Archive for February, 2008
Thought of the Day
* Treat your personal finance as your own business.
* A business in debt is a business in debt, if you are in debt, you are in debt.
* A business flush in cash is a business flush in cash, if you are flush in cash, you are flush in cash.
* A business with assets is a business with assets, if you are with assets, you are with assets.
Question Your Prosper Strategy
Prosper, a popular peer to peer lending program where prospective borrowers can request a loan up to $25,000 at an interest rate to be determine through a bid-down system by individual lenders.
Since Prosper loans are unsecured loans, if the borrower defaults on the loan, you may or may not get your money back if any at all. You are really making a bet the borrower will pay back the loan in full with interest.
The results can vary from borrower to borrower. By having a strategy in place, you can minimize your exposure to more riskier loan requests and maximize your return with loans that tend to be more safer. It is important to realize all loans have an inherent risk built in.
When building a portfolio or a strategy, you should be asking yourself questions to cover all the bases. By finding out your answers, you will have a more clearer idea of what you want to achieve.
Hey Prosper! When Do I Get My MONEY Back???
Any investment you make comes with a degree of risk that you will loose your money. While you can make every attempt to minimize your risk, you also know you want to create a return on your investment.
After all, you are not lending your money for nothing, if that was the case, your money might as well be sitting under the mattress or in a safe deposit box.
The first question you should be asking before you make an investment is how long will it take for you to get your money back. If it is going to take you a 100 years to get your original 100 dollars back, it better be a damn well productive investment because you can get a better return on a CD or a bond.
Prosper which is a popular peer to peer lending program where prospective lenders can decide how much they want to lend to a borrower. The standard length for each loan is 36 months, or 3 years.
That answers the question as to how long before you can get your money back. There is a possibility you will get your money back sooner if the borrower decides to pay in full sooner than later. As with unsecured loans, there is also a possibility you may never get your money back should the borrower default on the loan.
Let the IRS do the work for you
If you have to pay taxes on your income in the United States of America, you should be aware that the Internal Revenue Service which is the taxing authority of the USA offers eligible taxpayers the option to have their tax refund directly deposited into as many as three accounts.
The I.R.S. implemented this a few years ago to encourage taxpayers to take advantage of a quicker refund as well as to cut down on the cost of printing and mailing refund checks.
While it is to your advantage to have your refund directly deposited into your account, you are encouraged to think about where you want your money to go.
You can have the money go straight into your checking account and spend it right away. You can also have your money go straight into your retirment account and invest it right away. You can also split your money three ways and have the IRS direct it into three different accounts in your name.
While the tax returns varies for each individual, you can ask yourself several questions to determine the S.M.A.R.T. approach to help you direct the I.R.S. to where to send your tax refund.
What is a Budget?
A financial plan for saving and spending money.
as quoted by the University of Arizona Credit Wise Cats
Shopping For Hearing Aid Batteries
Not all hearing aid batteries were created equally. There are standard batteries and high powered batteries. Standard batteries simply runs out of power too quickly and often are not enough to support digital hearing aids.