My Loans Consolidated

During the real estate boom in the early 2000, companies believed in the Federal Reserve’s illusion of low interest rates and people were mesmerized by the same illusion of continuously increasing home prices. The illusion by the Federal Reserve then fueled investment in real estate and property but now everything has changed.

With increasing homes abandoned due to foreclosure, the neighborhoods more and more experience a degradation in public safety as abandoned homes become havens for crimes.  According to a study by the advocacy group ACORN, areas where crime rose between 2006 and 2008 were areas that had high foreclosure rates. It is only common sense that foreclosure and crime go together. As homeowners left in foreclosure towns lose more and more of their neighbors who help keep an eye on each others safety, they face more an more risk living in their area. Often they see squatters in abandon homes and and in some areas drug dealing and rapes happening in empty buildings in their neighborhood.

All the crimes and risks due to foreclosure is just the beginning. Bank owned homes are used by formerly employed workers to stay off the streets. There are several community organization groups who break into foreclosed homes to put the former owners back into their former properties.

Although it is common sense that crime rates rise during any economic recession, it is predicted that today’s depression will be much worse than the country has ever experienced. Gerald Celente has even predicted that America will see a great increase in crimes and will experience food riots, tax riots and even kidnapping as it is now happening in underdeveloped countries. With the crime increasing in foreclosure towns, this is very much possible.

An enormous amount of money is being directed away from creating jobs by job-producing companies. The money should have probably gone to help bail out private corporations that are bankrupt to help people keep their jobs. This money went into the foreclosure prevention plan to help keep the mortgage interest rate low in the hopes that homeowners can afford to pay off their mortgage and prevent losing their homes. But without jobs, paying off anything no matter how low the interest rates are, is just not possible.

Now, unemployment rate in the US will remain high if not increasing. It is going to pass 10% and it is likely to cross 25%. More homes may be gone into foreclosure and crimes will also increase. People unable to have any income will become more and more desperate for food and shelter and other needs for their families. If you still have your homes, consider your own safety against home invasion and robberies. Abandoned homes may be a target for people who are looking for shelter and other valuable assets, but occupied property such as yours are full of food, cash and people to take advantage of. This is exactly what Gerald Celente has warned about.

As property tax revenue has fallen dramatically with the rising foreclosures and more empty homes, less and less people are employed as police officers or firemen. Homeowners will probably have to rely on their own abilities to survive in case of vandalism or even home invasion.

In places like Queen Creek, Arizona, (population 20,800), on Phoenix’s outer rim, there is one foreclosure for every 25 people. Parrish, Florida, (pop. 6,900), in the lakelands outside Tampa, and Perris, California, (pop. 53,600), south of Riverside, have 54 and 70 foreclosures per capita, respectively. Thanks to its large population, Indio’s concentration is only one foreclosure for every 153 citizens.

Popularity: 3% [?]

If you are interested in the stock market and feel overwhelmed with big news items that shakes the market every time you start having insight into what the market should do next, you probably should consider taking a short course on this subject.

Many investors has been wondering if they can really invest in today’s economy with all the surprising news almost every day now. When you see the volatility in this market caused by the news, you also wonder how did any of those investors and traders be successful and just know what to do in terms of getting in and out of their stocks?

That’s just it. I have learnt from BetterTrades that professional stock investors don’t really base their trades around the daily news. Better Trades, founded by Freddie Rick, is like a ‘school’ that gives people stock market education without requiring them to invest  their money. Professionals, don’t react to what has already happened and reported in the news. Interestingly, they do the other way around. What they do is believing that some price movements of stocks and underlying signals in the market will actually tell them what will happen before the news hits the market! Trading gurus such as BetterTrades coaches will show you how to be confident of these signals and systems that you don’t really have to stare at the stock market news at all.

As I read more about BetterTrades on their website, I am curious to understand how stock market professionals really do it!

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After you graduate from a university, your student loan company will learn about it and your loan will come into the status of repayment. Usually, immediately on the first month that you are out of university, you are required to start paying the loan. Most people have their student loans set to a 20 year repayment schedule.

Here is what you need to know about paying off your student loans. You may have stayed with the same student loan company during your education years. But the loan company usually consider each year or each semester as a different loan. When you make your payment, what you are paying will be considered as different loans and are not consolidated. You can either put up automatic monthly payments  to repay or send a check every month to the company. But you need to know that setting up an automatic payment will save you money because most companies will give you a smaller interest rate. Keep in mind that federal student loans charge you also a lower interest rate compared to private loans.

Because student loan companies consider each year or semester as different college loans, you will be charged different interest rates as you may have more than four loans. You might notice that your interest rate for one year is 6.8% and the next year is a 7.1%.  If you have a federal student loan you will be able to get your different loans consolidated into one monthly payments with lower interest rate.

