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CBS News financial consultant Ray Martin offers a bit of advice to parents and children as they head off to college. At times it can be tricky to know exactly how much money you need...

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With the housing market in the tank right now there are actually some really good opportunities to refinance right now. Rates on 15 year fixed loans are actually under 5% if your credit is decent. Even if it's not you are bound to be able to work something out with a lender to actually get a good rate. Refinance.Com has some really good information on refinancing and getting a low rate mortgage  even if you are looking at a bad credit mortgage refinance.

There are also some pretty good tools at the web site in order to see if you qualify for a home refinance bad credit notwithstanding. There is an easy refinance calculator, an amortization calculator, bi-weekly payment calculator and one just to see how much of a loan you can afford. Don't be fooled by your lender with the bi-weekly scam they try and pull though. Some lenders will let you set up a bi-weekly plan but often there are service fees tucked in that you aren't aware. Generally if you just send them a payment every two weeks, or tack on an extra $100 a month onto your mortgage payment you can pay the loan off several years early and avoid quite a bit of interest just by making one extra payment a year spread out over twelve of them.

If you are interested in refinancing, even if it's a bad credit home refinance you owe it to yourself to get as much information as possible. Go check out Refinance.Com and see what kind of info you can gain.

 

The federal government has made a lot of promises in your name. It has committed you to pay most of the health care costs of the elderly (Medicare), and to provide them with a small stipend (Social Security). It has also borrowed trillions of dollars, to pay current expenses, that your children and grandchildren will have to repay. Unfortunately, future revenues will be insufficient to fulfill these promises.

The Government Accountability Office estimates the future shortfall in funding at $53.3 trillion. Other experts say the number is almost certainly higher. This means that every full-time worker owes a staggering $440,000, courtesy of government excess.
Eventually, that debt must be paid, either in higher taxes, or in reduced benefits. These numbers represent a looming crisis of staggering proportions.  

What can be done?

Can the politicians raise taxes to cover the shortfall? The answer is no. The Government Accountability Office estimates that federal taxes would have to double in order to do the job. Can you afford to double your taxes? Could you afford to pay $440,000 in government debts, even if you had two decades to do it?

Would massively higher taxes even work? The answer is no. Higher taxes don't necessarily result in higher revenues to the government. Increased taxes always lead to increased tax avoidance, a decreased incentive to work and invest, and fewer dollars available to capital markets. The result can be less revenue rather than more.
Can we grow our way out of the problem? The answer is again no. The Government Accountability Office estimates the economy would have to grow at a double digit rate for the next 75 years!, but . . .

In the real world our economic growth is only in the low single digits, and even this rate of growth may be hard to sustain as the weight of rising government expenditures takes more and more resources from the productive economy.

Indeed, the current debt estimate of $53.3 trillion already takes economic growth into account. If the rate of growth should prove lower than expected then the real size of the unfunded liabilities will be even higher. Those who look to economic growth to magically cure this problem are whistling past the graveyard.

What about benefit cuts for Medicare and Social Security? This might help the government balance its books, but at the cost of breaking government promises and pushing expenses back on the elderly.

What about borrowing? Can the politicians borrow their way out of this mess? Alas, no. Moody, the credit rating service, has already issued a warning that the federal government's credit rating will be lowered if doesn't reduce its debt burden. Practically speaking, a lower credit rating means higher interest rates on federal government debt. And that means more and more of your taxes will go to pay the interest on that debt -- making BOTH the inevitable tax increases and benefit cuts more painful. 

Meanwhile, the politicians continue to run deficits year after year, in spite of the looming financial crisis. More debt means more interest charges. Interest payments will already consume nearly one dollar out of every four you pay in personal income taxes this year.
One sure way to improve things would be to . . .

• Cut government spending now
• Stop running deficits now
• Start paying off the government debt now
• And thereby reduce what we will owe in future interest payments

It's time to stop whistling past the graveyard. It's time to start facing facts, which means we must start cutting government spending, now! Downsize DC! Please send Congress a message. Make Congress aware that you're aware of the government's dire financial plight. Tell them you want reduced spending now, a balanced budget now, and debt retirement, starting now.

You can send your message here.

I will be getting all of my paperwork ready for the spring as I am going to start looking at auto loans again. My car is running OK but I thing it's about time to go ahead and consider getting a new one. The last car I bought was in 2000 and the wife is driving it while I have her car which is 14 years old now and has around 200k miles. One of the places I have been looking is Complete Loan Source. Along with auto loans they are really a one-stop shop for all different sorts of loans particularly if you are interested in consolidation debt.

There are several different ways that you can consolidate your debt. Some people take out second mortgages but my preference is a personal loan. The reason behind that is that with a second mortgage you are paying off lifestyle debt by taking out loans against your house and that's just not a responsible idea. Although with a personal loan if your credit isn't that great you may have to come up with some sort of collateral such as property you still have a chance to get a loan without it.

Right on the heels of the report that the dollar is doing lousy against the euro comes this report that the DOW touched an all-time of 14,111.53 early this afternoon. The previous high was 14,021.95 back on July 19th of this year. The S&P and Nasdaq both gained 1.3% and the Russell 2000 small-cap index jumped more than 2%.

The market is rallying which is a good thing and with all of the unfavorable news that has been going on investors are afraid of falling behind.

Today is the first day of the fourth quarter and hopefully things will continue looking up.

The company that I work for has been around a little over 50 years. One of the things that we have done since it's inception is to pay our bills on time. Sounds stupid and simple right? You might be surprised how often that is not the case. One of the reasons our retirement plan is so good and our profits are great (aside from us working our tails off) is that we have no debt. Plain and simple. No debt. We pay all of our bills within seven days, no matter how big and if it is something that would cost more than we actually have in fluid assets we find another solution.

We own our own property except in cases where it makes sense to lease and in those cases we generally try and get as good a deal as possible and sign 20-30 year leases so that we can lock in the income from that location.

We used to own our own restaurant supply company as well as be self-insured but have moved away from that completely over the last few years as it became financially better to have someone else do it for us.

One of the reasons that so many large and small businesses go under during recessions and rough periods with the economy is debt. If you owe more money than you actually have then when times are hard you have to either borrow even more money to stay afloat or go under.

More people need to apply these principles to their personal affairs as well.

One thing I try not to do is to loan my employees money. At least once a week someone will come to me or one of my managers and ask for a cash advance on their upcoming paycheck. My stock answer is normally along the lines of "I have a deal with the bank. They don't make waffles, I don't make loans" but they can be pretty persistent at times. Occasionally emergencies happen and I have loaned money out of my pocket and I make sure that I am standing there on payday if I do loan it out. Recently I had to write up one of my managers because he loaned money out of his store safe, and that is just one thing we don't do. We took it out of his check and now he can try to get the money back from the employee himself.

During the month of July pending sales of pre-owned homes in the U.S. fell by 12.2% as creditors tighten their belts in the real estate markets. The National Association of Realtor's Pending Home Sales Index fell to a reading of 89.9 which is the lowest it has been since September 2001.

Economists were only expecting about a 2% decline from what I have read and it makes the housing market look a darn site worse than everyone was thinking before.

Back around March two years ago I decided that the time had come to take out a

President Bush outlined a plan today that won't do any good for real estate speculators but may help out people that could lose their homes. Of course it really means nothing but puts the ball in Congress' court whom he called upon to pass legislation to help credit worthy homeowners under distress.


My question is this...Who decides who is credit worthy? The Federal Government? The same Federal Government that can't balance it's budget or pay the bills that it owes? Give me a break.