"let's talk on ""qe"" by: raul m. ramos   20  september  2012  thursday, manila, ph   i want to share this to all the - “brilliant economists” - in this world   let's talk on ""qe""    by:  raul m. ramos  qe is not a cure - it is a stimulant. qe is synthetic - no more, no less. qe is artificial - it cannot and will never hold water. qe is only a temporary relief - not an outright, total solutions. qe is absolutely not a guaranty - not an assurance for recovery or growth. qe is a very good tool - this acts as an oxygen to a dying patients to breathe. qe is now and forever - taking away the oxygen, the patient will going to die. qe is a big balloon - continues to expand, amplify, waiting to explode, to burst. qe will keep you moving today - but not for the rest of your life. qe is quicksand - the more you move the more you get sucked down. qe will bring joy today - (later) it will bring tears, pouring in your eyes that could not stop. qe is worthless - infusing, injecting precious blood, highly precious dollar to a zombie economy (a lifeless economy), an “absolute waste”. qe is brainless - simply do not know what will going to be the consequences to the economy. do not have the idea of what will going to be the final result. qe is only a dream - being over optimistic that one day everything will go back to normal, that at the end of the day the economy will recover and finally would realize growth. qe is just a fantasy - meaning punching the moon, the stars (thinking it will resolve the year 2008 economic meltdown). qe is an investment - yes!!! a massive investments to a dying economy, (absolutely wrong investments). qe will keep you running - it is like a ticking time bomb. qe is not good for the economy - the government acts (or play) as an investor instead of the businessman. qe is being very kind and generous to businessman, while keeping the country, the state's economy at stake or in jeopardy. qe is putting more money to a moribund business - supporting the company to stay, to exist for the time being. and later on will literally closed shop. qe is killing the mighty, precious dollar - slowly but surely. qe is hide and seek - like suze orman (of cnbc) say's, ""show me the money"". qe is treasure hunting - ultra rich, millionaires, billionaires is keeping it. they hide it. where are those precious dollars? making the economy sick, crippled, dead. qe is a money making machine (printing press) - once the economy becomes frail, weak, all they have to do is just print. qe is putting plenty of money to a basket full of holes - truly very few will benefit and so many will going to suffer.  this is inequality.  disparity is very disturbing (counter to a good economy). qe is experimental - (trial and error, testing) probability never done before. qe is good at the start (year 2008) - after spending, investing, releasing, trillions and trillions of mighty precious dollars - big companies, millions of jobs were blessed, saved, rescued, erstwhile salvaged.  and like magic - america the wealthiest and most powerful country in the  universe is now going to act again (today!!!) to spend, invest, release again (and again and again and again . . .) trillions and trillions of mighty precious dollars for the economy to keep moving, (my God!!! what an “abnormal cycle of the economy”). qe is a wild guess (absolutely speculative) - before only big businesses, huge companies are at stake.  today it is now the whole country is at risk.  not yet talking of the whole wide-world (with special mention - to my dearest, my beloved country - the philippines).  this is certainly,  absolutely contagion, domino effect.  no one, not one will ever be spared. qe is very contagious - before only america needs to be saved to be salvaged. today all countries is in distress (suffering), badly needs a rescue. qe is keeping inflation very low - yes!!! absolutely for today but not for tomorrow.  the medicine that they used during the 2008 economic slump is luckily still moving.  meaning still working.   but once this medicine starts to slowdown and begins to die down.  you may call all the saints above.  and the (true) inflation you are looking for, searching for will surely and definitely come into your midst.   inflation will going to kill us all. qe is a wrong medicine - temporary patch or band.aid qe is phoney - it is just an easy money and definitely not a hard earned (labor generated) money. qe is a gamble - trillion dollars is at stake. if we are lucky the dying person or the economy will live. if we are not lucky the dying person will die, the economy will going to collapsed, and still we have to pay all the “debts” as long as we live. qe is domineering - the economy today is at the mercy of ""qe"".  (the economy is captive, hostage by ""qe"") interest rates is a lose-lose situations. keeping it zero.  the u.s.a. government will lose trillions  and trillions of dollars, that is badly needed.  now, raising this rates will surely and definitely starts  the u.s.a. markets and precisely the world economy to react, pulling down the unstable economies  of the whole world to jeopardy.  now, which one would you like to choose? again, which one would you prefer? qe is trial and error - a complex, complicated solutions.  healing one part of the body and the other part will swell and burst. qe is evaporation - (using taxpayers money) pension funds, retirement benefits and all entitlements is going to fade, will vanished in thin air. qe are waiters - simply waiting day and night for growth, for recovery. qe is thirstiness - it dries up the u.s.a. treasury. qe is debt - a never ending debt. keep in mind there is no such thing as unlimited debt or debt unlimited. don't be fooled. qe will going to keep you in good sleep - but will wake you up bankrupt. qe is not an answer - it is the culprit. qe is universal - it was copied all over the world (worldwide). qe is an absolute solutions (yes!!! for all dumb economists) - a 100percent “hopeless, desperate, solutions”. qe to be specific is going back again to the 1930's depression or the great depression part 2 – yes!!! precisely but with a ""big bang"". qe before is only a staggering risk. today it is now “debt impregnating” - simple as, it keeps on giving birth (by the hour, the minutes, the seconds) and after eight long years the final,  the end result is massive “pure debt”. very sorry to say, not growth (and) or definitely not recovery. qe is a dying move - no one, not one ever dared to affirm, to attest, to certify, that this is a “correct solutions”. qe is mad - it will make you crazy because of ""debt"". qe is the only options - yes!!! absolutely, when your big brains is ""not working"". qe is easing the pain - correct!!! for a very short period of time, but will going to ""destroy"" the economy in the long (or short) run. qe is history - it will haunt you forever and ever. qe - what more can i say?   fb:     thegreatdepression.part2@yahoo.com"


"I expect that data may be copyright. Data that's published (e.g. on a newsfeed or web site) is subject to terms of use. Standard & Poor's web site says, about the Shiller indexes, Who do I contact at S&P to license my   use of these indices?   Questions   regarding licensing the   S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices   can be addressed to:  Bo Chung    Managing Director    bo_chung@standardandpoors.com,   +1.212.438.3519 As for 'recording' the information yourself, that may depend on how and where (e.g. from what source) you're recording it. If for example you tried to record prices from the Canadian MLS (Realtor's) network, they too have their own terms of use on the data they publish. Copyright laws vary from country to country (and terms of use certainly vary): for example see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural which is case law about copyrighting a phone directory in the USA, and contrast that with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right which is European legislation. So who owns data if it is determined by free market? I guess that ""determined by free market"" means that buyers and sellers are publishing their offers-to-buy and their offers-to-sell, and I guess that the publisher (e.g. the stock exchange) has 'terms of use' about the data (the offers) that they're publishing."


"Lol master in computer science. I'm an idiot. K bro. I'm just calling it like it is.  The problem with finance guys is they look at rich guys and accept their word as law. I don't care if this guy is a ""VP"" or whatever, I care if he has the technical chops to understand the technology. I'm willing to bet money he hasn't read a single paper on the technology, including the original Bitcoin paper, which by the way explicitly says do not speculate on cryptocurrencies (fun fact). I agree it's overvalued, but it's because traders with no idea of the real value of the tech are speculating.  Everyone is speculating on crypto, but historically disruptive tech is far undervalued. Think Microsoft when the iPhone was coming out. People were literally saying Apps are stupid and will never take off. At the end of the day I have money in it and we'll see where it goes."


For many folks these days, not having a credit card is just not practical. Personally, I do quite a bit of shopping online for things not available locally. Cash is not an option in these cases and I don't want to give out my debit card number. So, a strategy is this: use a credit card for a purchase. Then immediately, or within a couple days, pay the credit card with that amount. Sounds simple but it takes a little effort to do it. This strategy gives you the convenience of a credit card and decreases the interest enormously.


> more people should die if it means companies can operate more efficiently.  I don't care about companies operating efficiently. I care about individuals operating effectively. Small business owners do it everyday, even using simple technology platforms to propel their business. They follow government safety guidelines, interact directly with their customers in a professional way, and no one dies. Placing all the liability on companies is ineffective and a sign of government doing too much.


I've never had a problem with connection or speed. But they have given me the run around since the start.   Signed up for just Internet at the beginning. They told me to try Prism TV. If I don't like it, I can cancel it within 30 days and get my money back. Canceled within 2 weeks. Still got charged for the TV.   It's been an on going battle. Let's see if this month's bill is finally correct. It's been 5 months now.


I was able to request a modest advance on my salary when I started my first job out of college, for essentially the same reason. Alternatively, you might consider requesting a small personal loan from friends or family. If you have a credit card that can cover things like grocery expenses for that period, this may also be the appropriate time to use it. Buy cheap food, like lentils and beans. :P In the future, once you earn some money, you should keep around a few months' worth of essential expenses in a saving account to avoid this situation. :)


dude its an internship, don't get depressed over something that is going to last a couple of months. This is your chance to impress people, gain experience, bla bla etc. You are not different than anybody else who hates shitty work, but you need to man up if you want things to get better.   Do your best and suck it up


Sorry... I'm a software engineer not an academic.  My assumption is that you can measure things like average throughput on a checkout line, or number of widgets assembled on an assembly line (and possibly the defect rate of those widgets), or pounds of fries dumped in the trash because they got cold before being served relative to fries served. Is this not the case?  In my field we measure things like the change in average time to launch, or the revenue impact of features, or the change in performance metrics, etc. They're all proxy measurements though. Poor performers are generally much easier to spot than high performers. Mediocre performers can generally get through things, but may not earn promotions etc.


