by Silicon Valley Blogger on 2012-01-2633
Want to be a landlord? Here are some points to consider.
For those of us who are investors, real estate has been considered as a decent, long-term investment that can provide us with some reasonable level of diversification. Its historical returns have been somewhat lower than stock market returns over the long run as measured over the length of a few decades — for instance, if we look at the period of time between 1978 to 2004, housing has turned in an annualized return of 8.6% (commercial real estate has delivered 9.5% in that timespan), whereas for the same time period, major stock market gauges have given us 13.4% returns. Of course, a lot has happened to these markets since then (with recent years reflecting very unusual conditions); thus, if you check the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices up to early 2012, you’ll see just how steep a dive and just how bloody a beating the real estate market took between 2008 and 2010. There’s been a little recovery since then, but who knows what the future will bring.
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by Beth M. on 2012-01-2420
In my circle of friends, I am known as the budget traveler, a point of pride with me. I have a long list of cheap trips under my belt, and I love talking travel with whoever wants to listen, and not only to encourage them to travel often but to consider doing it cheaply. If someone wants to stay at the Ritz, I don’t discourage them, but most people think they can’t afford travel and don’t know how to find bargains, and therefore often decide to stay home. But you don’t need to be confined to your home, in my opinion. If you know how to find good deals, you can travel more often, stay longer at your destination, or actually take that distant trip you’ve been pining for.
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by Silicon Valley Blogger on 2012-01-236
Being a business owner, I’ve contemplated picking up a credit card to handle my business expenses. There are actually a lot of good choices from some of the well known issuers, such as Chase and American Express. One of those I’ve had the chance to check out is this business credit card with a rewards program, the Ink Bold with Ultimate Rewards card.
Chase Ink Bold Business Card Review (Receive 50,000 Bonus Points)
This looks like a great business rewards card. Note that it’s a charge card that requires you to pay your balance in full each month. Let me list some of the features that I like about this card:
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by Silicon Valley Blogger on 2012-01-228
It’s not just how much you make that matters, but also how much you actually keep.
There are but few words in the financial vocabulary that strike fear in me, and TAX is one of them. The annual chore of preparing and organizing my financial documents that comes around February or March never fails to raise forth in me just a tad bit of anxiety, perhaps because at the very end of the exercise, I find out, like in most years of my existence as an income generating individual, that I will once more pay out what seems like an enormous sum from my coffers — a sum that was just getting comfortable where it was situated in my savings account, kicking off a few nice rounds of interest and dividends.
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by Silicon Valley Blogger on 2012-01-2023
It’s one of those things I fiddle with — those little financial tools from CNN Money or Bankrate.com that tell you how financially adequate you are. Aren’t you curious about how you stack up against the general populace? These money tools are meant to dish out test results to help us keep track of our own fiscal health and progress, and may give us some insights on how others are doing as well.
So what do you expect your personal net worth to be? You can get the answer from a net worth calculator such as this one from CNN Money. I first ran this tool around 5 years ago, and ran it again today. I’ll discuss some interesting results below.
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When I was in middle school, my parents took me on a road trip to Madison, Wisconsin to see the Badgers play my beloved Iowa Hawkeyes (whom I have since deserted for Iowa State). Not only was it the first college basketball game I had been to, but the first major sporting event of any kind. For a kid who lived and breathed sports, it was a big deal.
Even though we had pretty mediocre seats, I soon realized that something was wrong. I couldn’t make out any of the players — they were all just a blur! Luckily, my dad had brought his binoculars, so I used them to watch the game.
The problem, obviously, was that I needed glasses.
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by Stacey Doyle on 2012-01-1711
Many people are drowning in debt and don’t know where to start. It’s time to take the bull by the horns. If you’re one of those folks who started the year by resolving to get your finances and debt under control, and feel that there’s more you’d like to do for this cause, then do read on. You might want to check out Savvy Money, an online debt management tool that aims to give you transparency over your debt. SavvyMoney allows you to chip away at your debt by bringing you more visibility of your situation and by helping you make the most of your current resources. Following is our review of this online service.
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Health care has come a long way, hasn’t it? Ailments used to be treated with tonics made from roots and other raw, unprocessed ingredients from nature, while non-invasive options to surgery are now much more prevalent. Conditions that used to be threats to our life and health in the past are now simply just minor annoyances or chronic conditions.
It’s a long road to finding miracle treatments and cures for many medical conditions. For every drug that finds its way into one of your pill bottles, many drugs fail to make it to your pharmacy, and many more of these medications see tens of millions of dollars in investment before they are rejected, or shelved. The average consumer who asks why treatments are so expensive must remember that the cost of developing a drug also incorporates the costs incurred by drugs that didn’t make it through the development process.
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