budgeting personal finances

What a fantastic basic concept.

Hitler lost the second world war because he attacked Russia too soon. udervise ve vood all be speeking Deutsch now.

We employed the alternative massively effective budgetting tool.

Be a self employed Engineer for 15 years with take home pay of £50K a year and spend it all (and more besides, because ‘I want one of those NOW’) because ‘my jobs safe’.

Watch as the banks destroy the worlds finances.

Suddenly realise that over 90% of British industry is ultimately owned by Japanese investment banks, who suddenly have no money to fulfill their legal obligations to complete legislation driven improvment projects.

Watch as my £50K a year take home falls to ZERO.

Start a brand new business with Kleeneze (sorry not available in the USA) Which although it’s building really well is , after all, a business and needs time.

Suddenly HAVE to live on £18K a year GROSS.

Best Motivation for re-inventing your budget that anyone can have LOL.

We used to spend about £1,000 a month on groceries, now we spend around £300 a month, AND we eat more healthily.

Fortunately the finance on my car ended a month after our income disappeared saving us £375 a month.

We’ve sold my wifes’ car (THAT hurt) it was a really nice car, but it was costing us £489 a month in finance.

We’ve moved to a cheaper house saving us £400 a month in rent.

We’ve cancelled everything that wasn’t absolutely essential - including SKY and the TV license (It’s true, you don’t die if you turn the telly off!)

We still have creditors who we’re negotiating reduced payments and frozen interest with, but basically we are starting again from scratch.

We won’t fall into the credit trap again

Certainly not in the next six years or more ‘cos no-one in their right mind will give us credit now anyway!!

The one thing that keeps coming back to me though is

WHY aren’t our schools teaching kids how to budget? It’s a thousand times more important than even the basics.

Who cares if you can’t spell budgit if you can make one and stick to it.

It CAN’T be one of the things that are left to parents because nobody ever taught us!

Back to subject,

Your article is brilliant and if it helps one person (which I’m sure it already has) to get out or stay out of debt then you’ve done a service to humanity.

Keep it up &

we’ll see you

OVER the top

Five Best Personal Money Management Sites

Web-based financial management tools have grown in sophistication to the point where many people manage their entire financial lives with online tools. Here's a look at five of the most popular personal money management sites.

Photo a mashup of images by Leonardini and Wilton.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite personal money management site; now we're back to highlight the five most popular contenders.

Click on the screenshots below to take a closer look.

Buxfer (Basic: Free, Premium: From $2.79/month)

Many people are hesitant to use online banking services because of security concerns. Buxfer's compromise to provide ease of use while also assuring users and keeping things as controlled as they would like is to offer multiple methods for storing your credentials. You can manually synchronize your financial accounts with the site, you can store your passwords and login credentials locally using Google Gears, Firefox, or Safari, or you can use the Firebux Firefox extension—Firebux helps you automate the process of downloading financial data from your banking institutions and reviewing Buxfer data. If you'd like to skip the hassle of handling your own syncing, Buxfer offers automatic nightly syncing of your financial data, automatically logging into and pulling data from your various online money portals. Buxfer comes in three flavors: Basic (free), Plus ($2.79 per month), and Pro ($3.79 per month). All accounts include features like split bills, automatic tagging, and mobile access, but you'll pay a premium for unlimited budgets, bill reminders, and balance projections. You can try a live demo of Buxfer here.

Yodlee MoneyCenter (Free)

As many readers were quick to point out, Yodlee provides the guts to the user sites for hundreds of banking and financial services. Organizations like Mint, Thrive, and large banks like Chase use rebranded but Yodlee-powered interfaces. Yodlee users will often characterize Yodlee as similar to Mint, but without such a strong emphasis on flashy graphics. Instead it focuses more on analyzing your raw data—transaction descriptions, for example, are easier to search and more detailed. Yodlee can import data from thousands of institutions, help you generate a budget, automate your bill paying, and send out user-defined alerts. If you like the idea of a site like Mint but want more fine-grained control and the ability to manually tweak things when necessary, Yodlee is a solid alternative.

Mint (Free)

Mint has risen to prominence as a major player among web-based financial management tools by putting an extreme emphasis on user-friendliness and automation. The focus on automation is so strong, in fact, they only recently added the ability to add in any sort of manual transactions. By providing Mint with your various logins, you can track all your financial accounts in one place—checking, savings, credit cards, investments—and easily generate budgets and projections based off your data. Mint has won many people over, especially in the younger demographic, by being the first tool they've used to really get a good look at their money and where it's going.

ClearCheckbook (Basic: Free, Premium: $4/month)

ClearCheckbook is a web-based checking account ledger on steroids. You can track your spending, input your daily expenses from the web-interface or from your iPhone, Android, or Palm, and generate a budget with spending limits. Upgrading to a premium account gets you a custom report tool, custom transaction fields, future balance projection, and editing of the auto-suggest feature. Visit ClearCheckbook at the link above to check out the video tours of both the free and premium accounts—available at the bottom of the main page.

Mvelopes ($39.60/quarter)

Mvelopes is a robust web-based financial tool built on the old principle of budgeting with envelopes—each budget category gets an envelope with a set amount of money. Its focus on an old budgeting technique, however, doesn't mean you're stuck with dated tools. Mvelopes automatically pulls transaction data from hundreds of financial institutions, supports automatic bill payment, and helps you generate snapshots of your net worth as you adjust your budget and goals. Mvelopes is notable for being the only contender in the Hive without a free account option, a testament perhaps to how happy people are with the service that it made an appearance in the top five despite the lack of free-as-in-beer option.

Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best personal money management sites, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:

Have a favorite web-based tool that didn't get a nod or want to talk up your favorite a bit more? Let's hear it in the comments. Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Send us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with "Hive Five" in the subject line and we'll do our best to get your idea the attention it deserves.

Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.

mike fuljenz mike fuljenz mike fuljenz mike fuljenz mike fuljenz mike fuljenz

Eric Boehlert: When Does Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Ugly Race Baiting Become The Story?

The conservative movement is now wallowing in the kind of unapologetic race-baiting that mainstream American politics hasn't seen in decades, if not generations.

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Colton Harris-Moore -- better known as the 'Barefoot Bandit ' -- waived extradition before a federal judge in Miami, Florida on Friday, and is headed back to his home state of Washington, RadarOnline.com has learned.

Stabroek <b>News</b> - Deal signed in Shanghai for Amaila

Good News but: 1) strange that the Minister went to Parliament to give info.! I mean, as he said, the Pres. is in China. So one figure this was a staged reporting exercise OR, Norway demanded this report to PArliament ...

foreclosure search

A reader writes:

As a budding scientist who has been involved in the HIV field, it is rather frustrating to see media reports of the latest breakthrough in research without a full understanding of the findings and their significance (not that the medical establishment is not complicit … we put out these press releases in order to justify continued research money).  As you are well aware, the field had been fraught with repeated false hopes and, after more than two decades of trying, we are no closer to a preventative vaccine than when we first started.

These findings today do not really change this fact.  The same group has previously described another such neutralizing antibody but have been unsuccessful in their attempts to elicit this response in other individuals (this is the premise of a vaccine).  The very fact that the vast majority of people fail to mount a significant immune response against the virus (unlike we do to most other pathogens) suggests that a vaccine may not even be possible in the first place.  Pharmaceutical therapy, for better or worse, will remain our best response to this disease for the foreseeable future. 

That being said, without any signs of the disease abating, research like this cannot be discounted.  Just don’t expect results any time soon.

I don't. The Dish has long been dismissive of the search for a vaccine against HIV, but this did seem like a positive development. Another writes:

Thanks for that piece of news, Andrew. It actually brought tears to my eyes. I keep forgetting how much we suppress those hopes for a cure, then I read something like that and there's this flame, this glimmer of promise and I'm suddenly in tears. We forget how much that hope for a cure means to us, and how much we've pushed it aside and filed it away.

Right now I'm in this perfect storm of unemployment, heathcare crisis and AIDS.

Since I am, according to some, too lazy or drug-addled to find work, I've had to choose between my COBRA payments and my med copays and Dr. visits. I chose my COBRA payments for fear of that dreaded insurance lapse that would kick in pre-existing exclusions and not getting that all important certificate of coverage for my next (hopefully) job. Since I actually have a home (not sure for how long) and not totally homeless and destitute (yet) I don't qualify for a lot of help. Even if I did now, the state of GA, like many states, now have a Ryan White waiting list to get meds. Even my discount med cards from the drug companies didn't help enough to make them affordable.

So I'm waiting, waiting, waiting - so much has to fall into place, IF I can get a job in the next month or so, and IF they have good benefits, and IF the timing is just right, I might just be able to keep my insurance and go back on my life-saving meds. IF in the next month or so, I don't, I"m hitting several walls, my unemployment running out, my COBRA ending, foreclosure, bankruptcy. That's hoping too that after almost a year off my meds now, that I'm not blindsided by some totally preventable HIV related disease that would put me in the hospital and suddenly make any hope of this turning out well fly right out the window.

I have an older brother who is a wealthy retired executive from Philips, and very much a ditto head. They can't see giving me money since they would just be "enabling" me and keeping me from really looking a job (yes he really said that, almost a verbatim FOX talking talking point). Being a Christian though he did help me rewrite my resume. He keeps saying "just get private insurance" and even "just start my own company" but he hasn't a clue. With my meds running at $10,000 a month and having HIV/AIDS, I'm uninsurable through private health insurance, he doesn't understand that and almost refuses to believe it.

To address a lot of the current bashing of the unemployed: I'm a sharp hard working guy. I had the highest SAT scores in my class, I was pre-med at Wake Forest, two years ago I was making almost $60,000 a year, running an entire print production facility and doing it well. I've worked in consulting firms, F500 marketing departments, I have a killer resume. Yet...

So thanks again for that article. I do still hope. I've been in this crisis from the beginning, HIV+ back before there was even a test or a known cause. I had a partner who was only months ahead of me in progression, yet for every new drug that he just missed being able to take advantage of, I was able to. So our paths that at one time seemed to be almost lockstep veered apart and he died some 20 years ago and I'm still kicking around (I hope). I would just be crushed though that after living the miracle that being a 20+ year long-term survivor entails, that because of seemingly mundane things like a job and health insurance it might all be for nothing.

A reader writes:

As a budding scientist who has been involved in the HIV field, it is rather frustrating to see media reports of the latest breakthrough in research without a full understanding of the findings and their significance (not that the medical establishment is not complicit … we put out these press releases in order to justify continued research money).  As you are well aware, the field had been fraught with repeated false hopes and, after more than two decades of trying, we are no closer to a preventative vaccine than when we first started.

These findings today do not really change this fact.  The same group has previously described another such neutralizing antibody but have been unsuccessful in their attempts to elicit this response in other individuals (this is the premise of a vaccine).  The very fact that the vast majority of people fail to mount a significant immune response against the virus (unlike we do to most other pathogens) suggests that a vaccine may not even be possible in the first place.  Pharmaceutical therapy, for better or worse, will remain our best response to this disease for the foreseeable future. 

That being said, without any signs of the disease abating, research like this cannot be discounted.  Just don’t expect results any time soon.

