June 29th, 2009
When you purchase a home, your mortgage lender almost surely won’t allow you to close the purchase until you’ve demonstrated that you have proper homeowners insurance. Lenders aren’t being paternalistic, but rather selfinterested. You see, if you buy the home and make a down payment of, say, 20 percent of the purchase price, the lender is putting up the other 80 percent of the purchase price. So if the home burns to the ground and is a total loss, the lender may care more, at least financially, than you do. In most states, your home is the lender’s security for the loan.
Some lenders, in years past, learned the hard way that some homeowners may not care about losing their homes. In some cases, where homes were total losses, homeowners with little financial stake in the property and insufficient insurance coverage simply walked away from the problem and left the lender with the financial mess. Because of cases like this, almost all lenders today require you to purchase private mortgage insurance (PMI) if you put down less than 20 percent of the purchase price when you buy.
When you buy a home, you should want to protect your investment in the property (as well as cover the not-so-inconsequential cost of replacing your personal property, if it is ever damaged or stolen). In short order, your clothing, furniture, kitchen appliances, and beer-can collection can tally up to a lot of dollars to replace.
Posted in Financial, House & Home, Insurance | No Comments »
May 24th, 2009
Ideally, financial planning for retirement should start the day a person lands his very first job. Realistically, it usually doesn’t.
Retirement planning is a process that helps a person determine how much money he’ll need to see him through the years after he stops working. It also lays out a plan for the best ways to save and accumulate money. Unfortunately, many people hardly think about funding their retirements until they’re ready to retire, by which time it’s too late to start saving adequate amounts.
We all know that hindsight is 20-20, and there are things in our lives we wish we’d done differently. Many people who have retired say one of their regrets is not having saved more money, and not having planned financially.
Studies show that most people need at least three-quarters as much money to maintain their standard of living during retirement as they required while working. This varies, of course, depending on factors such as health, location, and so forth. Social Security benefits for the average retiree are about 40 percent of their pre-retirement earnings. As you can see, there’s a large gap between what Social Security provides and what it costs to live in retirement. If a retired per- son doesn’t have enough money saved to make up the difference, there’s a big problem.
Posted in Financial, Money | No Comments »
April 2nd, 2009
With Web content mushrooming, you need something that helps you weed through all those millions of Web pages. Enter search engines. Seven years ago, no one knew what a search engine was. Now, search engines are big business. The people who own search engines operate their businesses like major multimilliondollar corporations — because they are!
For your purposes, it serves you well to try out all the search engines on this list and choose at least three to use as your primary search engines. Always use a good cross-section of search engines when you’re looking for Web content — as you’ll discover, search engines vary widely in quality, number of pages they index, and search methods. This list is a great starting point for checking out the top search engines currently available.
Posted in Business, Web | No Comments »
March 24th, 2009
Figuring out how to get a job online means a whole lot more than just going online, popping your letter-perfect resume on the Web, and waiting for the phone to ring. Though all those activities are part and parcel of getting a job, an online job search involves a critical follow-up component, and that’s what this chapter is all about.
A big part of what has changed about job searching is that the phone has become a critical “back-end” part of the job search. This is particularly true of an online job search. Even if you have a great resume, even if you have put it in all the right spots, and even if you’re inundated with 100 phone calls as a result, you still have to “win” the phone calls that you receive in order to land interviews and ultimately get a job.
Posted in Employment, Online, Uncategorized | No Comments »
January 24th, 2009
‘We all need somebody to lean on—especially when caring for elderly parents. Because care giving can be so demanding and emotionally draining, you’ve got to know where to find help when it becomes necessary As care giving becomes a better recognized and talked-about topic, more sources of help are springing up. Some people, however, are reluctant to ask for help in any matter, taking care of elderly parents included.
As a society we tend to take pride in being able to do it all. We think we should be able to handle everything, without looking for help. Many people get up before it’s light to have a cup of coffee and a quick look at the newspaper before starting a day that involves working, driving, cleaning, cooking, talking, listening, and planning for the next day. Add care giving to that list of chores, and life can seem pretty impossible.
If you’re caring for an aging parent, or think that you soon will be, do yourself a big favor, and find out now what resources are available in your area.
Posted in Family, General | No Comments »