Blog

According to a recent survey conducted by LegalZoom, just 41% of Americans had a last will and testament, and only 9% had a living will.

Death isn’t something anyone particularly wants to think about or plan for, but it’s essential for your loved ones to know what to do if the inconceivable does happen sooner than expected.

Both a last will and testament (often referred to simply as a will) and a living will serve as a final plan for financial and other details at the end of life. The key difference is that while a will doesn’t take effect until the subject’s death, a living will takes effect when the subject is medically incompetent to manage their own affairs, including medical care and personal finances. Read more…

It’s every car owner’s worst nightmare: you wake up one morning, ready to go to work, and there’s one less car in the driveway than you expected. You call the police to see if it’s been found stolen, but they let you know it’s being held at Bubba’s Towing and Wrecking, three months delinquent on its loan. Maybe you were falling behind on your payments but you still thought you could catch up… but now it’s too late. Maybe it was a technicality, some issue with your registration or insurance that you didn’t even realize you had until the car went missing. Either way, it’s Time to ask the tough questions and figure out how to rebuild. Read more…

Yesterday, Bitcoin hit yet another all-time high of $2779 per BTC, before retreating nearly 20% by afternoon… and gaining more than half of that back in the overnight!

Does this sound like your kind of investing? Are you ready to make and lose thousands of dollars in a matter of hours? If so, cryptocurrencies may have a place in your wallet.

Created by a shadowy figure named Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin originated as an economic experiment, virtual coins worth about $0.10 apiece, which could be “mined” by your computer crunching through math equations while you slept. Learn more…

It didn’t seem so bad while you were in school – yes, you’d have to pay for it eventually, but here it is, tens of thousands of dollars a year to support not only your Master’s degree in ethnomusicology, but the biggest parties in the conference, and that one week in Cozumel you’ve sworn never to tell anyone about, and now it’s due.

You’ve already got a job lined up after graduation, but it’s not in your field (what is, anyway?), and at $13.60 per hour, with food, shelter, the health insurance penalty, and a couple of cases of beer a week to pay first, that doesn’t leave much for paying off your loans, let alone starting that 401(k) or finally going to London. Even on the income-based plan, you’re still looking at 40 years of your disposable income eaten up to pay for that education, and all of a sudden you regret everything you’ve learned, and start researching more and more drastic ways to get free… here are a few that are recommended around the Internet, some of which work, and some of which really, really, don’t. Read more…

Once investors move on from basic equity trading, for purposes of seeking alpha, or leverage (investments that move up and down at a faster rate parallel to the market), it’s hard to get very far without making use of options. But where most companies only have one stock, and one price for that stock, dozens of options exist for each share with options available.

Options, in general, give you (hence the name) the option to buy or sell one share of a stock at a named price, whether or not that price is the market value of the security. Like futures, options also have an expiration, or execution, date. However, unlike the commodities futures, where a forgetful investor can suddenly find themselves drowning in a tanker-truck worth of orange juice, all an expiring option does is whatever it says it will do — for example, if you have an option agreement to buy 400 shares of Wal-Mart stock for $73 each at the end of August 2017, and you do not actively exercise it, it goes into expiration. Read more…

According to an article in Friday’s New York Times, Vitaly Borker is back in prison.

Read more…

In the first 100 days of the Trump administration, one of the main directives given to the transition team was to eliminate two regulations for every new government regulation passed. In addition, the administration used a rarely-utilized loophole known as the Congressional Review Act to target every amendment and regulation passed in the closing months of the Obama presidency.  One of the prime targets, the Fiduciary Rule, is a financial regulation intended to provide customers an extra measure of protection when they find a financial advisor, originally scheduled to go into effect in April.

Why was this law so controversial? For one, the financial industry has always preferred self-regulation to government involvement. But the Fiduciary Rule goes far beyond that in terms of customer assurance and transparency. Read more…

In one of the strongest signs yet of the long-term effects of the economic recovery, for the first time since 1974, the world’s five largest corporations by market capitalization are both US-based and all in the same sector.

While the last two years have been particularly bullish for tech stocks, the broader-market slowdown combined with continued growth in the internet sector have shifted the focus away from the traditional market titans, energy and heavy industry. This change reflects the shift in the employment market as well, with the smallest share of American labor involved in manufacturing since pre-industrial times. Read more…

One month ago, amid even higher than normal volatility, Bitcoin underwent a split known as the “hard fork”. While there were myriad technical reasons for this to happen, the most pressing issue was the Bitcoin network being too slow to process the much higher volume of trades developing as cryptocurrency becomes a viable investment. After a few alternative solutions failed to get enough support to improve this situation, including a “replace-by-fee” method where, in essence, the trades that paid the highest commission would pass through the exchange first, the community gained enough votes to support splitting in two, and launching a second currency. While a financial advisor may compare this to a stock spinoff, what is actually happening is rather different, since unlike a stock spinoff, no value needs to be lost or redistributed from Bitcoin into an alt-coin. Read more…

While Medicaid pays for 59% of long-term elder care in the US (its largest category of spending by far), when the program was created it was intended as a “payer of last resort” — a form of insurance that takes over for poor seniors or, as is often the case, senior citizens made poor by their long-term care. With the average cost of a nursing home in New York reaching $128,000 per year, twice the cost of college, Medicaid is an inevitable fact of life for even successful retirees with what seemed like perfect estate planning.

Due to its need-based mandate, Medicaid has notoriously stringent criteria for eligibility, including hard limits on income (zero – any incoming payments must go directly to Medicaid), assets (no more than $14,200 in cash or investments), and gifts, both given and received. These rules became stricter after the Deficit Reduction Act of 2006 (which also made bankruptcy a more difficult, painful process) and will likely be tightened again in the next few years through the currently proposed health care reform. Read more…