I don't. The Dish has long been dismissive of the search for a vaccine against HIV, but this did seem like a positive development. Another writes:

Thanks for that piece of news, Andrew. It actually brought tears to my eyes. I keep forgetting how much we suppress those hopes for a cure, then I read something like that and there's this flame, this glimmer of promise and I'm suddenly in tears. We forget how much that hope for a cure means to us, and how much we've pushed it aside and filed it away.

Right now I'm in this perfect storm of unemployment, heathcare crisis and AIDS.

Since I am, according to some, too lazy or drug-addled to find work, I've had to choose between my COBRA payments and my med copays and Dr. visits. I chose my COBRA payments for fear of that dreaded insurance lapse that would kick in pre-existing exclusions and not getting that all important certificate of coverage for my next (hopefully) job. Since I actually have a home (not sure for how long) and not totally homeless and destitute (yet) I don't qualify for a lot of help. Even if I did now, the state of GA, like many states, now have a Ryan White waiting list to get meds. Even my discount med cards from the drug companies didn't help enough to make them affordable.

So I'm waiting, waiting, waiting - so much has to fall into place, IF I can get a job in the next month or so, and IF they have good benefits, and IF the timing is just right, I might just be able to keep my insurance and go back on my life-saving meds. IF in the next month or so, I don't, I"m hitting several walls, my unemployment running out, my COBRA ending, foreclosure, bankruptcy. That's hoping too that after almost a year off my meds now, that I'm not blindsided by some totally preventable HIV related disease that would put me in the hospital and suddenly make any hope of this turning out well fly right out the window.

I have an older brother who is a wealthy retired executive from Philips, and very much a ditto head. They can't see giving me money since they would just be "enabling" me and keeping me from really looking a job (yes he really said that, almost a verbatim FOX talking talking point). Being a Christian though he did help me rewrite my resume. He keeps saying "just get private insurance" and even "just start my own company" but he hasn't a clue. With my meds running at $10,000 a month and having HIV/AIDS, I'm uninsurable through private health insurance, he doesn't understand that and almost refuses to believe it.

To address a lot of the current bashing of the unemployed: I'm a sharp hard working guy. I had the highest SAT scores in my class, I was pre-med at Wake Forest, two years ago I was making almost $60,000 a year, running an entire print production facility and doing it well. I've worked in consulting firms, F500 marketing departments, I have a killer resume. Yet...

So thanks again for that article. I do still hope. I've been in this crisis from the beginning, HIV+ back before there was even a test or a known cause. I had a partner who was only months ahead of me in progression, yet for every new drug that he just missed being able to take advantage of, I was able to. So our paths that at one time seemed to be almost lockstep veered apart and he died some 20 years ago and I'm still kicking around (I hope). I would just be crushed though that after living the miracle that being a 20+ year long-term survivor entails, that because of seemingly mundane things like a job and health insurance it might all be for nothing.

synchronous

Washington Post buys personalised <b>news</b> site iCurrent | Media <b>...</b>

The Washington Post Co (NYSE: WPO) has made a small acquisition, buying up personalised news site iCurrent, we have confirmed. By Joseph Tartakoff.

AVP console patches &quot;scrapped&quot; <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

I really believe that a decent patch would attract and encourage more people to play, even buy it at the reduced price it is now. Of course the worst thing is, this news comes less than a week after the latest map-pack was released. ...

EMMYS: PBS, &#39;60 Minutes&#39; Dominate <b>News</b> and Docu Emmy Noms; Jailed <b>...</b>

PBS once again leads the News and Documentary Emmy nominations announced today with 37 noms, followed by CBS with 31 noms, including 16 for venerable newsmagazine 60 Minutes, the most nominated program by a mile; HBO (20); ...

1 internet marketing

As one of the founders of the original Napster and CloudMark (an anti-spam service), Jordan Ritter, has always been fascinated by the idea of combining the power of the cloud and the potential of human capital. Last April, he met up with Alex Edelstein, a former CloudMark executive, to hammer out their next business plan.

Over a round of beers, the idea for CloudCrowd was born.

Like CrowdFlower and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, CloudCrowd is trying to bring labor into the cloud, by creating a vast network of workers around the globe. Today, there are roughly 25,000 workers, who have completed more than a million tasks since the site’s launch in October 2009. That represents a small fraction of CrowdFlower’s claim to 500,000 workers, but CEO Edelstein says their force is quickly expanding, with some 2,000 additions each week. Although it took 7 months to reach the one million task mark, Edelstein predicts they’ll reach 2 million jobs in 8 weeks. See video above.

CloudCrowd has two main segments. The bulk of its business is client-driven work: a company submits tasks to CloudCrowd and the service will farm that out to eligible workers. Workers access CloudCrowd through a Facebook app, where they can pick available tasks and arrange payment.The tasks can be as simple as checking the quality of an image or involve the translation of entire web pages. Because pricing is determined by the level of difficulty, the payouts range from one penny to several dollars. Once a task is completed, a different user will check the finished product for an additional fee, creating a level of quality control.

The second part of their business is a new layer of consumer-facing services.

CloudCrowd recently launched EditZen, a simple web site, where consumers can submit pages for editing at $4 a page. The company will soon launch TranslationZen, which will offer translation services at $19.95 a page (far cheaper than some alternatives which are priced at $60 a page).

Aside from their consumer services, CloudCrowd’s cut varies widely depending on the job— ranging from a 20% cut to as high as 80%. The average worker doesn’t get paid handsomely for their task, but it can be a nice source for supplemental income— especially for workers in developing countries where salaries are generally well below America’s mean. In fact, the company now attracts more workers outside of the US, with a heavy concentration in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe (many from Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore).

