How Much Credit can you Afford? by: Cindy Morus

Before making the decision to add more debt, you need to make sure that you: *Allocate sufficient money for your essentials. *Borrow only for items that you need and can afford. *Borrow only if you're spending less each month than you take home. 1. Start with your monthly take-home pay. This is the amount you have left after taxes and other deductions have been made. 2. Subtract the amount you need for necessities and fixed expenses. This includes savings, your mortgage or rent payment, utilities, food, transportation, child care, medical care, clothing, and recreation. Include payments made on a quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis, such insurance and taxes. 3. Subtract monthly payments for existing loans and credit cards. 4. The balance is the amount you can safely apply to debt repayment. Avoid thinking you can spend all this amount, since emergencies do occur, and you may not wish to use your regular savings account to cover small, unexpected expenses. Monthly Take Home $ _______________ Fixed Expenses ---- $ _______________ Loans/Credit Cards ---- $ _______________ Amount Available For Additional Debt $ _______________ Moral of the Story: If you’re planning to buy a new house or car, pretend you have already done so and start “making the payment” but to yourself. Within a few months, you’ll know whether or not you can really afford it and you’ll have some money set aside for repairs, etc. when you actually do make the purchase. If you can’t make the pretend payment, you certainly won’t be able to make the real one consistently. Time to go back to the drawing board and figure out what else you’re willing to give up in order to have the new debt. HOW TO MANAGE CREDIT CARD USE Many people find themselves with credit problems because they don't keep track of purchases they make with their credit cards. A simple method of keeping track of monthly credit card charges is to: 1. Determine the total amount you can responsibly charge on all your credit card accounts during that month. 2. Keep track of your credit spending in the same way you maintain a running balance of your checking account. 3. Subtract each amount charged from the monthly charge limit you set. 4. Stop using your credit cards if you draw this balance down to zero.

Financial Back-to-School Basic for Mom and Dad by: ARA

(ARA) - Each fall, millions of moms and dads spend countless hours purchasing back-to-school necessities for their children. While some parents equip their child with the latest gizmo -- a personal digital assistant (PDA) or cell phone, for example -- most know that “the basics” like paper, pencils and folders are essential learning tools to secure their children’s future. Unfortunately, many parents ignore a simple financial back-to-school basic. They often buy the latest gadget for their kids but then fail to carry a critical component for their family’s future and their children’s education -- namely, adequate life insurance coverage. “If a parent is worried about his or her child’s education, he or she should also worry about having the financial protection underpinning those plans that life insurance can offer,” says Todd Gillingham, JD, CLU, ChFC, a partner with Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. “Without adequate insurance protection, every parent’s best laid education plans will fall apart under the financial burden left on their surviving children.” Regardless of your income or assets, life insurance is the key to protecting the financial future of your loved ones and “should be the foundation on which other goals are built,” says Gillingham. Surveys show that roughly one-third of American adults have no life insurance protection and, of those with coverage, nearly one-third have coverage that is less than one time their annual income -- not nearly enough for long-term family protection. Four in 10 single parents have no life insurance coverage of any kind. Perhaps this is why the Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education found that nearly half of Americans (48 percent) say they are worried that if they die tomorrow their loved ones would not be financially secure. “Various funding vehicles such as 529 plans and Coverdell education accounts can often grab the headlines,” says Gillingham. “While these are important ways of saving, they can lead parents to mistakenly ignore their life insurance needs. Such an oversight can be financially devastating.” Without the protection life insurance offers, financial security is often illusory. In the case of premature death, life insurance helps families pay for living expenses -- including mortgage and education payments -- when the income of a loved one is lost. Without this protection, the resulting financial stress frequently undermines all other goals. Beyond daily expenses, life insurance protects against sharp reductions in future pension and social security payments by replacing assets cut short by premature death. For example, anticipated assets in an individual’s retirement plan may be reduced by 50 percent or more simply because the individual’s death interrupts the long-term growth of the assets within the individual’s plan. Business owners and those with significant assets also use life insurance to pass those assets to their children in a tax-efficient manner or as a vehicle for charitable gifts to nonprofit organizations. Without life insurance’s special tax privileges, many families would lose the family business or not be able to leave a lasting legacy to the cause or organization of their choosing. “These benefits aside, the fundamental reason for life insurance remains the protection of your family and your financial programs,” says Thrivent Financial’s Gillingham. “Death often strikes when we don’t expect it, so goals that require continuing funding such as a child’s education are especially vulnerable to death’s effects.” While shopping for school supplies this fall, remember this back-to-school lesson -- the essentials come first. Says Gillingham, “adequate life insurance is one back-to-school basic parents should simply not live without.” To learn more, contact a financial services professional, or visit www.thrivent.com/insurance/life. Courtesy of ARA Content

