to get rid of, unless it is good debt (very low interest rates - ie: lower than you could borrow the money for). Good debt should still get paid off - who knows how long your job could last for - but maybe not dump all of your $50K on it. Roth is amazing. You should be maxing that contribution out every year.

I'm 23 and was given $50k. What should I do?

First, I'm really sorry to hear about your mother. My wife was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, so I know that there is a possibility that your mind is in "survival" mode, trying to preserve as much as you can in the way of things that you can effect (that's how I've been feeling recently). Having a loved one with cancer is really tough because there is absolutely, positively nothing tangible that you can do to change the fact that they have cancer. You will have to ask yourself some questions: How important is it that your mom can stay in her house? Moving could add some unneeded stress. How may years have you been contributing to your 401k? If you have 30 years left, you could have enough time to recover some of your losses from reducing the amount of money you have given up for your mom. Will your mom be able to pay you back for paying the taxes over time, or would this be a 'gift'? Have her doctors told her that she "... has N months left..."? What is the next step after you are able to pay her taxes and save the house? Someone close to me recently told me that "There is no point in trying to save for someone for the future, if you can't sustain them until they get to that future. What will happen to your mom if she loses her house? Will it make it easier or harder for her to recover if she can stay? To paraphrase someone famous, "you can't take a loan out for your retirement, but you could take a loan out for this event." At any rate, good luck. My thoughts are with you and your mother.

Should I cash out my Roth IRA to pay my mother's property tax debt, to avoid foreclosure on her home?

I think you're off base here. The bureaus only remove information if the creditor cannot verify any dispute within 30 days, or if the information's super old. If the creditor can provide corrected information, then the credit bureau is required to apply it to its own database. A dispute can be about the entire account, or it can be about payment status within a given span (or spans) of time. Of course, it's the consumer who has to initiate the dispute.

Are there any rules against penalizing consumers for requesting accurate credit reporting?

Someone mentioned sign up bonuses but only mentioned dollar values. You might get points, sweet, sweet airline points :) which some might find compelling enough to churn cards so they always have a few open.

What are the reasons to get more than one credit card?

Asset Allocation serves many purposes, not just mitigating risk via a diversification of asset classes, but also allowing you to take a level of risk that is appropriate for a given investor at a given time by how much is allocated to which asset classes. A younger investor with a longer timeframe, may wish to take a lot more risk, investing heavily in equities, and perhaps managed funds that are of the 'aggressive growth' variety, seeking better than market returns. Someone a little older may wish to pull back a bit, especially after a bull market has brought them substantial gains, and begin to 'take money off the table' perhaps by starting to establish some fixed income positions, or pulling back to slightly less risky index, 'value' or 'balanced' funds. An investor who is near or in retirement will generally want even less risk, going to a much more balanced approach with half or more of their investments in fixed income, and the remainder often in income producing 'blue chip' type stocks, or 'income funds'. This allows them to protect a good amount of their wealth from potential loss at a time when they have to be able to depend on it for a majority of their income. An institution such as Yale has very different concerns, and may always be in a more aggressive 'long term' mode since 'retirement' is not a factor for them. They are willing to invest mostly in very aggressive ways, using diversification to protect them from one of those choices 'tanking' but still overall taking a pretty high level of risk, much more so than might be appropriate for an individual who will generally need to seek safety and to preserve gains as they get older. For example look at the PDF that @JLDugger linked, and observe the overall risk level that Yale is taking, and in addition observe the large allocations they make to things like private equity with a 27%+ risk level compared to their very small amount of fixed income with a 10% risk level. Yale has a very long time horizon and invests in a way that is atypical of the needs and concerns of an individual investor. They also have as you pointed out, the economy of scale (with something like #17B in assets?) to afford to hire proven experts, and their own internal PHD level experts to watch over the whole thing, all of which very few individual investors have. For either class of investor, diversification, is a means to mitigate risk by not having all your eggs in one basket. Via having multiple different investments (such as picking multiple individual stocks, or aggressive funds with different approaches, or just an index fund to get multiple stocks) you are protected from being wiped out as might happen if a single choice might fail. For example imagine what would have happened if you had in 2005 put all your money into a single stock with a company that had been showing record profits such as Lehman Brothers, and left it there until 2008 when the stock tanked. or even faster collapses such as Enron, etc that all 'looked great' up until shortly after they failed utterly. Being allocated across multiple asset classes provides some diversification all on it's own, but you can also be diversified within a class. Yale uses the diversification across several asset classes to have lower risk than being invested in a single asset class such as private equity. But their allocation places much more of their funds in high risk classes and much less of their funds in the lowest risk classes such as fixed income.