The startup, which has yet to reach profitability, is a 15 person operation in San Francisco with modest funding. So far Edelstein is their sole investor, with $1.5 million in the project, but they are talking to major VC firms about a Series A round.

The main challenge for a company like CloudCrowd is keeping pace with its ever-growing workforce. Edelstein admits that feeding the machine with sufficient volume and variety is a difficult endeavor in this early stage. The company has not spent a significant amount of capital on marketing and courting clients, instead, CloudCrowd still relies on word of mouth to attract new business.

“Well it’s true that the number one complaint of our workers is give me more work, I want more availability of jobs. In both of the previous outsourcing, disruptive eras, the era of manufacturing moving to China and developing nations and the era of white collar work moving to India it took years of explaining, educating and showing corporations and all sorts of people who had work how much they could benefit…how consistent the work quality could be,” Edelstein says. “We don’t expect that overnight every single company in the Fortune 500 is going to outsource significant amounts of their work to the internet cloud but we’re sure that it’s going to happen over time.”

The key to their success (and beating rivals like CrowdFlower) lies in the credibility of their workforce and amassing as much information as possible on the skills of their workers. According to Ritter, the system  is structured to create dynamic profiles on each user. Every time a user completes a task and that task is reviewed, CloudCrowd will learn how reliable that user is and which skills they excel at. If all that information is organized properly, that could be highly valuable for a client who needs to finish a targeted task in a short time frame.

“We’re building sort of what we call the credibility graph of known reliable people on the internet,” Ritter says. “If there are particular customers who… say, ‘I want a thousand reliable people on the internet to do a particular job for me.’ Well today you really can’t find that. Where would you find 1,000 reliable people on the internet.”

As one of the founders of the original Napster and CloudMark (an anti-spam service), Jordan Ritter, has always been fascinated by the idea of combining the power of the cloud and the potential of human capital. Last April, he met up with Alex Edelstein, a former CloudMark executive, to hammer out their next business plan.

Over a round of beers, the idea for CloudCrowd was born.

Like CrowdFlower and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, CloudCrowd is trying to bring labor into the cloud, by creating a vast network of workers around the globe. Today, there are roughly 25,000 workers, who have completed more than a million tasks since the site’s launch in October 2009. That represents a small fraction of CrowdFlower’s claim to 500,000 workers, but CEO Edelstein says their force is quickly expanding, with some 2,000 additions each week. Although it took 7 months to reach the one million task mark, Edelstein predicts they’ll reach 2 million jobs in 8 weeks. See video above.

CloudCrowd has two main segments. The bulk of its business is client-driven work: a company submits tasks to CloudCrowd and the service will farm that out to eligible workers. Workers access CloudCrowd through a Facebook app, where they can pick available tasks and arrange payment.The tasks can be as simple as checking the quality of an image or involve the translation of entire web pages. Because pricing is determined by the level of difficulty, the payouts range from one penny to several dollars. Once a task is completed, a different user will check the finished product for an additional fee, creating a level of quality control.

The second part of their business is a new layer of consumer-facing services.

CloudCrowd recently launched EditZen, a simple web site, where consumers can submit pages for editing at $4 a page. The company will soon launch TranslationZen, which will offer translation services at $19.95 a page (far cheaper than some alternatives which are priced at $60 a page).

Aside from their consumer services, CloudCrowd’s cut varies widely depending on the job— ranging from a 20% cut to as high as 80%. The average worker doesn’t get paid handsomely for their task, but it can be a nice source for supplemental income— especially for workers in developing countries where salaries are generally well below America’s mean. In fact, the company now attracts more workers outside of the US, with a heavy concentration in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe (many from Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore).

The startup, which has yet to reach profitability, is a 15 person operation in San Francisco with modest funding. So far Edelstein is their sole investor, with $1.5 million in the project, but they are talking to major VC firms about a Series A round.

The main challenge for a company like CloudCrowd is keeping pace with its ever-growing workforce. Edelstein admits that feeding the machine with sufficient volume and variety is a difficult endeavor in this early stage. The company has not spent a significant amount of capital on marketing and courting clients, instead, CloudCrowd still relies on word of mouth to attract new business.

“Well it’s true that the number one complaint of our workers is give me more work, I want more availability of jobs. In both of the previous outsourcing, disruptive eras, the era of manufacturing moving to China and developing nations and the era of white collar work moving to India it took years of explaining, educating and showing corporations and all sorts of people who had work how much they could benefit…how consistent the work quality could be,” Edelstein says. “We don’t expect that overnight every single company in the Fortune 500 is going to outsource significant amounts of their work to the internet cloud but we’re sure that it’s going to happen over time.”

The key to their success (and beating rivals like CrowdFlower) lies in the credibility of their workforce and amassing as much information as possible on the skills of their workers. According to Ritter, the system  is structured to create dynamic profiles on each user. Every time a user completes a task and that task is reviewed, CloudCrowd will learn how reliable that user is and which skills they excel at. If all that information is organized properly, that could be highly valuable for a client who needs to finish a targeted task in a short time frame.

“We’re building sort of what we call the credibility graph of known reliable people on the internet,” Ritter says. “If there are particular customers who… say, ‘I want a thousand reliable people on the internet to do a particular job for me.’ Well today you really can’t find that. Where would you find 1,000 reliable people on the internet.”

online stock trading online stock trading

Early Market <b>News</b>: Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google Inc. (NASDAQ <b>...</b>

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web site promotion internet marketing

mike fuljenz mike fuljenz mike fuljenz internet marketing course

foreclosure law

Jerry Kane, the man who with his son shot and killed two police officers after being pulled over in Arkansas last week, was a largely unsuccessful traveling pitchman for an esoteric anti-government theory known as "Redemption," telling desperate homeowners facing foreclosure that they did not have to pay off their mortgages because bank loans are fundamentally illegitimate, according to JJ MacNab, a Maryland insurance analyst who tracks anti-tax and anti-debt schemes.