Buying your First Home by: Nathan Dawson

by: Nathan Dawson

can be exciting but there is a lot to know. Buying a home will depend on real estate laws and customs where you are located but there are basic steps that every first homebuyer needs to accomplish. Step 1- Your Finances Establishing credit is very important especially when you are looking to purchase a large investment like a house. Your credit reports reflects how you manage your finances. Study your credit report and your financial history so you are familiar with it before applying for a mortgage. These reports will be needed for the mortgage approval process in finding out the interest rate and other loan terms. Step 2- Familiarize Yourself with the Mortgage Industry Do your research. Finding the right loan and lender is extremely important to your home buying success. Choose the lender that is best for your needs but be sure to understand the loan process as much as you can before talking to a lender so you don’t feel completely lost. Step 3- get Pre-Approved for a Mortgage Once you talk with a lender, you should be given an estimate of how much you can afford for a house. Being pre approved can help you in a variety of ways. So if a home seller gets two offers, one being yours with a pre approved letter from your bank saying you have been approved for the amount offered, and then there is the other person with no letter, your chances of getting the house are much better. Step 4- Determine what you Want and what you need Buying a home isn’t as challenging as most think. If you familiarize yourself with the real estate market and narrow down what you want and need before buying house the process will run a lot smoother. Be sure to understand agent duties and devotion because some real estate agents represent buyers, sellers, or both or depending on the state they can work as neutral facilitators for either party. Step 6- Start Searching for your New Home Your agent will most likely give you multiple listing sheets to review. You might have also picked up a real estate magazine in your area and found a house through that, shop online, or find ads in the newspaper. Other ideas can be driving around the neighborhoods that have houses for sale. Either way you look, consider these home buying search tools in your search. Home Buying Search Tools 1. Consider houses that others may overlook 2. Get out there to see what’s out there 3. Look into public versions of multiple listing service web sites 4. Search for real estate agent web sites 5. Browse real estate search engines and networks 6. Find for sale by owner properties 7. Look at magazine and newspapers in print 8. Find foreclosed homes Step 7- Handle Pre-Offer Tasks When looking at houses be sure to look at its structure and features which can help determine if its something you want or not. Step 8- put in an Offer There's no one specific set of instructions that cover all the differences in real estate laws and customs that exist throughout the United States, so when putting in an offer on a house, it will depend on your location. Step 9- House Inspections and Other Tests Some states allow home inspections before the final contract is signed where as in other states inspections take place after the contract is signed. No matter when you have to do them, it's very important to decide which inspections and tests you want done. Discuss with your real estate agent or if you don’t have one, then an advisor to find out when inspections should happen and if additional types of testing are needed for a specific area. Step 10- Avoid having to Correct Last Minute Problems As the closing date approaches, everyone involved in your real estate transaction should be checking the progress on a daily basis. That way if a problem arises it can be taken care of right away. Step 11- Closing Closing, also called settlement, is the event that transfers ownership of the property from the last owner to you. Happy house hunting! About the author: Nathan Dawson writes for http://www.marriedfinances.comandhttp://www.successfulmarriageresource.com,great online sources for marriage and finance information.