Use a limited company. Use the HMRC website for help on limited companies and get a good accountant for doing your taxes. Mixing your website income and personal income  may make you pay a higher tax rate. You can take out expenses from the limited company, which are tax deductible. But if you group it in personal income it wouldn't be tax deductible. In a personal capacity you are 100% liable if your business goes bust and you owe debt. But for a limited company you are only liable for what you own i.e %age of shares. You can take on an investor if your business booms and it is easier if you do it through a limited company rather than through a personal endeavour.


"If it was me, I would sell the house and use the proceeds to work on/pay off the second.   You don't speak to your income, but it must be pretty darn healthy to convince someone to lend you ~$809K on two homes.  Given this situation, I am not sure what income I would have to have to feel comfortable.  I am thinking around 500K/year would start to make me feel okay, but I would probably want it higher than that. think I can rent out the 1st house for $1500, and after property management fees, take home about $435 per month. That is not including any additional taxes on that income, or deductions based on repair work, etc. So this is why.  Given that your income is probably pretty high, would something less than $435 really move your net worth needle?  No.  It is worth the reduction in risk to give up that amount of ""passive"" income.  Keeping the home opens you up to all kinds of risk.  Your $435 per month could easily evaporate into something negative given taxes, likely rise in insurance rates and repairs.  You have a great shovel to build wealth there is no reason to assume this kind of exposure.  You will become wealthy if you invest and work to reduce your debt."


Except North Korea just backed down.  I expect you down voting cunts to be able to pick up a rifle and a grenade since you make light of the Korean war. Your type was called to service in the spirit of a  general named Macarthur. Like you, he thought he was right and affected weird appearance in the form of a corn cob pipe unlike your piercings and tattoos. He went across the northern korean border chasing north korean armies in retreat, but in his perfect moral charge- just as you act by downvoting since you must purge your perceived enemies- he met 1 million chinese soldiers hidden in the forests who chased his arrogant asshole all the way back to the 38th parallel where the border is today. Suck my ass.


(1). Is this right? Pretty much, though this is a really rudimentary way to think about it. (2). If it is, why is it that extensive services are provided by high margin companies competing for talent, rather then lower margin businesses looking to boost their profits by reducing their expenditures on employees (by cutting out the government)? It's the polar opposite of that. Google (and companies like that) do things like have a day care center on premises.  The company staffs a day care center which has costs, then lets employees use it for free.  This is a business expense for Google, and in relative terms, a considerably large business expense that a lower margin business could no afford. Employer healthcare is a tax protected expense for employees via section 125 of the tax code.  The company portion of the healthcare costs are a deductible business expense to the company, as expected.  Healthcare is different than most other expenses because the employee can forego income before it's effectively received which negates it from taxable income.   This doesn't work for something like food purchased at a cafe on a Google complex.  If employee money is being spent at a corporate cafe, it's taxable income being spent (though the cost of running the cafe is a tax deductible business expense to the company). There have been discussions in congress to assess a value as income to employees for services like on site child care and no cost employee cafeterias. To address your new example: For example, suppose John Doe makes $100,000 a year taxed at a rate of 20%, for a take home pay of $80,000. He spends $10,000 on food. His employer Corporation decides to give him all of his food and deduct it as a business expense - costing them $10,000. But now they can pay John Doe an amount so his take home pay will be reduced by $10,000 - $87,500 The company is now spending $97500 employing John Doe, for a savings of $2500$. This would be an audit prone administrative nightmare.  Either You need John to submit receipts for reimbursement up to the $10,000 agreed upon amount which would require some kind of administrative staff, or After a very short period of time John forgets the abstract value of the food cost arrangement, that is only really benefiting the employer in the form of lower payroll expense, and is enticed away for more pay somewhere else anyway.  The company may be saving $2,500, though again there will be an additional administrative expense of some sort, but John is only saving $500 ($97,500 * 0.20 - $100,000 * 0.20).


They pay the most because they have the most money this sort of thing is highly misleading, and I hear it so often it is working, people pay no income tax because they have next to no income to tax the top 2% are getting a raw deal whilst the 0.001% end up paying only about 7% tax


If Jack owns all of the one million founding shares (which I assume you meant), and wants to transfer 250,000 shares to Venturo, then he is just personally selling shares to Venturo and the corporation gains nothing. If Jack does not own all of the founding shares, and the corporation had retained some, then the corporate shares could be sold to raise cash for the corporation. Usually in situations like this, the corporation will create more shares, diluting existing shareholders, and then sell the new shares on the open market to raise cash.


> A few years back JetBlue offered discounted flights across the States. Reddit pooled money together and bought a guy tickets to destinations selected by Reddit.  The guy met up with local Reddit users who showed him around town.  This part is true. /u/77or88 iirc. The rest is fake news ;)  Soure: my flair


> As an employer, why would I not want to hire someone who is philosophically similar to me?   Because you've got that covered. You already think like you, you don't need everybody else to think like you *too,* any more than you need a whole company full of people with skills you already have. Sure, having *some* people who think like you can help spread the workload of thinking like you around, but unless you have plenty of people around who *don't* think like you, the company will never think of the things *you'd* never think of. And, obviously, the more different ways your company can think, the better.


The laws of the United States of America require that the federal currency issued is accepted as legal tender for all goods and services anywhere within this country.  One really has to wonder what the motivation behind this story is. VISA obviously knows that such a move is illegal. I am skeptical that there's any truth to the article at all.


"Customer support, getting information, dealing with stolen identities, etc. I had to file a credit discrepancy report with both. Transunion: ""we'll look into it"". Equifax: ""okay, you need to do this... this.. this... this... this... maybe we now can help you"".   It's almost faster to let Transunion deal with it, and let Equifax realize they goofed"


That's a misrepresentation of my point. I said class warfare was a ruse, not that inequality wasn't real. They are not the same thing.  Class warfare is the deliberate attempt to harm one social group to benefit another, involving theft of resources.  Inequality is simply a description of the allocation of resources without any comment on how or why they are distributed in such a manner.


When has Walmart fairly compensated someone?  Edit:  The question is do I think Walmart fairly pays their employees. The answer is no, because they don't have health care and they use up government subsidies.  Well, do you know how much Walmart would need to raise each product for $12 Min wage. It would cost Walmart to raise there all products by 1.1%.. that would be from 2015 min wage of $7.25. Which roughly around 65 in increase wage. So how much would $15 min wage cost in raise prices. It would cost Walmart around 1.3 to 1.4 in product pricing increase.  But let's not forget they only have 30,000 of 1.4 million employees have health insurance. Guess where tax dollars are going if they don't have health insurance .... to Obamacare and Medicaid. What even crazier is the purposely make sure to schedule people under 32 or 34 hours week so they are part time so they don't have to provide health insurance.  Then employees from Walmart are on welfare costing the taxes payers over $6 billion a year. On average each Walmart superstore that is open cost tax payer $900k to $1.5 million a year.   We talk socialism is at the door step of this country but already lives here, it is thanks to Corporation like Walmart. Corporate welfare is okay but asking a company to pull their weight when they cost the tax payer so much damn money is too much to ask for.


"I guess there are accepted channels for this sort of thing, but I don't really understand why. Couldn't anyone sell them to anyone else at any time in any kind of market? I mean, if I had a friend who was talking the the IPO up, couldn't I have just said, ""Hey Fred, I'll sell you a Facebook share in two weeks time for thirty five bucks"" and be done with it?  Do exchanges provide legal services? Is there a law that says you have to go through them? And even if you *did* have to go through them, why wouldn't multiple exchanges list them instead of just one, and why wouldn't an exchange start listing them from the minute the gun fired (or before)?"


PayPal is free for buyers, taking their profit from the sellers -- in much the same way that credit cards take a percentage from the seller (though they will also charge you interest if you don't pay off the entire balance every month). As far as I know, there's nothing that keeps a vendor from having a different price for PayPal customers than cash customers... but that would show up in the number displayed by PayPal before you authorize the purchase, so if you're paying attention it shouldn't be possible to sneak it by you. PayPal has several modes of operation. I'm not aware of one where they hold your balance. Normally you either give them your credit card info, or you give them information about (one of your) bank account(s) and authorize them to do electronic funds transfer from and to that account on your behalf. I've always stuck with the credit card approach; I trust PayPal but I don't trust them that far, on principle. If I was going to link them to an account, it would be a small account I'd create for that purpose, NOT my main savings/checking accounts! (Hm. Actually, I do have one account which normally floats around $500 -- it's the one I dump accumulated pocket change into -- and I could use that. If I ever feel a need to do so.) PayPal does reduce the risk of credit card numbers being abused, by reducing how many people you've given the number to. Depending on what kinds of purchases you make, that may be a security advantage. It certainly doesn't hurt. Personally I have no problem with giving my card number directly to a serious business, but on eBay or sites of that sort where I'm dealing with individuals who are complete strangers I do like the isolation that PayPal provides. In other words, eBay is exactly the environment where I DO use PayPal. After all, that's exactly what PayPal was created for.