The Asset Allocation Paradox

I think you're misunderstanding how tax brackets work. If you make $1 more and that bumps you into a higher bracket, only THAT particular dollar will be taxed at the higher tax bracket rate... Not your entire income. Short term capital gains are treated as income. Long term capital gains have a special tax rate currently.

Will capital gains affect my tax bracket?

The comments are getting too much, but to verify that you are not insane, you are being bullied. It sounds like this is a sub-prime loan, of which you are wisely trying to get out of. It also sounds like they are doing everything in their power to prevent you from doing so. For them you are a very profitable customer. This might take some legwork for you, but depending on how bad they are violating the law they might be willing to forgive the loan. What I am trying to say, it might be very worth your while! Your first step will be looking for any free resources at your disposal: Just be cautious as many "credit representation" type business are only offering loan consolidation. That is not what you need. Fight those bastards!

Can a car company refuse to give me a copy of my contract or balance details?

The worth of a credit score (CS) is variable. If you buy your stuff outright with 100% down then your CS is worthless. If you take a loan to buy stuff then it is worth exactly what you save in interest versus a poor score. But there is also the "access" benefit of CS where loans will no longer be available to you, forcing you to rent. If you consider rent as money down teh tiolet then this could factor in. The formula for CS worth is different for everyone. Bill Gates CS is worth zero to him. Walking away from a mortage is not the same as walking away from a loan. A mortage has collateral. There are 2 objects: the money, and the house. If you walk away the bank gets the house as a fair trade. They keep all money you put against the house to boot! Sometimes the bank PROFITS when you walk away. So in a good market you could consider walking away to be the Moral Michael thing to do. :)

When should I walk away from my mortgage?

Invest in solid companies, not in esoteric products built on sand. The problem is with finance, not with real economy: oil companies make money, mobile phone companies make money, airlines make money...

How to make money from a downward European market?

There is another drawback, and this is why I keep a low-limit card for online purchases and another for carrying in risky/unfamiliar situations (e.g. travelling) a small limit acts as as damage limitation in the event of theft. In theory you may not be liable if your card is stolen and used. In practice you may be out of pocket for a considerable amount of time, and trying to spend large sums on an overlimit card will soon trip it up (especially if those large sums are out of the ordinary)

Negatives to increased credit card spending limit? [duplicate]

Late to the party, but it's just improving your cost basis in a defined risk trade even further. If you want to put up less risk capital but want to test the waters, this can be one way to do it. Another could be buying cheap OTM butterflies or financing a further otm option with the basis reduction from the debit spread if you want to gamble a bit further and venture into 15-20 delta positions. Usually, I am doing debit spreads with a buying atm and selling a couple strikes further otm or at least at the most liquid strikes, but if it's a high flier, it can be disappointing, but a good trade. If you're more of a contrarian in where you buy your calls/puts, it's absolutely a good way to lessen your risk on a calculated bet.

Why buy a vertical spread if I could instead buy a naked call?

In this case, it looks like the interest is simply the nominal daily interest rate times number of days in the period. From that you can use a spreadsheet to calculate the total payment by trial and error. With the different number of days in each period, any formula would be very complicated. In the more usual case where the interest charge for each period is the same, the formula is: m=P*r^n*(r-1)/(r^n-1) where * is multiplication ^ is exponentiation / is division (Sorry, don't know if there's a way to show formulas cleanly on here) P=original principle r=growth factor per payment period, i.e. interest rate + 100% divided by 100, e.g. 1% -> 1.01 n=number of payments Note the growth factor above is per period, so if you have monthly payments, it's the rate per month. The last payment may be different because of rounding errors, unequal number of days per period, or other technicalities. Using that formula here won't give the right answer because of the unequal periods, but it should be close. Let's see: r=0.7% times an average of 28.8 days per period gives 20.16% + 1 = 1.2016. n=5 P=500 m=500*1.2016^5*(1.2016-1)/(1.2016^5-1) =167.78 Further off than I expected, but ballpark.