"He was one of the followers of the Redemption method, the idea being because the bank loaned you money from someone else's checking account, it's committing fraud. Therefore, you don't have to pay your loan," says MacNab, who first encountered Kane about four years ago when, she says, he began posting on a now-defunct Web forum called SuiJuris.net.

Kane and his young son were killed by police in a second confrontation shortly after the traffic stop.

Redemption theory is described by the Anti-Defamation League as based on the premise that "a bankrupt United States converted the physical bodies of its citizens into assets against which it could sell bonds, and that knowledgeable people can 'redeem' these assets and, through manipulating them and various imagined accounts, use them to their advantage. Much of the rhetoric is, as is common with 'sovereign citizen'/'common law' theories, nearly incomprehensible and often laced with Biblical references used as points of law."

MacNab says the SuiJuris.net was inhabited by followers of the sovereign citizen movement, which holds that most government institutions are illegitimate.

About two years ago, at the height of the mortgage crisis, Kane shifted from being a poster to a promoter of his own debt elimination seminars, MacNab says. According to his website (the password, as publicly revealed by Kane, is "makeme"), Kane criss-crossed the country, giving recent seminars in Arizona, California, and Las Vegas. When he was killed in Arkansas Thursday, he was en route to Florida, and was then scheduled to go back to the West Coast this summer.

Kane's site features links to standard foreclosure documents along with obscure texts like "The Law of Negotiable Instruments," written in 1904 by one Major D.H. Boughton, a Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, cavalry instructor.

MacNab says that some of Kane's competitors -- debt elimination pitchmen like Tim Turner of americacanbefree.com and Sam Davis of statusisfreedom.com -- can pack a room with ticket-paying guests in a cheap hotel or event hall. But Kane, in his regular appearance (.mp3) on an amateur Web radio show earlier this month, complained he wasn't having much success.

"I had a class in Denver back in January, and I went to Denver and not one person showed up for it," Kane said.

In the Web radio appearance, held on a community call service called TalkShoe, Kane comes of as sluggish and incoherent, lacking even the superficial charisma and fluency with language associated with successful motivational speakers. Still, enthusiastic listeners keep calling in to hear Kane hold forth about how to use "deeds of trust" and "power of attorney" to advantage during foreclosure proceedings.

Traveling the country with Kane was his 16-year-old son Joe, who was also killed by police Thursday. At one seminar at which Joe Kane appeared with his father, Jerry Kane reportedly bragged to the audience: "Can anybody tell that my son has never been to school? ... He slipped though the cracks."

Jerry and Joe Kane's home in Springfield, Ohio, was itself foreclosed on in 2006, according to WREG in Memphis.

A resentment for the government appears to undergird much of Kane's thinking. Speaking on the May radio show of his arrest and brief imprisonment in New Mexico (mugshot above) for driving without a license, Kane said he was "putting together an invoice for him for approximately $80,000 in gold for eight uses of my name" by the police.

Of the arresting officer, he said: "I've already done a background check on him, I found out where he lives, his address, his wife's name." And continued: "They're psychotic. Go look up the five categories of psychopaths. They get a sexual thrill out of it. They're sick in the head, that's all. So we just have to play their silly ass little games, go in there and kill the monster under the bed so to speak."

Here's a sample clip from one of Kane's seminars:

An Ohio-based loan modification service disciplined in its home state a year ago now faces similar allegations from neighboring Indiana that it promised more than it delivered to save troubled homeowners from foreclosure.



The lawsuit filed against Foreclosure Assistance USA by the Indiana Attorney General alleges 600 Indiana residents signed contracts with the company. FA USA sent direct mail offers with specific foreclosure case information, claiming it could offer immediate assistance, the attorney general's office said.



In addition to deceptive practices, the suit claims the company further violated Indiana law by not providing a $25,000 surety bond -- a sum of money given to a third party to back up a transaction if it falls through -- to protect consumers for money-up-front services. A new law will go into effect July 1 requiring all foreclosure assistance operators to have a $25,000 surety bond on file with the state.



An attempt to reach FA USA at the number listed on their Better Business Bureau reliability report found the line disconnected.



In a similar case, the Federal Trade Commission placed a restraining order on New Jersey-based New Hope Property for collecting money on services not provided. The case found them owing $11.45 million in civil settlements to the state.



The FTC is cracking down on companies trying to take advantage of distressed homeowners by adding new defendants to its case against mortgage relief scammers.














Mike Fuljenz Mike Fuljenz

foreclosure homes

"That's a very good thing," said Thomas Lawler, an independent housing economist in Virginia. But he noted that even with that positive trend, "you are highly likely to see an acceleration in the number of actual completed foreclosures."

Lenders are offering to help some homeowners modify their loans. But many borrowers can't qualify or they are falling back into default. The Obama administration's $75 billion foreclosure prevention effort has made only a small dent in the problem.

About 25 percent of the 1.2 million homeowners who started the program over the past year had received permanent loan modifications as of April. About 23 percent of those enrolled dropped out during a trial phase that lasts at least three months. Many more are in limbo.

Among states, Nevada posted the highest foreclosure rate in May. One in every 79 households there received a foreclosure notice. However, foreclosures there are down 16 percent from a year earlier.

Arizona, Florida, California and Michigan were next among states with the highest foreclosure rates. Rounding out the top 10 were Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Utah and Maryland.

