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PersonalFinanceUSA — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:38:01 CDT

Interesting Personal Finance Reading Stuff

PersonalFinanceUSA — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:39:45 CDT

A list of Personal Finance reading materials that I bumped into lately and I can say worth your reading time:

Blog: Personal Finance USA by Bob Schumann

Book: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things with Money: Overcoming Financial Dysfunction

Managing your own financial affairs can be a complicated and perilous business, fraught with emotion, the pull between desire for money and fear of losing it, and the danger of making bad choices. But who wants to turn over their future-not to mention their funds-to commissioned brokers with hidden agendas and undisclosed conflicts of interest? Let Bert Whitehead, a top fee-only personal financial advisor, show you how to build a strong financial foundation. His behavioral-based concepts, adopted by hundreds of financial advisors and tested and confirmed by thousands of real-life, satisfied clients, make planning easy. By identifying different approaches to money and understanding your specific personality type, you can avoid the common pitfalls of investment and develop a smart system of effective money management that will work for you.

Why Smart People Do Stupid Things with Money: Overcoming Financial Dysfunction sets the road to financial freedom, enabling you to:

Analyze your own financial personality, strengths, and weaknesses
Benchmark where you stand in your financial life cycle
Discover how to avoid the most common mistakes of money management
Find out about five fundamentals of fiscal fitness: saving enough, having sufficient liquidity, fully funding pensions, buying the right-sized house, and paying off consumer debt
Learn how to structure your portfolio using the three categories of functional asset allocation: interest earning assets, real estate, and equities
Differentiate between large-cap, small-cap, and international stocks
Determine how much debt is too much.

Whitehead's unique approach pays special attention to what is for most people their most important investment real estate and provides concrete formulas to guide you on the most tricky particulars. How much house can you afford? Should you payoff your mortgage? When should you refinance? How do your real estate investments impact the rest of your allocation of stocks, bonds, and cash? Filled with exercises, tables, and graphs, this unique guide can help ensure that you and your money won't soon be parted.

About the Author
BERT WHITEHEAD, MBA, J D, has been named one of the "Best 60 Financial Advisors in America" by Worth magazine every year since 1994. Mr. Whitehead, a fee-only personal financial advisor since 1972, is a pioneer member of the National Association of Personal Finance Advisors, the foremost organization in America for fee-only fiduciary advisors, and founder of the Alliance of Cambridge Advisors, a growing group of financial counselors who share his belief in unbiased, independent financial advice and consumer advocacy. He has trained and licensed more than one hundred independent financial-planning practitioners in sixty cities. An outspoken critic of the abuses of the corporate financial industry, he has appeared frequently on television and radio programs, and his pithy, Insightful advice is often quoted in leading publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Kiplinger's, Newsweek, and Consumer Reports. Mr. Whitehead is the host of the PBS special, Why Smart People Do Stupid Things with Money.

Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. New York

Book: Deduct It! Deduct It! For Tax Year 2008
Deduct It! Deduct It! is updated each year to document your non-cash charitable donations for use on your individual tax return (Form 1040 Schedule A). Fair Market Values are researched across the country in used clothing stores, thrift shops, online, and other methods. Our program meets all IRS regulations and is designed for you to document your donations as you're boxing them up. All you may need is a caculator at year-end to add up your tax savings!

Book:Deduct It! Deduct It! For Tax Year 2009

Deduct It! Deduct It! is updated each year to document your non-cash charitable donations for use on your individual tax return (Form 1040 Schedule A). Fair Market Values are researched within the prior three months of the publication date across the country in used clothing stores, thrift shops, online, and other methods. Our program meets all IRS regulations and is designed for you to document your donations as you're boxing them up. In this 2009 edition, you will find a new 'verification' process for your charitable donations. All you may need is a caculator at year-end to add up your tax savings!

Book: Facing Financial Dysfunction: 2nd Edition

Becoming fiscally fit is at least as difficult as becoming physically fit. We have to actually change our behavior, and few of us want to. In Facing Financial Dysfunction, Bert offers profound guidance with simple concepts in understandable language. He helps us examine and change our belief systems, our behavior, and our capacity to accumulate wealth. He is a master teacher, and in this authoritative book he offers the best of what he knows. Read it and prosper.

