Tired of feeling like you’re living from paycheck to paycheck? Have interest charges driven your credit card balances so high, you feel like you’ll never get out of debt? If so, you’re not alone.

According to the nonprofit Consumer Counseling Service in Dallas, the average American family carried about $9,300 in credit-card debt in 2005. That’s a 115 percent increase over the last 10 years.

Nobody plans to dig themselves into a financial hole, but once you’re there, if you do nothing, the situation can only get worse. Make today the day you start looking into your options.

To read more go to http://www.bradfordera.com/articles/2007/11/10/ara/money/657.txt

A high-interest look at our collective debts

Maxed Out’s James Scurlock and Elizabeth Warren on NightLine

"Maxed Out," a film about the consumer debt crisis, might as well be ripped from the headlines, in light of last week’s stock market plunge (blamed in part on too many mortgages sold to high-risk home buyers). But here’s the man-bites-dog part: This factoid-filled, talking-heads documentary — by a business school graduate — turns out to be amusing. And enlightening. And positively riveting.

Gas prices hit a new record at the pump!

NEW YORK - Gasoline prices hit a new record at the pump on Monday, but gas futures prices fell on concerns that $3 gas will crimp demand. Oil prices, meanwhile, rose on reports of refinery problems in the U.S. and abroad.

The average national price of a gallon of gas hit $3.073 on Monday, up almost a penny from Sunday’s also record-setting price, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Gasoline is now well above the previous record of $3.057, set on Sept. 5, 2005, soon after Hurricane Katrina.

But gasoline futures for June delivery fell 5.09 cents to settle at $2.3012 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Light, sweet crude for June delivery rose 9 cents to settle at $62.46 a barrel on the Nymex.

Heating oil futures fell 1.55 cents to settle at $1.8668 per gallon on the Nymex, while natural gas prices gained 5.3 cents to settle at $7.952 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Brent crude for June settled unchanged at $66.83 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

Chip Hodge, energy portfolio manager at John Hancock Financial Securities, in Boston, thinks gasoline futures traders may be reacting psychologically to the fact that pump prices are setting new records.

"You just get a feeling that $3 a gallon. … It’s got to have an impact from a demand standpoint," Hodge said. "So, maybe there’s a little bit of a selloff on those pressures."

While oil prices rose on the day, they settled well off their earlier highs on news that Chevron Corp. plans to restart a 42,000 barrels-per-day Nigerian oil facility, said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Alaron Trading Corp. in Chicago.

"There was good news out of Nigeria after a lot of bad news," Flynn said. "They’re pumping oil again."

But that good news was tempered by new reports of refinery outages, including a fire at a large Preem facility in Sweden, and a quickly resolved problem at a Valero Energy Corp. refinery in Texas last week.

"Any refinery problems anywhere on the globe now adds to concerns" that gasoline supplies won’t be adequate to meet peak summer driving demand, Flynn said.

The summer driving season begins in two weeks, on Memorial Day weekend. The government reported that gasoline inventories rose slightly last week, but remain low by historical standards.

"Tightness in the U.S. gasoline situation will continue to drive the market … because the summer driving season is right around the corner," said Victor Shum, energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore. "There’s not a lot of time for refineries to catch up with demand."

Credit history or credit report is, in many countries, a record of an individual’s or company’s past borrowing and repaying, including information about late payments and bankruptcy. The term "credit reputation" can either be used synonymous to credit history or to credit score.

When a customer fills out an application for credit from a bank, store or credit card company, his or her information is forwarded to a credit bureau, along with constant updates on the status of his or her credit accounts, address, or any other changes made since the last time he or she applied for any credit.

This information is used by lenders such as credit card companies to determine an individual’s or entity’s credit worthiness; that is, determining an individual’s or entity’s means and willingness to repay an indebtedness. This helps determine whether to extend credit, and on what terms. With the adoption of risk-based pricing on almost all lending in the financial services industry, this report has become even more important since it is usually the sole element used to choose the annual percentage rate (APR).

How credit rating is determined
Credit ratings are determined differently in each country, but the factors are similar, and may include:

Payment record: A record of bills being overdue will lower the credit rating.

Control of debt: Lenders want to see that borrowers are not living beyond their means. Experts estimate that non-mortgage credit payments each month should not exceed more than 15 percent of the borrower’s after tax income.

Signs of responsibility and stability: Lenders perceive things such as longevity in the borrower’s home and job (at least two years) as signs of stability.

