Many of us with small and home businesses don’t think a lot about getting a credit card.
After all, what do we need with a business credit card, when everything is so…small?
However, a small business credit card can be a good move for just about any small business — even if you don’t think that you need one. There are advantages to having a credit card in the name of your small business.
There are many different savings vehicles to choose from, but two of the most common are money market accounts and savings accounts.
There are similarities between the two—both pay interest, have fixed balances, and are pretty easy to deposit money into or withdraw it out. Either account type could accomplish your savings goals.
But there are significant differences between them, and those differences could help you decide when one is more appropriate as a savings vehicle than the other.
Every other week, it seems, we hear dire warnings about how much debt our college students are burdened with when they graduate.
Indeed, more than ½ of college students take out student loans, and the average student loan tab for a graduating senior is just over $25,000. Coupled with a rough economy and a general lack of financial knowledge, recent college graduates are struggling financially like never before.
Yet, it hasn’t always been this way.
Many of us just grew up knowing that student loans have, and will be, available, but that hasn’t always been the case.
With the 2012 Olympics about to start I found something very interesting in a CNN Money article this week.
In “Olympic athletes face financial hardship“, writer Charles Riley informs us that American Olympians are often earning little or no money from their athletic endeavors. Unlike other countries that sponsor and pay their athletes, USA Olympians are mostly on their own in terms of income. They have to hope to land a sponsorship deal or be at the very top of the sport to get any kind of income.
I found this quite interesting.
You see all of these amazing athletes in the top 10 or 20 in their sport in the entire world, and a majority of them on the US side aren’t making any money. Yet the Olympic committees and broadcast companies will earn millions or billions in advertising revenue and licensing fees.
You know I love ING Direct products.
I have both the Orange savings account for online savings and their Electric Orange checking account. What I also have is a brokerage account with ShareBuilder (owned by ING Direct). This is where I buy stocks outside of my IRA accounts.
ShareBuilder is offering a promotion where new customers get a $50 bonus code for opening a new ShareBuilder account.
The offer is in effect until 9/30/12. In order to receive the bonus you need to fund your account with $2,000. And most important – make sure to enter the code 50LSQ3 when you sign up to make sure your account gets credited with the $50 bonus!
There are some myths that never die no matter how many times they’re disproved and no matter how many people get burned chasing them down.
Get rich quick is one of those myths.
In our minds, we know get rich quick isn’t legitimate, and we’ve been told as much again and again by parents, teachers, friends and coworkers.
Then why does it seem that there’s some part of us that might believe that get rich quick is possible?
Every now and then, financial catastrophe strikes.
You never know when you will run into a financial emergency. Sometimes, things are simply out of your control.
When a financial emergency arrives, though, it’s important to take control as quickly as possible.
While you can’t control what happens in terms of an unexpected financial setback, you can control your reaction to it. When you find yourself dealing with a financial emergency, here are 6 steps you can take to get back on track as soon as possible:
In the recovering American economy some people are just glad to have any job.
But in certain sectors of the economy — information technology being one of them — unemployment is incredibly low. That leads to many candidates receiving multiple competing offers that must be compared to each other.
Whether you are looking for your first job offer, trying to leave your current job, or need to compare multiple offers, there are some points about compensation you must be aware of before making a decision.
If you have a soon to be graduating high school senior, she has hopefully been accepted to several schools and is in the processes of deciding which to accept.
Your high school students should be blissfully debt free right now, but as soon as she decides what school to attend, that may all change.
Far too many students decide what college to attend because they like the campus or the atmosphere or because they want to move far from home.
Ideally, before she even begins to apply to colleges, you, as the parent, should sit down with her and discuss finances. This conversation should occur no later than before your child makes a decision as to what college to attend.
Most parents would like to pay for their child’s entire college education, but that is often not possible due to the current economy and rising tuition costs.
Chances are, if your child attends an expensive university or private college, she will have to take out student loans, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars worth of student loans. The cold reality is that she may be paying these loans for the next 10 to 20 years, and she may have to delay important life events such as getting married, having a child and buying a home all because of her student loan debt level.
America turned 236 years old this week, but in the financial markets that news was nothing compared to the scandal rocking London financial markets.
It came to light this week that Barclays — and potentially other mega banks — helped prop up or inflate the LIBOR rate over the past several years.
Why is LIBOR important?
It stands for London Interbank Offered Rate. It is the rate that major banks can expect to be charged when they borrow money from another bank. If a bank’s cost of borrowing was artificially higher than it should have been they would then have to charge their customers higher interest rates on loans.
In short, we all may have been paying slightly higher interest rates on every type of lending product because a few banks conspired together to artificially keep rates higher than they needed to be.
That’s big financial news.