US Finance World

Drawn by the desire to stay on the road and lower auto insurance costs, a growing number of older Americans are signing up for driving school. But some of the fastest-growing classes aren’t behind the wheel. They’re behind a keyboard.

That’s right: Adults can now take driver’s ed without ever sitting in a car labeled “student driver” or making a single three-point turn. Instead, online classes — typically four to eight hours in total screen time — have become the fastest way for adults to brush up before a driving test or secure a discount on auto insurance. The AARP’s online driver safety course had more than 60,000 students nationwide in 2010, up 30% from a year earlier. By July of this year, another 40,000 had already enrolled. Participation in the American Automobile Association’s national online senior driving course has also increased an average of 20% per year over the last three years.

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Anyone can spot a low price/earnings ratio. But figuring out which companies hold undervalued patents can provide an investing edge.

Just this past week, Google (GOOG) agreed to pay $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility (MMI), a struggling cell phone maker with a vast patent stash. Earlier this summer, Google was outbid by Microsoft, Apple and others on thousands of patents held by Nortel Networks, a telecom operating under bankruptcy protection.

These patent grabs suggest tomorrow’s dominant smart phone or tablet is a three-legged stool built from software, hardware and communications–and companies are in a race to add rights to whichever legs they’re missing. More broadly, big patent portfolios are increasingly being used as financial weapons.

A recent boom in patent sales is lifting patent values in general, says Nir Kossovsky, executive secretary at the Intangible Asset Finance Society, a Pittsburgh research group.

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At some point every single one of us has heard the advice, Buy a home, so you can get the tax deduction.

The reality is that this piece of advice being a financially smart move is not a universal truth. Its anything but that.

Before I get into number crunching, I want to clarify the basics of what the mortgage tax deduction is and when you could claim it.

What is a Mortgage Tax Deduction?

When you get a mortgage, you are often paying insane amounts of interest in that mortgage, particularly in the beginning. Banks front load the mortgage with higher interest amounts in the beginning of the mortgage which taper off over the years. They do this so they can get more money out of each mortgage in the event the debtor were to pay off the loan early.

On the mortgages Ive held, almost two-thirds of the total payment in the first 5 or more years of the loan were interest payments. The other third actually went to paying down the principal (what you actually owe) on the house.

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If this past month has shown us anything, its that the U.S. political climate is toxic, cancerous, deceitful, arrogant, and all around dysfunctional.

The result of this lunacy is that our nations debt is climbing, our infrastructure is crumbling, our job market is hurting, we have lost our world leader image, and our stock markets have been in stall mode for over a decade.

All of these things impact your bottom line. And if the debt ceiling debate didnt raise your concern as a citizen of this country, not much will.

How did we get this way? Those who are Republicans werent genetically born as Democrat haters, and vice versa. Something must have happened along the way

Im not a Washington insider, so perhaps Im not the most qualified person to write about how to fix our political climate. On the other hand, perhaps that makes me more qualified.

I have worked in political advertising in the U.S. and doing so has given me some insight into how political campaigns are bought and sold (er, lost and won).

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As Zack Zbar gets ready to apply to colleges this fall, his parents have established one important ground rule. Jeff, a Florida writer, and his wife Robbie, a nurse practitioner, would like to send their son to the best college he can get into, but they don’t intend to go into debt to make that happen. They’ll look for grants and scholarships, or they’ll turn to an in-state option. “If we can’t afford it, then we have some reckoning to do,” says Jeff, 47.

A growing number of parents are rethinking how much they’re willing to spend on a child’s college tuition. According to a report released last week by student lender Sallie Mae, about 51% of parents “strongly agreed” that they would stretch financially to to send their children to college, down from 64% of parents last year; about the same number said they would go into debt to do so, down from 59%. It marks the first time those numbers have dropped since the firm began the survey in 2007.

It also marks a reversal in the longstanding ambition of parents to send their kids to college despite the cost.

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