Surety Bonds Hold Finance Professionals Accountable

When you're making significant financial decisions, you shouldn't have to worry about the reliability of the professionals who are working with your money. Surety bonds are a means of financial protection that can provide additional reassurance. Unfortunately, although many industries mandate the use of surety bonds to protect their consumers, the consumers themselves are oftentimes unaware of this means of protection. The basic idea behind surety bonds is to limit fraud and other unethical ...

Benefits of Employee Stock Purchase Plans

Whether you are a business owner, CEO, or manager, you need to find ways to keep employees satisfied, fulfilled and productive, as well as ensuring they want to stay with the company. A good way to make sure that employees are happy with the company is to provide employee benefits, such as the employee stock purchase plans, or ESPP. An employee stock purchase plan allows employees to buy stock options during a prescribed period, sometimes at a discount. A company can offer workers a qualified...

Investing Online For Beginners

Through the years, online investment has popularized and has piqued the interest of many individuals. How about you? Are you ready to face the challenge that comes with this venture? Investing online can be tedious particularly if you know nothing about it. It is a must that you take time to do your own research. Apart from researching, you may also opt to take up special classes for yourself to become fully abreast of the mission which you desire to take on. You can also expose yourself t...

3 Simple Ways to Keep Track of Your Stock Investments

Not everyone is a financial whiz and understands the ins and outs of investing in the stock market or mutual funds. That doesn’t mean that you should never get into the investment arena. Even if you don’t understand the stock page of the newspaper, there are ways that can make keeping abreast of how your stocks are doing a bit simpler. (more…)

OptionMentoring.com – Review*

Many people may have heard of options and have seen that they can trade them in their online account, but, most people don't really understand options and could use an options trading mentor. An option is a contract to buy or sell a specific financial product officially known as the option's underlying instrument or underlying interest. For equity options, the underlying instrument is a stock, exchange-traded fund (ETF), or similar product. (more…)

Understanding Capital Gains Tax Rates

The advantage of capital gains, as opposed to ordinary income, is that the basic maximum tax rate on capital gains for property held for more than one year is currently 15 percent. In contrast, the top four ordinary income tax rates are all higher than this, with the top rate for 2005 through 2010 at 35 percent. The IRS taxes short-term and long-term gains differently. The "holding period" is the amount of time you held some security before you sold it. A short-term gain or short-term loss is a...

What did Albert Einstein, well known for being smarter than the average cat, claim to be the most powerful force in the universe? ... Compound interest! Compound Interest has also been called the eighth wonder of the world and the greatest mathematical discovery of all time. Fortunately for the rest of us, you don't have to be a genius to understand compound interest. In fact, it's pretty simple. (more…)

I Bond Rates

The big news as of late is the new I bond rates. With the current fixed rate of 1.2%, I bonds bought between now and the end of the October will pay 4.8% for the first 6 months, and then 6.92%(!) for the next 6 months. The question, then, for those of you considering buying I bonds, is whether to buy before the end of October or before the end of November. (more…)