Remember that your private student loans should be separated from your federal student loans. The average private student loan even with consolidation is 6%. If you choose to consolidate your private student loans, any loans that you have within the same company will be consolidated into one loan. You will then be charged the going interest rate on your loans and then you will have one monthly payment on the private loans. Keep in mind if you have private and federal loans you will still have two payments, but both loans are consolidated wisely.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 2% [?]

When I watched the video on YouTube about the condition in Zimbabwe, it made me think. The value of Zimbabwean dollar went down to almost nothing. From the beginning of this year, people are taking only gold for payment.

Today, it may not look as if the rest of the world is going down the way Zimbabwe went down. But with the economy uncertain we definitely should think about it and more and more people are starting to turn to invest in gold. After predicting food riot, tax riot and revolution in the US, Gerald Celente, CEO of The Trends Research Institue suggested that to prepare for a worse time, we should buy gold bullion. Combined with the video about Zimbabwe where gold has become their currency, I would say it does sort of make sense.

I browsed through the internet to search where people can actually buy gold and how they do it. Besides gold bullion, you can also buy gold coins, which is smaller but not necessarily cheaper than a gold ‘bar’ or bullion.

As I was researching where to buy gold, I found this website GoldCoinsGain.com which I found very useful and thought I would share it with you. Not only does the website sell gold coins but it provides a wealth of information on gold investment. It also shows you that you can even place physical gold in IRA’s. On their website you read all the information you need to know regarding gold IRA and what type of gold you can use to invest in your IRA and 401(k).

If you are thinking of investing in gold, GoldCoinsGain.com seems to be a good place to start.

Popularity: 3% [?]

With the tobacco companies boosting their cigarette prices by 11% as the US government has shown the figures, smoking is not just bad for your health but is also getting rougher on your wallet. The increase in prices is due to the federal government increase in excise tax from 39 cents to $1.01 per pack which was effective early this month.

One of the many ways to save money -especially if you are deep in debt already- is by cutting cost on smoking. If you have already toyed with the thoughts of saving money by stopping to smoke, you probably already realize that you can actually save hundreds of dollars per year! Imagine what you could have used the money for instead.

Here is a great tool to calculate the money you spend on cigarettes while you are struggling to get out of debt!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 3% [?]

If you are currently struggling to find your way out of debt, filing for bankruptcy may be one of the options that you are considering to do. You may be tempted to file for bankruptcy regardless of the risk of damaging your credit score. It is true that by filing for bankruptcy, you will be able to have a fresh start. The stress of being in a financial turmoil probably But if you are also considering whether to choose to apply for a loan modification or file for bankruptcy, you should consider the advantage and disadvantages of each option.

Bankruptcy may not prevent foreclosure

If your mortgage is what most pushes you to consider filing for bankruptcy, please know that filing for one does not immediately mean that it will prevent foreclosure. As soon as you file for bankruptcy, there will be nothing else you can do to save your home. On the other hand, a refinance or loan modification may not discharge your debt but with a better and lower interest rate of a loan modification, you will be able to save your home by paying slowly but surely.

Bankruptcy does not discharge certain debts

If your financial distress does not come from your mortgage but from other debts, you must know that there are some debts that can not be discharged by filing for bankruptcy. These include child support back payments, criminal fees, federal tax and student loans. Debts like credit card debts and similar are the ones that can be resolved by bankruptcy.

If the former ones are what are causing your financial woes, your better option would probably applying for a consolidation loan and pay them off completely, but even before you do that, you will have to consider the consolidation loan fees and also the interest rate that you have to pay.

Liquidating your assets

Another important drawback of filing for bankruptcy is the requirements to liquidate some of your assets in order to pay off some of your debt that you still have. Whatever assets you have that can be liquidated, will be liquidated. There are more drawbacks that you should know of. It is best to thoroughly discuss these with your financial advisor or bankruptcy lawyer first.

Popularity: 7% [?]

As I watched how the global crisis is affecting nations around the world and how it is said to be the ‘worst recession since 1930”, I wondered how we got into this position in the first place. While looking for answers about the origins of this financial meltdown I found an interesting fact in history that predates this crisis way back before the Great Depression, and that this would be the beginning of a world where a great financial shake up like this was possible to take place.

The theory began with how money was originally created and used in the past and how it has changed in today’s world. In the beginning, money was used to represent value of gold and silver that a person had saved in a bank. It was a receipt that could be redeemed for a fixed weight of gold or silver. Today, a paper or digital dollar can only be redeemed by a paper or digital dollar. Over the years the function of money shifted from representing actual vaue of gold or silver to representing debt. To learn more about this twisted historical fact of the origins of money, watch the 5 part video about the Corrupt Banking System.

