Financial news and information

So you didn’t get started on your retirement savings at 20, but it isn’t too late. While advisors warn that if you don’t start early, you won’t be able to save enough, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t start at all.

Better late than never.

Millions of Americans are over 40 with no substantial retirement savings. The key is taking full advantage of every penny between now and retirement.

First, you need to sit down and estimate how much money you will need to retire. Don’t focus on how to arrive at the number; there are a lot of conflicting methods. You don’t need to necessarily set the round $1 million figure as a goal, either. Simply get a good ballpark figure by looking at what bills you pay right now and what you intend to pay in retirement. There are a few online retirement calculators that may be useful.

Planning for your financial future is by all means a difficult task and to make it harder you have to realize that any mistake may be a detrimental one. For so many aspects of financial planning there is no going back, at least not without some sort of penalty.

The goal is naturally to wind up with a secured future in which you can sustain yourself throughout your retirement.

One of the biggest mistakes, in every sense of the word, is sometimes one that is unfortunately unavoidable. It was one that is worth any possible sacrifice to try to avoid though. This is where people take out a longer mortgage than they really have to. A thirty year mortgage over a fifteen year mortgage winds up costing so much more then you should ever have to pay for a house. Paying it off quicker means you’ll have less money to invest in the first years of your home life but you will have a massive amount more to invest later.

Almost half of all the professionals I know complain about either their student loan payments or their credit card payments. A few can’t even afford their own place because their debts are so high. What are college students doing wrong?

I believe that we simply don’t teach our young people how to wisely manage their finances. Personally, no one ever sat me down and talked about credit, interest, saving and debt. This is partly because my parents didn’t understand those things either.

Most college students don’t understand the consequences of credit cards. The average undergrad in 2004 had four credit cards and over $2,000 in debt. Seniors had the highest balances, probably because over time it simply builds up.

Simple tips that could save you time, aggravation and… oh right, money.

With tax day just a few weeks away, there is no better time to cross your t’s and dot your i’s.

Unfortunately, many people mix up their i’s and t’s, forget the dots and make common tax blunders that could easily be avoided with a little extra time and some help troubleshooting.

Even before the big numbers are calculated, it can be the details that often trip up taxpayers. So before you get cracking, here are some simple do’s and don’ts that could literally pay off on tax day.

Although I am sure that someone at the State Department will argue otherwise, Cyrus The Great (590 - 529 BC), founder of the Persian Empire, was no terrorist. Quite far from it. Although one might not have wanted him as next-door neighbor, Cyrus II of Persia was very illuminated for his times, according to the Greek historian Herodotus. Cyrus, in fact, beheaded only those who would not bend under his rule. But all others were spared. Such was the case with Croesus of Lydia, whose life was spared by Cyrus after the battle of Pterium, and that of Nabodinus after the battle of Opis and the siege of Babylon. However Cyrus, like all military geniuses, had his … shall we say … pet-peeves: if he ever caught anyone charging interest on loans, he would order him tied at the stake, would personally pull out his Zippo and … woosh, set him ablaze right there and then.

In this day and age of mortgage and lending interest rates as well as returns on investment and yields, it is interesting to look at how the very concept of interest - both active and passive interest - has developed throughout the centuries to the point of where we acknowledge and understand it today. Looking back at how things were once seen is always gratifying, to the extent that it provides us with a measure of how times have changed.

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