I work in financial tech, and we've been working on regulatory projects non stop since the middle of last year. Not a single feature enhancement for traders has been implemented despite very high demand.   The other (smaller) wing of the tech division has been working on electronic trading. As regulation and position transparency ramp up, voice spreads will fall and desks will have to rely on volume driven by electronic trading to make up revenue. The people driving this will be technology, and not the traders.   So: if you want to get in on the finances money, brush up on your programming skills: C++, Java, python are the bare minimum.


Did you even read the article? It's about salaries at the NY-NJ Port Authority whose commissioners are appointed by the NY and NJ state governments. Statewide elections actually have a huge bearing on these employment contracts. The mayor has no bearing on these employment contracts. It's sad that idiots like you can blatantly lie and other malleable morons upvote without doing any independent research. I guess that is to be expected in such a liberal forum.


Just like Switzerland lost its banking privileges by not being in the EU, huh?   The truth is none of us really know what's going to happen so we all need to stop throwing out opinions as fact.  London has an already established stable banking climate and the cost and effort of relocating to other places might prove to be too high as opposed to just working something out between the Brits and the Europeans. We just don't know yet.


"Some stocks do fall to zero. I don't have statistics handy, but I'd guess that a majority of all the companies ever started are now bankrupt and worth zero. Even if a company does not go bankrupt, there is no guarantee that it's value will increase forever, even in a general, overall sense. You might buy a stock when it is at or near its peak, and then it loses value and never regains it. Even if a stock will go back up, you can't know for certain that it will. Suppose you bought a stock for $10 and it's now at $5. If you sell, you lose half your money. But if you hold on, it MIGHT go back up and you make a profit. Or it might continue going down and you lose even more, perhaps your entire investment. A rational person might decide to sell now and cut his losses. Of course, I'm sure many investors have had the experience of selling a stock at a loss, and then seeing the price skyrocket. But there have also been plenty of investors who decided to hold on, only to lose more money. (Just a couple of weeks ago a stock I bought for $1.50 was selling for $14. I could have sold for like 900% profit. Instead I decided to hold on and see if it went yet higher. It's now at $2.50. Fortunately I only invested something like $800. If it goes to zero it will be annoying but not ruin me.) On a bigger scale, if you invest in a variety of stocks and hold on to them for a long period of time, the chance that you will lose money is small. The stock market as a whole has consistently gone up in the long term. But the chance is not zero. And a key phrase is ""in the long term"". If you need the money today, the fact that the market will probably go back up within a few months or a year or so may not help."


Are you suggesting that the banks are using marketing to convince retail customers to buy financial products that they would not normally purchase due to the products' complexity?  While that concerns is certainly valid, I believe it can be applied all the way down to the simplest of securities, e.g. stocks, or even assets, e.g. houses.   That does not mean with should prohibit the sale of these products to retail customers.


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"S-Corp is a corporation. I.e.: you add a ""Inc."" or ""Corp."" to the name or something of that kind. ""S"" denotes a specific tax treatment which may change during the lifetime of the corporation. It doesn't refer to a legal status."


">would this even be possible?  Anything is possible, but it would be extremely difficult because of the second question you posed. From my experience, crowd sourcing pools small amounts of money compared to institutional (aka accredited) investors.   Not only that, but to lead change, you need people representing the group with deep financial sector experience. A hedge fund that becomes an activist investor (i.e. Third Point) has a decisive plan in place and knows what needs to be accomplished. It will also recommend candidates to replace existing directors that sit on the board.   Most ""main street"" investors don't have what it takes to lead change in any business, let alone financial institutions, which are as complex as a corporation comes. That being said, why would there be a limitation to banks?"


"A check is simply an order to the bank to pay money to someone. The payor's signature on the front of the check is all that's needed to make that order binding. If you read the check carefully, you'll see that it says ""Pay to the order of ...""; that's the payor's instruction to the bank, and as payee you can make a further order, to pay the money to someone else, in which case you'd have to endorse the check to make your order binding. But nobody does that any more; instead, people always just deposit checks into their accounts. When you deposit a check, the payor's signature is all that's needed to tell the payor's bank that it should pay the money. If your bank insists on a signature as well, that's just to pretend that they're paying attention in case it turns out that you stole the check. In reality, banks don't pay attention to signatures, nor to the name of the payee. I once put the wrong check into an envelope, and the phone company got a check for something over $700 on a bill of less than $50, payable to some completely different company; they deposited it and gave me a credit for the balance; none of the banks in the transition chain questioned it."


API wise there's just one at the retail level: Interactive Brokers (India). Brokerage is high though - 3.5 bps for F&O and 5 bps for cash.  I've used Sharekhan (good, can get to 2 bps brokerage, trading client software, no API). Also used multiple other brokerages, and am advising a new one, Zerodha http://www.zerodha.com. API wise the brokers don't provide it easily to retail, though I've worked with direct access APIs at an institutional level.


Aren't we in /r/economy worried more about all of Canada and the entire oil sector?  Sure evaluations are arbitrary, but carbon will be utterly worthless in a few ~~decades~~ years, whereas solving the byzantine generals problems seems to be very helpful.


"Been to many job interviews, here's my advice:  1) What the hell the company sells, who it sells to and who the competition is.  THINK about the company. What do you think they do well, what do you think they need improvement on? It's a public company so a great way to start is look at yahoo finance.  You can read headlines, ready the financial statements, etc.  http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AFG  2) What do you bring to the company? Have 5 ways to talk about how you are a great, smart person by talking about examples.  Anybody can say they are smart, dedicated, etc.  People want to hear examples; ""Past performance = future performance""  3) Ask questions, a million.  Goes back to #1.  Know the ins and outs of the company and ask a million.  Someone who asks a boat load of good questions will show they are interested, did their homework and looking to learn.  Don't worry if you think it will show you don't know things...people actually want someone they can teach; not someone who is smarter than they are.   (Just to be clear, don't ask about the stock or its price)    4) I have an exclusive interview tip that I will not broadcast to everyone.  But if you want it, PM me."


My wife has been doing younique and some other health MLM drives be crazy cuz she's going no where fast.  I support her but she doesn't listen to the fact that she is spending more than making.


"This answer is to supplement the answers about what CD laddering is and what its benefits are. I'm going to talk about its risks. CD ladders are subject to risk. They are not subject to very much credit risk and investment risk (they're federally insured! Barring the dissolution of the United States government as we know it, you will get all your money back!). However, they are subject to inflation risk and a little bit of interest rate risk. A CD is basically a promise for a certain amount of money after a certain amount of time. Inflation risk happens when there's inflation and the money that you've been promised isn't worth as much anymore, because everything's gotten more expensive. Interest rate risk happens when you buy a CD in a very low interest rate environment (like, oh, the year 2010) and rates subsequently rise. You might have been somewhat better off waiting for rates to rise before buying the CD. (Also, if you were to try and re-sell it, you would get an inferior price - enough to make up for the interest rate difference.) Note that interest rates tend to rise if there is a significant amount of inflation, so these two risks go together. Interest rate risk and inflation risk are higher for longer-term CDs (at least right now) because there's more opportunity for inflation and interest rates to rise. 2010 has been marked by the extraordinarily low interest rate environment which prevails, and the Federal Reserve has announced that it is trying to bring about a higher rate of inflation (you may have heard something about a ""second round of quantitative easing""). A quick look at interest rates show that 2-5 year CDs yield about 1.50% these days. You could, alternatively, get a savings account that yields 1.4%, preserves your liquidity, and will raise the rate it pays you on savings in the event that inflation and interest rates rise (or, if they don't raise it, you can move the account, unlike a CD). In summary, as of right now (October 2010), fixed-income investments like CDs don't pay you very much and have elevated levels of risk, especially for long-term investment. This is one of the worst times possible to invest in a CD ladder."


"Not to state the obvious, but you realize this can only be done in hindsight? Sure, you can project out to get a range of expected return, but the tax laws can change every year, your own income changes so your marginal rate will change. You may have started with a 7% mortgage, and refinanced now to 4.5%, so you are far better off than the original plan. I'll repeat what others mentioned, for your own home, the rent you are ""not"" paying is most of your return. A $100K home may appreciate at whatever rate 3-5%, say. But the $800/mo rent you don't have to pay is $9600/yr, nearly 10%. So when you imply that a house merely rising with inflation is a zero real return, I'd suggest that's far from accurate, all other expenses taken into account of course."


