| You're stuck with tardy ex on mortgage
Dear Bruce: I am a divorced woman, trying to rebuild my credit. My ex-husband was not very reliable about making payments on time. I have cleaned up everything except one issue: the mortgage. My name is still on the house, even though I no longer own it. The payments are consistently late (11 of the last 12 were more than 30 days late). Needless to say, this is a black spot on my credit report. .
Giving Families Credit Where Credit Is Due
Every year right after Christmas millions of Americans get a little gift from the Internal Revenue Service in their mailbox. It's their 1040 income tax booklet, and every year, sadly, this unsolicited present from the IRS gets a little heftier. This year the growth of the booklet was especially noticeable; instead of a saddle-stitched binding with staples holding a few dozen pages together, the 2006 Federal Income Tax booklet has a glued spine just like the Sears catalog. The difference is that this catalog is ordering something from you. What it's ordering is a record take of more than $1 trillion in individual income tax revenue. Revenue to the U.S. Treasury from individuals was up a whopping 12.6 percent in fiscal year 2006. Did you receive a 12.6 percent salary increase last year? To make matters worse, chances are that the typical American will not be calculating this record tax liability on his or her own.
Saving for retirement: How much is too much?
When I read this lead in an article in the New York Times, I couldn't believe my eyes: "When a group of economists argued recently that Americans might be saving too much for retirement ...." This reminds me of something that I saw in a book of highlights from the Headlines segment of Jay Leno's Tonight Show, where readers send in funny headlines from newspapers and advertisements. The headline read: "Postal Service looks to deliver mail more slowly." If Americans are indeed saving more than is necessary for retirement, is that really a big problem? With the national savings rate below zero, how can less than nothing be more than enough? According to a survey released by Fidelity Investments (in rebuttal to the argument), the average American saves only enough money to generate 58% of their pre-retirement income, less than the 65% that the economists said was a realistic estimate of how much would be required.
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