Don’t Quit Your Day Job – Personal Finance, Economics and Investing

What’s wrong with taxing individuals making over $200,000 and couples making over $250,000? Nothing, if you are honest about what is really going on. The health care plan in the senate would mean new taxes for ‘rich’ folks in these tax brackets. Worse still? It doesn’t account for inflation in this calculation. What follows is a calculated tax which, like the Alternative Minimum Tax, will slowly creep into the middle class as inflation starts to show up again.

Carnivals and links for the week.

Long written off as the stuff of ‘goldbugs’ and conspiracy theorists (mostly unfairly), gold is coming into its own as a favored investment. Monday, gold climbed to an all time high of $1174 an ounce, enough to make many people sit up and take a look. Gold has been in a bull market for a long time… is gold for real, or are we witnessing the third bubble in a ridiculously short time (housing, oil, gold)?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Maybe you can think of an exception, but the only free lunches I’ve been on were for interviews or retirement seminars. How about free credit reports?

Surprisingly, yes, there is a way to get a free credit report. You can get a free credit report from each credit agency every year, to boot. How to do it? For starters, you don’t go to the site with the singing pirates.

Yesterday saw a 1.45% rise in the value of the S&P 500 Index and a 1.33% rise in the Dow. The closely followed indexes have been strong in November, rising 5.53% and 5.09% respectively. However, they are being boosted by a weird trend – the outperformance of large cap stocks.

Yesterday there was an interesting topic on CNN Money, one which gets touched on at most major personal finance sites: should you loan money to friends? The answer most often given, is no. There are some caveats… this specific article mentioned securing the loan in some way. What’s the best way to structure such a loan, assuming you go through with it?

Carnivals and featured links for the week.

Or is it? The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 2.03% yesterday, on the surface a nice gain for the index. Rises such as that give confidence to investors that the worst is over and it’s time to work back into stocks. Let me briefly present the other side of that argument.

Yes, the title has a double meaning. New credit card rules to be enacted with the Credit Card Act of 2009 will shake up the agreements you have with your credit card company. Because of new rules which will make it harder to increase fees and APRs after cards are issued, issuing companies will be forced to make terms more onerous up front. How far will you let companies go before you cancel?

California increased its income and sales taxes recently, in the midst of a recession. That measure was intended to be a temporary increase. Coupled with an increase in the yearly car registration fee, it appeared that plenty of funds would be raised by the new levies. Well, the summer showed that California hadn’t yet left budget crisis mode. As part of a deal to close a $26 billion budget deficit, California is resorting to a dirty trick- taking a no interest loan from its constituents.