How Christmas shopping online better your Christmas! by: Ebe Heng

Christmas shopping online is not for you? If you are one of those that share this thought, you probably like to enjoy the atmosphere of physical shopping. Doing your Christmas shopping online despite all its convenience, lack the festive mood. The convenience of online shopping has reduced the shopping experience to a browse and click mode, no mood and very little atmosphere. So, you might think that despite the staggering numbers that shows how many people are actually doing their Christmas shopping online, they are just a minority out of the entire Christmas shopping population. Well, while I do not have the statistics to back this up –this thinking is likely to be true To ascertain the fact that the Christmas shopping online folks are really a sub-set of the Christmas shopping crowd, just visit Marcy’s, Barnes and Noble or one of the large departmental stores during the pre-Christmas period, and the crowd you see would highlight the fact that a very large proportion of shoppers are still doing their shopping offline. And of course, it is this crowd that give rise to the Christmassy feelings. Never mind that you have to wait an hour to find a parking lot or half an hour to pay for your purchases, this feeling enhanced by the jingles that flood the stores is something that doing your Christmas shopping online would never be able to offer. Having said so much about the value of shopping physically, are there any merits to doing your Christmas shopping online? Yes, from my own experience there are at least two major contributions that doing your Christmas shopping online can provide. First, Christmas shopping online eliminates the hassle of browsing and deciding at absolutely ground zero on the spot. Imagine you are doing shopping with only a vague idea of what to buy for whom and your only reference is some scribbling on a post-it note. Enter online Christmas shopping, and you are able to browse online and zero in on the category of items that you would like to get for your love ones. One of the biggest value of Internet is it allows you to conduct your research and craft a comprehensive list of items that you would like to get for your love ones. So that, when you are doing it physically, all you have to do is to choose from the different brands and decide on the ones that have the best value. Thus, saving time and allowing you to buy for more people in lesser trips. The other contribution of online Christmas shopping is that it is able to take care of your ‘bulk purchases’. What I mean is during this festive season of giving and sharing, there would be lots of gifts exchange, and gifts giving to acquaintances. So, for this group of people, you would probably be getting something that is nice but would not invest too much thought into it, and then you would buy plenty of it to last through the season. Doing your Christmas shopping for these folks online frees out more time for you to choose something special for your love ones. It also takes care of the inconvenience of bringing a lot of stuff home (online shopping would have the purchase deliver right to your door steps). There you have it! Online Christmas shopping allows you to do a thorough research on the gifts to get for your love ones and it also gives you more time in physically shopping for those gifts by allowing you to buy the generic stuff online. So, using technology allows you to enjoy the magic feeling of shopping under the thick Christmas atmosphere provides by shopping malls with lesser things on your mind to worry about. Having said all these, I hope you folks would integrate (what a word!) online shopping to brighten your overall Christmas shopping experience and enhances the joy and magic buying for those special ones… Merry Christmas! Ebe editor@christmasgiftsshopping www.christmasgiftsshopping.com

Cure Autism Now with a Silver Charm by: Kaitlin Carruth

Purchasing a silver charm is just one of the ways that you can help support autism research. Autism is a brain disorder that affects one’s ability to communicate and associate with others normally. Symptoms are usually detected in the first three years of life. Autism affects about 1 out of every 166 people in the United States; however, there is currently very little information about autism. Cure Autism Now (CAN) is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to increasing the quantity and quality of autism research in order to find better treatments. If you are searching for a way to help, there are several different ways, including: purchasing one of the organization’s silver charm bracelets, participating in a WALK NOW event, becoming a corporate partner, starting your own fundraiser, or making a monetary donation. Silver charm bracelets are now available through the CAN website to raise more money for autism research. Each silver charm bracelet comes with a silver charm heart. For an extra donation, you may also receive five additional silver charms with different designs (a boy, a girl, a cross, a peace sign, and a Star of David). This silver charm bracelet was designed by actress Rene Russo, an honorary board member of CAN. The charm bracelet is also available in gold along with other accessories that will help benefit CAN with your purchase. In addition to the silver charm bracelet, one can support CAN by participating in a WALK NOW event. WALK NOW is a 5 K (just over 3 miles) walk to raise money and provide awareness for autism. At each WALK NOW event there is an information center where parents and others can learn more about autism and what the current research has found. There are also arts, crafts and other activities to keep the children entertained. There are several WALK NOW events every year in different locations to give a chance for everyone to participate. Another way to help CAN is to become a corporate partner. CAN is always looking for corporate sponsorship. Some of CAN’s current corporate partners include Johnson and Johnson, RBC Mortgage, and MBNA America. If you have a company that would like to become a corporate partner, CAN would truly appreciate any help you can offer. You can also help out CAN by creating your own fundraising event or campaign. This method takes a great deal of planning and organization, however, it is a way that you can let your imagination run wild. One of the more creative fundraising events for CAN was the “Express Your Love” Motorcycle Ride in Chicago. However, there are some guidelines and procedures from CAN that must be followed if you want to create your own charity event. Lastly, if you would like to make a cash donation but are not interested in a silver charm bracelet, there are several other ways to make a monetary donation. You can do it online, by mail, or through United Way. You also have the option to donate appreciated stocks and mutual funds or you can even include CAN in your will. CAN will appreciate any way that you can possibly help them out financially so they can continue to provide quality autism research. Purchasing a silver charm bracelet, participating in a WALK NOW event, becoming a corporate partner, creating your own fundraising event, making a donation are all ways that you can help support CAN in the goal to find suitable treatments for autism. With this research, there is hope for tens of thousands of people to find decent treatment or possibly even a cure for autism. CAN works to bring hope. About the author: Kaitlin Carruth is a client account specialist with http://www.10xMarketing.com– More Visitors. More Buyers. More Revenue. For information on other silver charms, please visithttp://www.harrismichaeljewelry.com/learning-center/resources/silver-charm.html