Personal Finance

With the current credit crunch, raising capital to start or expand a small business can be a real challenge. The bitter irony is that while interest rates are at historic lows, access to funding sources has [...]Recommended For You:What is Your Lending Club Performance?Investing and Making Money with Lending Club Peer-to-Peer…Borrowing Money from Lending Club and ProsperThe Best Places to Borrow MoneyWhere to Find Small Business Loans Read the rest of 5 Reasons to Get Unsecured Business Loan from Lending Club at Moolanomy.com.

Some banks may be turning a blind eye to fraud because it makes them money.Court documents and interviews with officials at the Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau show banks turning a profit after ignoring potential fraud warnings and sometimes playing a more direct role in "enabling dubious merchants to prey on consumers," The New York Times says."Banks across the country, from some of the largest to smaller regional players, help facilitate billions of dollars of fraud each year, according to interviews with consumer lawyers and state and federal prosecutors," the Times says.Read 6 remaining paragraphs on MoneyTalksNews.com.

What Kills an AmateursNothing is more fatal to amateur investors than thinking that a stock trading near a 52-week low is a good buy. They based this logic on the notion "what goes down must eventually comes up".Suppose we have 2 companiesi. Co. A had recently gone down from $5 to $1. ii Co. B had recently gone up from $1 to $5.Believe it or not, all things being equal, a majority of amateur investors will choose Co.A because they believe that it will eventually make it back up to those levels again. On the other hand amateur investors will think that chasing after Co.B is almost suicidal because the music will end soon. The point is that the stock price is a reflection of the company. If a great firm is run by excellent managers, there is no reason the stock won't keep on going up, vice versa.Therefore dun said the falling knives killed you when actually you have performed hara-kiri yourselves.Ref:http://www.investlah.com/forum/index.php/topic,49773.msg972601.html#msg972601Health is Wealth Bullbear Stock Investing Notes

Sadly, many people experience costly and painful conditions near the end of life, which can have serious ramifications on their finances and relationships. These conditions also may require family members to navigate the healthcare system on behalf of a loved one who is unable to do so, which can significantly add to the already existing [...]How to Navigate End-of-Life Care Decisions When Family Members Disagree is a post from the Money Crashers personal finance blog.       

Whether or not you're concerned about the revelations that the NSA could be digging through your personal information, private companies might be just as bad, if not worse.CNN and BuzzFeed came up with 10 ways we're already giving up data, including to social networks and other businesses that track you or use your data to sell things. Here are some of them:Last year, Facebook bought data on 70 million U.S. households and has been tracking user behavior to help businesses tailor ads designed to reach them.Twitter just partnered with major global ad firm WPP Group, which will use the site's data "to set up a way to better monitor real-time consumer behavior," CNN says.Retailers are using eye-tracking technology to see what you look at in stores. Sometimes the cameras are in mannequins.Department stores such as Nordstrom use their Wi-Fi networks to track smartphone users' location and movements. (You can opt out.)Target has a system that tracks purchase history and analyzes it to make recommendations and give coupons. It works so well that "a Target in Minneapolis determined that a teenager was pregnant before she did," CNN says.For better or worse, this is the new normal. CNN also mentions that local law enforcement agencies are building DNA databases of crime suspects, and we recently wrote about how credit bureaus are watching our Facebook posts for signs of fraud.Read 1 remaining paragraph on MoneyTalksNews.com.

Flickr | http://www.flickr.com/photos/eguidetravel/6198882526/ This week we’re going to test an oft-quoted theory about purchasing online airfare tickets, in which a traveler might encounter different prices depending on how a travel/airline site stores a user’s cookies. A person might get different deals depending on their browser history, which seems wildly discriminatory and unfair. Rick Seaney writes in USA Today, The question is, are these travel sites smart (or brazen) enough to target your personal behavior via cookies to jack up rates and pocket the difference? Or is this price-jumping behavior simply an artifact of airline pricing technology and the shortcuts used by quoting websites to handle the insatiable demand for ticket quotes? The team at MyBankTracker is going to test it out to see if there’s any truth to this. We’re going to look up flight prices every day this week using three different travel sites: Expedia, Kayak, and Orbitz. The plan is to conduct searches on various browsers (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome) and then on Thursday, we’re going to delete our browser cookies and do another set of searches with a “clean slate.” If we notice a price discrepancy after clearing our cookies, it might reveal that airline companies do provide users with different results depending on their internet browsing histories. It would be a good reminder, then, to always clear cookies between searches when planning future trips! Leave a comment if you’ve ever noticed a difference when looking to book travel tickets when you booked on separate computers, or during different times of the day. Top 5 Credit Card Bonus Offers for Summer 2013 Travel Related Stories: 5 Cheap Options For Using Your Smartphone Abroad Price of Gas Jumps Over 100% in the Past Decade United Airlines to Offer Subscription Packages for Fliers Money Challenge: Does Browsing History Really Affect Airline Prices?

More than 7.4 million people will receive small checks from a pair of settlements related to credit card foreign transaction fees.From CCFSettlement.com, the official website for the settlements:On April 16, 2013, the court approved a distribution of checks concerning foreign transaction fee claims made in connection with the settlements in the two related matters In re Currency Conversion Fee Antitrust Litig. and Ross, et al. v. American Express Co., et al. (The initial distribution of checks in connection with the currency conversion fee settlement was completed by mid-January 2012.)Read 4 remaining paragraphs on MoneyTalksNews.com.