Re-Aging: Through re-aging, a credit history is re-written and you are given a fresh start on that particular account. This can dramatically improve the credit score. In 2000 the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) clarified guidelines on re-aging accounts for delinquent borrowers.

Credit cards that are not used: Although it is believed that having too many credit cards can have an adverse effect on a credit score, closing these lines of credit will not improve your score. The credit rating formula looks at the difference between the amount of credit a person has and the amount being used, so closing one or more accounts will reduce your total available credit. This in turn lowers the percentage of available credit, and the credit score will drop. The credit formula also factors in the length of time credit accounts have been open, so closing an account with several years of history is another avoidable credit mistake.

Credit inquiries: An inquiry is a notation on a credit history file. There are two kinds of notations:

"Soft" Credit Pulls:

1. A credit bureau may sell a person’s contact information to an advertiser purchasing a list of people with similar characteristics, like homeowners with excellent credit.
2. A creditor can check a person’s credit periodically.
3. A credit counseling agency, with the client’s permission, can obtain a client’s credit report with no adverse action.

"Hard" Credit Pulls: Hard credit inquiries are made by lenders. Lenders, when granted a permissible purpose by a borrower for the purposes of extending his credit, can check his credit history. Hard inquiries from lenders directly affect the borrower’s credit score. Keeping credit inquiries to a minimum can help a person’s credit rating. A lender may perceive many inquiries on a person’s report as a signal that the person is looking for loans and will possibly consider that person a poor credit risk.

Understanding credit reports and scores
In the United States, once every 12 months, each person is entitled to one free credit report from each of the three nationwide consumer credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

Have you seen MySpace to test news service to boost ad revenue?

This is very big if you have stock! I am sure that Rupert Murdoch are going to do very well with this venture. This is a must read!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - News Corp.’s MySpace social network plans to test a service on Thursday that scours the Web for news stories and lets users rate them, aiming to lure more advertisers to the Rupert Murdoch-controlled company.

The service, called MySpace News, resembles a mix of Google Inc.’s Google News, which collects stories and arranges them based on thematic similarities and Digg.com, which displays stories suggested by its readers and displays them according to their popularity ranking, executives said.

MySpace News is an attempt by the company to keep its more than 100 million unique visitors, according to comScore Network’s March figures, on the popular social network site longer.

News Corp. executives are aggressively courting entertainment and other types of content from other media sources as it seeks to bolster a leading position on the Internet, executives have said. News Corp. expects to generate over $500 million in revenue from its digital businesses this fiscal year.

Before the launch, MySpace users would have to leave the service to read news on the Internet. MySpace users spend about 10 average minutes per visit in the U.S. and visit the site about 19 times per user per month in March, according to comScore.

The service, long rumored, will have 25 main topics and about 300 sub-categories ranging from celebrities and gossip to autos and fashion.

"We’ve had a ton of different brands who hadn’t previously worked with MySpace and now do because of the service," Brian Norgard, co-founder of Newroo, a company purchased by News Corp. last year, which created MySpace News’ technology, said in an interview.

Categories such as autos, for example, could draw big autos manufacturers to the service seeking to reach MySpace members interested in the topic.

Executives also said its service would draw from a wider collection of news sources than Google News. Google News draws from about 4,500 sources, according to its site. News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media executives declined to specify the news outlets.

The technology scans thousands of news sources and displays them on the site based on how popular the stories are to its readers who can vote on them.

But services such as Google News, which displays brief excerpts of stories and photos from other companies on its site, has drawn the ire of news organizations seeking to build their own Internet businesses. Google recently settled a closely watched copyright dispute with Agence France-Presse.

The deal now clears the way for Google to continue displaying text excerpts and photos from the agency.

News publishers can request to have their news feed removed from the MySpace service.

Read more at Reuters

Lock-downs and Evacuations after Virginia Tech Shooting 

It is hard to conceive that on the following day of the Virginia Tech Shooting there are lock-downs and evacuations at universities in Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee and two public schools in Louisiana. Our feelings go out to those that have lost loved ones and also to the family of the shooter Cho Seung-Hui.

AUSTIN, Texas - Campus threats forced lock-downs and evacuations at universities in Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee and two public schools in Louisiana on Tuesday, a day after a Virginia Tech student’s shooting rampage killed 33 people.
 
In Louisiana, parents picked up hundreds of students from Bogalusa’s high school and middle school amid reports that a man had been arrested Tuesday morning for threatening a mass killing in a note that alluded to the murders at Virginia Tech.