Coffee is sold at convenience stores, supermarkets and vending machines most often in can form.  Convenience stores like 7-11 sell fresh coffee in a cup too but it's a bit more expensive.  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ja/b/b4/IruCa%E5%AF%BE%E5%BF%9C%E8%87%AA%E8%B2%A9%E6%A9%9F.jpg  The cans at the top are all coffee different brands and such.   http://s.ameblo.jp/kht711/image-11372796662-12223359284.html Cans at the top are all coffee. Bottles are mostly different tea types (green tea, black tea, milk tea, oolong tea). Cans that look like bottles on the bottom right are aluminum coffee cans with lids.   Monster, redbull, and burn is sold here. Burn comes in a can with a lid.


"GB Stone are known scammers. I don't know why ""Joe Taxpayer"" removed this essential information from the question."


You can always cancel the card and close this account. Consider switching to a bank that has better customer service. Closing accounts typically gets a lot of attention and it's fairly likely they will contact you to reconsider and so you'll have a chance to air your grievances.  Whether they have anything to offer that would cause you to stay is for you to decide.


"In addition to dpassage's excellent advice on dealing with your debt in the most efficient manner, you may also want to consider Consumer Credit Counseling Services (CCCS). These are non-profit agencies (free or low-cost) that can work with you and your creditors to come up with payment plans and sometimes negotiate lower interest rates to help you get out from under the debt. You should definitely avoid for-profit ""debt consolidation"" companies, but the National Foundation for Credit Counseling can refer you to non-profit services in your area."


If the stock has dropped from $10 to $2 and now is range trading between $2 and $3, and you were not able to sell your shares earlier, then I would no be holding on to them now. As soon as the price hit $3 sell them. After you have sold them and you noticed the stock still range trading one strategy you could apply is to go long after the price bounces off the $2 support placing a stop just below $2, then as the price moves up you trail your stop up with the price. As it starts getting close to $3 tighten your stop. If it keeps range trading and bounces off the resistance at $3 and you get stopped out, you can either go short and reverse the process or wait for it to bounce off the support at $2 again. One word of warning though, the longer a stock range trades, the bigger the outbreak out of the rage (either up or down) will be, that is the reason why you should first wait for confirmation that the price has bounced off support/resistance before opening a position, and secondly why you should use a stop loss to get you out instead of just selling when it hits $3, because if it breaks through $3 you can continue profiting as it moves up.


"I'm being taxed at a 40% rate, then I can give $500,000 to charity, write it off, and save $200,000 on my taxes. That's a net loss of $300,000. I may have paid less taxes, but it cost me 300 grand. Your logic is correct. However, here's another way to think about it. Suppose you are being taxed at a 40% rate. You wish to purchase $500,000 worth of diamonds.  How much do you have to make in income to do so?  You need to make $833,333 in income, pay 40% of that ($333,333) in taxes, and then spend the $500,000 on the diamonds.  But to spend that $500,000 on a charitable donation, you only need to make an income of $500,000, taxed at a rate of 0%, because donations to charity count against your taxable income. Or, yet another way to think about it, is that if you make $833,333 in income, you can spend it on $500,000 worth of diamonds, or $833,333 worth of charitable contributions; effectively you get to purchase $333,333 worth of charitable contributions ""for free"" over the equivalent purchase that is not a charitable donation."


I like how whether or not its okay to do *exactly* what the tax code says is determined by your presumed intent in following the tax code, and not whether or not you actually followed the tax code.   Besides, what reasonable person or business *doesn't* minimize their tax burden, in the same way they minimize *every* and *any* burden?


You should get a 1099-MISC for the $5000 you got.  And your broker should send you a 1099-B for the $5500 sale of Google stock. These are two totally separate things as far as the US IRS is concerned. 1) You made $5000 in wages. You will pay income tax on this as well as FICA and other state and local taxes. 2) You will report that you paid $5000 for stock, and sold it for $5500 without holding it for one year. Since this was short term, you will pay tax on the $500 in income you made. These numbers will go on different parts of your tax form.  Essentially in your case, you'll have to pay regular income tax rates on the whole $5500, but that's only because short term capital gains are treated as income.  There's always the possibility that could change (unlikely).  It also helps to think of them separately because if you held the stock for a year, you would pay different tax on that $500.  Regardless, you report them in different ways on your taxes.


While I can't say how it is in the Philippines, my wife the insurance broker leads me to believe that individual insurance is more expensive than group coverages in the US almost always.  So much so that people will go to great extents to form any sort of business just to insure themselves. If however it is cheaper, can't you simply opt out of your employer's plan?  If you can opt out, will your employer give you any of the money they aren't paying for your insurance? If you can't opt out, or if you paycheck doesn't grow, I can't see why you would want additional coverage especially at such a young age.  Should you lose your job in the near future and you worry about, go get the insurance then. EDIT One big advantage is if you get personal insurance, you might need to get an exam to qualify, and it is likely the younger you are the better you will qualify. But again, you already have insurance that covers you so I would advise keeping the group policy is probably better.


"What gets me is he was to retire in October. He ""worked"" his entire life to get so close to the finish line just to blow at the end by saying something stupid. Just goes to show you always have to be careful with what you say."


If both cards have the same interest rate, there's likely no practical difference here. Very likely, the required minimum payment is calculated the same on both cards. Pay off one card and put the rest on the other, or split the payment across both cards. My personal preference would be to entirely pay off one card and put the rest on the other. It feels like a bigger accomplishment. If one card has a significantly different interest rate, obviously you'd try to pay that one down first. Alternatively, if you owe less on one card, you may choose to pay that off and then cut up the card, if you are trying to recover from a poor financial situation. This way, you have achieved a specific goal. But again, in your case, it sounds like your two cards are entirely interchangeable. Either way you do it, well done on putting your money where it'll make the most difference right now.


If that were provably true, we'd be able to pack up sociology, anthropology, political science, and most of history and go home. Since we haven't done that yet, I suggest considering the possibility that the world is more complicated than you believe it to be. See ShakeyBobWillis' comment above.


I would hire an accountant to help set this up, given the sums of money involved.  $53,000 would be the minimum amount of compensation needed to maximize the 401k. The total limit of contributions is the lesser of: 100% of the participant's compensation, or $53,000 ($59,000 including catch-up contributions) for 2015 and 2016. and they don't count contributions as compensation Your employer's contributions to a qualified retirement plan for you   are not included in income at the time contributed. (Your employer can   tell  you  whether  your  retirement  plan  is  qualified.) On the bright side, employer contributions aren't subject to FICA withholdings.


Agreed. I constantly think how much happier I'd be running my own business. Not even considering pay. But right now pay is what matters and I haven't acquired a skill that will give me a product masses will want or that I can afford to implement on my own.


California has a GDP 60% larger than that of Texas, and this is only one quarter, so I really don't think cherry picked data for a 3 month time span proves dick.  And why don't we look at Kansas' growth, the real dream of supply side economics (while the state is being crushed by debt and an inability to raise funds). The point being if a state is run so poorly that it can't even provide basic services its only a matter of time before businesses leave to go to states that can provide things like roads and other infrastructure.


Making juice with a juicer is expensive, too. I watch my gf put so much fresh fruit and veg into the juicer and get... one jar. It's really good juice but it was like $8 worth o produce to make..


That is a pretty exclusive club and for the most part they are not interested in highly volatile companies like Apple and Google. Sure, IBM is part of the DJIA, but that is about as stalwart as you can get these days. The typical profile for a DJIA stock would be one that pays fairly predictable dividends, has been around since money was invented, and are not going anywhere unless the apocalypse really happens this year. In summary, DJIA is the boring reliable company index.


"Wire transfers are not the same as ACH transfers.  I regular transfer money between Chase, Ally, Capital One 360 and Fidelity and have never been charged a fee because I never do wire transfers.  (The default for all these banks is ACH; you must explicitly choose wire transfers.) EDIT: to answer the modified question. https://www.depositaccounts.com/blog/difference-between-wire-transfer-and-ach.html ""One of the fastest ways to send money is via wire transfer. Although a wire transfer can take days, in most cases a wire transfer takes place within minutes. It is a direct bank-to-bank transaction that allows you to move money from your account directly into the account of someone else."" ""While it may seem similar to a wire transfer, a transaction accomplished with the help of an automated clearing house (ACH) is not the same thing. ... When you arrange for the electronic transfer of funds, all of the information is included in a batch, which is then sent to the clearing house. All of the transactions in the batch are then handled by the clearing house, rather than as a direct bank-to-bank transaction. ... As a result, your money is not available as quickly as it often is with a wire transfer. The ACH process can be more convenient and is less expensive, but it also takes a little bit longer."""


Always fun to revisit old comments.  I do not reside on the right and have never voted for a Republican candidate.  Your idea is monumentally stupid. It rewards those who willfully disregarded America's legal system and subsequently punishes those that respected it.  America should not reward the immoral, regardless of the color they may happen to be.  Non-citizens who see themselves as above the law should be punished and sent home.   The polite thing to do next would be to allow them to wait in line like everyone else. The harsh thing would be to make a note of their hubris and ban them from ever applying.


If you are inside of a ROTH IRA you are not getting taxed on any gain.  Dividends, distributions, interest payment, or capital gains are never taxed.  This, of course, assumes you wait until age 59.5 to do ROTH withdrawals on your gains.