Las Vegas continued to be the city with the nation's highest foreclosure rate, but activity there was down 18 percent from a year earlier. And nine out of the top 10 cities with the highest foreclosure rates posted annual declines. The exception was the Vallejo-Fairfield area in California, where foreclosures were up 1 percent from a year ago.

Foreclosed homes are typically sold at steep discounts, lowering the value of surrounding properties. That's a concern for local communities, and a drag on the economic recovery.

In recent months, home prices have started to sink again after stabilizing last summer. Economists at Goldman Sachs predicted in a report last week that prices will fall about 3 percent nationally over the next year, with the largest declines in cities where mortgage defaults are rising.

"The housing market remains plagued by enormous excess supply," wrote Goldman economist Sven Jari Stehn.

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My business cratered in 2008, followed by a huge loss on a particular project and a tax issue. This all followed on a couple bad years and a couple refinancings on my place. Come the end of 08, I stopped making payments on the mortgage and started sliding sideways into foreclosure and default on the overextended credit card, all the while having next-to-no work coming in.

I economized and gutted it out, managing to keep the lights, heat, and phone on, gas in the car and cadging food and such as I could. I became expert in sussing out when the supermarket would be putting almost-expired chicken on sale for 59 cents a pound. Living in a city, I was able to walk a lot of places and economize further.

After about 6 months of this, I grew tired of the constant phone calls both from bill collectors and from people trying to sell me one flavor of debt salvation or another. I’m a lawyer and I know that most of those schemes were not worth the money, assuming I had the money in the first place. I decided to sell out because even after a couple refinancings, I still had some equity in the place.

All the while, the creditors were trying everything.

The mortgage company and the credit card company tried every line: angry, pleading, appeal to morality, making one feel guilty or ashamed for not paying, you name it.

If it was Bob With The Indian Accent and obvious intercontinental connection, I told him I didn’t understand him and that I had to hang up. Other cases, I’d tell the guy I’d pay when I could. To the inevitable followup question “When do you think that will be?” I’d answer “I don’t know but you’ll find out shortly after I do.”

They would try, try, try to get me to make a promise to pay. Falling into that trap is a bad idea for the debtor for two reasons. First, it can (and a creditor will construe it as) a “novation” of the debt, that is to say, an entirely new contract affirming (and admitting) the validity of the debt. It’s a variation on the scheme Sears used to play with people who got their Sears card debts discharged in bankruptcy and who Sears later approached to try to collect on it anyway. Second, it opens the debtor up to the emotional appeal of not wanting to break your promises and will be used against the debtor that way.

To all that, I would answer “how can you expect me to make you a good-faith promise to pay you this debt when the circumstances that put me in the position of getting phone calls from you have not changed? How can you come to me and tell me that it’s OK to make a promise to pay, when I don’t have the means to do that?” and similar logical flips. I would stick to my positions and let the bill collector do all the arguing.

When they wanted to be my friend, I’d remind them “you’re a bill collector. You are not my friend. You are not trying to help me. You are trying to take money from me – food out of my mouth – so as to move the odometer on this debt. That’s all it is – an odometer. Just numbers that have no relation to reality or anything. you want me to move the numbers in your favor, when I can either eat and make sure the dog is fed or move the numbers in your favor. If our positions were reversed, what would you do?” Not a few times, the collector admitted he’d be doing pretty much the same as I was.

I felt no guilt about taking up their time. If they were working on an hourly wage (highly unlikely), then I was making sure this guy got some hours in and got paid while getting nothing to the employer paying him for it. Screw the employer. If they were working on a percentage of recovery (much more likely) and weren’t bright enough to recognize they were wasting their time with me, well, screw them. Their problem, not mine.

In all things, I was unfailingly polite. I recognized and kept in mind that these were peons trying to do a nasty job, quite probably the only job available to them. “Do unto others…” is something one has to work on all the time. I also knew that they were recording whatever went on, so making a promise or blowing up or making a threat or whatever would be there and pointed at, time and again, for whatever purpose.

The one time, one of the collectors blew up and flew into a tirade about how he hated lawyers and how he hated how we thought we were above the law and a whole panoply of personal insults. I flew back at him and told him to go fuck himself. I then took the time to calm down and straighten my head out first. Then, I called the credit card issuer – they had sent the debt out to a collection agency – and spoke to someone. Since they had shipped this out to an agency, they tried to demur and send me back to the agency. But I reminded them the debt was with them and, more importantly, their agent was violating the law. That’s the Federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

When you start waving the FDCPA around, creditors sit up and listen. I worked my way up the chain of supervisors until I reached, I believe, a senior vice-president at the creditor. I explained to him the situation:

I knew there was a problem with the credit card,

I had issues with the way his company had handled it (independent of the collection agency) which left me ill-disposed to view his company as my friend (despite a long, good relationship),

I had serious issues with the illegality of the collector’s conduct,

I admitted and apologized for my blowing up and profanity,

I’m a lawyer and I know all about the FDCPA,

I don’t want to go down the lawsuit road though I easily could and would win.

Having thus set the table, I then told him what I wanted was that I wanted that bill collector fired. Because if he’d done that to me there was little doubt he’d done it to others and he was a litigational ticking time bomb waiting to tear into both his company and the collectors. I then repeated that I could not now pay, but would in the future.

In other words, I dealt with a sensible, sophisticated, professional person in a sensible, sophisticated, professional way.

I didn’t get Mr. Abusive fired, but I got no collection calls for a couple months and none from him for a good six months.

This went on all summer while I was listing and showing the property and going to contract. When the mortgage company filed the foreclosure suit, I waited as long as I could, then filed an answer asserting they had no standing to sue – the documents had been run through the MERS and there was all sorts of assignment language. This bought me months through the legal procedure while I managed to bring the contract to the point of a buyer with a mortgage committment coming. Another six weeks and we closed the sale. The mortgage was paid off, the other debts that had liened the property were paid off and title closed.

