Most of us don’t like the idea of the federal government and the politicians that run it being in control of our retirement funds. That’s why we put money into vehicles such as 401ks, Roth IRAs, IRAs, etc., to ensure that there will be cash available when we are too old to work. Unfortunately, there is some indication that some politicians would like to seize or take control of tax-deferred retirement plans and divert the money to their pet projects. Naturally, many of you are wondering if there are alternatives to 401ks, where you can
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The so-called fiscal crisis in Washington is nothing but politics. Even though Congress and President Obama claim that the country is out of money, politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to be able to come up with money for pet projects. An investigation by Senate Republicans found that the Labor Department had enough funds to spare to promote unions and collective bargaining overseas. Republicans learned that the Department had given $2.2 million to the Solidarity Center (an AFL-CIO organization set up during the Cold War to help workers in Communist countries) to promote
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The key to your family’s financial survival is your assets, namely your money and your property. Therefore, protecting your assets must be one of your family’s top survival priorities. Unfortunately, many preppers put far more thought and effort into physical survival (storing food, etc.) than into protecting assets, even though protecting them is often just as important. There are two major threats to your family’s assets in today’s world: confiscation and inflation. Confiscation means that government will try to seize all or part of your funds through taxes or simply by taking it. Confiscation isn’t
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If you listen to the financial industry’s propaganda, you might believe that having a poor credit score means you will end up sleeping under a bridge and foraging for food in garbage cans. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s fairly easy to live with a poor or even a bad credit score; in fact, tens of millions of Americans are doing it. And guess what? The vast majority of those people have homes, cars, jobs, and washing machines, just like the rest of us. This doesn’t mean that a credit score isn’t important.
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The United States might be on the verge of another collapse that is potentially more devastating than those in 2007 and 2008. This isn’t the opinion of survivalists, but the opinion of executives at the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. Internal emails leaked to Bloomberg News indicate that some Walmart executives think an economic collapse is under way. In the emails, Walmart’s vice president of finance and logistics, Jerry Murray, called February sales a total disaster and the worst he’s ever seen. Another Walmart vice president, Cameron Geiger, even asked, “Where are all the customers? And
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For the last several weeks, the market has given indications that it was going to take a run at the old 2007 highs of 14,000+, but every time it would get near the target, there would be a several hundred point sell-off, followed by a mediocre up day, and then another several hundred points to the downside the next. So what triggered this final run to the roses that broke through the resistance and then kept going for at least another day, setting an all time record high of 14,296.24 on the DOW and 1541.46
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Educating children for economic survival can be very difficult, especially in a society where most adults don’t even know how to survive or thrive economically. Instead, most adults go through life making financial mistake after financial mistake that leaves them unable to save money or even pay the bills. This problem begins in childhood because most children learn little or nothing about money. They grow up thinking “money is something I ask Mommy and Daddy for” and “Mommy and Daddy will always be there to take care of me,” and they keep that attitude all
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It’s that time of year again… the time of year that ordinary, docile, American citizens either become snarling, snapping, frothing-at-the-mouth, kick-the-dog lunatics or they walk around with boxes of papers and a perpetual look of confusion on their faces, entering and exiting tax preparers’ offices like mindless little robots. Aspirin and Tylenol sales go through
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There are ways that you can save for retirement without relying upon plans like 401ks, Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), and Roth IRAs. To be honest, these plans are not a very good deal for most Americans, and they could be subject to government confiscation at some point in the near future. That means that the lack of a 401k or IRA should not be an excuse to not to save for retirement. The truth is that Americans had little or no trouble saving for retirement before these plans existed. In fact, many Americans who are
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Putting off starting a savings program until you pay off your debts is one of the worst financial moves that you can make. Waiting until your debts are paid off to start saving is a good way to ensure that you’ll never start saving and will always be in debt. The truth is that most of us will always have some debts, whether it’s credit cards, a mortgage, car loans, or student loans. If you make debt an excuse not to save, then you’ll always have an excuse not to save. You’ll never get into
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