Personal Finance

By ROB CARRICK
Monday, November 06, 2006
The first rule of investing: The cuter the investment industry gets in developing a product, the warier you should be about buying it.

With that warning out of the way, let's get up close and personal with one of the hottest and cutest investment categories of the moment, wrap accounts.

By ALAN S. NOVICK
Sunday, November 05, 2006
We continue this week to look at Individual Retirement Accounts with a particular focus on rules governing distribution of funds.

The basic IRA distribution terms are the required beginning date (RBD), the minimum required distribution (MRD) and the "first distribution year" (no acronym).

New IRA distribution rules greatly simplify the determination of how much of a distribution must be taken each year.

By STEVE BUCCI
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Dear Debt Adviser,

I enjoyed reading "50 good things about being debt-free." Within that article, I would like to read more detail on "Plan an Attack, Mac." Very, very interesting subject.

By OTESA MIDDLETON MILES
Sunday, November 05, 2006
After six years as a stay-at-home mother, Melissa Silver entered the real estate sales game last year, when the market still boasted a boom.

Talk of home prices included words like "record breaking" and "skyrocketing," as buyers outbid one another, making both sellers and sales people happy.

By KATHLEEN PENDER
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Despite all the doom and gloom you hear about real estate, mutual funds that invest in the sector outperformed every other category of mutual fund, foreign or domestic, in the third quarter.

Real estate funds gained 8.4 percent on average in the three months that ended Friday, according to both Morningstar and Lipper.

They are also at or near the top of the charts for the past one, three and five years, which makes you wonder how long they can keep beating the market.

Jeff Tjornehoj, senior research analyst with Lipper, says the real estate slowdown you hear about "has to do with residential real estate.

By ALAN S. NOVICK
Thursday, November 02, 2006
The latest individual retirement account distribution rules together with other changes this year make IRAs easier and better tax planning devices for retirement.

IRAs have always offered tax advantages while allowing the employee to set aside money for retirement, but in the past investing in an IRA often proved more confusing than comforting.

Previously, a very complex method of calculating minimum distributions was the law.

By STEVE BUCCI
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Dear Debt Adviser,

My boyfriend has more than $30,000 in credit-card debt that he wants me to help pay off. He amassed an additional $30,000 debt three years ago, but rolled this into his mortgage.

By HOLDEN LEWIS
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
House prices are falling in much of the country, and more than 4 million dwellings are on the market. That's bad news for sellers, because buyers feel free to make lowball offers and then just wait.

It's a buyer's market, but don't despair.

You can increase your chances of selling your house in a reasonable time by following a few good guidelines.

First, play the cards you're dealt.

By KATHLEEN PENDER
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Since taking over as Securities and Exchange Commission chairman last year, Christopher Cox has been pushing to make Edgar, the electronic database that stores financial filings, more user-friendly and interactive.

This week, the SEC awarded three contracts designed to speed up the premiere of Edgar 2.0 by exploiting a technology called Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL.

This technology tags every piece of information, such as net income or short-term debt, with a unique label to make it searchable.

"Say you're looking at Exxon Mobil as a potential investment and want to look at its past eight quarters of earnings and compare those with its four largest competitors," says Corey Booth, the SEC's chief information officer.

Today, you would go into Edgar (at www.sec.gov), find and open 40 separate reports, search each one for the right piece of information, then type it into a spreadsheet.

If the financial statements were coded in XBRL, however, you could simply ask the database for eight quarters of earnings for each of the five companies and the numbers would pop up.

By ALAN S. NOVICK
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Over 30 years ago, the dean of the Harvard Law School told an audience of lawyers and estate planning professional that if a delegation from Mars came to the United States to study retirement planning, they would report back to their leaders that the goal of the Internal Revenue Code was to make it too complicated for anyone to attempt to put money aside for retirement.

Since then the rules for retirement planning, pensions plans, profit sharing plans and Individual Retirement Accounts, (IRA's) have been attacked, changed, and made more complicated, and also simpler by various statutory amendments.

IRA reforms were supposed to make it easy and uncomplicated for a working person to put aside money for retirement, while also providing some tax incentives to do so.