I had the good fortune of having lived in a desirable neighborhood that had not suffered a big decline in value and equity in the property and a buyer who wanted the property because it really made an improvement in the work commute; I managed to walk away with some money.

As to the credit card debt, which was not secured by the property, I held out on them. Ultimately, they offered to take 40 cents on the dollar and I paid them the same afternoon.

In the course of economizing, I lost something on the order of 15 or 20 pounds, the result of stress, cutting out beer and ice cream (and just about anything else other than the cheapest staples I could find or cadge) and making sure my money was allocated so the dog got fed first. I went on a vacation – paid for by a friend employed in a good job and repaid by me after closing on the sale. I avoided bankruptcy. I was too broke to go bankrupt (and I didn’t want to prepare, let alone file, the schedules, nor to go through the required debt counseling – a sick joke that favors only the creditors).

The NYT article linked is aimed at propagandizing a specific audience – the judges, lawyers and financilists on the institutions’ side of the foreclosure debate. They’ll read this and every contesting defendant will suddenly be running around in the gas-guzzling airboats, just like every welfare recipient was driving down to the welfare office in their new Cadillac after Reagan said so.

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personal finance planning

Women are becoming more knowledgeable about finances, becoming more confident managing their own investments and talking more openly about moneywith their kids, colleagues and peers. This, according to new research conducted by Citi's Women & Company.



I recently chatted with Lisa Caputo, president and CEO of Women & Co, and she says that it's about the recession and its aftermath. "Women are ushering in this new era of responsibility. They're stepping into the role of 'Chief Financial Officer' and building quality lives for themselves and their families."



They're going to graduate school. Starting companies. Becoming breadwinners. Even outgrowing the number of men in the workforce -- for the first time in American history. "We're taking the financial lead," says Caputo, "and becoming more empowered."



Here's how you can do it -- at any age:







In Your 20s

Time is on your side - use it to build a solid financial foundation.Start living on a budget, identifying financial goals and putting a plan in motion, and most importantly, setting aside income, says Caputo. Ideally, aim to set aside 15% of your gross salary. Not possible? This money doesn't have to come out of your pocket so it's not be as painful as it seems. For example, say you're single, and making $50,000 a year. If you have just $250 a month of pretax dollars automatically deducted from your paycheck, and deposited in your company's 401K plan, and if your company matches those contributions (50 cents on the dollar up to 6% of your salary), you're already more than halfway there!



In your 30s

Set up an emergency fund (ideally, 6 months worth of living expenses), max out the contributions, and "define your investment strategy and structure a well diversified portfolio," says Caputo.That may require your working with a financial advisor, particularly since you're probably having a tough time budgeting given your new status (married? kids?). You can find one through napfa.org.



In your 40s

You may be juggling the needs of a growing family and aging parents, but don't take a break from retirement savings. And think about protecting your legacy, says Caputo. "We're talking wills, naming guardians for small children, and getting life insurance if you have dependents."



In Your 50s

This is when you want to get serious about crunching the numbers -- specifically, estimating your retirement expenses and your projected income.There are calculators on the web to help you do this. Once you're age 50, you can add an extra $5,500 in catch-up contributions to your 401(k); IRA savers can throw in another $1,000. Take advantage of this. Caputo says you should also rebalance your portfolio, and review your life insurance coverage at this age.



In Your 60s

You're eligible to collect Social Security benefits beginning at age 62 -- the median retirement age -- but if you can wait a few years the payouts will be bigger. In fact, every year you delay drawing Social Security between age 62 and 70 increases your eventual payout by about 8% a year. Just something to think about, says Caputo, who also suggests you go back to budgeting basics as you learn to live on a fixed income, and that you additionally update your estate plans.

When I recently discovered that my local bank had finally been added to Mint, I immediately signed back up. MakeUseOf did an overview of Mint back in 2007 when it was in its beta release. Since then, it has grown and added more features so it’s time for an update post.

Mint is a free, automatic online finance tracking and budgeting platform much like Microsoft Money and Quicken. Since adding my financial accounts (Paypal, credit cards, banking), I‘ve stopped using similar software applications on my Mac and iPhone. Mint does all the personal accounting work for me. In this article, I’ll share some tips on using the features of Mint to track and budget your spending.

How to Make a Mint Budget – Setting Up Categories

When you add your financial accounts to your Mint account, about a year’s worth of your past and current transactions get added to your account. Using your past transactions, Mint assigns your transactions to various categories. For example, credit or debit card transactions you make at Target will be assigned the Shopping category. A transaction from Best Buy will get assigned to Electronics & Software. You may find that many of your transactions get assigned appropriate categories, but you can also change or create categories for any transaction.

Here’s how to do it.

• Open your Mint account and click on Transactions in the menu bar at the top of the webpage. Select the transaction for the category you want to change.




• Select the current category for the transaction and click on the triangle in the selection field to either change the name of the category or see if there’s a sub-category. So if say your transaction is from Amazon, you can leave the default category as Shopping or you can assign it a sub-category, such as Books or Clothing.


• Now that you have changed the category, you will probably want all future transactions from say Amazon to all be labeled Books instead of just Shopping. To make this happen, you need to change the rules set up for this type of transaction. Click on the Edit Detail tab.

In the resulting dialog box, select “Always rename Amazon as Amazon and categorize as Books.“ This new rule will change all existing and future Amazon transactions. Notice also, you can assign tags to transactions, which is great for keeping track of tax related expenses as opposed to personal expenses. By clicking “Manage your tags“, you can change, add, and delete tags.

