Category: your Money

Source: Myrtle Beach Online

If you’ve read this column for a while, you know I’ve often urged readers to think about making extra mortgage principal payments. This can dramatically cut the amount of interest you pay over the life of the loan and allow you to pay it off years early.

But obviously this can’t be the best move for everyone all the time. If the stock market were to soar as it did in the late ’90s, you’d want your money there, not in the mortgage.

Because investment returns and mortgage interest rates constantly change, a choice that’s good one year may be bad the next.

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MD’s Commentary: In keeping with the RE doom and gloom theme, I thought that this would be an appropriate post. Even with all of the negativity surrounding the Real Estate market, housing related stocks were up 2-3% on yesterday.  Be careful out there.

 

Source:  The Motley Fool
August 25, 2006

So now that the tide seems to be turning, and rates are rising, there’s the potential for a lot of heartache. So says a report from ACORN, the national community advocacy group, titled “The Impending Rate Shock.” It pointed out that about 75% of subprime home loans were ARMs. Folks who likely aren’t flush with funds face steeper housing bills in the near future, according to the report: “Rate shock could mean a sharp increase in foreclosures in some of the urban and minority communities that most need to build wealth through homeownership….” Plenty of others are affected, too — roughly 24% of all home loans nationwide are ARMs.

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NEW YORK (MONEY Magazine) – What scares parents most when it comes to the safety of their family? Terrorism? No. Crime? Negative. Violent video games? The environment? Not even close.

A recent survey asked 300 parents of school-age children to rank a list of fears in order of which inspired the most horror. Ahead of all the above, believe it or not, was the high cost of college tuition.

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A few weeks ago I posted an article on debt reduction that generated an interesting conversation. It was a fairly standard article on what I thought was a commonly accepted principle. Here is the scenario:

 

Joe has two credit card balances. Card A has a balance of $8000 at 19.8% and minimum payments of $160 per month. Card B has a balance of $6000 at 5.9% with minimum payments of $120 per month. Joe has $400 per month to use for repaying his credit cards. How should Joe attack this debt? 

 

Continue reading “Debt Reduction: The Weed-Out Course on the Road to Financial Freedom”