Your Personal Financial Statements
Personal financial statements are the roadmap that guides us from where we are today, to where we want to be tomorrow. They also provide fixed points of reference from which we can measure our progress over time.
Personal Financial Statements
There are two basic personal financial statements that everyone should prepare, or have a financial advisor prepare, at least once each year; the cash flow statement and the balance sheet.
What Is The Coverdell Education Savings Account (ESA)
One of new products that came out of the Budget Reconciliation Act of 1996 is the Coverdell ESA. The Coverdell ESA offers the potential for tax-free growth when you use the account to fund a child's qualified higher education expenses.
The Increasing Cost Of Education
A college education is an investment that pays off. According to The College Board's annual report, Trends in College Pricing, median annual income for bachelor's degree recipients is 80 percent higher than median income for those with only a high school diploma. Over a lifetime that difference exceeds $1,000,000.
Minimum Retirement Plan Distributions
Most qualified retirement plans offer significant tax benefits for those willing to follow a few IRS specified rules. The government wants to make these plans (401(k)s, Keoghs, SEPs and traditional IRAs) available for specific needs, and has established tax law to help eliminate potential abuses of these tax advantaged investment alternatives.
Choosing A Business Continuation Plan
The death of a major shareholder in a closely-held corporation can seriously interrupt continuity and profitability of the business. Surviving shareholders must struggle with how to continue the company as a profitable business with the loss of a key player. Heirs must concern themselves with how to replace the income that the shareholder had earned and how to extract their inherited portion of the company value.
Health Insurance - How It Works
Without health insurance, a single illness can cause serious, and often irrevocable, financial hardship.
Insurance of any kind is intended to transfer financial risk to an insurance company in exchange for a reasonable insurance premium. Where most insurance coverages pay once a loss has occurred, health insurance has the added benefit of paying to keep your loss from getting worse.
Finding Scholarship Opportunities
Over 85% of the nation's schools offer various types of scholarship, granting money to college students based on a host of criteria such as academic merit, financial need, and in some cases, racial or ethnic background.
Though the application process can be complicated and redundant between scholarships, there is a great deal of money available for those who are willing to jump through the right hoops and prove their merit and/or need.
What Is Permanent Life Insurance
Once you have determined that you need life insurance, and calculated how much coverage you require, you will have to choose between several types of life insurance. There are two very different types of life insurance contracts -- term and permanent.
