Financial Security | Personal Security

Japan Will Take The World’s Breath Away, Part II

Japan Will Take the World’s Breath Away, Part II

by MN Gordon

The National Bureau of Economic Research marks June 2009 as the end of the Great Recession. That means the United States economy has been in recovery for nearly three years. Semantically this is accurate…all the stimulus and monetary easing has successfully pushed GDP into positive over this time. But just what type of recovery is this?

According to the latest CNBC All-American Survey, 36 percent of the American public believes the economy will improve over the next year. Apparently, this is a 9 percent increase over the survey results from November 2011. Yet, despite the marked improvement, what this means is, 64 percent of (Read More....)

How To Effectively Plan Your Small Business Growth

Before starting your small business, you may already have your business plan. You could have used that plan when you sought capitalization from loan providers. As you operate your venture, you may already have realized that operating a small business is different. For sure, you may have discovered that no matter how rigorous you were on doing your research and how hard working you are in setting up your own company, some things could still go wrong.

Your daily business operations may be going smoothly for now. But how long would it do well in the future? Your small business need not get stuck in that level. It should grow and expand for it to cope with the times and to earn more income. As a small business owner, the responsibility is yours to make growth plans for you venture. Here are several recommended ways to effectively plan the growth of your small business.

Assess your small business so you could determine if it has been successful so far in bringing about its commitment to customers. As always, your products or services should be complemented by aggressive (Read More....)

5 Tools You Could Use To Improve Your Budgeting Skills

Are you wondering where all your money went? Many people face the same conundrum at the end of each month. After taking care of the bills and expenses, you find that there is no money left over. When you sit down to calculate where you spent it, you are unable to remember over half the transactions. This is why budgeting is an important skill to acquire. Keeping a monthly budget enables you to stay in control of your income and expenses. Else, you would end up facing the same situation month after month. Here are five tools you can use to improve your budgeting skills.

Mint.com

Mint.com is fast becoming a preferred money management tool for people looking to plan their monthly expenses. The level of security offered to users is high and all the information you store is safe. The best thing about the website is that it is extremely user-friendly in design and navigation. You can easily create a budget and enhance your skills. Mint.com is completely free to use which makes it even greater for use.

Save Benjis

Save Benjis is an application designed for your iPhone and (Read More....)

Pilot Program Encourages Deadbeat Parents To Pay Up

When a debtor simply doesn't have the means to pay all that they owe, lenders typically agree to accept part of the amount owed. While governments have long used a similar approach to managing monetary economics, states have historically lacked the freedom to use logic in their efforts to collect overdue child support. In fact, many states spend much more money hunting down, prosecuting and even incarcerating parents who owe back support than they could hope to collect from them. Now, a study shows that a pilot program in Wisconsin that offered parents for some of their outstanding debt were more likely to make payments on their current and past-due child support.

Non-custodial parents owe over $100 billion in back support to families and states. According to Brett Burkhart, one of the researchers who studied the pilot program for the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research on Poverty Families, most of that money would be considered uncollectible by a private lender. The bulk of it is owed by (Read More....)

How The U.S. Government Will Seize Your Retirement Account

Following in the footsteps of a rather ignominious list of nations like Argentina and Hungary, the government of lreland is set to take its ‘fair share’ of private retirement funds. Drowning in debt and faced with unpopular, unrealistic, ridiculously unpopular austerity measures, the government has announced that it will now tax private pension savings in order to raise 470 million euros (roughly $675 million) per year… a lot of money in a country of only 4.4 million people.

Somehow, the government expects to be able to create 100,000 jobs to bring down an unemployment rate at 14.7%. Perhaps they plan on hiring 100,000 new workers to go around the country and collect the tax.

It reminds me of what I saw in Bolivia a couple of weeks ago– there’s a tax or toll or fee for nearly everything you do. Driving on the highway (if you can call it that) outside of Santa Cruz, you pay a toll… obviously not for the maintenance of the road, but to pay the salary of the toll collector.

At the airport, you have to pay an airport tax before departure… obviously not for the upkeep and efficiency of (Read More....)

Is There Financial Security To Be Found In The Stock Market In 2011?

Under the Big (Market) Top

Courtesy of Phil of Phil's Stock World

SPY WEEKLY

1,332.

That is a 100% in the S&P since it's March 2009 low of 666 (see David Fry's chart). Does it matter? Can we expect even a LITTLE pullback after a 100% run or is it "to the moon Alice" and maybe Mars and Jupiter while we're at it as the Federal Reserve's multi-Trillion Dollar thrusters send us to the stars, breaking the bonds of gravity(and logic) as they send stocks every higher in an expanding universe of freshly supplied money. As fellow stock market physicist, Art Cashin said yesterday:

The Newtonian Rally Continues – A mild paraphrase of one Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of force and motion (inertia) says that a body in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by some counterforce. That seems to be the guiding rule for (Read More....)

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