>When a Business entity is so large and powerful its failure threatens the safety and well being of the nation it is based / present in.  Don't you think we should approach this issue from the other side and say that the government should be enforcing these restrictions pre-emptively? In other words, firms should be prevented from attaining 'too big to fail' status. It seems a bit controversial to me for a government to go in after the fact and forcefully break up a private company. Where was the government beforehand?  >The government should be able to forcefully break up the company into smaller groups, or instate laws and regulations that promote competition and allow smaller businesses the ability to compete.  How is management distributed across the new entities? How is intellectual property distributed? It is easy to say we should break these companies up, but actually breaking them up is a nightmare. Each of the new companies will need a duplicate management structure, and invariably they will have to source outside resources to fill these roles. If one firm retains the more valuable management then it has an advantage over the other firm. The same goes for intellectual property, or any other rare or unique assets. Shareholders will not receive the same dividend yield from their shares because the two companies once split will lose out on some economies of scale. Should the government compensate shareholders for the lost value of their shares? If not, why not and how is this different from the government directly seizing assets of the shareholders even though they have not committed any crime? Bear in mind nearly every American citizen owns shares in these companies through their retirement funding and so any loss in market cap will affect normal people, not just rich investors.  >National preservation.  Once again, I think we need to be asking a different question: how did these firms come to exist in the first place? Its one thing to turn around and plead to the government to break the firms up but it as the government itself which was asleep on the job and allowed the firm to reach this point anyway. Should we really trust the government (who let the firms come into being) to break them up again?


"Chris's answer is a great start. Keep in mind that when you withdraw from a Roth IRA, you ""shrink"" the size of the IRA (i.e. if the start up flourishes, you can't put the $10k you withdrew back, as you're limited to ~$5k in contributions per year). You may want to consider funding your startup with a credit card (ideally a balance transfer of $10k at 0% interest).  If you need to, you can always pay your card off with your Roth balance, but if the startup takes off, your IRA is unharmed. (On a side note, I wouldn't feel comfortable quitting my job to do a startup with only $10k in savings, but to each his own!)"


This solution obviously wouldn't work for everyone, and is contingent on the circumstances of your parents' finances with regards to their house, but...  Have you considered buying your parents' house?  This way your parents' desire for you to get a house as an investment would be satisfied, they wouldn't have to worry about losing their home, and you might even be able to work out a financing/rent deal that is beneficial to everyone involved.  There are definitely fewer costs going this route anyway, for instance, your parents won't have any marketing costs associated with selling the house and could pass this savings along to you.  Also, having lived in the house for a large part of your life you will also know what you are getting in to.


"The confusion comes from ambiguity in popular belief -- that businesses are required to accept x_y_x as payment. In reality, a business can state the terms of a transaction to their pleasure. On the other hand, debt is different -- no lender can refuse cash or other legal tender for repayment of debt. Sometimes, people try to split hairs and argue ""Well, if I eat a steak and I owe the restaurant $100, they should have to accept my $100 as tender for the debt of my meal."" Not true. The restaurant isn't giving you a line of credit, they're billing you after services rendered, and your payment is due on their terms."


Point 9: Don't waste time on irrelevant stuff. Such as reading this article.   Proper business guys don't go to conferences and start up meets and read entrepreneur books. They just get on with it. You've either got it or you haven't.   I should have given up at the point he said you need to train your sales staff properly. Em, How about hiring the correct sales person to start with who already knows their stuff and doesn't need training? That'll gain you hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales instantly.   Written by a twenty something blogger who knows f*** all about doing business properly.


"Individual liberty and freedom are inalienable rights and that is what conservatism was built on. Conservative principles will always stand true. My time and how I choose to spend it is my natural born right. Using my time the way I want is my liberty so long as I am not obstructing another person's same  natural born rights. This is not an opinion. Again, these are what conservatives - not the Mitch McConnell, or Paul Ryan, or other slimy GOP party member types in Congress - believe in. Those crumbs want big government, too. You don't get the hypocrisy with conservative thinking that you get with the progressive (and current day democrat) thinking. Progressives and democrats believe in something called pro-choice. You probably already knew that. You know the ""my body, my choice"" slogan that baby terminators believe in? Well, tell me why that same slogan doesn't hold true when it comes to health care? ""My body, my choice"", am i right?  I think I am done here."


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As one can see here, the world population is growing. Assuming worldwide demand for gold is a function of population, the question you have to ask is whether gold mining outpaces population growth. Just eyeballing it, I'd say they're about even although annual production is far noisier. Keep in mind that gold extraction is not an easy process though. At the end of the day, gold is only worth what you can trade it for, just like any other store of value.


"TL;DR - my understanding of the rules is that if you are required to register for GST (earning more than $75k per annum), you would be required to pay GST on these items. To clarify firstly: taxable income, and goods and services tax, are two different things. Any income you receive needs to be considered for income tax purposes - whether or not it ends up being taxable income would be too much to go into here, but generally you would take your expenses, and any deductions, away from your income to arrive at what would generally be the taxable amount. An accountant will help you do this. Income tax is paid by anyone who earns income over the tax free threshold. By contrast, goods and services tax is a tax paid by business (of which you are running one). Of course, this is passed on to the consumer, but it's the business that remits the payment to the tax office. However, GST isn't required to be charged and paid in all cases: The key in your situation is first determining whether you need to register for GST (or whether indeed you already have). If you earn less than $75,000 per year - no need to register. If you do earn more than that through your business, or you have registered anyway, then the next question is whether your items are GST-free. The ATO says that ""some education courses [and] course materials"" are GST-free. Whether this applies to you or not I'm obviously not going to be able to comment on, so I would advise getting an accountant's advice on this (or at the very least, call the ATO or browse their legal database). Thirdly, are your sales connected with Australia? The ATO says that ""A sale of something other than goods or property is connected with Australia if ... the thing is done in Australia [or] the seller makes the sale through a business they carry on in Australia"". Both of these appear to be true in your case. So in summary: if you are required to register for GST, you would be required to pay GST on these items. I am not a financial advisor or a tax accountant and this is not financial advice."


so probably a stupid question but anyway.  Suppose I take a loan of 10lakhs INR(20k C$ or 15US$) in india for studying abroad.  and get a job after studying ther like 2-3 years later. How easily I can pay off the loan. Considering I can get a 50k c$ job and live frugally.   I think i could easily pay off the loan in a year or two. is that right. Or would I suffer and end up paying installments (right word?) every month for like 10 -15 years.  I know i may be exaggerating too much on latter part. But still. Would it be easy since currency is quite 'strong' as in you earn quite a good money for even a starting job or even minimum wage job.  Thank you


If you withdraw money, even under a hardship clause like for purchasing a house, you'll still own taxes and a penalty on it.  If you are talking about a 401K loan, a loan will have no taxes/penalty, but you'll repay the loan with after-tax reduction of your salary. Max is 50k or 50% of the balance. It maybe up to the 401K administrator whether all of the funds need to go to the down payment and closing costs or whether some can go towards renovations.


As JoeTaxpayer illustrated, yes you can.  However, one thing to remember is that unless you live in a state with no state income tax, there may be state tax to pay on those gains.  Even so, it's likely a good idea if you expect either your income (or the federal capital gains tax rate) to rise in the future.


It doesn't matter if you aren't maxing out your IRA contributions anyway.  If you are maxing out IRA contribution and you still have extra money to deposit then yes you better have all the money inevested, but if you aren't maxing out your contribution then it doesn't really mattter where you stick your emergency savings.  But if you fall into money later you will be glad you put your emergency in a roth.


Have you considered social lending (for example: Lending Club)?


Depends on the incentives.    Reading the article there really doesn't seem to be any except a bit of convenience (mostly for the employer).      >“Now, instead of remembering hundreds of passwords, we’ll be able to hold our hand over an RFID reader,” says CEO Todd Westby.   Having the RFID chip stuck in a ring would get you close to the same level of usefulness.      It's a bit of a slippery slope, though.   I'd probably dig my heels in just on principle.


Where is the best place to get a small loan? (~$200 at least). I have to pay off a speeding ticket and make a car payment, and my weekly check isn’t going to cover it. I’d like to get it ASAP. I don’t know if it’s better to go through my bank, a loan company, or wherever. I don’t know if this question is applicable to this thread either, I just thought I could get some realistic information.


If you know what bank your parents used, call them and ask. (Or you might have to go there and show id). Chances are if such an account exists, it would be at the same bank. You can also search for unclaimed property. Here's the information link for Florida.


"You're asking for opinions here, because it's a matter of how you look at it. I'll give it a shot anyway. For insurance purposes - there's a clear answer: you insure based on how much it would cost you to replace it. For some reason, you're considering as a possibility negotiating with the insurance company about that, but I've never heard of insuring something at a ""possible sales value"" unless you're talking about a one of a kind thing, or a particularly valuable artifact: art, jewelry, etc. That it would be appraised and insured based on the appraised value. Besides, most of the stuff usually loses value once you bought it, not gains, so insuring per replacement costs makes more sense because it costs more. As to your estimations of your own net worth to yourself - its up to you. I would say that something only worth what people would pay for it. So if you have a car that you just bought brand new, replacing it would cost you $X, but you can only sell it for $X-10%, because it depreciated by at least 10% once you've driven it off the dealer's lot. So I would estimate your worth as $X-10% based on the car, not $X, because although you spent $X on it - you can never recover it if you sell it, so you can't claim to have it as your ""net worth""."


