World of Finances

There’s no way to sugar coat it, raising a kid is going to cost you. According to a recent article on cnbc.com, “The cost of raising a child from birth to age 17 has surged 25 percent over the last 10 years, due largely to the rising cost of groceries and medical care…” understandably the cost of hiring a babysitter has also soared. Online-nanny.com states that the average salary of a babysitter should be from $6-$18 per hour. That’s a big range. So how much should you really be paying the babysitter?

The rate varies depending on the following factors

Where do you live? Fox Business states the closer you live to a major city, the more you are going to have to pay your babysitter. Take into consideration the “going rate” in your neighborhood and ask around; see what other parents in the area pay.

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Money transfers out of country may be needed at times, due to an emergency requirement for a daughter who is going out on a tour, or an urgent need of money at home when one is outside their country. All these situations need an expert like Caxtons. They are popular and a trusted institute for money transfers and visa currency cards. They also offer business accounts that help one maintain foreign currency for their business buying and selling purposes. Whether one wants good interest for their bonds, or secure online transfer of money, they can manage everything in one place when they are dealing with this institute.

When one is using their services for bonds, or has opened an account with a paying institute for overseas money transfer, they should check for fee levied. At times, this fee is too exorbitant. Only this institute does not charge any fee for transfer rates. There are some institutes that not only charge a fee, but also offer lesser value than exchange rate. Full Article…

Harvard Professor James Stock and Princeton Professor Mark Watson presented a very interesting paper last week at the Spring 2012 Conference for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Their paper studied similarities and differences between the 2007-2009 recession and other U.S. business cycles.

Stock and Watson characterized the comovements over 1959:Q1-2007:Q3 of 198 different U.S. macroeconomic variables in terms of 6 primary factors. These factors could be calculated from the first 6 principal components of a non-redundant subset of their observed variables. This method amounts to finding 6 different summary indexes (or 6 different sets of weights to associate with each of 132 of these series) that could collectively account for as much of the variation as possible of all the data.

Their first question was whether the observed U.S. macroeconomic data continued to track those factors in the same way during the most recent recession and recovery as they had historically.

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Spring break starts tomorrow for my kiddo, so I won’t be hanging out at the computer–we’ve got some serious goofing off to do. Therefore, I’m posting links to some stuff I hope you’ll find interesting, by myself and others, a day early.

Bob Sullivan of MSNBC posted a very scary column about how “Hackers turn credit report websites against consumers.” This one’s a must read.

GoBankingRates.com posted my column “Biggest Myths About Credit Scores.” We know so much more about  how these formulas work than we did a decade ago, but some of the same myths persist. Falling for any of these could cost you.

Fox Business picked up Jodi Helmer’s piece for CreditCards.com “Seven Easy Ways to Go Green with Your Finances,” to which I contributed a thought or three.

Donna Freedman’s latest for MSN, “A cheap death: Donate your body,” may take frugality a touch too far for some, but it could be just the ticket for those who want to benefit science and education while avoiding big burial costs.

Are you pregnant, or hope to be so soon?

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