Filed under: Debt, Real Estate

In the past few weeks, we’ve gotten quite a few emails from homeowners wondering if they should take advantage of these historically low interest rates and refinance. A general rule of thumb is that you should refinance if you can lock into a rate approximately 2% below your current rate. Otherwise, the costs and hassles of refinancing outweigh the benefits.

When you refinance, you have to pay many of the same costs you paid when you bought your home in the first place: attorney’s fees, appraisal fees, application fees, processing fees (whatever that is), etc. But many of these costs scale well — the costs refinancing a $3 million loan might not be substantially higher than refinancing a $50 thousand loan. So a large part of whether refinancing makes sense is the size of your loan — if your loan is small, you will need a large difference between your current interest rate and the new one.

Use this handy-dandy refinancing calculator from BankRate to get an idea about whether refinancing makes sense for you.

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Filed under: Debt

What’s wrong with us as consumers when it is considered “normal” to be broke? Weren’t our parents a part of a generation who saved their money, bought things only when they needed them and had the money in hand, and generally were responsible with their money?

But one of my favorite personal finance gurus, Dave Ramsey, states that it is now commonplace to be in money trouble. And that’s a sad, sad statement about our money management skills and our readiness for the future.

Dave states the best thing consumers can do to put themselves on the path toward long-term money success is pay off their debt. Consumers are victims of their own overspending, not of earning too tiny or being otherwise financially persecuted. He does say, however, that this generation has been “marketed-to” more than any other, and that’s had a definite impact on our buying habits.
Consumers are also sucked in with offers of simple debt. When they begin looking at major purchases as just another small payment per month, they’re setting themselves up for disaster. With all these debt payments lined up each month, what happens when there’s an unexpected illness or job layoff?

Dave Ramsey tells people that their best bet is to totally get rid of their debt. Stop using the credit cards and aggressively work to pay them off. He advocates beginning by paying off your smallest debts first - that way you can see some progress right away and that gets you excited to keep going. There’s no swift fix for money problems, especially when you’ve got serious debt. But the sooner you begin working to pay it off, the sooner you’ll feel a weight coming off your shoulders.

It’s time for consumers to get more responsible with their money, and strive to become “abnormal” by not being continuously financially strapped.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Record-keeping, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Features, Web services, Social Software

If you can’t get enough of the English-language Weblogs, Inc. blogs, you can always check out some of the ones we serve up in other languages — Autoblog Chinese or Engadget Spanish, for example. What? You don’t know any other languages? Well, it’s time you learned.

Babbel is a well-designed Web site designed to instruct you a foreign language. It’s part instruction, part wiki, and part social (isn’t everything these days? What’s next? A social network for wood stork enthusiasts? But we digress). Babbel incorporates a few different methods to facilitate learning one of the five languages they offer: Spanish, French, Italian, English, and German.

Continue reading Learn a new language at Babbel, por favor

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Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

If you go to sign up for a new LiveJournal account, you may notice something missing. The company behind the blogging service/social network has removed the Basic account option, while leaving the Plus and Paid options in place. For $2 a month you get the capability to post more picturs, receive more notifications, and store more media on the web than you could with a free Plus account. And you don’t have to put up with advertising.

The Basic option used to be ad-free as well, but users didn’t get advanced search options, additional storage space and many other features that came with Plus and Paid accounts. In other words, LiveJournal wasn’t really making any money off of Basic account holders. You know, unless you count the fact that Basic account holders were adding value to the service by creating a community of active users that was so popular that some people were even willing to pay for advanced features.

When LiveJournal management announced the change earlier this month, LiveJournal users didn’t exactly keep their concerns private. As of this writing, there are 68 pages filled with comments, most from users who are critical of the change. But since the new policy affects new users more than existing users, it will probably take a while to determine what impact the change will have.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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Filed under: Financials and analyticals, Raising money, Private equity industry, Investments

There has been much speak about how the credit squeeze and slowing economy has affected the public markets, but how has it affected private-equity firms? An article in the Hartford Business discusses how private equity firms are feeling the pain, especially as many private-equity owned companies have very high risk ratings and default risks. This appears to be more concerns of the past coming to fruition over leverage and credit quality more than breaking news, but it may come front and center before long.