help with how a loan repayment is calculated

Forget about terms. Think about loans in terms of months. To simplify things, let's consider a $1000 loan with .3% interest per month. This looks like a ten month term, but it's equally reasonable to think about it on a month-to-month basis. In the first month, you borrowed $1000 and accrued $3 interest. With the $102 payment, that leaves $901 which you borrow for another month. So on and so forth. The payoff after five payments would by $503.54 ($502.03 principal plus $1.51 interest). You'd save $2.99 in interest after paying $13.54. The reason why most of the interest was already paid is that you already did most of the borrowing. You borrowed $502.03 for six months and about $100 each for five, four, three, two, and one month. So you borrowed about $4500 months (you borrowed $1000 for the first month, $901 for the second month, etc.). The total for a ten month $1000 loan is about $5500 months of borrowing. So you've done 9/11 of the borrowing. It's unsurprising that you've paid about 9/11 of the interest. If you did this as a six month loan instead, then the payments look different. Say You borrow $1000 for one month. Then 834 for one month. So on and so forth. Adding that together, you get about $168.50 * 21 or $3538.50 months borrowed. Since you only borrow about 7/9 as much, you should pay 7/9 the interest. And if we adding things up, we get $10.54 in interest, about 7/9 of $13.54. That's how I would expect your mortgage to work in the United States (and I'd expect it to be similar elsewhere). Mortgages are pretty straight-jacketed by federal and state regulations. I too once had a car loan that claimed that early payment didn't matter. But to get rid of the loan, I made extra payments. And they ended up crediting me with an early release. In fact, they rebated part of my last payment. I saved several hundred dollars through the early release. Perhaps your loan did not work the same way. Perhaps it did. But in any case, mortgages don't generally work like you describe.

Prepaying a loan: Shouldn't the interest be recalculated like a shorter loan?

You cannot deduct commute expenses. Regarding your specific example, something to consider is that if the standard of living is higher in San Francisco, presumably the wages are higher too. Therefore, you must make a choice to trade "time and some money for commuting costs" for "even more money" in the form of higher wages. For example, if you can make $50K working 2 hours away from SF, or $80K working in SF, and it costs you $5K extra per year in commute costs, you still come out ahead by $25K (minus taxes). If it ends up costing $20K more to live in SF (due to higher rent/mortgage/food/etc), some people choose to trade 4 extra hours of commuting time to put that extra $20K in their pocket. It's sort of like having an extra part time job, except you get paid to read/watch tv/sleep on the job (assuming you can take a train to work).

Does the IRS reprieve those who have to commute for work?

There are a number of ways and it all depends on your concentration and range of skills (or skills you're willing to develop). As for involving your wife ... things that can be done locally for neighbours is always a good idea. The most important thing is not to spend too much time or cash on anything that will take a long time to pay off. That excludes writing your own iPhone apps, for example, which would take long hours of development and much marketing (and luck) to be successful. Good luck and congrats.

What ways are there for us to earn a little extra side money?

All investors have ultimately the same investment goal: maximize returns while limiting risk to an acceptable level. Of course we would love to maximize returns while minimizing risk, but in most cases if you want higher returns you must be willing to accept higher levels of risk. We must keep in mind that investors are humans, not computers. As such not everybody is willing to accept the same level of risk. Insurance is simply a way to "buy down" risk. Yes, it reduces our overall gains (most of the time), but so do bonds vs stocks (most of the time). And yet who among us doesn't have bonds in our portfolio? Insurance is yet another way to balance risk and return.

Why do people buy insurance even if they have the means to overcome the loss?

Definitely not. Credit cards only exist to suck you into the soulless corporate system. What you want to remember here is that you can't trust banks, so you'll want to convert all your savings into some durable asset, say, bitcoins for example, and then hoard them like Smaug until after the Fall.

Should I open a credit card when I turn 18 just to start a credit score?