How far back into history the cause of today’s global financial crisis is and what exactly is the cause, we can probably never be too sure. As right now the only thing that people are more concerned about is how to survive, many don’t even like to even think of how the future is going to be, throughout the global crisis and out of it, if we can ever get out at all – let alone trying to understand the cause of it in the past. But understanding the past may be the only key to predict the future in order to survive the present all the way into the future.

Some predict that the global crisis will only last for a short time. In the beginning of this crisis, it was believed that the world’s largest economies were only experiencing a sudden short-term panic. But a year into the crisis now, this idea seems more and more strained. There have been different predictions about how long this recession is going to last. Some say it will extend until 2010 and some others predict that it will take up to 20 years to recover.

According to Kirby Daley, senior strategist in the Newedge Group, back in October 2008, the US will either fall into a deep abyss or into a deep long recession.

Gerald Cassente, CEO of The Trends Research Institute, even drew a gloomer picture of the future of the US. According to him, under the Obama administration, the US will be the first undeveoped nation of the world by2012. He predicted food riots, tax riots and revolution, job riots and even kidnapping as seen in the third-world countries today, happening in the US.

As I heard of the Zimbabweans panning for gold in the rivers to buy a loaf of bread, I wondered whether the whole world would actually come to this point. The Zimbabwean dollar had become less and less valuable over the past few months/ years which forces shops to only receive gold as the currency. It is expected that the British Pounds and the US dollar currencies have and are still going to weaken through the year (2009). Will we come to the point where eventually the world decides to follow the steps of Zimbabwe, where gold is the only currency that the whole world will accept?

Morris Cerullo, a minister and evangelist, believes that the financial shake up will lead to the fulfillment of a well-known prophecy in the Books of Revelation chapter 13 — the creation of a one world currency under a one world government. If the world’s currencies continue to lose their value, maybe what happened to Zimbabwe will eventually happen to the rest of the world.

But there is also a prediction saying that the global crisis today will lead to a new geopolitical, economic world order that ends Western domination. As Morris Cerullo believes that there will be a wealth transfer happening among nations, Dick Kamuganga, a writer at the New Vision, Uganda’s leading news website, predicts that a shifting of economic power of nations will occur through this financial shake up. This is based on historical events where a great shake up in the financial and economic world would always result in a new geopolitical, economic world order. The latest shift happened in the Great Depression in 1930 where the center of gravity of the global economic power was shifted from Europe to the United States.

The changes in world power and wealth distribution geographically and politically is happening under the impact of the economic crisis, as the US commentators in the G20 summit have come to terms regarding the new patterns of geopolitics and geo-economics. According to Dicky Kamuganga, the nations that were predicted to become the next centers of gravity of the economic power and wealth distribution are in Asia. They are China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Credit repair can seem overwhelming if you don’t know much about the basics about your credit, credit score or how it actually works. But rest assured that it is not all that difficult to clean u your credit and plan towards a better financial future by applying smarter spending and borrowing practices.

Here are 4 main ways to repair credit:

Work On A Debt Management Plan

Remember that  the longer you ignore your debt, the worse it will get and the harder it becomes for you to fix it. Before creating a debt management plan get all three of your credit reports and take your time to mark all the open accounts that still have a balance. Highlight all of the debt that you need to pay off and do not include your monthly living expenses such as rent, utilities, the your child’s education and so on. Some may be listed in your credit report but do not highlight them.

Create a debt pay off plan where you pay the highest balances or the highest interest rate first. These accounts are the most harmful to your credit. If your goal is to pay off your debt faster, the smaller accounts should be the one you pay off first because it will be easier to do that. But since your goal is to fix credit, get rid of the accounts that are more harmful to your credit score.

Although you are focusing on paying off your larger debt, you must not forget to pay maintain the minimum payments of your other smaller accounts and also paying for your living expenses to avoid going deeper into financial turmoil.

Keep Your Good Accounts In Positive Standing

If you already have good accounts, they will help you to fix credit and keeping it steady, especially when you have paid off all of the bad accounts. Once this is done, consider adding a good and small account which will help your credit. But until you have completely dug yourself out of the debt hole, don’t try adding any more accounts at all.

Check Your Credit Reports for Errors

Errors on your credit reports can happen by accident or through identity theft. Whatever the cause, try and find them and dispute it. Read through the dispute policies that your credit reporting agency has and follow them accordingly. If you have found an error, simply call them up to correct them.

Plan Your Future Financial Success

Your financial success greatly depends on your ability to handle money in a smart way and avoid getting back into the same situation that you were in before. Learn to live within your means, set your monthly budget by listing your priorities and learn the difference between “need” and “want”.

Many times, people find it hard to plan a financial success because they are too accustomed to a particular living standard or they have friends who live with a higher standard than you. Many times people would just spend money to impress others by wearing the latest fashion clothes. You just have to be honest with yourself and acknowledge the struggle that you are currently in and tell yourself that you are on the way to reach the life you want in the future and you don’t want to jeopardize that.

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