Posted by admin on June 30th, 2010
If you have received an offer recently for a 0 APR credit card, you may have been very tempted to send in the form signed and ready to go. You may have seen the words “0 percent interest” and jumped at the chance to shop for six months with impunity. You may even have thought that this was the answer to all your credit card or bank loan debt, allowing you to consolidate your bills and pay one low price with no interest. And all of these things may be true. However, there are some serious consequences that you need to know about before you blindly start spending with your new card.
1. Limited introductory period – Credit card companies who offer 0 APR cards cannot offer you this deal for very long or else they would not make any money off of you. So most deals last for six months, nine months, or even up to a year. This means that you will only pay 0 percent interest for this introductory period and no longer.
2. High interest rate – Very often, after the introductory period is over, the interest rate charged for use of your new credit card will be higher than the average rate. Usually, it is anywhere from nineteen to twenty-one percent interest, and perhaps a higher rate on cash advances and other transactions.
3. Penalty for late payments – If you pay your bill late or forget to pay it altogether anytime during the introductory period, you interest rate will immediately go up to a penalty rate. This could be as high as twenty to twenty-four percent on your entire balance.
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Posted by admin on June 28th, 2010
BetterTrades™ is the solution to your trading problems. If you have any questions about trading or any doubt that you have the knowledge necessary to compete in today’s trading world, BetterTrades™ is the place to turn for helpful classes and useful advice as well as articles and workshops that will allow you to improve your trading strategies and techniques.
Everyone would love to be able to make money on the stock market, and whether your ambition is to learn about trading for your own personal gain or to work toward becoming a professional trader, BetterTrades can help you turn your goal into a reality. BetterTrades has already helped hundreds of people learn more about trading, giving them the details and the inside information to become stronger, more successful traders.
If you would like to join this educational experience, all you have to do is sign up. The registration process for BetterTrades is fast and easy, and it grants you instant access to the multitude of topics and resources on BetterTrades. With your free registration, you will be able to sign up for online interactive classes hosted by a team of professional trading educators, work with our comprehensive article database, or register for one of our live events.
BetterTrades can be your virtual classroom; with some of the top trading instructors working to create classes that will interest, educate, and inspire you, you can participate in a trading education like no other. Work with some of the top names in trading today, and get experience from the professionals who have been on the trading floor and have published books to back up their techniques and skill in the industry. The BetterTrades virtual classes allow you to experience the give and take of a traditional classroom from the convenience of home with their online education programs.
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Posted by admin on June 27th, 2010
Your credit score is an integral part of your financial life. It is important that you understand what it’s all about. Lenders, landlords, insurers, utility companies and even employers look at your credit score. It is derived from what’s in your credit reports, and it ranges between 300 and 850.
Yet, according to a survey that was recently conducted, nearly half of all Americans don’t know how these scores are derived or even what factors are used to come up with them.
For example, if your credit score is 580 you are probably going to pay nearly three percentage points more in mortgage interest than someone who had a score of 720.
Or another way of looking at it, if you had a $150,000 30- year fixed-rate mortgage and your credit score was good enough to qualify for the best rate, your monthly payments would be about $890. This is according to Fair Isaac, the company that created the FICO score and who the rate is named afte (Fair Isaac COrporation). If your credit is poor, however, it is very likely that you would have to pay more than $1,200 a month for that same loan.
With so much depending on the credit score, it’s important to understand what it is all about and what are the things that affect it.
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Posted by admin on June 26th, 2010
A child custody agreement can have serious implications on your tax filing and your taxes overall. This issue should be addressed with your attorney or with your accountant while you are going through the process of negotiating or litigating child custody or a divorce agreement. Waiting until after you have finalized a child custody agreement to investigate the tax impact is not adviseable.
State law on child custody does not dictate who gets the tax deductions. If your child custody agreement is entirely silent on this issue, the parent with primary residential or sole custody will have all of the tax benefits available through the children. That party will be able to claim the children as deductions, and so forth. This can be a significant issue. There are parents who simply assume that if they are paying thousands of dollars per year in support, they will be able to take the children as deductions. Not so. This is incredibly important when you consider that all child support payments are not tax deductible to the payor and they are not taxable to the recipient parent.
Thus, when negotiating your child cusody agreement, you must address the issue of how custody will be structured and who will recieve the tax benefits. This negotiation should be a part of an overall financial scheme that encompasses a consideration of all issues, including child custody, child support, property, alimony, and tax impact.
The ability to claim head of household instead of married filing separate or even filing single can be incredibly important to your overall tax scheme. You can claim head of household if you have your children for more than 50% of the time. Thus, a head of household tax filing should be a part of the overall negiating outline in a divorce or separation situation. A child custody agreement that is silent on this issue is really not a well negotiated or written agreement.
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