US Finance World

In six months, 54,000 homes have failed to sell because of this worrying trend!

Over the years, estate agents have coined some weird words to describe the behaviour of buyers and sellers.

There is gazumping (which you could remember as ‘goes up-ing’), which is when a buyer thinks a deal is done, only for the seller to accept a higher offer from a different buyer at the last minute. This last-ditch outbidding of one buyer by another first appeared during the property rush of the late Eighties and again at the height of the Noughties boom.

Gazundering (‘goes under-ing’) is the opposite of gazumping and is increasingly common in property downturns, such as the crashes of 2007/09 and 1989/95. Just as contracts are about to be exchanged, a buyer threatens to pull out unless the seller reluctantly accepts a reduced price.

On occasion, gazumping and gazundering have been rife in England and Wales. How

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One way to bet on the Federal Reserve’s latest move to lift the sinking housing market is to buy a rental property. Another cheaper and easier option: invest in an ETF that owns residential and apartment real estate investment trusts.

So far this year, interest in the 27 exchange-traded funds that invest in REITs has been tepid. But there’s reason to believe that could change. The Fed’s decision last week to launch Operation Twist is aimed at lowering longer-term rates to encourage longer-term investments, including equipment and property. While certain sectors of the real estate market like office and commercial space are more volatile, residential and apartment REITs may play right into the Fed’s hand.

There are other reasons to like residential REITs. For one, residential REITs have returned 3.5% over the past five years, compared to a 0.78% annualized loss for the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index.

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Several years ago, I hired a summer student enrolled in university for some general office administration. Before the start of the next summer, she called and asked if I was hiring for that summer. For a variety of reasons, we did not need help that summer. However, I asked her if she could forward her resume to me in case someone I knew was looking for help. In such an event, I could quickly pass her resume along with a kind word.

She said no.

This to me was a head-scratching move. Summer jobs are hard enough to come by even if you know the employer. But to turn down a chance to have a resume passed along with a reference is tantamount to ensuring your summer spent unemployed or in summer school. Not surprisingly, I have not heard from this summer student since.

We often use the phrase it is not what you know but who you know to emphasize (both positively and negatively) that your network is sometimes more important than your credentials.  Yet, when confronted with an opportunity to expand ones network, some of us turn down these opportunities.

The notion of human capital, often called the most over-looked aspect of personal finance, is traditionally seen as an output of education and experience.

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It is very easy to apply for a personal loan, because of the advance of the Internet. A borrower can obtain emergency financial support just in few hours after the approval process done successfully. It is not possible for everyone to go and ask any form of financial aid from family and friends all the time. This type of lending is very effective in the short term monetary obligations that may arise suddenly.

These loans are especially designed to provide easy instant cash to people who need quick money for some personal uses. Read more…

Laurence Montello, a certified financial planner in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., stayed the course through the stock market’s swings earlier this month. Now that stocks are slumping again, led by Thursday’s 3.7% decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, he is urging clients to bail out.

“Three weeks ago, I would have said: ‘We’re in it for the long haul,’” Mr. Montello says. “But we don’t want to see these $200,000 to $300,000 swings in performance in a $5 million account.”

Mr. Montello now is advising clients, many of them retired, to move 20% of their stock portfolios into cash and 10% into Treasurys.

Greg Zandlo, a certified financial planner in Coon Rapids, Minn., went further: He advised clients Thursday to move their investments completely out of equities. “Stocks that have a 5% dividend are great, but what kind of consolation is that going to be if they’re down 10%?” he asks.

After the 419.63-point selloff by the Dow, many individual investors are finally throwing in the towel.

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