How to be Rich, Happy and Free from Scams

by Bankrate.com Debt is a concept as intricately intertwined with America these days as baseball, Mom and apple pie. The amount of personal debt in this country is ever-increasing, and a large part of the reason is that credit has never been easier to get. Whereas credit card issuers previously looked for customers who could repay, today card issuers relish the chance to reel in those who'll continuously charge beyond their means at 18 percent or 20 percent. But debt is a complex concept. Not all of it is good -- a fact a surprising number of Americans fail to realize until they're in the hole -- and yet not all of it is bad. When used intelligently, debt can be of tremendous assistance in building wealth. One of the secrets, therefore, to being smart with your money is to differentiate between good debt and bad debt. While the differences often seem logical, it is a logic that apparently is missed by many Americans. "When you buy something that goes down in value immediat...

There is nothing like an inquisitive child to make you realize just how complicated the topic of money is. That’s what I ended up thinking after my 4-year-old daughter a few weeks ago stomped her feet, turned red and demanded to know why we did not own a summer house. It might have been funny if it hadn’t totally knocked the wind out of me. My wife handled it better, noting that if we had spent money on a second home, our daughter wouldn’t have been able to go to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival this year or on a beach vacation. My wife also pointed out that it was generous of our friends to share their weekend home. But it reminds me that while it may be possible to dodge the subject of money in polite adult company, there is no denying children and their often relentless follow-ups. Children ask tough questions — whether their families are rich, why they can’t have an iPod Touch like their friends do. So below you’ll find an introduction to five of the most difficult questi...

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ While much of the country remains fixated on the bleak employment picture, hiring is beginning to pick up in the place that led the economy into recession — Wall Street. The shift underscores the remarkable recovery of the biggest banks and brokerage firms since Washington rescued them in the fall of 2008, and follows the huge rebound in profits for members of the New York Stock Exchange, which totaled $61.4 billion in 2009, the most ever. Since employment bottomed out in February, New York securities firms have added nearly 2,000 jobs, a trend that is also playing out nationwide at financial companies, commodity contract traders and investment firms. Though the figures are small in comparison to overall Wall Street employment, executives, economists and headhunters say they expect the growth to pick up steam in the coming months. “I think we’re seeing some hiring in anticipation of better times,” said Rae Rosen, a regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank o...

by Laura Rowley Two new research papers argue that money can buy life satisfaction, but not happy feelings -- and that earnings beyond $75,000 a year don't buy a lot more happiness. First, a Gallup survey of 136,000 people in 132 nations found higher income is strongly correlated with how people evaluate their lives, but only moderately with day-to-day positive feelings. The study appears in the July issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Does money make people happy? We must say it increases the likelihood that they will be satisfied a lot," says study co-author and psychologist Ed Diener of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in a statement. "In our study of richest people, there were a few very unhappy people." Researchers crafted several ways to measure different types of well-being: First, they asked respondents to do big-picture assessment of their lives, ranking themselves on an imaginary ladder from zero to 10 (with 10 repr...

Don’t put a dollar figure on your financial goals. Beware multiple savings accounts. Ignore the minimum balance figure on your credit card statement. And if you think paying off your smallest debt will motivate you to tackle the larger ones, think again. Those were just a few of the surprising research findings presented last week at the Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making, sponsored by the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Framing Savings Decisions Conventional wisdom suggests the best way to save money is to put a time frame and dollar figure on a financial goal and work backward; so if you want to save $500 for a vacation in 10 weeks, you divide 500 by 10 and save $50 a week to reach the goal. But depending on how a consumer thinks about a goal, that approach may be counterproductive, according to four studies conducted by Gülden Ülkümen at the University of Southern California and Amar Cheema at the University of Virginia. “There are be...

Within the next 20 years, the most profound changes in economic history will sweep the globe. The economic chaos and turbulence that we are now experiencing are merely the opening salvos in what will prove to be a long, disruptive period of adjustment. At least that's my theory, and careful investors owe it to themselves to hear me out. If I'm right, long-term investing in stocks and bonds will deliver lackluster returns at best and be destroyers of wealth at worst. To explain why, I need to tell you about how "Three Es" -- the economy, energy and the environment -- are interconnected and why we need to consider all three at once. The first "E" refers to the economy. Even if we were to limit our analysis to this realm only, I could make a compelling case that stocks and bonds face the most daunting structural headwinds seen in generations. As I argued in The Great Asset Bubble, as baby boomers transition from being net savers to net spenders, this will have ...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Investors should be looking past the banking sector to the consumer sector in China, with ETFs such as Claymore/AlphaShares China Small Cap and Global X China Consumer. The Agricultural Bank of China's IPO is grabbing headlines, but the big news for AgChina has drowned out more negative news for the banking sector. China's government used the banking sector to implement much of its stimulus policy in 2008 and 2009. Banks jumped at the chance to make loans and there's liable to be some amount of bad loans in the mix. Even before these bad loans have emerged, the banks need to raise capital to shore up their balance sheets amid tightening regulations in China. One such regulation passed just this week reduces the amount of loans that banks can package and sell to financial companies. This means the banks will have to hold more assets on their balance sheet and will have to slow their lending growth. Last week, Bank of China said it will raise nearly $9...