Additionally, private equity-backed companies have large debt loads and when combined with decreased consumer spending, companies have less cash to service those loans. Leverage has enhanced returns, but it also augments the losses and decreases the returns to the private-equity firms that own the companies. This states that 25 of the 42 companies that ratings bureau Standard & Poor’s says have the lowest credit ratings are owned or controlled by private-equity firms, which gives them the highest chances for default.

It also appears that many private-equity firms overestimated the potential value and performance of the companies they bought, or at least that conditions exists now that credit is tight and the economy slower. If many industries and sectors are struggling in today’s economy, it should come of no surprise that private-equity firms that bought them with leverage are feeling the burn as well. A less-leveraged economy isn’t leaving the billionaires entirely immune.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Diigo is a social bookmarking service which we covered briefly while it was in private beta. But the service is out of beta, and has launched a new set of tools that make it simple to mark up web pages, save pages to your account, and search through your bookmarks and those of other users.

The service has also added a recommendation engine. Since users are constantly saving and tagging web content, Diigo has a large database of web pages that may feature similar content. So if you like pages about Windows freeware, Diigo probably knows that and when you click on the recommendations feed you should be able to find pages that you’ll like.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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Filed under: Audio, Fun, World wide web, Social Software, web 2.0

Remember when you put together mix tapes on cassettes and lovingly wrote the song titles in microscopic script on the tape label, maybe even including artistic doodles? Remember the recorded intro you did for the recipient? Remember the songs you selected? Each one chosen for its particular meaning - a special code for you and the receiver’s relationship. Yeah, we don’t remember that sappy stuff either.

Well *cough,* not that anyone would do that, but Mixwit is a site where you could if you wanted to theoretically talking, do something kind of, sort of, like that, if you were into that type of thing, which you’re definitely probably not.

Making a mix tape with Mixwit is super simple. You can upload your own artwork for the tape skin, search for songs on the web and drag and drop them on the playlist you’re creating, share by publishing it on Mixwit or even embedding on your blog or website. It’s absolutely free too. We think you’ll love it.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Diigo is a social bookmarking service which we covered briefly while it was in private beta. But the service is out of beta, and has launched a new set of tools that make it simple to mark up web pages, save pages to your account, and search through your bookmarks and those of other users.

The service has also added a suggestion engine. Since users are constantly saving and tagging web content, Diigo has a big database of web pages that may feature similar content. So if you like pages about Windows freeware, Diigo probably knows that and when you click on the suggestions feed you should be able to find pages that you’ll like.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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Filed under: Audio, Fun, World wide web, Social Software, web 2.0

Remember when you put together mix tapes on cassettes and lovingly wrote the song titles in microscopic script on the tape label, maybe even including artistic doodles? Remember the recorded intro you did for the recipient? Remember the songs you selected? Each one chosen for its particular meaning - a special code for you and the receiver’s relationship. Yeah, we don’t remember that sappy stuff either.

Well *cough,* not that anyone would do that, but Mixwit is a site where you could if you wanted to theoretically talking, do something kind of, sort of, like that, if you were into that type of thing, which you’re definitely probably not.

Making a mix tape with Mixwit is super easy. You can upload your own artwork for the tape skin, search for songs online and drag and drop them on the playlist you’re creating, share by publishing it on Mixwit or even embedding on your blog or website. It’s completely free too. We think you’ll love it.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Ping.fm is a new service that lets you update a bunch of social network/messaging sites all at once. Instead of logging into Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, and Tumblr and manually posting updates, you can just visit Ping.fm and write a single message which will be sent to each site. So far, it sounds a lot like HelloTXT, right? Well, it is, but Ping.fm has a few features that make it a lot more useful than HelloTXT.

First of all, you can post updates via email. When you sign up for a Ping.fm account you’ll be assigned an email address. Just send a message to that address and the message will show up on all of your linked accounts. You can also enable an IM update option. Right now you need to have an AOL Instant Messenger account to use the IM posting option. But you don’t have to use the official AIM client. As you can see in our screenshot, Pidgin works just as well, as should Adium, Trillian, Meebo or Digsby.

Ping.fm is still in private beta, but we’ve got 100 invites to giveaway. Just enter the code dls on the signup page.

[via Mashable]

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