Well, that's probably not even all of it. If that stranger did his taxes properly, then he already paid about a third of it to the government because wherever he got it from it was income for him and thus it must have been taxed. Now, the remainder is in your hands and yes, according to US law it is now your income and so now you too, must pay about a third of it to the government, and yes you are supposed to explain where it came from. Be careful giving it to somebody else or it'll be taxed yet again. disclaimer: I am not a US citizen

Do I have to explain the source of *all* income on my taxes?

My bank's bill payment system saves nothing more than writer's cramp and stamps. When a paper check is required they mail it, but it's drawn on my account just as if I'd written it out by hand and mailed it myself. There is no "temporary account", and at the time of month when I take care of the bills, my balance oscillates up and down depending on what's cleared and what hasn't. I'm going back to mailing checks because it saves a day or two of time between payment initiation and check clearing, which sucks. And electronic payments aren't much better. It recently took about five days for a payment to my car insurance company to be processed--and the amount is finalized and subtracted in the bank's website only after clearance. I can't know what I have without balancing the account every. frigging. time. IIRC bill payment systems were a lot more seamless and user friendly when they first became widespread.

How many days does Bank of America need to clear a bill pay check

This page from the CRA website details the types of investments you can hold in a TFSA. You can hold individual shares, including ETFs, traded on any "designated stock exchange" in addition to the other types of investment you have listed. Here is a list of designated stock exchanges provided by the Department of Finance. As you can see, it includes pretty well every major stock exchange in the developed world. If your bank's TFSA only offers "mutual funds, GICs and saving deposits" then you need to open a TFSA with a different bank or a stock broking company with an execution only service that offers TFSA accounts. Almost all of the big banks will do this. I use Scotia iTrade, HSBC Invest Direct, and TD, though my TFSA's are all with HSBC currently. You will simply provide them with details of your bank account in order to facilitate money transfers/TFSA contributions. Since purchasing foreign shares involves changing your Canadian dollars into a foreign currency, one thing to watch out for when purchasing foreign shares is the potential for high foreign exchange spreads. They can be excessive in proportion to the investment being made. My experience is that HSBC offers by far the best spreads on FX, but you need to exchange a minimum of $10,000 in order to obtain a decent spread (typically between 0.25% and 0.5%). You may also wish to note that you can buy unhedged ETFs for the US and European markets on the Toronto exchange. This means you are paying next to nothing on the spread, though you obviously are still carrying the currency risk. For example, an unhedged S&P500 trades under the code ZSP (BMO unhedged) or XUS (iShares unhedged). In addition, it is important to consider that commissions for trades on foreign markets may be much higher than those on a Canadian exchange. This is not always the case. HSBC charge me a flat rate of $6.88 for both Toronto and New York trades, but for London they would charge up to 0.5% depending on the size of the trade. Some foreign exchanges carry additional trading costs. For example, London has a 0.5% stamp duty on purchases. EDIT One final thing worth mentioning is that, in my experience, holding US securities means that you will be required to register with the US tax authorities and with those US exchanges upon which you are trading. This just means fill out a number of different forms which will be provided by your stock broker. Exchange registrations can be done electronically, however US tax authority registration must be submitted in writing. Dividends you receive will be net of US withholding taxes. I am not aware of any capital gains reporting requirements to US authorities.

Possibility to buy index funds and individual funds in a Canadian TFSA

Peer to peer lending such as Kiva, Lending Club, Funding Circle(small business), SoFi(student loans), Prosper, and various other services provide you with access to the 'basic form' of investing you described in your question. Other funds: You may find the documentary '97% Owned' fascinating as it provides an overview of the monetary system of England, with parallels to US, showing only 3% of money supply is used in exchange of goods and services, 97% is engaged in some form of speculation. If speculative activities are of concern, you may need to denounce many forms of currency. Lastly, be careful of taking the term addiction too lightly and deeming something unethical too quickly. You may be surprised to learn there are many people like yourself working at 'unethical' companies changing them within.

