My Mind on Mortgages

This article in the WSJ last Friday indicates that President Obama and lawmakers are likely to allow income tax rates on the highest earners to increase in 2011.  Currently, Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire at the end of the year.  Assuming lawmakers don’t intervene this means that households will pay higher income taxes.  [...]

Brent Hunsberger’s column in this weekend’s Sunday Oregonian touched on the fact that the new financial overhaul bill fails in implementing the fiduciary standard of care for money managers.  It also talks about the CFP(R) designation for which I just completed my exam (Brent and I were classmates at University of Portland).  Here are a [...]

My daughter is only 8 weeks old but my wife sent me THIS ARTICLE over the week to read from the NY Times.  It is an article about talking with your kids about money and I think it is a great resource.  As you know I am a big advocate for educating kids about money [...]

Being in the real estate finance business for over 8 years now I have come across many a conversation about the tax and investment benefits of owning rental real estate.  I’ve found that many people (including many real estate and mortgage professionals) overstate the tax benefits of owning investment real estate.  There is a lot [...]

Homebuyers with bad lenders just got a break.  Congress has passed an extension provision to the popular homebuyer credit.  Now homebuyers who qualify under the other rules (including going into contract by April 20, 2010) have until the end of September to close.

Marketplace money had a good story over the weekend about the financial impacts of living to be 100.  You can read/ listen to it HERE.  The story profiled Horte Guttman who is now 102 years old.  Unfortunately she ran out of money at age 98 despite good financial planning.  According to the story a new [...]

I mentioned last week that I was going to take some time over the weekend to read about last Thursday’s temporary 1,000 point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  I thought NPR’s Planet Money did the best job of explaining it in layman’s terms.  Here is a link to the podcast.  The explanation starts [...]

My wife emailed me David Brook’s column in the NY Times today.  David writes about the relationship between money/ professional success and personal relationships through the lens of  Sandra Bullock’s current situation.  What’s interesting for me is that a couple weeks ago when teaching my personal finance class to high school seniors at Sunset High [...]