When you first set up your account and add transactions, you may find there are numerous transactions which are uncategorized. Taking the time to set up rules for uncategorized transactions will inevitably help you monitor your spending. Also, one useful tool in this regard is that you can click on the “Show all“ button on the right side of your Transactions page to get a list of the total spending for all transactions for a particular category, sub-category, or store.

Setting Budgets

One of the best reasons for using Mint and taking the trouble to categorize transactions is that you can make Mint budgets, especially for discretionary spending items and services. For example, I like to make sure I’m spending a limited amount of money on books and iPad/iPhone apps per month. If I don’t monitor my spending on such items, I tend to overspend and even sometimes waste money by not tracking those expenses.

Again, when you set up your Mint account, Mint creates a few default budgets which you can change or create new ones. To do this, click on Planning in the menu bar of your account’s page. Select the budget you want to change or update. Or click the Create Budget button to create a new budget.

For an existing budget, you can increase or decrease the amount by clicking on the left and right triangles. You can make additional changes by clicking the Edit Details tab, in which you can change the time period of the budget, and check whether or not you want the selected budget to roll over to the next month. As you spend money toward those budgets, the bar color will change from green to red when you are over your budget.

Almost everything about Mint is automatic. So once your transactions are updated for your accounts, all your categories and budgets get automatically updated. You never have to manually input that data.

Setting Up Email Alerts

Another useful Mint feature which helps you monitor your finances is by sending you email alerts for when you’ve gone over budget, when your balance is low, when a bill is due, and so on. You can configure the settings for alerts by clicking on Your Profile on your accounts page. In the drop-down box, select Email and Alerts to set up changes.

Get the Free Mint iPhone App

If you‘re an Apple mobile user, you can download the free Mint app to view your online account. Transactions, however, may not immediately show up on your Mint account. It may take an hour or two to get updated. But using the mobile app also allows you to add tags and/or change categories for new transactions. Your new alerts also show up in the app.

There are many more features in Mint, and once you get your accounts set up, you’ll see that it provides you with a wealth of information about your finances, as well giving you tips on how to save money.

Mint.com may not be the best solution for say tracking a large business account, but for personal and small business accounts, the service is a huge time saver. The biggest drawback to the service, however, is that it doesn’t provide a way to print out reports of your transactions, categories, and summaries. You have to download the data and then set up a spreadsheet to create reports. Hopefully the developers of Mint will address this problem in future updates.

Let us know if and how you use Mint.com. Has it helped you budget your spending?

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Personal financial planning is neither a mystery or an art. It is a methodology and discipline. It is about getting rich slow. There are no shortcuts and no magic tricks. The younger you start, the better. Here are the steps you need to follow.

First, eliminate credit card debt. High interest credit card debt is the biggest threat to most peoples' financial well being. The interest you pay can run over 30% per year. That's money you could put to work in investments. When you pay that money to a credit card company you get nothing in return. Eliminating bad debt like credit card debt should be your number one priority.

Establish an emergency fund. There is no such thing as job security. A job loss could occur any time through no fault of your own. It's necessary to establish a savings fund against disaster. Traditional wisdom says a six to nine month reserve is need. I recommend 9-12 months, especially during times when the economic outlook is negative and jobs at a premium. Keep this money in a liquid form such as a savings account or money market fund.

Review your insurance coverage. If you are single or married without children you probably don't need life insurance. If you do have children estimate how much your spouse will need through their college years. This is the ideal amount of insurance you should have. Purchase term insurance. It is pure protection. Other forms of insurance, like whole life, have an investment component. You can do better elsewhere. Your house insurance should cover the value of your property and replacement cost for your belongings. Things devalue quickly and if you don't have replacement cost coverage you'll have a real problem if a crisis occurs. Liability coverage on your home and automobile should be at least five times your income or double your net asset value, whichever is greater.

Ask what money you will need in the next five years. A house down payment is the number one answer. Set up a savings pan for this goal and contribute regularly. This money should be kept in a safe and liquid asset such as a savings or money market account.

You are now ready for investing. The first thing to do is to review your employer's 401k plan. This money grows tax deferred. If your employer is matching contributions contribute up to it's maximum match first. This is free money and should not be left on the table. The return is actually great enough that it can outstrip the negative of credit card debt. If your employer does not match contributions, invest first in your Roth IRA. The one cardinal rule is to never invest in your company's stock. If your company runs into disaster you lose your job and your investment. Think Enron.

Open a Roth IRA. Use a discount stock broker or mutual fund. company. This money is contributed after taxes and grows tax exempt. When the account has been held five years money may be withdrawn tax free. When young this money is best invested in stock oriented securities. As you get older you can change your investment mix to include safer instruments, such as government bonds. Unless you are willing to follow the market and your companies closely do not invest in individual stocks. Get diversification by buying mutual funds or exchange traded funds. Specify that you want your dividends reinvested. You do not have to make your annual contribution all at once. Make monthly or quarterly contributions . This will make your saving easier and also allow you to dollar cost average into your investments.

Lastly, remember to pay yourself first. Make your investment contributions and then you are free to live off the remainder of your paycheck.

Sources: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/01/061301.asp
http://www.rothira.com/
http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/financial-planning/401k.htm
http://www.statefarm.com/insurance/identify_insurance.asp

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The bias remains up in crude oil and news out of China that the country plans to allow more flexibility in its exchange rate is just more fuel for an already.

Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Entertainment <b>News</b>

totally OT but I am in Costa Rica watching the Colombian news channel and the military guy Santos, heir to Uribe, just won the election. I just find it freaky that he has the whole military contingent on stage with him. Very creepy. ...

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