US Finance World

Its not just ropey journalists who employ a little phone hacking…

It’s fair to say that the hacking of mobile phones has been in the news a fair bit over the last week or so. Indeed, the practice has led to the closure of a 168-year-old newspaper, and the arrest of the Government’s former director of communications.

So what is phone hacking, and how do you ensure that you don’t come a cropper?

For a while now it’s been public knowledge that journalists at the News of the World indulged in a little phone hacking in order to secure news stories. What started out with members of the Royal Family and celebrities has taken a sinister twist though with the revelation that grieving families of terrorist attacks and murder victims also had their phones hacked.

Hacking in this instance means gaining access to the user’s voicemail. And when these activities were at their most popular at News International, this was a pretty easy thing to do. It used t

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If youve had enough of get rich quick schemes, try to see if you can out-do the Jones by beating them to poverty. Heres how.

This nation is in some ways excellent at getting poor. You will recognise what we’re good at when you read some of the items on the list below. In other ways, many of us are just too cynical of so-called professionals to let them tell us what to do with our money.

Or are we? Here are my tips for getting poor faster.

Learn to trust strangers

Give all your money to someone you have never met and know nothing about, and ask him to look after it for you for a while before he secretly passes it to someone else you’ve never met to look after.

The investment fund industry generally doesn’t like people to enquire too closely into the long-term records of its managers.

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A new handy dandy info-graphic from Deals.com below shows how many points you need for a free flight on Alaska, Continental, American, Delta, Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, United, and US Airways.

I dont have any airline credit cards personally, do you find them worth the hassle and/or annual fee?

Original infographic source: Deals.com

Lenders seize 110 properties every day. Heres how to keep the roof over your head!

In the first three months of this year, mortgage lenders repossessed (seized) more than 9,100 homes, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML).

Only 7,900 homes were taken back in the final quarter of 2010, so repossessions leapt 15% in the first three months of this year. However, this is in line with seasonal variations, with fewer people kicked out of their homes in the festive season. Indeed, home seizures between January and March 2011 were down a tenth (10%) on the same period of 2010.

Alas, the CML predicts that 40,000 mortgage borrowers will lose their homes this year, thanks to difficulties with paying their home loans. In other words, mortgage lenders seize 110 homes each and every day. This which works out at 4.6 homes every hour of the year, or one repossession every 13 minutes.

Of course, it’s a personal tragedy whenever homeowners lose the roof over their heads.

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The S&P Case Shiller Home Price index was updated yesterday with data through March 2011, or 2011 Q1. Here is the []. Here is the chart:

Click to enlarge. Sources: S&P Indices

Nationally, home prices are back to their mid-2002 levels. This means that any run-up in home prices between 2002 and the 2006 peak has been erased. On average home prices are selling at the same value they were nine years ago and are 34% below their 2006Q2 peak.

I feel like this whole thing is still going to take a while to fully unwind.