Sunday, April 18, 2010

“Personal Finance: Considering options to pay for ... - Philadelphia Daily News” plus 3 more

“Personal Finance: Considering options to pay for ... - Philadelphia Daily News” plus 3 more

Personal Finance: Considering options to pay for ... - Philadelphia Daily News

Posted: 18 Apr 2010 03:07 AM PDT

This is the season when high school seniors hope their families somehow can find a way to pay for the dream colleges that just accepted them, and parents spend sleepless nights worrying about the cost - maybe $200,000 for the next four years.

Generally, colleges give families about a month to ponder acceptance letters and talk with financial aid offices about obtaining more help. By May 1, students typically must indicate if they will attend in the fall.

Although Congress and President Obama approved substantial changes in the federal student loan program last month, many families will see little impact. If your income is less than $60,000, you might receive more help from extra Pell grant money allocated by the government. And if your income is above that level, colleges might be a little freer about handing out some of their own grant money, now that the government is helping more.

Last year, 18 percent of college entrants turned down their top school choice because it was too expensive and aid too limited, according to research by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute. Colleges don't like losing students who have been accepted, so financial aid consultants advise parents to ask for more aid.

Here's what you need to know:

Pell grants: Most students can qualify for some aid. The best form is grants, which is money that does not have to be repaid.

Depending on your family and financial situation, you might qualify for a Pell grant of up to $5,500, an increase from the maximum of $5,350 this year, because the government is providing additional funding. The change was part of the recent health care overhaul legislation.

Student loans: Although the federal legislation changed the student loan program so that the government is no longer going to subsidize private lenders, the $61 billion in savings is going to have little impact on most students. Most of the money is going to Pell grants in the coming years. About $9 billion is helping the government pay for health care legislation.

Parents worried about paying for multiple college students can breathe easier if some start college in 2014 or later. Beginning then, no student will have to pay more than 10 percent of their adjusted gross income for student loan payments each month after finishing college. Now, the rule is 15 percent. If, after 20 years, the loans are not paid off, the government will forgive the debt. Now, it takes 25 years.

What families can do: For students preparing to enter college, now is the time to negotiate for a better financial aid package. Take your best offer to your top-choice school, say that finances are tough and ask for more aid. Colleges often respond to this because if students walk away from an acceptance, it can lower the school's standing on such lists as U.S. News and World Report's rankings.

If you have a talent that is attractive to a coach, academic department or admission office, find an advocate from the staff to help you with the financial aid office. If your SAT or ACT score is high compared with the average for a particular school, you also have negotiating power. Find averages on the U.S. News and World Report list. If you are from a distant part of the country or from a race or religion that's not common at the school, that might help.

If a family member has lost a job or incurred a major health expense, tell the financial aid office and write an appeal letter. Communicate with the financial aid director, not the person who answers the telephone.

Gail MarksJarvis is a personal finance columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Send her e-mail at gmarksjarvistribune.com.

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Survey: Financial education expands, but many Pa. high ... - Herald-Standard

Posted: 18 Apr 2010 11:57 AM PDT

HARRISBURG - More Pennsylvania high schools are requiring students to study personal finance in order to graduate, according to a new survey, "The Status of Financial Education in Pennsylvania High Schools 2009."

The survey, conducted by the Penn State University Survey Research Center, was commissioned by the Department of Banking's Office of Financial Education to identify the extent to which personal finance courses are being offered and required for graduation in Pennsylvania.

The survey first was conducted in 2007. Several findings from the 2009 survey are considered significant:

n Forty-four Pennsylvania high schools now require stand-alone courses in personal finance for graduation, an increase of 24 schools since 2007.

n Eighty-five percent of high schools offer some type of integrated or stand-alone course, while 15 percent of schools offer no personal finance instruction. This ratio remains virtually unchanged since the 2007 survey.

n Personal finance teachers are often "lone rangers" in their schools and districts: 83 percent of the schools report that stand-alone courses are taught by a single teacher.

n Personal finance teachers are resourceful. More than half use guest speakers from their community and more than one-third use no textbook at all, relying instead on a variety of other resources. One-and-a-half times as many teachers are using www.moneysbestfriend.com, the Web site of the Pennsylvania Office of Financial Education, as were in 2007.

n There are signs that progress is being made to improve financial education: one in four schools report efforts are underway to increase the extent to which personal finance is taught - up from one in five in 2007, and respondents in 29 school districts report that personal finance is being considered as an addition to their graduation requirement.

"We strongly believe that students need financial education to help them make solid, well-informed financial decisions as adults to the benefit of themselves, their families and communities, and Pennsylvania," said Mary Rosenkrans, director of the Office of Financial Education. "We continue to study and advocate for financial education programs across the state and look forward to reporting more progress in future surveys."

More information, including the full text of the 2007 and 2009 surveys, can be found at www.moneysbestfriend.com/default.aspx?id=351.

The Office of Financial Education works to help Pennsylvania's teachers incorporate age-appropriate personal finance principles into the reading, math and other subjects they're already teaching; show Pennsylvania's employers how to provide personal finance tips, tools and training to their employees in ways that complement their business objectives and boost their bottom lines; and connect existing community-based efforts, and help more community-based organizations offer high-quality financial education and counseling throughout the state.

