Look at the bottom for my recommended mortgage lenders

When you look for a mortgage lender to either buy your home or refinance your existing home you are always faced with so many choices that it really becomes a time consuming process. Terms like conformal loan, non-conformal loan, points, PMI, LIBOR, HELOC, etc. etc. are good enough to give anyone headaches. Combine that with tons of options and numbers. Happiness coming with buying a house just evaporates with these stressful options.

I will come straight to the point. You need to have 6 months of expenses saved in hard cold cash that you can take out anytime you want. If you are married to a working partner then you are fine with savings of expenses for 3 to 4 months.

If you haven't yet done that please do that ASAP and make it a point that every month you put some portion of your paycheck to build your 3 to 6 months of emergency savings.

Where should you put your saings for emergency? Definitely in a saving bank account so that you can withdraw money whenever you want.

Dollar cost averaging is a technique used by investors to invest a large sum of money in parts over a period of time. Let's say you have $10,000 and you want to invest in a mutual fund or in a stock. You have two options -

1. You invest the entire amount at one go
2. You invest the entire amount over 1 or 2 years

The second style of investing is called dollar cost averaging.

Why is dollar cost averaging useful and how does it help investor?

If you are reading this blog then you are one of those few people who took time to think about their finances and do something to make money rather than brooding over how to do it.

Having interest in saving and investing is the first sign that you want to make money and become rich in the process of doing so. It shows that you want your money to work harder for you and generate more income rather than letting them sit idle in some saving bank account earning 1-2% interest.

This is very unusual article(free) published in Wall Street Journal on April 21st, 2008 about rising food price.

What makes me more canny about this is that there is enough supply of rice in US. I agree that the world wide demand for rice and food items have increased but US is producing around twice the amount of rice required by some 300 Million people in US. Excess is always exported.

The first paycheck of around $600/adult and $300/child is about to come in the first week of May as announced by the President. So if you are average family you will get 1200 for a couple and 600 for two children totalling $1800 from the government to go out and spend so that you can boost the economy.

This is just a farce by the US government to show that they are doing something to improve the economy. US is facing a very severe economic situation and printing extra paper money to hand out is not the solution.

The title says it all.

The slow and steady path of creating wealth has always worked in a long run. 401K & 403B(Non profit organizations usually provide 403b) plans offer a way for working class people to save money in a tax deferred account in a slow and steady way.

Much anticipated thought that there would be some reprieve for the struggling home owners after the Fed's rate cut doesn't hold any ground. It's true that recent rate cut has made it easy for banks to borrow cheap money from Fed and one another. But since these banks have been so bitterly bitten by the sub prime mess that they don't want to lend the money in the mortgage market. Instead, they want to buy high quality treasury bonds and other safer and higher yielding investment to fatten their profit and make their books look good.

Looking at the sub-prime crisis, writing down billions of dollars by big banks like Citibank and Morgan Stanley, Fed bailing out Bear Sterns and still so many houses in the market for sale the title of this article might sound crazy to you and you would want to get back to some other stories. But if you like someone who doesn't go with the herd and who thinks independently then read on as you will see that stocks of great companies at at sale.

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With US economy almost on the verge of recession and very bearish outlook on the US economy growth rate it is very natural to ask if the slowdown in US economy will affect emerging and other developed overseas. Will it stall their growth or even make it negative?