Ethics and investment

I'm not intimately familiar with the situation in Australia, but in the US the powers that be have adopted an interventionist philosophy. The Federal Reserve (Central Bank) is "buying back" US Gov't debt to keep rates low, and the government is keeping mortgage rates low buy buying mortgages with the proceeds of the cheap bond sales. While this isn't directly related to Australia, it is relevant because the largest capital markets are in the US and influence the markets in Australia. In the US, the CPI is a survey of all urban consumers. If you're a younger, middle class consumer with income growth ahead of you, your costs are going to shift more rapidly than an elderly or poor person who already owns or is in subsidized housing, and doesn't spend as much on transportation. For example, my parents are in their early 60's and are living in the house that I grew up in, which they own free and clear. There are alot of people like them, and they aren't affected by the swing in housing prices that we've seen in the last decade.

When the Reserve Bank determines the interest rates, do they take the house prices into account?

The major reason to start an LLC for side work is if you want the additional personal liability protection afforded by one. If you're operating as a sole proprietor, you may be exposing yourself to liability: debts and judgments against your business can put your personal assets at risk! So, if you're intending to continue and grow your side work in the future, you ought to consider the LLC sooner than later. It's also an important legal decision and you should consider seeking a professional opinion. The Wall Street Journal has a brief guide titled How to Form an LLC. Here are some notable excerpts: A limited liability company, or LLC, is similar to a partnership but has the legal protections of personal assets that a corporation offers without the burdensome formalities, paperwork and fees. [...] Some states charge annual fees and taxes that can diminish the economic advantage of choosing to become an LLC. Among LLC advantages: pass-through taxation – meaning the profits and losses “pass through” the business to the individuals owning the business who report this information on their own personal tax returns. The result can be paying less in taxes, since profits are not taxed at both the business level and the personal level. Another plus: Owners aren’t usually responsible for the company’s debts and liabilities. [...] Also check out onstartups.com's Startup 101: Should You Form An Inc. or An LLC? Here are some additional articles that discuss the advantages / disadvantages of forming an LLC:

When should I start an LLC for my side work?

Taxes Based on the numbers you quoted (-$360) it doesn't appear that you would have a taxable event if you sell all the shares in the account. If you only sell some of the shares, to fund the new account, you should specify which shares you want to sell. If you sell only the shares that you bought when share prices were high, then every share you sell could be considered a loss. This will increase your losses. These losses can be deducted from your taxes, though there are limits. Fees Make sure that you understand the fee structure. Some fund families look at the balance of all your accounts to determine your fee level, others treat each fund separately. Procedure If you were able to get the 10K into the new account in the next few months I would advise not selling the shares. Because it will be 6 to 18 months before you are able to contribute the new funds then rebalancing by selling shares makes more sense. It gets you to your goal quicker. All the funds you mentioned have low expense ratios, I wouldn't move funds just to chase a the lowest expense ratio. I would look at the steps necessary to get the mix you want in the next few weeks, and then what will be needed moving forward. If the 60/40 or 40/60 split makes you comfortable pick one of them. If you want to be able to control the balance via rebalancing or changing your contribution percentage, then go with two funds.

What else besides fees should I consider in rebalancing my fund portfolio's asset allocation?

You might consider working on getting your new employer to sponsor a 401k, there may be options where you can invest and they aren't required to add anything as a match (which gives you higher limits). If they don't match, they may just be liable for some administration fees. If you have any side business that you do, you might also be eligible for other "self-employed" options that have higher limits (SEP, Simple - I think they may go up to $15k) although, I'm not sure the nitty gritties of them.

Saving for retirement without employer sponsored plan

Purchases and sales from the same trade date will both settle on the same settlement date. They don't have to pay for their purchases until later either. Because HFT typically make many offsetting trades -- buying, selling, buying, selling, buying, selling, etc -- when the purchases and sales settle, the amount they pay for their purchases will roughly cancel with the amount they receive for their sales (the difference being their profit or loss). Margin accounts and just having extra cash around can increase their ability to have trades that do not perfectly offset. In practice, the HFT's broker will take a smaller amount of cash (e.g. $1 million) as a deposit of capital, and will then allow the HFT to trade a larger amount of stock value long or short (e.g. $10 million, for 10:1 leverage). That $1 million needs to be enough to cover the net profit/loss when the trades settle, and the broker will monitor this to ensure that deposit will be enough.

How does high frequency trading work if money isn't available for 2-3 days after selling?