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One homemade calculator led to empire of personal ... - Seattle Times

Posted: 17 Apr 2010 10:00 PM PDT

Karl Ebert can credit the Roth IRA for his success. It was 1998, and Ebert thought he might convert some money from a traditional IRA to a Roth. But he couldn't find a calculator to show him if it made financial sense.

So the computer-science minor with an MBA in finance built a calculator.

"It worked great. And my goal was to market it and sell it," he said. But he wasn't sure he could pull it off. "Having no contacts and no means of actually marketing that one little calculator, I quickly realized it was something to put on my Web site that was pretty cool."

About that Web site: The University of Minnesota graduate, who bought a house a mile from campus in the area known as Dinkytown, purchased the URL dinkytown.net/">www.dinkytown.net in 1997. He'd hoped to turn it into a community site for the area that made money from local business advertisements. But he couldn't persuade stores and restaurants to sign on. "No one was using the Internet in 1998," he said.

He decided to slap up his Roth IRA calculator and a few others he'd programmed, and threw up information about how people could buy them and stick them on their Web sites. Then one day, "My wife called me ... and asked me who this person was, 'Because they just sent you a check.' " He doesn't remember who first licensed his calculators, but they sent him $250. And a business was born.

Each time he created a calculator, he's put it on dinkytown.net, where people could use them for free. "Search engines found them very well," he said.

Clients small and large — the ones who would pay to put it on their own Web sites — did too, without Ebert having to hire a sales guy or advertise.

A dozen years later, and Ebert has as many as 10,000 clients ranging from individual Web sites to financial institutions such as Anchor Bank, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans and U.S. Bank. More than a million people visit www.dinkytown.net each month, with spikes in traffic once New Year's resolutions to shore up finances are put in place. The retirement planner, mortgage qualifier and 1040 tax calculator are perennial favorites. I like the lunch-savings calculator myself.

Thrivent has about 80 of Ebert's financial calculators on its Web site. Scott Wisgerhof, director of advice-tools strategy, says the calculators add value for time-strapped consumers who want to do some number-crunching. "These aren't the end-all. These aren't financial planning by any means. But this is a good way for clients to get a directional read on where they're heading on specific issues. We'd still like them to come talk to us to get more in-depth," he said.

Today, Ebert has built 471 calculators on topics such as retirement planning, housing finance and debt payoff that are available to the public and dozens of customized projects for financial institutions. He recently finished a series of calculators designed to help investors — including himself — decide whether to convert pretax retirement dollars to a Roth IRA. Now he's working on one that figures out how looming tax changes in 2010 will affect an individual's tax picture.

To create the calculators in the first place and then keep up with the ever-changing tax code, Ebert is a frequent visitor to IRS.gov and a voracious reader of financial publications.

But he doesn't mind. He's a bit of a personal-finance geek. In sixth grade, "I made a compounding-interest calculator on my computer — a TI-99/4A" and confronted his dad about how $1,000 invested on the day he was born could have grown in 11 years.

So what's his money style today? "I don't waste money. I don't save money. I earn money," Ebert explains: "It's easier to earn more money than to save it. If I can earn $100, should I earn the $100 or make the same effort to save $10? I'll choose earning the $100. ... I am saving [money], but the reason I'm saving it is not that I'm focused on limiting my spending." Still, while he's not a penny pincher, he admits he's naturally "pretty cheap." He works in the basement of the house he's owned for 16 years, even though three kids now rule the roost. He also drives a 1995 Explorer he bought from his sister-in-law.

If he had one piece of advice to share (besides using his calculators) it's this against-the-grain wisdom: "Acquisition costs of things is where your money can really be sucked away fast. You could buy an awful lot of lattes for the financing of a new car. And you could buy a lot of new cars for the cost of financing that new house. So if you look at those top-level items first, then the day-to-day stuff doesn't matter."

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

U.S. stocks face new week with fresh humility - Marketwatch

Posted: 18 Apr 2010 08:58 AM PDT

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By MarketWatch

MARKETWATCH FRONT PAGE

The U.S. stock market will begin the week with a new, and humbled, perspective -- thanks to the volcanic eruption that hit Wall Street in the form of Securities and Exchange Commission charges against Goldman Sachs. See full story.

Web sites let you invest like the top pros

Do-it-yourself-investing Web sites, such as Covestor, kaChing and MarketRiders, hold particular appeal for people who are frustrated and fed up after two bear markets that lost them more money than they've made. See full story.

Why is gold falling so much today?

There very well may be a rational explanation for why today's fraud charges against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. should cause gold to fall, writes Mark Hulbert. But it's not obvious what that would be. See full story.

Gold prices stumble following Goldman charge

Gold futures end 2% lower as news that U.S. authorities charged Goldman Sachs Group Inc. with fraud rocks markets and triggers a sell-off in commodities. See full story.

Crude settles 2.4% lower on Goldman news

Crude-oil settles 2.4% lower on a selloff triggered by news that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Goldman Sachs, one of the largest commodities brokers, with fraud. See full story.

MARKETWATCH COMMENTARY

As Wall Street gushed over Intel Corp.'s stellar first-quarter earnings report this week, some investors were a bit concerned about the decline in sales of its popular lower-cost Atom processor, Therese Poletti writes. See full story.

MARKETWATCH PERSONAL FINANCE

When it comes to saving for retirement and building a portfolio to last a lifetime, most Americans are way behind the eight-ball, the nine-ball and all the other balls on the pool table. See full story.

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