Why then did Ford (and the auto industry in general) suddenly decide to court such buyers?  Clearly when they felt they had a viable solution to the financing and could open up the market of buyers they were previously ignoring. If more sales are desired, surely the same can be accomplished with simply lowering prices? Millions of people have bad credit.  Apparently Ford thinks adding millions of people to the pool of potential buyers is more effective to boosting sales than discounting product for the pool of existing potential buyers.


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"Perhaps you can track your VAT amounts in a Liability account.  Using a tax liability account is a common thing in accounting. To do this, when you receive money, split the transaction such that your actual revenue (which you will keep after VAT remittance) goes into an Asset account, and the amount you will eventually have to pay back to the state goes into a Liability account.  Later, when you pay the VAT back to the state, your transaction will effectively ""pay back"" the liability, with one end of your double-entry decreasing the funds in your checking account, and the other end decreasing the funds in your tax liability account. Having said that, I've found that there are many shortcomings in the Cash Flow report, and I'm not sure that using a tax liability account (which I think is the Right Thing to do) will necessarily solve this problem for you..."


"Answers: 1. Is this a good idea? Is it really risky? What are the pros and cons? Yes, it is a bad idea. I think, with all the talk about employer matches and tax rates at retirement vs. now, that you miss the forest for the trees. It's the taxes on those retirement investments over the course of 40 years that really matter. Example: Imagine $833 per month ($10k per year) invested in XYZ fund, for 40 years (when you retire). The fund happens to make 10% per year over that time, and you're taxed at 28%. How much would you have at retirement? 2. Is it a bad idea to hold both long term savings and retirement in     the same investment vehicle, especially one pegged to the US stock     market? Yes. Keep your retirement separate, and untouchable. It's supposed to be there for when you're old and unable to work. Co-mingling it with other funds will induce you to spend it (""I really need it for that house! I can always pay more into it later!""). It also can create a false sense of security (""look at how much I've got! I got that new car covered...""). So, send 10% into whatever retirement account you've got, and forget about it. Save for other goals separately.  3. Is buying SPY a ""set it and forget it"" sort of deal, or would I need     to rebalance, selling some of SPY and reinvesting in a safer vehicle     like bonds over time? For a retirement account, yes, you would. That's the advantage of target date retirement funds like the one in your 401k. They handle that, and you don't have to worry about it. Think about it: do you know how to ""age"" your account, and what to age it into, and by how much every year? No offense, but your next question is what an ETF is! 4. I don't know ANYTHING about ETFs. Things to consider/know/read? Start here: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/etf.asp 5. My company plan is ""retirement goal"" focused, which, according to     Fidelity, means that the asset allocation becomes more conservative     over time and switches to an ""income fund"" after the retirement     target date (2050). Would I need to rebalance over time if holding     SPY? Answered in #3. 6. I'm pretty sure that contributing pretax to 401k is a good idea     because I won't be in the 28% tax bracket when I retire. How are the     benefits of investing in SPY outweigh paying taxes up front, or do     they not? Partially answered in #1. Note that it's that 4 decades of tax-free growth that's the big dog for winning your retirement. Company matches (if you get one) are just a bonus, and the fact that contributions are tax free is a cherry on top. 7. Please comment on anything else you think I am missing I think what you're missing is that winning at personal finance is easy, and winning at personal finance is hard"


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In most mutual funds you delegate voting rights to the investment manager.  The securities are typically held by a third party bank as part of the requirements for Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).  You own equity in that mutual fund, which owns the shares (but are held by a third party); you don't have direct ownership as in most cases that would result in you owning fractions of shares.


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These big companies are the cause of the worlds angsts at the moment. When growth stops in your domestic market where do you look and who do you lobby to get them to open up borders and create trade deals.  The governments are vaguely held hostage by these megacorps and are killing off smaller startups. Its not a good situation at all.


"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."


"Thank God you have your child back, it is so awesome that you finally found a medical treatment that worked.  It must have been a truly trying time in your lives.   That situation is an important template in personal finance.  Through no fault of your own, a series of events occurred that caused you to spend far more money then you anticipated.  Per your post this was complicated by lost income due to economic situations.   What is to say that this does not happen again in the future?  While we can all hope that our child does not get sick, there are other events that could also fit into this template. Because of this I hate all options you present.  Per your post, you are pretty thin with free cash flow and have high income, and yet you are looking to borrow more.  That is a recipe for disaster with it being made worse as you are considering putting your home at risk. The 20K per year per kid sounds like a live at the university state school; or, a close by private school.  Your finances do not support either option.  There are times when the word ""No"" is in order when answering questions.   Doing a live at home community college to university will cost you a total of about 30K per kid rather than the 80K you are proposing.  Doing this alone will greatly reduce the risk you are attempting to assume.  Doing that and having your child work some, you could cash flow college.  That is what I would recommend. Given that you are so thin, you will also have to put constraints on college attendance.  No changing major three times, only majors with an employable skills, and studying before partying.  It may be worth it to wait a year of two before attending if a decision cannot be made. I was in a similar situation when my son started college.  High income, but broke.  He worked and went to a community college and was able to pay for the bulk of it himself.  From there he obtained a job with a healthy salary and completed his degree at the University.  It took him a little longer, but he is debt free and has a fantastic work ethic."


In principle, when you are the sole owner of a limited company, and also the sole employee, then it is much easier to assume that someone else is the employee. Let's say your twin brother John Adler.  John Adler receives a salary from David Adler's company. Of course John has to pay income tax on his salary. Absolutely in the UK, and in Estonia as well if they have any sensible tax laws at all (which I assume but don't know for sure).  Then there is the company. It's profit equals revenue, minus cost. You said £4000 revenue, and John Adler's salary, plus anything the company has to pay on top of the salary, is cost, which is subtracted from the revenue to calculate profit. In the UK, the company pays 20% corporation tax on those profits, and the rest stays in its bank account (or may be in goods that the company purchased).  Where does David Adler come in? He owns the company, but doesn't work for it and gets no salary. He owns the company, but he does not own the company's money. He can't just help himself to the money. He can get a loan from the company, and is personally responsible for repaying that loan. If it's not repaid, HMRC will be very angry which will hurt. Or he can pay himself a dividend, and pays dividend tax on it. Or of course he can leave the money in the company.  That's exactly how it works in the UK, and I would assume Estonia to be similar. And of course if it's not the twin brother who is the employee, but the OP himself, then the situation is exactly the same.


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> Microsoft has done a great job with their cloud platforms, revamping the microsoft office suite to compete with google's, their entire surface line of laptops and tablets, purchasing linkedin, etc.  I don't understand the economics of the cloud platforms. I've heard some people say there could be an excess capacity problem like there was 20 years ago with fiber. Is that possible?


Technically yes, in most cases you'll probably get all the AMT you pay for exercising in-the-money incentive stock options (ISOs) credited back to you. Practically, however, inflation could significantly reduce the value of the money when you get it back. Remember you can only recover the differential between regular income tax and the tentative minimum tax (TMT) each year. Depending on your situation, that could be a few thousand dollars or less, in which case $50k of AMT credit would take a while to use up. However, as you point out, if you end up selling your shares you'll likely use up all your AMT credit that year. So yes, you'd probably get your $50k of AMT back, but a lot of people don't have that much to tie up in taxes for an extended period of time.


It does not matter. Your credit score is affected by late payments, by credit usage and by age of credit. DO NOT PAY LATE.  Paying early is only good in that it means you don't pay late. Your credit usage is calculated by percentage of the credit you have that you actually use.  Keep your usage to under 20% of your limit and you look great as a credit risk as you have lots of buffer.


Here's a pretty comprehensive data source on immigration trends: http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/social-issues-migration-health/international-migration-outlook-2017_migr_outlook-2017-en#.WazX28aB2gA#page18  On page 18 there's a table when you can compare the net immigration flows to the EU and to the US.  The EU net immigration annually is roughly double that of immigration to the US.  For people of immigration origin the US has more; EU figure is 35M.  Source: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/1/10/Foreign-born_population_by_country_of_birth%2C_1_January_2016_%28¹%29.png  The US had roughly 43.3M people of immigration origin in 2015.  Source: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states  My point being - there is plenty of incoming cheap work force available in all rich countries. The structure of the US service economy cannot be explained with supply of work force.


The benefit, as other answers have mentioned, is higher interest rates than are available compared to other comparable options.  My bank keeps spamming me with offers for a sub 1% APR savings account that only requires a $10,000 balance, for example.  While CDs and similar safe investments don't seem like they offer much value now (or in the recent past), that's because they strongly correlate to the federal funds rate, which is near historic lows.  See the graph of CD rates and the federal funds rate, here. You may have felt differently in July of 1984, when you could get a 5 year CD with an APR above 12%.  As you can see in this graph of historical CD yields, it hasn't always been the case that CDs offered such small returns.  That being said, CDs are safe investments, being FDIC insured (up to the FDIC insurance limits), so you're not going to get great rates from one, because there's basically no risk in this particular type of investment.  If you want better rates, you get those by investing in riskier instruments that have the possibility of losing value.