Are you really talking about share price, or share value? Because what about stock splits? Market Cap stays the same, but the price per share is lowered. This is so that the stock is more liquid and accessible to a greater number of investors. This encourages people to invest in the stock though. I can't really think of any reasons why a company would want to lower their share value or discourage people from investing unless they are trying to reacquire shares. Returning value to the shareholders is the #1 priority of any publicly traded company.

Could there be an interest for a company to make their Share price fall?

The buy-to-rent investment bubble created (in some markets) a large number of new housing starts often exceeding the available demand. Since people were investing in the capital gain, they didn't mind whether a place was rented or not. Many places stood empty at the prices investors wished to charge. In the UK where building restrictions are so dire that few new houses can be built, new house production is less than market demand which keeps up rental prices. There just isn't any stock. In the US, where construction is more liberal, rental prices can fall as new stock enters the market. A driver will be where the sales market dries up and owners must rent to cover at least some of their mortgage losses. Or, as Joel points out, if a major employer which dominates a small town, leaves. Many old industrial towns feature both low rentals and plenty of empty, low-priced property. Liverpool, in the UK, features entire empty neighbourhoods all boarded up. If you're looking to track metrics on this simply look at migration patterns. Where large numbers of people are moving "towards" prices (and rentals) will rise. Where people are moving "away" all prices fall.

What can cause rent prices to fall?

I contacted Stephen Fishman, J.D., the author of Home Business Tax Deductions, to let him know that this question was missing from his book. He was kind enough to send a reply. My original phrasing of the question: If your car is used for both business and personal use, and you deduct via the actual expense method, do trips to the mechanic, gas station, and auto parts store to service or repair the car count as business miles, personal miles, or part-business-part-personal miles? What about driving the newly-purchased car home from the dealership? And his response: Good question. I can find nothing about this in IRS publication or elsewhere. However, common sense would tell us that the cost of driving to make car repairs should be deductible. If you use your car for business, it is a business expense, just like transporting any other piece of business equipment for repairs is a business expense. This should be so whether you use the standard mileage rate or actual expense method. You should probably reduce the amount of your deduction by the percentage of personal use of the car during the year. The same goes for driving a car home from the dealer.

How to treat miles driven to the mechanic, gas station, etc when calculating business use of car?

They are looking at your work history to see that you have maintained a similar level of income for a period of time, and that you have a reasonable expectation to continue that for the foreseeable future. They are looking to make a commitment for 15-30 years. They see the short term contract, and have no confidence in making a guess to your ability to pay. Before the real estate bubble burst, you would have had a chance with a no documentation loan. These were setup for people who earned fluctuating incomes, mostly due to being commissioned based. They were easily abused, and lenders have gotten away from them becasue they were burned too often. Just like building your credit rating over time, and your down payment over time, you might have to wait to build a work history.

Cannot get a mortgage because I work through a recruiter

I don't know if those machines work this way in the UK too, but here in the US you can often avoid the coin-counting fee if you opt to convert the money into a gift certificate instead of cash. I routinely convert my coins to Amazon gift certificate money with no charge. Individual machines differ in which particular gift cards they use, but at the least, almost all of them offer the option for a no-fee conversion to a voucher/gift certificate to the store where the machine is. So it's likely you'd be able to use the machine to convert the cash to "money" you can use to buy groceries.

What should I do with the change in my change-jar?

There are a few people that do this for a living. They are called "market makers" or "specialists" in a particular stock. First of all, this requires a lot of capital. You can get burned on a few trades, a process known as "gambler's ruin," but if you have enough capital to weather the storm, you can make money. Second, you have to be "licensed" by the stock market authorities, because you need to have stock market trading experience and other credentials. Third, you are not allowed to buy and sell at will. In order to do your job, you have to "balance the boat," that is buy, when others are selling, and sell, when others are buying, in order to keep the market moving in two directions. It's a tough job that requires a lot of experience, plus a license, but a few people can make a living doing this.

Why does selling and then rebuying stock not lead to free money?