Schools Superintendent Jerry Payne said both schools were locked down and police arrested a 53-year-old man who allegedly made the threat in a note he gave to a student headed to the private Bowling Green School in Franklinton. Both towns are in southeastern Louisiana.

"The note referred to what happened at Virginia Tech," Payne said. "It said something like, ‘If you think that was bad, then you haven’t seen anything yet."

In Austin, authorities evacuated buildings at St. Edward’s University after a threatening note was found, a school official said.

Police secured the campus perimeter and were searching the buildings, St. Edward’s University spokeswoman Mischelle Amador said. She declined to say where the note was found and said its contents were "nonspecific."

The two other scares were determined to be unfounded.

At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, officials ordered three campus administration buildings evacuated for almost two hours Tuesday morning in response to a telephone bomb threat. The city’s bomb squad searched the buildings but found nothing, campus spokesman Chuck Cantrell said.

Cantrell said there was no reason to believe the bogus threat was related to the shootings at Virginia Tech, but "we just chose to err on the side of caution today."

The other, at the University of Oklahoma, had started with a report of a man spotted on campus carrying a suspicious object, officials said.

The man was carrying an umbrella, not a weapon, and he later identified himself to authorities, University of Oklahoma President David Boren said in a statement. Boren initially had said the person was believed to carrying a yoga mat.

"We now consider the matter closed," Boren said. "We always want to err on the side of caution in a situation like this."

At St. Edward’s in Austin, students who live on campus were being allowed to return to their dormitories as police finished searching each building, Amador said. Faculty, staff and all other students were asked to stay away from the campus, and morning and afternoon classes were canceled. About 5,200 students are enrolled at the Catholic university south of downtown Austin.

Amador said the university’s reaction was not influenced by Monday’s attack at Virginia Tech.

"No matter what day or when this would have happened, we will always take the necessary precautions to protect our students, our faculty, our staff, the entire university community," she said.

Story form Yahoo News

We are sad to announce that 33 killed in Virginia Tech Shooting

BLACKSBURG, Va. - A gunman opened fire in a Virginia Tech dorm and then, two hours later, shot up a classroom across campus Monday, killing 32 people in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history. The gunman committed suicide, bringing the death toll to 33.

 
Students complained that there were no public-address announcements or other warnings on campus after the first burst of gunfire. They said the first word they received from the university was an e-mail more than two hours into the rampage — around the time the gunman struck again.

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.

"We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur," he said.

He defending the university’s handling of the tragedy, saying: "We can only make decisions based on the information you had on the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it."

Steger said the university decided to rely on e-mail and other electronic means of notifying members of the university, but with 11,000 people driving onto campus first thing in the morning, it was difficult to get the word out to everyone.

Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum would not say how many weapons the gunman carried. But a law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was incomplete, said that the gunman had two pistols and multiple clips of ammunition.

Read more at Yahoo News

Top 10 Tax Deductions - Don’t overlook any of these personal tax deductions–they make itemizing your deductions well worth it.

• Mortgage interest and property taxes
• Charitable donations
• Medical expenses and health savings accounts
• Child and dependent care
• State and local taxes
• IRA and 401(k) contributions
• Student loan interest
• Education expenses
• Job expenses
• Home office tax deduction

Mortgage interest and property taxes
You can deduct the mortgage interest (not the principal) that you pay on a loan secured by your primary residence or a second home. To claim the deduction, you must be obligated to pay the debt and you must actually make the payments.

You can also deduct any taxes you pay on real estate you own that is not used for business. If you have a mortgage on the property, the annual mortgage statement (Form 1098) you receive from the bank should include both the amount you paid in real estate taxes for the year and the interest and points you paid for the year (your mortgage interest deduction).

Charitable donations
You can deduct any cash or noncash contributions you make to a qualified nonprofit organization. While you are supposed to save receipts for any contribution, deductions for noncash contributions under $250 are rarely questioned.

For noncash contributions over $250, you must have a receipt or acknowledgement from the nonprofit organization. For noncash contributions over $500, you have to file an extra form with your tax return, Form 8283, Noncash Charitable Contributions.

Medical expenses and health savings accounts
You can deduct the amount of your medical and dental expenses that exceeds 7.5% of your adjusted gross income. Eligible expenses include both health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses not covered by insurance for both you and your dependents. Unless your medical expenses are substantial, however, your medical expenses will probably fit within the 7.5% limitation, meaning you won’t be able to deduct anything.