My computer mouse uses two AA batteries. Our television remote control does, too, as does our DVD player remote. Our son’s fish tank filter uses two AA batteries as a backup. Our small flashlight uses AA batteries, and our large flashlight uses an adapter that allows it to use AA batteries. I don’t even want to speculate how many of their toys use AA or AAA batteries, but it’s quite a few. I could go on and on with this list. Suffice it to say that we use a fair amount of AA and AAA batteries around our home. At our house, we use rechargeable eneloop batteries. These work wonderfully for our needs. They tend to last a very long time on a single charge and recharge quickly. The problem with rechargeable batteries – at least ones that are well made and hold charge – is that they’re expensive. An eight pack of eneloop batteries costs $20, making the batteries cost $2.50 each. If you really shop around, you can find them for as low as $2 each, but you have to really watch for sales. On the other hand, you can buy a jumbo box of Maxell AA batteries for $0.29 per battery. In other words, you can buy seven Maxell AAs for the cost of one eneloop AA. But that’s not all! You have to also pay a small amount to recharge an eneloop each time. According to my observation, it takes about 450 watts to recharge an eneloop battery, which adds up to about $0.06 per recharge. If you add in the cost of the recharge, the eneloop doesn’t get cheaper per use until after the eighth recharge. It takes that long for the rechargeable batteries to start beating the generic batteries. Where the rechargeables start to really come through is when you start looking at a lot of recharges. Let’s say you take a single AA eneloop and you’ve recharged it 30 times. Since an eneloop is usable out of the package, that’s the equivalent of 31 batteries. If you use the cheap Maxell batteries, that’s $0.29 times 31 batteries, adding up to $8.99 in total expense. On the other hand, with the eneloops, you’re paying $2 up front for the battery and recharging it 30 times at $0.06 per charge, totaling $1.80 for the recharges, bringing you to a total cost of $3.80. It’s about $5 cheaper once you get to the thirty recharges mark. Here’s the scoop: rechargeable batteries can end up saving you money but you have to commit to the routine. When a battery runs out of charge, you have to get in the routine of charging it. You need a system in place so that you’re not left without batteries when you need one. Our system was simple. We switched pretty much everything all at once. When we ran out of batteries, we bit the bullet and loaded up on eneloops up to the count that we thought we needed, along with a charger. Our goal was to have enough batteries so that when we need one, we can just put the old one in the charger and grab a new one out of the drawer, which meant that we needed a few extra AA and AAA batteries. The up front cost of this was almost $100. That’s a painful amount. What happened after that makes it all worthwhile. When our batteries run out, we put four of them in the charger, use up maybe a quarter’s worth of electricity, and we have four perfectly good batteries. We put them in the drawer and just grab them as needed. It will take us ten or so uses of each of these batteries to get the cost down to where it should be. That will likely take us about fifteen months, based on our usage and our battery replacement habits. After that, it’s incredibly cheap. What’s the lesson here? If you can pay more up front for lower upkeep costs over time and you’re sure that you’ll use the item enough that you’ll easily recoup the upkeep costs, go for the more expensive up front cost. The lower your maintenance costs and your replacement costs as time goes forward, the more flexible your monthly budget becomes.

We like to think the Mint team has thought of pretty much everything when it comes to budgeting and spending money. But occasionally a question comes up that needs clarification – like how to track spending that is unbudgeted. By unbudgeted, I mean spending that doesn’t fall into a category you’ve designated, like your car payment, grocery bill, or health care spending. Unbudgeted money is a free agent, and it blurs your true financial picture. Here is how to track your unbudgeted spending: Step 1 If you are not already set up with Mint’s free budgeting tools, take five minutes to log in, click on the Budget tab, and create a budget. Then meet me right…back…here! Okay, so you’ve set up a budget in Mint and wow! You’re showing a huge surplus, but you’re pretty sure that you don’t have all that money sitting around, just waiting to be spent on massages and fancy leather shoes. Step 2 Scroll down to the bottom of the Spending categories you’ve added and look for a line item called “Everything Else.” Whoa, Nelly! That figure represents all the spending you haven’t put into a specific category. You can create a line item in your budget for Everything Else and leave it amorphous, but it’s better to create additional Spending categories. Step 3 Mint does most of the work for you. Click on the words Everything Else. A bunch of expenditures, already organized by category, will drop down. Click on the little gray plus button next to the dollar amount. A screen will pop up that allows you to customize how this category will be added to your budget. Adjust the variables as you wish, then click Save to add this category to your budget. Repeat this process to whittle down the spending categories that fall into “Everything Else.” This way, you’ll get a clearer overview of your spending. Alternative Route Another way to see the big picture of your spending is to scroll to the top of the page and click on the Trends tab. Then in the right column, click on Net Income, and then click on Over Time. Green represents your income. Red is your spending. And the black line is your net income. Look for more data below the chart. Now you have a clear picture of how much money you have, and where the money you spent went. Was this helpful? Do you have more questions? Leave them in the comments! Julia Scott curates freebies and spending tips at BargainBabe.com.

Just saw this press release and I’m grinning from ear to ear: “USAA announced that Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III will support its military appreciation efforts this year. This agreement supports USAA’s Official Military Appreciation Sponsorship of the NFL and the Washington Redskins. The 2012 NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year was born on a U.S. military base and grew up in military communities across the country as his parents served in the U.S. Army.” Two of my favorite enterprises coming together to kill it :) Yeah USAA and RGIII!!! Keep it real, babies… Best thing I’ve read all day.