It is ALWAYS possible for a company's valuation in the market to be larger than the market it serves, and in fact it is not uncommon. There's valid argument that Uber would be a good example of this, with a market cap of more than $60 billion. Market cap is the total value of all shares outstanding. Keep in mind that what a company's shares trade for is less a reflection of its past (or, to some degree, even present) revenue activity and more of a speculative bet on what the company will do in the future.

What does it mean for a company to have its market cap larger than the market size?

Turbotax community had a similar question. They claim you just put it into "Office Expense". I never understood why there are so many categories when they are just summed up and subtracted from your income. How can you possibly get in trouble for putting something in a wrong column if the final tax liability doesn't change.

Where on schedule C should a PO Box Rental fee go?

I have been careful here to cover both shares in companies and in ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds). Some information such as around corporate actions and AGMs is only applicable for company shares and not ETFs. The shares that you own are registered to you through the broker that you bought them via but are verified by independent fund administrators and brokerage reconciliation processes. This means that there is independent verification that the broker has those shares and that they are ring fenced as being yours. The important point in this is that the broker cannot sell them for their own profit or otherwise use them for their own benefit, such as for collateral against margin etc.. 1) Since the broker is keeping the shares for you they are still acting as an intermediary. In order to prove that you own the shares and have the right to sell them you need to transfer the registration to another broker in order to sell them through that broker. This typically, but not always, involves some kind of fee and the broker that you transfer to will need to be able to hold and deal in those shares. Not all brokers have access to all markets. 2) You can sell your shares through a different broker to the one you bought them through but you will need to transfer your ownership to the other broker and that broker will need to have access to that market. 3) You will normally, depending on your broker, get an email or other message on settlement which can be around two days after your purchase. You should also be able to see them in your online account UI before settlement. You usually don't get any messages from the issuing entity for the instrument until AGM time when you may get invited to the AGM if you hold enough stock. All other corporate actions should be handled for you by your broker. It is rare that settlement does not go through on well regulated markets, such as European, Hong Kong, Japanese, and US markets but this is more common on other markets. In particular I have seen quite a lot of trades reversed on the Istanbul market (XIST) recently. That is not to say that XIST is unsafe its just that I happen to have seen a few trades reversed recently.

What does it really mean to buy a share?

Look at the link to the SIPC. I don't know exactly what you mean by "runs out of funds," but the SIPC will replace shares of stock stolen from your account, and up to $100,000 in cash. The real risk is when a shady brokers sells you shares in a stock that becomes worthless, that's when "buyer beware" kicks in. No help there.

Stability of a Broker: What if your broker goes bankrupt? Could you lose equity in your account?

An economy produces goods and services and people use money to pay for those goods and services. Money has value because people believe that they can buy and sell goods and services with it in that economy. How much the value of money is, is determined by how much money there is in comparison to goods and services (supply and demand). In most economies it is the job of the federal/national reserve bank to ensure that prices stay stable (ie the relationship of goods and services to how much money there is is stable); as this is necessary for a well running economy. The federal reserve bank does so by making more (printing, decreasing interest rates) or less (increasing interest rates) available to the economy. To determine how much money needs to be in the economy to keep prices stable is incredibly hard as many factors have an impact: If the reserve bank gets it wrong and there is more money compared to goods and services than previous, prices will rise to compensate; this is inflation If it's the other way round is deflation. Since it is commonly regarded that deflation is much more destabilizing to an economy than inflation the reserve banks tend to err on the side of inflation.

Can you explain the mechanism of money inflation?

Some lenders will work with you if you contact them early and openly discuss your situation. They are not required to do so. The larger and more corporate the lender, the less likely you'll find one that will work with you. My experience is that your success in working out repayment plan for missed payments depends on the duration of your reduced income. If this is a period of unemployment and you will be able to pay again in a number of months, you may be able to work out a plan on some debts. If you're permanently unable to pay in full, or the duration is too long, you may have to file bankruptcy to save your domicile and transportation. The ethics of this go beyond this forum, as do the specifics of when it is advisable to file bankruptcy. Research your area, find debt counselling. They can really help with specifics. Speak with your lenders, they may be able to refer you to local non-profit services. Be sure that you find one of those, not one of the predatory lenders posing as credit counselling services. There's even some that take the money you can afford to pay, divide it up over your creditors, allowing you to keep accruing late/partial payment fees, and charge you a fee on top of it. To me this is fraudulent and should be cause for criminal charges. The key is open communication with your lenders with disclosure to the level that they need to know. If you're disabled, long term, they need to know that. They do not need to know the specific symptoms or causes or discomforts. They need to know whether the Social Security Administration has declared you disabled and are paying you a disability check. (If this is the case, you probably have a case worker who can find you resources to help negotiate with your creditors).

