Moneta Group

If you have an email account, you are probably familiar with requests that show up in your inbox asking for personal and bank account information in exchange for a deposit to your account to help someone in a foreign country get money into the U.S. These scam emails are typically easy to spot since they usually have grammar and style mistakes—no capitalizations, misspellings, etc. Hitting ‘ALT-Delete’ usually takes care of these obvious scams with little to no effort on our part.

There is enough plastic out there to keep Benjamin Braddock in business for life. Don’t remember the famous line from “The Graduate?” Never mindnearly everyone has a credit card. They’re sent to college-bound high school seniors and even some much younger. I did a little research recently on cancelling credit cards, and while I was hoping I would find simple yes or no answers to my questions, there are a number of variables to consider when making this decision.

If you have been reading the business section of your local newspaper—or almost any financial magazine—then you are probably aware of the Roth IRA conversion option that presents itself on January 1, 2010. However, while you may be familiar with the concept, I have found that many clients are uncertain as to whether this planning idea applies to them. This piece is meant to shed some light on the subject.

I can always tell when the U.S. dollar is on the decline. Not so much from my daily glance at Bloomberg, but more from the stack of emails that make their way into my inbox from friends back in Australia. They usually go something like this: “G’day mate – Looks like the Aussie dollar is catching up to the U.S. Could I send you some money to do some shopping for me?” Fundamentally, a sagging dollar actually helps sales of U.S. exports as those goods become less expensive to foreign markets. It’s one of the benefits those outside the U.S. enjoy when the dollar declines.

It’s an age-old conundrum: Did a chicken lay an egg, hence, more chickens? Or, did an egg hatch into a chicken, hence more eggs?