If you have a qualified Health Savings Account (HSA), you can deduct your contributions to the account, and you don’t have to pay tax on any interest you earn from the account. To establish an HSA account, you must have a high-deductible health plan that qualifies under the HSA rules. You can use money in your HSA account to pay almost any kind of health-related expense.

Child and dependent care
If you have to pay someone to care for your child (under 13) or a dependent needing care so that you can work or look for work, you may be able to claim a tax credit for those expenses. The credit is a percentage of your eligible work-related child or dependent care expenses, ranging from 20% to 35%, depending on your income.

There is a dollar limit on the amount of expenses for which you can claim the credit. The limit is $3,000 of the expenses paid in a year for one person, or $6,000 for two or more. You must reduce these dollar limits by the amount of any dependent care benefits provided by your employer that you exclude from your income.

State and local taxes
Under the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, taxpayers have been given a choice when it comes to deducting state and local taxes. For the tax year 2005, you can choose to deduct either your state and local income taxes or your state and local general sales and use taxes, but not both. You can decide whether it’s more beneficial to deduct your income tax or your sales tax.

This is good news for taxpayers who live in states with no (or a low) state income tax like Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming. In 2006, taxpayers will no longer have the choice to deduct state and local general sales taxes, unless pending legislation extends this option to future years.

IRA and 401(k) contributions
If your employer offers a 401(k), it pays to maximize your contributions, especially if your employer matches them. For the 2006 tax year, the maximum contribution increased to $15,000. If you are 50 or older, you can contribute an extra $5,000.

For IRAs, you can contribute $4,000 in 2006, and deduct that amount from your income. If you are 50 or older, you can contribute an extra $1,000.

Student loan interest
You can deduct up to $2,500 in student loan interest payment per year, for the lifetime of the loan. However, there are income limits–you can’t take this deduction if you make more than $65,000 as a single person or $135,000 as a married couple.

Education expenses
You can currently deduct $4,000 for tuition-related expenses every year, or you may qualify for the Hope and Lifetime Learning credits, which are also for education.

In addition, you can now contribute up to $2,000 to a Coverdell education savings account (formerly called an education IRA) each year. (The amount isn’t deductible, but distributions from the account for payment of tuition are tax-free.)

Job expenses
You can deduct education and training costs for your job if your employer doesn’t reimburse you for them (and if the education is for your current job, not to get a better job later). Job-hunting expenses, including mileage, are also deductible. If you’re a teacher, don’t forget to include teaching-related expenses for a small tax break.

Home office tax deduction
If you use a portion of your home exclusively for business purposes, you may be able to deduct home costs related to that portion, such as a percentage of your insurance and repair costs, your mortgage or rent and depreciation.

To read more great tax related articles visit Forbes today!

Procrastinator’s Tax Guide - Are you ready for tax day?

April 17 will be here sooner than you think, so unless you plan to file an extension, now would be a good time to start gathering the information you need to file your 2006 tax returns.

Luckily, the Internal Revenue Service has made it easier than ever to pay taxes online. More than 70 million taxpayers avoided the paper clutter and filed their returns electronically last year. E-filing perks include automatic error-checking, easy credit card payments and refunds that are delivered in about half the time it takes for snail mail filers.

If you are not quite ready to click "send" on your computer, the series of stories below will help you get ready to file your taxes in short order. First stop should be our Tax Time Check List, which gives you the lowdown on the most important things you need to remember for 2006, including the alternative minimum tax provisions, maximum contributions to IRAs and 401(k)s and dividend tax rates. Also read our "Most Overlooked Tax Deductions" story, which contains the 50 deductions that the veteran experts at Ernst & Young claim are commonly missed.

To read more visit this Forbes page.

BlackRock Enhanced Equity Yield & Premium Fund

Bryan Perry, author of " The 25% Cash Machine: Double Digit Income Investing,” recommends buying the BlackRock Enhanced Equity Yield & Premium Fund.

The BlackRock Enhanced Equity Yield & Premium Fund (nyse: ECV) is a diversified, closed-end management investment company that invests primarily in dividend-paying common stocks of the U.S. issuers. It closed Tuesday at $20.37, a 12% premium to its net asset value.

The fund’s current payout is $2.05 per share, for a yield of 10.06%. In the past year, the price has ranged between $16.60 and $20.84.

As reported today at Forbes