"As far as I can recall, savings and chequing accounts exist due to regulations on the banking industry that put were into effect after the depression to prevent a ""run"" on the bank.   A chequing account is a ""demand"" account, meaning you can go and demand your money, and they have to pay immediately, by means of a withdrawal or a cheque.  Banks used to get out of hand and loan out pretty much all the money they had on deposit, and of course those people with loans just put the money they borrowed into another chequing account and the bank loaned that out to someone else.  The money that people believed they had access to multiplied indefinitely.  However, when everyone goes to take that money out at the same time, you have a run on the bank.  Therefore, government regulations stipulate a % that the bank must have on-hand.  The typical number is 5%.  That effectively limits the money multiplier to 19 times. Savings accounts get around this restriction by putting limits on how much and how quickly you can withdraw the amounts.  They pay you more interest because the money in a savings account is worth more to them, because it's not subject to those restrictions. Some chequing accounts pay interest, but you have to maintain a minimum balance.  Some savings accounts allow you to write cheques, but I assume the withdrawal limitations probably still apply. There's also something to do with deposit insurance (as in, the chequing accounts are covered by government deposit insurance, but savings accounts are not).  I'm not 100% certain of that though."


All the time. Unless you work for shitty companies. In my 6 years working in IT, unless you are abusing leaving office early or coming a little late. No one would really care. Shitty companies are shitty and you probably want to leave as soon as you can.


A brief time off, often 7-12 weeks is called a sabbatical. What you propose is far beyond that and unless you have it well planned out, you risk burning through all your savings and perhaps more.  Most of us are planning a retirement and have some idea of the savings needed. You first need to plan this 2-3 year hiatus, and then for both of you to get rehired, and start the savings again. I envy anyone who can manage to do this while they are young enough to enjoy it.


"They already do, it is just sneaky how it is done.  They have created a system with healthcare where we pay up to three times more per capita than any other western country.  They do this by setting up particular legislation and shutting down public options (and anything else that might cut out administration and executive profits).  They don't need to directly tax us in order to keep an unreasonable amount of money flowing to corporate executives and wealthy share holders.  That is without even getting into pharmaceutics and prohibition legislation.  One way they could easily keep money flowing to Hollywood, would be an additional tax refund that applies to ""legitimate"" entertainment costs.  Or perhaps doing as Canada does and adding taxes to storage media.  They can also continue to cut web freedom, options and bandwidth.  Every bit of legislation I see come down the pipe (with only a couple of notable exceptions, such as dadt) has been about protecting profits for the top of the economic pile, at the expense of everyone else.  EDIT:  I would also like to mention that our taxes already fund healthcare, and in fact, we pay so much that we could have a universal system already just with the money we spend via taxes.  It is so hyper-inflated because of the vast amount of profit built into the system at all levels.  http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/OECD042111.cfm http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258  We have to cut out admin and profits to the hyper-wealthy if we wish to have a reasonable healthcare system.  This chart in particular shows the problem.  http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/images/OECDChart3_1.gif  This was just in 2008, costs have increased since then at the accelerated rate.  So yes, the oligarchy has ways of making us pay without introducing specific new taxation."


This is a tech company where they are doing stuff for future, when elect cars become popular tesla will skyrocket and dominate the sector, think of how much cash they will make if they dominate the car market. Only logical way to criticize the situation of Tesla is to assume electronic cars wont make it and never be used otherwise comparing to companies who make extreme profits is stupid.


Edited to incorporate the comments elsewhere of @Atkins Assuming, (apparently incorrectly) that duration is time to maturity: First, note that the question does not mention the coupon rate, the size of the regular payments that the bond holder will get each year.  So let's calculate that. Consider the cash flow described.  You pay out 1015 at the start of Year #1, to buy the bond.  At the end of Years #1 to #5, you receive a coupon payment of X.  Also at the end of Year #5, you receive the face value of the bond, 1000.  And you are told that the pay out equals the money received, using a time value of money of 4.69% So, if we use the date of maturity of the bond as our valuation date, we have the equation: Maturity + Future Value of coupons = Future value of Bond Purchase price 1000 + X *( (1 + .0469)^5-1)/0.0469 = 1015 * 1.0469^5 Solving this for X, we obtain 50.33;  the coupon rate is 5.033%.  You will receive 50.33 at the end of each of the five years.   Now, we can take this fixed schedule of payments, and apply the new yield rate to the same formula above;  only now, the unknown is the price paid for the bond, Y. 1000 + 50.33 * ((1 + 0.0487)^5 - 1) / .0487 = Y * 1.0487^5 Solving this equation for Y, we obtain: Y = 1007.08


"At my soon to be legendary Stock Options Cafe, I recently wrote an article ""Betting On Apple at 9 to 2.""  It described a trade in which a 35% move in a stock over a fixed time (2 years) would result in a 354% gain in one's bet. In this case, the options serve to create remarkable leverage for speculators. In general, option help provide liquidity and extend the nature of the risk/reward curve.  There are option trades that range from conservative (e.g. a 'covered call') to wildly speculative, as the one I described above."


"You want to combine a set of techniques to avoid throwing food away. Consider setting aside a weekend day or other non-busy time to do some food prep.  Check to see if there is anything in the fridge that needs to be used quickly and prioritize meals that use that item.  Make a weekly menu and get your groceries.  Chop all the vegetables and fruits you need for the week's meals.  Cook meats that can be cooked in advance.  Chefs call the concept of having everything ready for making a meal ""mis en place.""  Try to do yours in advance to energize you for cooking and also make you more likely to cook on those nights you've been at the office late. Get to know and love your freezer.  Buy frozen meat in bulk and portion individually (wrap 1/2 lb blocks of ground beef and chicken pieces in foil then store in freezer bags, for example).  Get frozen packaged fish fillets for seafood.  Boil a whole chicken, shred the meat, and have on hand for easy meals like tacos, enchiladas, chicken pot pie, pasta, etc.  Do the same with beef roasts or pork shoulder for pulled pork, etc.  Freeze vegetables and fruits if you can't use them in time (or buy frozen vegetables to begin with).  You can even consider making dumplings like perogis or pelmeni and freezing for a homemade alternative to a frozen food aisle meal.  You can even go all the way with freezer cooking. Cook with shelf-stable items.  Rice, pasta, beans, lentils, canned goods, and other items can be made into major components of a meal. When you do buy something perishable that doesn't freeze well, try to utilize it in more than one of your meals for the week.  This works well for items like fresh herbs. If you don't want to spend a lot of time cooking, a source like stonesoup is a great place to start - many recipes there can be finished in under 10 minutes, most are five ingredients or less, and all are tasty and good for you. This question from Seasoned Advice has a lot of great suggestions, although geared towards a college student, that you should consider."


One of my previous landlords did the same thing. He was politically conservative and outspoken enough to admonish his renters that if the Democrat candidate won, taxes would likely go up, and he would pass the additional cost from his higher taxes onto them in the form of rent increases.


There may be specific answers that can be determined based on the interest rates, amounts, tax provisions, etc. But I'm here to tell you... It is much easier (i.e., less stressful) to own a home when you have less debt. Pay off any and every debt you can before purchasing a home because there will always be something requiring you to spend money once you own one.


In simple terms, inflation is a result of too much money chasing too few goods, i.e. there is an imbalance between demand and supply. The demand exceeds the supply. With all other things being constant it leads to increase in price, i.e. inflation.


"K-12 teachers never make six figure sums.   Professors in universities sometimes do, but for every professor that makes a lot of money there are probably dozens of nontenured faculty who are barely making enough to feed themselves and put gas in their cars.  The real reason the big corporate interests want to privatize US education is to use all those jobs as bargaining chips in globalization. that has been their plan for decades, they tried to do it in GATS, which could be seen as the first major attack on public services. That was in 1995.   But GATS ""Mode Four"" was not used extensively because it had a minimum of I think $800k worth of the contract- so for structural reasons its never caught on.   So now [they have rolled out TiSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_pPqnbXpA4) which is supposed to be the biggest trade agreement on services to date.. Its going to effect a huge number of people in the US, the EU, and Australia. More than half of all jobs are service jobs. But its priorities seem to be all wrong.  I am sure there are other, better ways for US companies to be afforded ""national treatment"" in the rapidly growing developing countries than TiSA.  For example, [ISDS is truly horrible](http://tpplegal.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/isds-domestic-legal-process-background-brief.pdf).  The financial chapter - which Wikileaks published an older draft of. is what people have focused on - It is like a laundry list of VERY bad ideas rolled into one. But, financial services are just a tiny part of Tisa. the most destructive part is the [attack on the few remaining public services](http://www.world-psi.org/en/psi-special-report-tisa-versus-public-services) which have survived GATS."


Just the Y-axis is manipulated, doesn't make it garbage. How else would you graphically demonstrate the strong correlation all in one graph given that the levels of the two series differ so much ... Would it be more convincing if he gave you the correlation coefficient over the relevant period (which I bet would be pretty close to 1 and would convey the same point as the graph).


