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Save Big Money When Buying A House

The U.S. title-insurance industry faces increasing pressure from regulators to justify the fees charged to consumers for ensuring they have clear ownership of their homes, Title insurance can range from several hundred to several thousand dollars!

So here is what you do. Early in the process of buying a home or refinancing, let your real-estate agent and lender know you will select your own title insurer. Research title-insurance costs online and check whether there are fees on top of the premium (in many states, consumers pay separate fees to the agents for that research, on top of the premiums).

Credit Card Payment Calculator

Put a Credit Card Payment Calculator on your site!

How to Negotiate Medical Bills

To maintain cash flow, “many doctors will knock 5 or 10 percent off if you pay up front. Uninsured patients can get even bigger discounts (50 percent or more). This is because medical practitioners are used to getting less than full price from insurance companies.

Find out what doctors and dentists typically bill for services and how much insurers pay. Negotiate the bill before your procedure. Offer to pay up front in exchange for a discount

Free FICO Score

The Fair Issac Corporation created the FICO score, and they are the folks that run myFICO.com. In fact, myFICO.com is the only place you can go to get your official credit score.

myFICO.com gives you your official FICO credit score as reported by Equifax when you sign up for a free 30-day trial of Score Watch. The sign up process is quick and easy. You will have to provide your name, address, date of birth, and social security number so that myFICO.com can pull your credit report and credit score. You'll also have to provide a credit card. You won't be billed unless you decide to keep the Score Watch past the 30-day free trial

A week before you free 30-day trial is up, they will send you an email notifying you that you credit card will be charged unless you cancel Score Watch. If you decided to cancel your free 30-day trial before you get charged, it's easy to do. Simply click on the "Support" tab at the top right of the main myFICO.com screen. This will take you to a list of help topics, the first of which provides the simple steps to take to cancel your subscription.

You can get a free estimated credit score at Quizzle (no credit card required).

You Should NOT Accept Credit Cards | #entrepreneur #smallbusiness

When merchants sign their service contracts, they also have to agree to a series of draconian security rules, under which they are automatically liable to the card companies if the card companies suspect fraud or lax security procedures.

Here is the full story: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/credit-card-firms-they-dont-just-steal-from-cardholders-20120109

Pre Pay Your Mortgage

I used an Excel based mortgage spreadsheet to see how the life of my mortgage would change if I paid a little more each and every month to the principal. It amazed me! By paying just an extra fifty dollars a month, I was able to shorten the length of my loan by five years and ten months and save more than $18,000 in interest!

 

The Best Bailout Plan Would Have Been To Rescue Homeowners

How? By simply paying off their mortgages. Since 2/3 of GDP is consumer spending, the savings would have gone to buy products/services. That would have kept the unemployment rate from rising.

The government could have financed this bailout by creating a line on your 1040 called housing debit. It would have worked exactly the opposite of the mortgage deduction. Each year, a percentage of that paid off mortgage would add to your taxes.

Here is what me research shows:

The quarterly survey published by the Federal Reserve, called the Flow of Funds Report, shows the total value of all home mortgages in the U.S. was $11.2 trillion through the third quarter of 2008.

According to a team at Bloomberg News, at one point last year the U.S. had lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion to rescue the economy.

Study Reveals Consolidated Power & Control

A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world's finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power.

A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the "backbone" of each country's financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country's market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.

Based on their analysis, Glattfelder and Battiston identified the ten investment entities who are “big fish” in the most countries. The biggest fish was the Capital Group Companies , with major stakes in 36 of the 48 countries studied.

11/1/2011 Follow Up

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc  (this study done before the collapse)
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

FIRECALC = Can You Retire Early?

Thinking of chucking it all and retiring early, long before you start getting a pension or Social Security, and before you have ready access to your 401k and IRA?

Better run through this calculator and get a dose of reality.  http://www.firecalc.com/

#OWS Misses Mark on Derivatives

Here is an article I published back in August.  A few updates:

1. Estimates of the notional value of the worldwide derivatives market go from $600 trillion all the way up to $1.5 quadrillion.  Keep in mind that the GDP of the entire world is only somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 trillion.
2. Today, the notional value of all the derivatives held by Bank of America comes to approximately $75 trillion.  JPMorgan Chase is holding derivatives with a notional value of about $79 trillion.
3. Back in 2002, the top 10 U.S. banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets.  Today, the top 10 U.S. banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.

And Congress/Obama have done nothing to curtail the use of OTC derivatives or stop "too big to fail"!