Britons want to have over £650,000 in their savings accounts. Read more…
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Archive for November, 2009
Financial services today cover a dazzling range of options. Ads promise great results, for low cost, with little effort. Base your search for the best option on a systematic review and comparison of written quotes.
Know you options for each type of service you consider. You may not qualify for all services. Initially look for companies offering advice, reducing interest rates, extending payment schedules, and negotiating reductions in principal owed. The best companies may use all tactics, depending upon the unique personal situation of each client.
Credit counseling services do not directly reduce payments or debts. Counselors advise clients how to reduce monthly expenses to pay all debts in full, according to the original agreement. Debt management services rely on a slightly more aggressive approach. Debt managers contact each of your creditors and request lower payments. Frequently, payment reductions result from lower interest rates or extended payment schedules.
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Nov
Nov
Will silver outshine gold?
Silver is not so much a poor man’s gold anymore, and investors might soon realize that the white metal is the real treasure. 
Best ways to invest in silver
True, at $17 an ounce, silver is cheap, trading around a 65th of gold’s record price of more than $1,100. But this year it has climbed 52% in value compared with gold’s rise of about 25%, according to FactSet Research.
Silver is a precious metal, after all, one that historically has outperformed gold in a bull market and doubles as an industrial metal. And supplies are declining much faster.
“Silver is unique in terms of being both a monetary and an industrial metal,” the Bullion Services Team at GoldCore said in a recent report, pointing out that silver is severely undervalued. “Silver remains the investment opportunity of a lifetime.”
Gold prices have climbed nearly 11% in the past two months, while silver has risen by only 3.1%.
And “investors looking for returns continue to wager on higher gold prices, whether it be on concerns over equity or currency markets .
In a highly anticipated move, lawmakers extended the tax incentives to keep homes selling in the real estate market. Over the last several months, thousands of first-time homebuyers took advantage of the $8000 tax credit and purchased their first home, helping to stabilize falling real estate prices in the process. This credit was set to expire at the end of November, but it has been extended and changed so that more people can now take advantage of the tax incentive. So far, the program has put $10 billion into the pockets of homebuyers that would have been collected as tax revenue. The additional time added to the program will cost the government an estimated $10.8 billion more.
The new program is available now it extends to purchases made through April 30, 2010 as long as those sales close by June 30, 2010. Although there are some similarities in the new bill to the original program to help first time homebuyers, there are also some key differences that are important to understand for anyone in the market for real estate.
What’s the same? <
With Sun Life’s (SLF) executives preparing to host an investor day in New York on Thursday, RBC Capital Markets analyst Andre-Philippe Hardy is telling clients to expect good news.
The investor day will focus on the insurer’s U.S. operations, and Mr. Hardy expects two key topics to be on the table: the potential for growth at the company’s U.S. asset-management unit, MFS Investment Management, and sunnier skies for the variable annuity business.
MFS’s net redemptions of retail funds fell to $400 million in the latest quarter, from $800 million a year ago.
In a note to clients Monday, Mr. Hardy said he believes the business is now well-positioned to benefit from a continued rebound in the mutual fund industry. “Strong investment performance relative to peers has led to improved net sales and should be a catalyst for further market share expansion in upcoming years,” he wrote. “MFS currently captures approximately 1% of total industry gross sales. We believe a