A Personal Finance Blog for Regular Folks
Stocks provide great returns. There’s really only one thing wrong with this investment class. It’s the risk! Lots of middle-class people feel that they must invest in stocks to have any realistic hope of attaining a good retirement but live in fear of the stock crashes that can wipe out the accumulated savings of a lifetime in a few years. If only there were a better way!
There is.
[Read more…] about A Better and Less Risky Way to Invest in Stocks
Lending Club is an online website that offers a unique borrowing and investing model to individuals who need funds and those who are looking to make some money.
Credit-worthy, pre-screened borrowers are paired up with savvy investors in what Lending Club calls a win win situation for all. Peer to Peer or Person to Person lending is the basis of the site. Investors sign up to make money and borrowers sign up to reduce their cost of paying back debt. In summary, investors fund loans for approved borrowers. Borrowers save over bank interest rates and investors profit with returns as high at 9% annually (about the average).
[Read more…] about Lending Club Peer to Peer Lending for Investors and Borrowers – Review
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 for opening a new ShareBuilder account. The offer is in effect until 6/30/12. In order to receive the bonus you need to fund your account with $2,000. And most important – make sure to enter the code 50LS12 when you sign up to make sure your account gets credited with the $50 bonus!
[Read more…] about ShareBuilder $50 New Account Bonus and Free Trades
There has been a lot said about peer to peer (P2P) lending lately. With the economy and credit market crunch making it difficult to get more traditional loans, “alternative” lending opportunities are arising. Peer to peer lending is a way for those who might be turned down by a bank to get the loans that they want/need, while providing an opportunity for investors to make some money by lending to others.
[Read more…] about What Is Peer to Peer (Person to Person) Lending?
A little while back I had the pleasure of attending a Tweetup at the NYC ING Direct Cafe hosted by Sharebuilder‘s president Dan Greenshields with special guest speaker Tom Gardner, CEO of The Motley Fool.
For those wondering what a Tweetup is, it’s basically an organized meeting of sorts over the social site Twitter. The meeting was held at the ING Cafe and people from all over could follow along and participate via Twitter.
The premise of the Tweetup was to help investors bust common investing myths and take the complexities out of investing.
I tried to takes notes as best I could so I could pass them along to you. Keep in my I’m paraphrasing here and some of the words are mine, but I think you’ll get the general ideas of what was being said.
To start, Tom Gardner talked about four basic investing rules we should all follow (this is just part of his full list of rules):
[Read more…] about Busting Common Investing Myths – A Tweetup With Motley Fool’s Tom Gardner and ShareBuilder’s Dan Greenshields