Book: Facing Financial Dysfunction: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things with Money

It is not hard to recognize some of the most common symptoms of financial dysfunction. Sometimes the symptoms are easy to identify, and sometimes you need to look deeper. Unlike in medicine, when a financially dysfunctional person learns to treat the symptoms, more often than not, the dysfunction will eventually go away.

Here are seven symptoms I see most often in my planning sessions:

1. Mortgage Aversion
2. Inappropriate Risk Reactions
3. Compulsive Spending or Excessive Debt
4. Poverty Mentality
5. Miser Mentality
6. Acute Financial Paranoia
7. Windfall Woes

Why Smart People Do Stupid Things with Money (2007) - DVD
This release is a holistic approach to financial planning that allows you to understand the financial mistakes you're making that are keeping you from accomplishing your economic goals. Bert Whitehead, M.B.A., J.D., selected by Worth Magazine as one of the top 100 wealthy advisors in the country, provides over 40 fin

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Top 5 Tips for Finding The Best Financial Advisor

PersonalFinanceUSA — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:21:41 CDT

Many middle-income Americans today are struggling to reach financial independence and peace of mind. As the entire world is going through much harder economic times, and unemployment rates are soaring in the US as well as everywhere else, that goal has become even more critical to millions of households.

In order to best understand what financial steps to take, ordinary Americans must first find the right personal financial advisor, provide them with details of their financial realities and aspirations, and get the highest value-for-money.
Some of the most critical questions you should ask your financial advisor are:

How much money do I need to retire?
How do I fund my children’s college education?
How can I increase return and reduce risk at the same time?
What should I do with my 401(k) money when I retire?
Where do I invest now?
How do I make my money last after I retire?
How can I build wealth faster?

Selecting the right financial advisor for you may not be as easy as it may seem. Top financial advisors – and you should only seek the services of those – can charge as much as $1,500 for a 45 minute phone appointment, and the standard 5.5% commission charged by insurance agents or stock brokers for investing a $ 50,000 in the context of your 401(K) plan will come to $2,740.

One key factor to be aware of, when you go to find a financial advisor, is what their commercial motivations may be, and whether they receive, on top of the fee they charge you for their advice, additional commissions paid by the providers of the specific financial plans they advocate you consider.
So when you are evaluating the right advisor for you, you best compare them against the following tips:

Are they top-tier personal financial advisors, recognized and accredited by reputable regulatory financial organizations?
How much experience they have providing advice to middle-class individuals?
Is their service based on fee-only compensation?
Do they operate based on the Fiduciary high standard, which renders them obligated to base the service only on their clients’ priorities – or do they receive 3rd-party commissions based on the advice they give you?
How fast and accessible is the service, regardless of where you live?

I personally have already selected my online personal finance advisor... PeoplesFinancialAdvisor.com!

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Top 5 Tips for Finding Best Financial Health
Interesting Personal Finance Reading Stuff

Top 5 Tips for Best Financial Health

PersonalFinanceUSA — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:21:02 CDT

Just like adhering to proper health habits, like eating right and exercising sufficiently, in order to maintain your physical health, practice proves that adopting proper financial behavior is critical to building wealth in the long term, and dealing with financial emergencies if required. Many Americans with middle class incomes have now come to base their financial conduct based on five simple principles, otherwise known as The Five Fundamentals of Fiscal Fitness©.

The Five Fundamentals for the best personal financial health are:
1. Save at least 10% of annual income – make sure you live within your means and balance your future needs against current ones. To fund your future needs you must save and invest at least 10% of everything you earn.

2. Have sufficient liquidity – you should always aim to pay bills and fund variable short term cash flow needs. This includes your ability to survive three catastrophic events within a six month period and make mortgage payments for 24 months.

3. Fully funded pensions – find out if you are maximizing the utilization of qualified tax shelters, so as to save money on your taxes, and invest it for future needs.

4. Buy the right house for your budget and be a savvy real estate investor – make sure you own the appropriate size home and have positive financial leverage and inflation protection. Furthermore, measure your diversification among three major asset classes of Interest Earning, Real Estate, and Equities. Each class provides major economic functions:

Leveraged Real estate serves as an inflation protection,
Interest earning provides safety & deflation protection, and
Equities enable growth during times of prosperity.

5. Pay off credit cards and consumer debt – keep your consumer (or "bad") debt in check, so that you do not borrow from the future to finance your ‘now’.

And another FREE tip... Go try this Financial Assessment Service for FREE!

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