Financial Solution News

SmartyPig $50 gift certificate
The nice folks over at SmartyPig.com just sent me a $50 gift certificate that I am going to pass along to the readers.
SmartyPig is basically an online savings account that allows your friends and family to contribute to your savings goals. They also provide you with additional incentive boosts from top retailers who sell the items you are saving for. And surprisingly, they are currently boasting a 4.30% (APY) – which is a heck of a lot more than ING Direct is paying or most other online banks.
A few more notes about SmartyPig:

Opening an account on SmartyPig is absolutely FREE. In fact, you can open your account, create a goal, reach your goal, and redeem your goal, and SmartyPig won’t charge you a thing.
SmartyPig savings accounts are FDIC insured, so consumers can be confident their financial information and savings are secure. SmartyPig [...]

Original post by bob

I’m sitting on what I have still with no changes yet.  Have y’all seen the price of FNM this week?  It’s down to 27.97.  I bought my call back on the day it hit it’s near term high.  The only saving grace I have with my ill feelings of throwing away so much cash is that I didn’t hold onto the puts I also sold, so I got out with a profit on those.  I had a feeling FNM would be pulled back down, but just not enough proof with that feeling to let it have the chance of running away from me.
Check out these charts of NVDA and VIP.  NVDA just gapped up above its 10 day moving average and is now using is for support.  VIP is being held back by its 10 day moving average and can’t break through.  I think NVDA is poised to take off and I’m [...]

Original post by Alex Fotopoulos

Congress should complete action on a Federal Housing Administration modernization bill and leave it to the Bush administration to find ways to help borrowers with “underwater” mortgages, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday in a major policy speech.
“We do not need a system wide solution for the vast majority of loans where the homeowner has negative equity,” Secretary Paulson told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The secretary’s comments show that the Bush administration wants to head off passage of a Democratic proposal that would encourage lenders to write down the principal amount of underwater mortgages so borrowers could refinance into FHA-insured mortgages.
The legislation would authorize $300 billion in FHA loan guarantees. The Bush administration would prefer that the FHA take a more limited approach and use its existing authority to address the problem. “Secretary Alphonso Jackson is examining the potential for FHA to be a solution for those borrowers,” Mr. [...]

Original post by Admin

I’ve received my CFA books and boy were they thick!!! Good luck to everyone who will be taking the test because they weren’t kidding about the need for at least 250 hours of study time!! Those who know me personally will probably be seeing less and less of me in the coming months as I will be busy studying but I will try my best to keep everyone updated on my progress!
On another note, Deb over at Bird On A Wire was nice enough to give me the title of Remarkable Blogger for the week! I’m so honored by the post so remember to check it out!
Finally, Fiscal Musings is giving away two copies of The Millionaire Next Door! If you want to become the millionaire next door, then I suggest reading his post about how to enter.
—Related Articles at Personal Finance Blog by Money [...]

Original post by MoneyNing

As you probably already know, there are many credit cards out there. The one you choose however, should reflect your lifestyle and your ideal spending amounts. If you are looking for the best possible deal and the best company for your credit card, you’ll obviously need to look around at what you have to choose from and what works best for you.
The first thing you’ll need to decide when choosing your credit card, is why you need one in the first place. Some people choose to get a credit card for cash flow purposes. With a credit card, you can make purchases and buy things, leaving your paycheck or other source of income in your bank account to draw interest. This way, your money will continue to grow while you continue to buy the things you need. Then at the end of the month, simply pay your bill.
Others will choose [...]

Original post by admin

So you think you’re a hotshot daytrader? Let’s see if you can walk the talk.
My colleague recently forwarded me a link to this cool website called Inspectd, where you can trade real stocks with fake money. While the Internet is already littered with hundreds websites that offer similar features, Inspectd is unique in that you can “fast forward” your time-horizon to ascertain your daytrading skills in a matter of seconds rather than waiting for weeks or months. From the website:
Inspectd.com allows you to test your stock market skills against over 20 million actual historical charts. We’ll show you a random stock from a random date in the past, and you try to guess whether it rose or dropped. We’ll even give you $100,000 in play money to test your skill. But beware: it’s addictive!

My little test drive was a wild one indeed. The monopoly money [...]

Original post by Financial Jungle Guy

I just visited an old friend of mine last weekend and we talked quite a bit about money and God. It was eye-opening for me to talk to someone who had a completely different mindset on money than I did. He has been on the opposite extreme of the American way of living extravagantly off of credit cards.
He hasn’t had a penny of debt, was very wise with his money, but had a distorted view of how much it takes to survive. He grew up in a wealthy household. And many people, including myself, would assume that concerns about money would not have existed, but we would be wrong.
They lived debt-free and had a ton in the bank, but as he told me concerns about running out of money were a very real issue. This was difficult for me to imagine having grown up with a lot less.  [...]

Original post by bob

I sold three VIP April 40 calls (VIQDH) a few weeks ago and at the beginning of this week put a limit order in to buy back and close all three.  When VIP started its decent again yesterday two hit and I paid $31.49 with commissions.  I should’ve let the ride since I have two naked puts at the 35 strike still ITM and two more ITM at the 30 strike.  I canceled my order for the last one since it’s likely to expire worthless in a few weeks. 
I entered a new limit during lunch today to sell a couple of May 35 calls, but then canceled the order.  I came back to the chart and saw that the current price for VIP at 29.01 is within a nickel of the previous two intraday lows back on January 23rd and last week on March 20th.  Sometimes the third time down on a retest is [...]

Original post by Alex Fotopoulos

This is a guest post by Heather Johnson, a freelance business, finance and economics writer, as well as a regular contributor at Business Credit Cards. Heather welcomes comments and freelancing job inquiries by email.
The foreign exchange market, also known as Forex, is the international exchange market where currencies are bought and sold. If you are already investing in stocks and would like to move over to the Forex market, you will quickly find that the two are very different.
Unlike the stock exchange, Forex trades 24 hours a day from 5:00 p.m. ET Sunday until 4:00 p.m. ET Friday. Also, there is no central hub like the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq. In its place, trade is carried out between investors through electronic communication networks (ECNs) and phone networks in various markets around the world.
So, when you learn that the US dollar has “closed” at a certain [...]

Original post by MoneyNing

As the sub-prime mortgage scandal continues to play out badly for many US companies, more and more questions have been raised as to whether the impact of a slowdown in one area will translate into a nationwide, or even global, recession. Growth prospects within the US are limited for this year by the unprecedented scale of bad securities that have become investments for many companies around the world, exposing them to grave losses and destroying investor confidence. According to polls, more and more Americans are becoming wise to the potential crises and have shored up spending, in turn triggering further softening of retail markets.
One cause of this problem with American consumer spending, the practically guaranteed market for many goods even in tough financial times, is that the borrowing people must first default on their mortgages before the securities (that their loans have been repackages and distributed) can truly become worthless. [...]

Original post by admin