If I were to get into a life situation where I would not be able to make regular payments, do lenders typically provide options other than default?

Sure. No-one promises that all the outstanding stocks are ever for sale, but if you get them all - you get them all, what marketplace you used for that doesn't really matter.

Can you buy out a pink sheet listed company by purchasing all of the oustanding shares?

The last 300 years of civilization have been amazingly atypical. We have experienced industrial revolution after industrial revolution. Economic revolutions that would have changed the world in 1000 AD show up as noise. Coal, Canal, Rail, Trade, Electricity, Refrigeration, Oil, Gas, Nuclear, Assembly Line, Vacuum Tube, Mass Education, Transistor, Integrated Circuit, Nano-tech, Antibiotics, Slaying of absolute Poverty, Democratic, Feminism, Superhighway, Automobile, Airplane, and on and on and on. A cascade of miracles and world-shaking events that have intertwined and together generated a many century long economic singularity that has upended the entire world and generated today's world. The question you should ask, is tomorrow going to be like today? And the answer is yes; in weather, and in economics, the most likely bet bet is always "things keep on going like they have in the short term". But next week? Next month? That is often not much like today. There is reason to believe that the yield on the above revolutions will continue to propel the economy forward, and that there are multiple promising new revolutions on the horizon. But barring that kind of world-shaking revolution, you are not going to maintain a 5% real return on investment over another centuries for the stock market. The value of investments has to go up by a factor of over 100 in order for that to happen, and the US stock market is already close to 20 trillion dollars. For it to have a market cap of 2 quadrillion dollars the world economy will have to be much larger than it is today. And to be that much larger, the world would have to be a much stranger place that values very different things. We are currently roughly a K-type 0.72 civilization. A simple linear expansion of our power of 100x brings us up to K-type 0.92, which is going to cook the planet from waste heat (not from CO2, but just from the waste heat of the energy it uses!) Efficiency can mitigate this, but only to a degree. 100x more efficient technology is going to less believable than a beanstalk and space colonies. If you believe that the stock market is going to continue to grow at 5%/year for the next century, start investing in really out-there technologies. Gene editing, virtual and augmented reality, space beanstalks and private lift, miraculously cheap energy storage, etc. Because simply refining the technology of today won't get us there. Modern industrial civilization has been a miracle factory. That is what pulled off that growth rate. If the miracles stop coming, so does the growth. There is a road to it. It would involve clean energy, mass personal automation and friendly (not smarter than human) AI, and the entire world lifted up to the standard of living of the top 3% of the USA on average. But it is far from guaranteed.

Why should we expect stocks to go up in the long term?

We have what we call "unallocated savings" that go into a fund for this purpose. We'll also take advantage of "6 months no interest" or similar financing promotions, and direct this savings towards the payments.

How to plan in a budget for those less frequent but mid-range expensive buys?

In a sole proprietorship AND an LLC, the expenses can still be deducted against the profits or losses from the operations. The IRS does not even require that a profit seeking activity be incorporated under its own entity, hence why this is also applicable in a sole proprietorship. From what you've said, there is no reason to use a more complicated and costly corporate structure at all. In comparison, a sole proprietorship and single-member LLC will be completely pass through entities to the IRS and all of their earnings go to you. With the LLC you have the option of letting the LLC's earnings remain with the entity itself, or you can just treat it as your own and pay individual income taxes on it. This has nothing to do specifically with a gambling business and is largely a red herring to your profit seeking motives. Gambling in casino games and lotteries already enjoy favorable tax treatment in some regards. Gambling in capital markets also enjoy a myriad of favorable tax laws. A business entity related to this purpose should be able to deduct costs related to this trade (and pass an audit more convincingly than not having formed an LLC and business bank account)

Formation of S-Corp for Gambling Trade