Morpheus, I think you are approaching this question the wrong way. The interest rate is not the most important consideration; you also need to consider the other characteristics of the investment. Money in a bank account is very liquid; you can do anything you want with it. Equity in a house is very illiquid; it is hard and expensive to access. Let's say you have $25,000 to either go towards a bigger downpayment or to invest. What happens if you lose your job? If you have $25,000 in the bank, you have a lot of flexibility; you can pay a mortgage for a number of months, or you could use it to relocate. If you put the money in the house, you cannot access it at all; without a job you can't refi or get a home equity loan. Your only recourse would be to sell the house, which might not be possible if there are systemic issues (such as the ones in the real estate crash). Even if you can refi or get a home equity loan, you will have to pay fees. My advice is to put the money somewhere else. If your term is long (say, 10 years or so), I would put the money in an index fund.


"> Because if someone gets hurt they may require medical care. Also, there is currently no hard definition of ""stoned"" and drug tests do not show if someone is ""stoned"" or not, just that they have used the drug at sometime in the past.   Which is why you minimize the risk by accepting more false positives."


"Happy cake-day!  The gap/disconnect in your argument is that the ""legal tender"", i.e., the money *itself*, is debt.   Whether you use green pieces of paper, or yellow metal discs, or a credit-card authorization, you are not giving the seller a pair of shoes to wear, or putting braces on their kids, or fixing their roof for them. You are giving them an IOU, a marker, that they can redeem for that stuff.   ""Legal tender"" just means debt that anyone will redeem. When you give someone a dollar, it is exactly the same as giving them a hand-written IOU that says ""bearer entitled to one pack of gum"" (or one cheeseburger, or one  can of coke, or 1/40,000th of a Mercedes, or whatever). The only difference between your handwritten promise to make good on demand versus a printed dollar bill, is in the credibility of issuing authority, and the willingness of other people to accept it.   > You can come into my store and I can insist that today I'll only accept euros. Or jelly beans. Or I can choose to simply not do business with you. We are two free people who are under no obligation to do business with each other, and if we choose to, how we choose to remunerate each other for that business is completely up to us.  This is absolutely true. If I trade you a head of cabbage for a pair of shoelaces, there is no money involved, and no debt."


"This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/amazon-prime-now-launches-in-singapore-its-first-market-in-southeast-asia/) reduced by 67%. (I'm a bot) ***** > The Amazon apps went live in Singapore early last night local time, and Prime Now - an aggressive two-hour delivery service - is available to Singapore&#039;s population of more than five million people from today.  > The launch includes &quot;Tens of thousands of items&quot; but it isn&#039;t the full Prime offering, which Amazon said will be available &quot;Soon&quot; in Singapore.  > &quot;This is the first time we&#039;re offering Prime Now to an entire country. Singapore allows us to launch to the whole country at the same time, but when you look at the Singapore consumer, at Singapore - it being urban, a great metropolitan city, people are very tech-savvy, it makes a great match with the Prime Now value proposition,&quot; Henry Low, who is Amazon&#039;s Director of Prime Now in Asia Pacific, told CNET in an interview.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6q163k/amazon_prime_now_launches_in_singapore_its_first/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~177470 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **Amazon**^#1 **Singapore**^#2 **Prime**^#3 **service**^#4 **back**^#5"


If you're looking for a purely financial answer (ignoring the social/environmental aspects) there are a few different ways you can look at it. For these types of improvements the simplest is a payback calculation.  How long would it take you to recoup the initial costs?   For example, if the entire installation cost $5,000 (including any tax credits), and you save $100 per month (I'm making both numbers up), you'll pay back your investment in 50 months, or about 4 years.   (Note that if you borrow money to do the improvement, then your payback period is longer because you're reducing the amount that you're saving each month by paying interest.) If you're deciding between different uses for the money (like investing, or paying down other debt) then you can look at the return that you're getting.  Using the same example, you are spending $5,000 and getting $100 per month back, for a 24% annual return ($1,200 / $5,000), which is better than you can get on almost anything but a 401(k) match (meaning don't stop your 401(k) contributions to do this either). The decision on whether or wait or not then becomes - will the price drop faster than the amount of savings you will realize.  So if you will save $100 per month in your electric bill, is the price of the complete installation going down by more than $100 each month?  If not, you'd be better off buying now and start paying back the investment sooner.


"It is illegal because laws are written by people, and laws of stock trade are written, in part, to make it appear ""fair"" and thus contribute to the willingness of the people to invest their money in that particular venue. Profiting from information on the stock market that some people have and some can't have is considered ""unfair"", since it presumably excludes the latter from profit-making opportunities and thus makes their trades less profitable than otherwise. Since it is universally felt so, people made laws that prohibit such behavior.  I am not aware of any research that shows beyond doubt that allowing insider trading would really ruin stock markets, but such thing would be very hard to prove. There are arguments to both sides, and the side that supports prohibiting such trade has a clear majority, so it is prohibited."


I got paid less than Walmart's starting rate while working an hourly position at Kohl's and at Target, so I've never understood the overwhelming distaste for Walmart's employee treatment. Is it more of how managers at the store level treat employees rather than their pay?


I get the point you are trying to make, but Walmart is a multi billion dollar company, this would never happen, even if Amazon tried, Walmart could outbid them.  Net neutrality protects the small companies that can't throw around millions of dollars. If you were to create a startup to compete with Amazon or Walmart, without net neutrality they could pay to throttle your website and effectively kill your business.


I would suggest opening a new account (credit card and bank) for just your business. This protects you in multiple ways, but is no bigger burden for you other than carrying another card in your wallet.  Then QB can download the transactions from your website and reconciling is a cinch. If you got audited, you'd be in for a world of pain right now.  From personal experience there are a few charges that go unnoticed that reconciling finds every month at our business.  We have a very strict process in place, but some things slip through the cracks.


"I'm guessing since I don't know the term, but it sounds like you're asking about the technique whereby a loan is used to gather multiple years' gift allowance into a single up-front transfer. For the subsequent N years, the giver pays the installments on the loan for the recipient, at a yearly amount small enough to avoid triggering Gift Tax. You still have to pay income tax on the interest received (even though you're giving them the money to pay you), and you must charge a certain minimum interest (or more accurately, if you charge less than that they tax you as if the loan was earning that minimum). Historically this was used by relatively wealthy folks, since the cost of lawyers and filing the paperwork and bookkeeping was high enough that most folks never found out this workaround existed, and few were moving enough money to make those costs worthwhile. But between the ""Great Recession"" and the internet, this has become much more widely known, and there are services which will draw up standard paperwork, have a lawyer sanity-check it for your local laws, file the official mortgage lien (not actually needed unless you want the recipient to also be able to write off the interest on their taxes), and provide a payments-processing service if you do expect part or all of the loan to be paid by the recipient. Or whatever subset of those services you need.  I've done this. In my case it cost me a bit under $1000 to set up the paperwork so I could loan a friend a sizable chunk of cash and have it clearly on record as a loan, not a gift. The amount in question was large enough, and the interpersonal issues tricky enough, that this was a good deal for us. Obviously, run the numbers. Websearching ""family loan""  will find much more detail about how this works and what it can and can't do, along with services specializing in these transactions. NOTE: If you are actually selling something, such as your share of a house, this dance may or may not make sense. Again, run the numbers, and if in doubt get expert advice rather than trusting strangers on the web. (Go not to the Internet for legal advice, for it shall say both mu and ni.)"


Assumptions 1 & 2 are correct. Plus you will improve on credit score. The only disadvantage is if you get lax about it and overspend beyond your limit ... Plus a small risk of fraud of card transactions ...


It's not native functionality, but you could probably do it. You could create a fake security/currency for the meter type (kWh, whatever gas/water get measured in ). Updating would be a pain, though. You'd have to go read it and enter the data manually -- unless it was a smart meter, and then you could probably build some sort of script for it. In terms of figuring how much to pay -- maybe have an account in liabilities for stuff you haven't paid for yet, and another in assets for what you have paid for? This seems like it could be a lot more complicated than it's worth.


Pulling money out of a credit card is generally a bad idea.  You'll be hit with interest from day 1, and some credit cards have cash advance fees on top of that. If you are really desperate for running up an automatic charge on your credit card to maintain use, then you have a few options: Personally, the charity route makes the most sense to me.  You can probably set up an automatic donation of less than 5 quid, and it may be tax deductible to boot.  Plus, you're helping an organization that (hopefully) is doing some good in the world.


I disagree. Compensation is linked to a lot of factors, many of them too intangible to quantify in a simple 8-step chart. Maybe this works fine in a (very) small company. It would be very difficult to maintain in any large organization, and I would imagine that it makes recruiting good talent much harder.  I can see certain benefits too, but look - as an employee, I want to work in an environment where I can advocate for myself and, occasionally, negotiate for better compensation. Some people aren't good at these things, and frankly, that sucks for them. I'll eat their lunch if they let me.


Yes that is actually on the win side for ebooks. The only thing is I'm not sure you can leave your account to your heirs but they probably don't feel like dealing with your big physical library of things they don't care about - so not really much loss there.