Medical expenses are a major concern for many of us today. With the rising cost of healthcare coverage, more and more employers are cutting costs by providing insurance plans with high deductibles or eliminating healthcare coverage altogether. Whether you are covered by your employer or you choose to purchase your own coverage, a high-deductible health plan [...]
A spousal IRA allows contributions to be made to into an account on their spouses behalf. They were created to allow stay at home parents to put away money for retirement even if they don’t earn any income. Normally you’re allowed to contribute $5,000 or 100% of your income to your IRA. However if you’re [...]
What is a soft credit pull? A soft credit pull will not affect your credit at all and they will not be visible to other people who are pulling your credit. You’ll want to try to make sure that applications for savings accounts or certificates of deposits do not require a hard credit pull because [...]
What is a Hard Credit Pull? A hard credit pull usually occurs when you are seeking some form of credit. These pulls are visible to other people who want to look at your credit. A common red flag is someone with many recent credit check requests, which suggests that they might be overextending their credit. [...]
A bond is defined as an interest-bearing certificate issued by a government or business, promising to pay the holder a specified sum on a specified date. Common wisdom says bonds are a safe haven from stock market turmoil. Does that mean you should buy bonds if that turmoil comes from recession or inflation? Complicating the [...]
Brokerage CDs A brokerage CD is simply a CD that is being offered by a brokerage. These CDs are are still issued by the same banks, and you might be able to get higher rates here because there’s a larger set of available banks. You can trade brokerage CDs on the secondary market, which does [...]
Callable CDs Callable CDs are “callable” by the issuing bank, which means that the bank has the option of closing the account after a protection period. Basically this allows the bank to maintain some liquidity. When you have a callable CD, you’ll get a call protection period. For example, if you have a 3 year [...]
Zero Coupon CDs Zero-coupon CDs are like zero-coupon bonds. What happens is you buy a CD at a deep discount to the par value of the CD. You’ll usually get a higher interest rate with these CDs, but you won’t get any interest each month, it all gets paid out in the end. For example, [...]
Liquid CDs These CDs allow you to withdraw money without being penalized before the term is over. You usually have to maintain a minimum in the CD, and many times the number of withdrawals is limited. The rates on liquid CDs are usually higher than savings or money market rates, but lower than traditional CDs. [...]
Bump Up CDs Bump-up CDs are ideal if rates are increasing. These CDs allow you to “bump up” your rate sometime throughout the term of the CD. You can usually only do this once, and the rate only applies to the remainder of the term. The drawback to this CD is that the starting rate [...]